BUT WHAT IS DEATH TO A TOMATO?
The corpses of my friends are rotting in the compost bin – intentionally. I didn’t say anything to them, as my hand reached for blood (soil), uprooting them from their bed as my neglect had left them to rot. It is ignorance that assumes a gmo’d seed soul might survive if left to its own devices. It is neglect that fails to recognise our part in its construction, that takes bloom at face value, giving no attention to dirt, to roots, to water. And I couldn’t speak to them today, as I might have when they made me happy – a selective action I occasionally perform to convince myself I am good person, good singular. Grief might become easier to manage should I reduce them back to objects. should I see my neglect as step in the learning curve of a new skill, new craft, and yet I do not want to be God in the face of the tomato folk – my reducing them amongst the garden still symptomatic of how I might not think, not speak in biomes. But my plot is not a forest. Enriched with concrete and invasive species, they will not survive without my care. Domesticated tomatoes that smile at me when I get home, this is not the place I wish to be, I wish to walk among food forests, be mollusc like in my invasion, nibbling a leaf here and a leaf there. The weight of the Anthropocene falls onto my collarbones, vertebrae tensing as I realise my lacking knowledge of horticulture post tribalism, post atomic bomb, that my attention being directed to cosmology and ideology has destroyed what is in front of me.
But what is death to a tomato? They laid so close to the ground that they become it. In a lap of the sun their corpses will have melted, giving food to the seeds they carry into the afterlife (soil) and forging new generations, their children that they did not get to meet. Tomatoes don’t consider things generationally. Their reproduction is interspecies, our colloquial use of language makes us forget the literal meaning of ‘the birds and the bees’. An insect pollinated the flower, allowing it to become fruit containing seeds that a small animal might eat a
redistribute - Theres no dick and pussy to class of organism that doesn’t need blood to eat. Chloroplasts and what not, I’m jealous that our consumption of these cells doesn’t turn our skin green like some sea creatures. Doesn’t turn me part leaf, allowing for pleasant consumption of sunlight over carcasses to provide my body with energy. But the immorality is not that this body requires another body for sustenance – it is the mutilation, disrespect, and depersonalisation of the body we consume. Tomatoes grow on supermarket shelves. Nuclear families of plump red bodies, equally distributed thanks to plastic membranes. Their bees are employees, stripes coordinating to which corporate superpower promises them h(m)oney. Light blue for co-op, orange for Sainsbury’s, etc.
My mother went to Iraq so I could live here and smoke carcinogens. You can imagine my joy upon realising an overgrown garden was in fact fruiting – I’d assumed the sea of green that had forced its way through miniscule cracks in patio must be weeds. I read about interspecies democracy, kissed their leaves, told them stories. And yet my focus on ideology had made me neglect the material reality. That the weight of their fruit forced them lower until a cacophony of leaves shrouded their stems to the sun. Left them wet, let them rot. The top layer of their leaves created a green screen on which I projected my visions of utopia, that I might eat their fruit as mollusc or monkey. let me believe my joy was there’s - I am an empath I decide how people feel and believe it etc. Let me believe that they are thriving because it is what I can see and no I will not look underneath, no I don’t understand their history but look they look (I look at them) so happily!
That tomato there, I’ve decided that one is my favourite, and I will invest it with value and all of the pressure of personhood. I believe in you little tomato, I believe in you over the stalk that provides you sustenance, over the spiders and caterpillars, over the rain and sunlight, I will believe in your edges. That you and you alone are a person amongst people. That you do not need biome, you do not need soil, simply soul. That if you believe in yourself truly enough once your brother’s have fallen, that your stalk has turned brown and mushy, collapsed to the ground, decomposed to forge more soil from which things might grow, I believe you will stay, hovering in place, growing plump and bright and red because you have edges, I have decided. You are person in a human way, and once you are old enough, I’ll enrol you in school so you might learn in western customs, so you can be anything you want so long as you are separated from the roots of your garden and forget my neglect for your species. You’ll be great one day, and I can be proud of my ability to have shown you a good life. Opened doors for you, so you might choose what corner of capitalism suits you best. You’ll make your own money, by a house with a picket fence, fall in love, go to supermarkets, and observe those similar to you without empathy because they are people without humanity.