I just had a hamburger (Do you like how I just blithely announce that as though I were talking about lunch rather than savagery toward animals, weight gain, artery clogging, and systematically destroying the earth's atmosphere? Yeah. I'm quite casual like that) and upon this hamburger was a tasteless tomato-shaped disk. This is hardly unusual. It has been true of millions of its hamburger forebears, to say nothing of the millions of sandwich brethren that have come before. Indeed one wonders if it might be some kind of rule that no real tomatoes may be used in the construction of 80% of culinary creations served between slices of bread. And yet, I happen to know that at the market just four doors down from the restaurant, there are bins full to overflowing with enormous, beautiful, deliciously tomato-tasting heirloom tomatoes. Yea verily. For I have seen them with mine own two eyes. Apparently tomatoes are currently what insiders call "in season."
Perhaps institutors of the 80% regulation fear that having tasted real tomatoes, we will thereafter clamor for them and create a dangerous ruckus in the long tomato-less wintry months. And, frankly, well we might. There may be tomato standoffs and protests and riots during the first few winters, but we'd get used to it. We could institute a system by which we joyfully eat them when they are plentiful and ripe then, later, instead of eating pathetic, anemic tomato imposters, we could, you know, just not eat them until they're plentiful and ripe again. It's crazy, but I think it just might work. And once we've got the tomato situation under control, we can move on to cantaloupe.