My earliest tomato memory features my younger brother languishing for hours at the supper table in the late evening light, limp tomatoes scattered ‘round his plate. Commanded by our parents to consume the dreaded remainders, the scene played out like a prison hunger strike with a desperate martyr leveraging the power of refusal. The tomatoes held only a supporting role – my brother’s will, his desire for gustatory autonomy, commanded center stage.
Just as they were at my childhood supper table, tomatoes the world over have been long-suffering culinary support staff, builders of sauces and the substrata of spreads and salsas, routine ingredients in the kaleidoscopic diversity of contemporary global cuisines. Cultures in the Americas devotedly cultivated a pantheon of tomato varieties in the dawn of recorded history, with European, African, and Asian converts coming late to the game, incorporating the tomato into staple dishes only beginning in the 1500s.
The world-traveling tomato began its culinary trajectory as an ingredient in Aztec cuisine, as a food of the common folk and a source of culinary ritual. For Aztec communities, ceremony enabled the creation of meaning, with cultivation, preparation, and consumption as narrative elements in a story placing the Aztec people in relationship to their deities at a particular place and time.
The fortunate among us eat multiple times daily. We eat for pleasure and we eat for health, but we don’t often contemplate the power of the act. As Elizabeth Morán explains, “time and space are created and destroyed by consumption.” Culinary ceremony, even a quotidian fast-food meal, serves as a meaning-making device, an episode in the narrative of self and community.
I tip my hat to the Aztec sensibilities that recognized the power of food, that incorporated a cultural practice of connecting the everyday act of eating to the structure of the cosmos. The where and why and how of our eating sets the table of our cosmological banquet. Every meal, even a quick stand-at-the-kitchen-counter snack, contains value judgements and environmental practices and assumptions about humans and our role in the world.
As we prepare and consume ordinary foods like the tomato we ritualize their use, we make them sacred in their support of our bodies and our beings. Aztec staples included chia, maize, beans, and amaranth, and the Aztec people honored their dependence on those ingredients. But they also gave tomatoes as “ordinary” offerings to their deities, making an everyday item part of everyday ritual. The tomato was ordinary and special in its persistent presence in Aztec communities.
It is the consumption that makes eating sacred, not the item consumed. The tomato is not sacred in itself but becomes so in the eating. I joyfully ingest tomatoes, I thrill to their flavors, colors, and shapes. In the gleeful act of eating, the taking in of tomatoes, their flesh supporting mine, the potent green of their branches staining my fingers, their scent in my hair, I am with tomatoes and tomatoes are with me. In that moment, I honor the web of connections – the sun, the bugs, the soil, the seed – that sustains us all, tomato and human alike. As Morán summarizes: “Consumption is part of that reciprocal relationship between people and divine powers; food received is consumed, ingested, and eventually returned to the earth. That is the order of things.”
In his juvenile intransigence, my brother embodied a cosmological profundity – eating is sacred, and so is not-eating. How we eat is how we live, dependent on the foods that feed us, living the stories that make meaning of our lives.
Sourcing:
Elizabeth Morán, Sacred Consumption: Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture, University of Texas Press, 2016.
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