Tomatoes as a metaphor.

As a kid, I hated tomatoes. It was a dislike compounded by the fact that the tomato, in its ketchup-guise, seemed overly blood-like (and that the English would apply the unctuous condiment, gorily, to their food at every opportunity.) Often it would take a day and a half of Heimlich-style coaxing to get it out of the bottle; and when you did, it would invariably squirt sideways out of your 'chip butty'* and come to land on your prized new jeans. Too much work by half.

But still, like them or loathe them, tomatoes were red. You Know, red: a good British colour, like the Routemaster bus or the Giles Gilbert telephone box. Yes, a dependable colour: it was an unspoken credo: a tomato should be ripe, ruddy and round.

I am almost ashamed to say that two years ago I knew next to nothing of heirloom tomatoes (let alone the term seed-saving or the name of Vandana Shive.) Sure, a friend of mine was locking horns with Monsanto over in London and I would occasionally festoon our telephone conversations with the odd 'good for you, mate!', but I did not fully comprehend the absolute horror of terminator seed technology.

Boy, have I have come a long way in a short space of time. I still am rather astonished á propos my former denial/ignorance. Indeed, I now wonder if tomatoes are really a metaphor for us as a people. Maybe secretly, those among us who think that tomatoes should be only one hue also secretly feel the same about politics, party allegiances, even people's skin colour.

Heirloom tomatoes speak openly of the diversity of culture, of the panoply of race. Like people, heirloom tomatoes have oral histories linking them to their ancestry. For example, the intense, sweet purple-green flesh of the Black Krims were brought to us from the "Island of Krim" in the Ukraine; in that self-same flesh is contained the hardship of the pioneer life and the many inclement prairie winters they faced.

Likewise, the Blaby Special cultivar comes to us, like a fresh-faced GI Bride, from Shoult's Tomato Farm in Leicestershire England.

Many colours. Many stories. It is, truly, a seed diaspora - redolent of the folk who, over time, nurtured and cultivated them.

And big Agriculture wants to silence those voices. It wants to expunge them and wipe them out forever. To them, tomatoes are hybrid and red: oftentimes, tasteless, ruddy and round. We must not let them obliterate this genetic diversity. To do so would be, literally, a crime against nature.