After having been in Germany for more than a week now, we are still remembering and thinking of our visit to the Canary islands and of course keep on telling our friends about the different things we saw, did, bought and ate! Obviously, on this sunny island, every fruit and vegetable that needs sun tasted just wonderful. With one strange exception: the tomatoes. And yes, it was so striking that I have the wish to write about this!
When we went for shopping on the fruit and vegetable market, we saw the greatest bananas and bought the sweetest peaches we ever ate! Every day we bought fresh oranges and made deliciously sweet juice ourselves! We shopped to our vegetable-loving hearts’ content and were looking forward to cooking with all the vegetable in lush, fresh colours, all from local farmers around the island.
Then we started looking for tomatoes. The vegetable which is essential to several delicious dishes and serves as appetizer in sauces and even lentils. The vegetable which is red and wonderfully sweet and incredibly flavourful when it was ripened in the warm sun of a southern country. Like Gran Canary.
We didn’t find any good tomato. Not one. They were green, they were orange, half-red but they were not the dark red that lets you know how great it would taste! We finally ended up buying just any of those which looked worse than tomatoes that we buy in Germany in mid-winter when everything red or green is imported! The result was predictable: the skin was so hard that it didn’t cook as well as it should and the taste was minimal, so you didn’t even notice there was tomato in your food.
The reason for such a tomato debacle? We saw tomato plantations all over the island! Where there was space, there were either bananas or there were tomatoes on the fields, the tomatoes covered to protect them from the hot direct sun. So how come we got so wonderful bananas but no tomatoes?
Because – believing our Canarian friends – they export all the good tomatoes to other countries!
Well, this is crazy! You have the best weather, you plant the most wonderful tomatoes and all of them are shipped abroad and the local population is left with something that has no taste!
Unfortunately this is not only happening with the tomatoes on Gran Canary, it is something global – but more about that tomorrow.
For the rest of our stay we avoided fresh tomatoes and either made dishes without tomato or used tomato puree. To get at least a taste of tomato!
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When I was in Darjeeling speaking to a tea trader, he said the the best quality tea is not available in India, it is directly exported to Japan.I also don’t understand because in India everybody is drinking instant coffee. I am not a coffee drinker, so I was not really looking after that, but I never saw real coffee in India, which is a coffee producing country!
Crazy world!