Do you eat tomatoes in winter? Please STOP.

A message from Yiayia (via me) to you and a winter salad recipe to roll with this week...

Corfu, 1998

I am eight years old, barefoot in the soft, fertile clay of the garden. Morning dew is stripped from blades of grass as I march, self important with the responsibility of choosing tomatoes that will make up the salad for lunch. I take my job very seriously. Some of the vines tower above me and so I make my way between the climbing green plants, eye-level with each ripe fruit, selecting the plumpest of red baubles and breathing in their verdant summer scent in anticipation of a burst of sweetness.

As is commonplace with Greek mothers, Yiayia is wary and in constant competition with my own English mother. I can hear her barking out barely masked insults as I carry my heavy bag of salad swag back to the house.

“We have the real tomatoes here — you don’t get tomatoes like this over there in England. Over there, they use chemicals and everything is tasteless and artificial,” she says, sneering.

Over there.

She’s intimidated by mum. Doesn’t want us to leave the village, can’t stand the idea of her only son leaving her behind. Choosing an English girl over his own mother. She wants to keep us in Greece at any cost.

She’s right about the tomatoes though.

Homegrown tomatoes taste of sunshine. They have the sweetness of a summer fling — a brief moment of brightness that if fleeting, leaves a lasting memory nonetheless. For as long as i can remember, Yiayia has sown, grown and harvested her own. To me, they are the symbol of the Mediterranean. Planted in spring and watered, lovingly and with diligence through to August and at a pinch, into September and October, they take on the very essence of summer. Postbox red fruits ripen on sturdy vines.

Giant beef tomatoes were the packed lunch staple of my high school years. Being from a Greek family, I would be weighed down with remnants of the previous night’s tray of yemista. My lunch box was filled not with your standard ham sandwich and chocolate biscuit bar, but with a hefty, rice-filled tomato, seasoned with oregano and thyme then topped with feta and a dousing of Yiayia’s olive oil then baked in the oven — the flavours of Greece exploding out of my tupperware box in a school gym in northern England.

Even after we had moved from Corfu to the UK, we observed tomato growing season, my dad and I taking years of trial and error in our garden’s greenhouse while the heavens pounded the glass of its warm, earthy confines. “You need to really work for good tasting tomatoes,” Yiayia’s words would echo as we eventually reaped the fruits of our labour — not as bounteous as in Corfu, but more satisfying than the anaemic options available at Sainsbury’s.

It’s been found that organic, homegrown tomatoes have a substantially higher concentration of antioxidants than the mass-produced, supermarket variety. Not only that — they have so much more character. In Greece, our tomatoes grow to different shapes and sizes — what might be an anomaly at a British or American grocery store, with its gradients of yellow and orange and the odd black spot or crack — is entirely normal for homegrown Mediterranean bounty.

On the subject of ‘normal’; Yiayia balks at any suggestion that a tomato might be eaten in winter. Herein is the point to my newsletter this week: Tomatoes just do not taste the same in winter. If you are interested in eating sustainably and are nostalgic for living life as our grandmothers once did, I cannot stress enough the importance of sourcing the fruit and vegetables that are available to you in the correct season.

Look to crunchy cabbage salads, hearty pulses, soups and stews in the winter and the light, bright dishes featuring tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes in the summer months. Most of us are incredibly privileged to have ingredients available to us year-round but you will never catch my Yiayia eating fresh tomatoes in November. First, they won’t taste good. Second, it’s really not the most sustainable way to eat.

Supermarket tomatoes available in winter are usually ripened with a hormone called ethylene. You can also find Ethylene in detergents, synthetic lubricants and its used to make polystyrene and rubber for tyres and footwear. Nice.

Scientists have found regular consumption of fruits artificially ripened with ethylene can sometimes result in dizziness, weakness in the body and at worst, some types of liver and heart related diseases. I’ve plumped for tomatoes as a case study here but this applies to lots of other fruits that are picked mature but not yet ripe and ripened with ethylene in order to catalyse the process for speedier consumption. This usually happens when you buy out of season and from the supermarket.

So. Please put the tomatoes down. Below, I’m sharing a recipe for a hearty winter salad that I’m currently making on repeat. Bright purple radicchio, sharp and spicy in its bitterness is sweetened with roasted butternut squash, cauliflower and apple. It works well as a ‘picky dinner’ and I ate it yesterday with a whipped myzithra, roasted garlic and toasted pistachio dip along with some crunchy sourdough. A far superior alternative to anaemic tomatoes.

Filakia from Athens xx