There's not much use throwing tomatoes at anyone anymore if you live in North America. The corporate Agri-businesses here have genetically modified all the damn tomatoes so that they are about as hard as tennis balls (and they don't taste much better either).

They did this over a period of years with an eye toward protecting the tomatoes from rough handling by harvesting machines and in shipment, and to keep them from getting bruises so they will look nice and pristine at your grocery. They now have thick, tough skins and very little flavour at all. What flavour they have is mostly sour.

Tomatoes used to be delicious, and they were picked mostly by Mexican workers who were treated like slaves and paid starvation wages. This guaranteed big profits for the growers. The Mexicans and other migrant workers organized and fought for decent wages and working conditions....and finally got some of that after decades of struggle.

The growers were not pleased. Since they now had to pay a half-decent wage to the pickers, they decided they might be better off with no pickers at all, and they hired people to find a solution. The solution was to replace the pickers with automated harvesting machines, but the machines turned out to be too rough and the tomatoes were getting damaged a lot by them. This caused loss of stock and hurt profits.

The Agri-business people hired more scientists and specialists to figure out how to make the tomatoes more durable. Their efforts culminated in an "improved" tomato that is picked green, ripened in a room by immersion in a toxic gas that will kill you if you stay in that room very long, and shipped by the billions to all the chain stores in North America. It is, like I said, almost as tough as a tennis ball, looks nice and bright red and flawless after it's been artificially "ripened" off the vine, and tastes like a wretchedly pale shadow of the delicious tomatoes people used to grow on 100,000 small independent farms all over the place.

The small, independent farms are virtually all gone now, because they can't afford the hugely expensive harvesting machines and can't compete with the Big Boys.

And we all get to eat lousy, hard, not very good tasting tomatoes that are very much lacking in the vitamins and minerals that natural tomatoes once had...so you could say that you're eating denatured celluloid that looks like a tomato.

This is the triumph of modern mass marketing! Oh yeah...and about 50,000 migrant workers lost their jobs to the harvesting machines...all because they wanted to be paid a living wage and not treated like animals.

If you want to throw a tomato at someone, throw it at the CEO of the corporation that ships tomatoes to your local supermarket. And use an Italian-grown garden tomato from Italy...a REAL tomato that will be soft and thin skinned like a tomato should be. It'll make a real mess out of his $3000 suit.