The tomato that travels well

The tomatoes on most stalls in a Giza vegetable market are red, firm, perfectly round, and taste of very little.

Nobody set out to make them that way. The trader who buys from the farms wants fruit that survives a long lorry ride and three days on a stall, so that is what he pays for. The farmer, who cannot sell what the trader will not take, plants varieties that crop heavily and bruise rarely, and picks them before they are ripe. The greengrocer stocks what the trader brings, because it arrives every morning at a price his customers accept.

And the shopper, holding one up to the light, takes it as the normal tomato. The one her children will picture when they hear the word.

Each person in that chain is making the sensible choice in front of them. None of them is the villain, and that is exactly what makes the arrangement so durable. A system built out of reasonable choices protects itself, because every link can point at the next one and say it had no option.

It is tempting to see the shopper as the person at the end of all this, the one it happens to. She is not at the end. She is one of the links. The stall sells what travels because people pick it up.

The few greengrocers in the city who carry the lumpy, cracked, deeply flavoured ones from smaller growers exist only because somebody keeps buying them. The system bends precisely where people decline to go along with it.

We are not stuck with the cheap tomato. We are part of the reason it is there, and noticing that is where changing it starts.