The best tomato is local, the worst flew 1,500 miles. Draw the map
We need to talk about what this taste test accidentally proved, because it's the entire food-systems argument in one supermarket shelf. Best in show: grown on the Isle of Wight. Best bargain: organic, from Essex, Soil Association certified. And the bottom of the table? A Spanish import and a Sicilian tomato that travelled some 1,500 miles to score one star. Distance, it turns out, is not a flavour.
The test even scored provenance and growing methods — imagine if all food journalism did that as standard! — and the pattern held: the tomatoes with roots in our own soil, from Kent's vast Thanet Earth greenhouse to a Hertfordshire vine, carried the flavour AND the smaller footprint.
One honest wrinkle, because we don't do cherry-picking (tomato-picking?): organic certification alone didn't guarantee taste. Fine. The lesson isn't a label, it's proximity — food grown near the people who eat it, picked riper, travelled less.
So here's the ask, and it's delicious: this summer, buy the British vine. Better yet, grow ONE tomato plant — a pot on a windowsill counts, a balcony is a farm in waiting. Imagine, instead, a nation of tiny greenhouses. Sign the petition; it's compostable. There is always a petition.