Qué culpa tiene tomato!

Felix Barroso Gutierrez.

Researcher and deep connoisseur of Las Hurdes.

A few, making a fruit skins, other, going to food banks.

The unforgettable Pablo Neruda, in his ‘Ode to tomato’, I sang like that: “…the tomato / earth star / star / repeated / and fecund… / boneless / without armor / without scales or thorns / gives us / the gift / of his fiery color / and all of its freshness”. Beautiful verses from a great poet. For some, tomato is a vegetable, but botanically speaking it is a fruit. Our memories of our small-town childhoods are gone (a great honor) and we get those tomatoes from the garden, round and flat like the red planet Earth, sated by loving knife and sprinkled with salt. Juicy merendilla. The old adages already say it: “Tomato with salt, for the poor it is a delicacy”. “Tomato with salt, ham for the ganapán”.

But that tasty Iberian ham from the garden has been degraded to unsuspected limits. The culmination of his misfortunes comes every last Wednesday of August, when in the Valencian town of Buñol they celebrate the unfortunate ‘Tomatina’. More than 100.000 euros are spent on this outrageous fun. And ones 120.000 kilograms of tomatoes are thrown from the trucks so that a whole battalion of acrobats, that in their hazardous lives they may never know what hunger is, collectively crash them against their bodies and wallow in the bloody juice they release. All this with the blessing of the public powers.

A few, turning a nourishing and honest fruit into hides and skins, just for fun; other, going to food banks to find food, out of real need. Quite a shameful affront to those 842 millions of humans suffering from chronic hunger (the 12% of the world population). Antonio Salort-Pons can now shout, Director of the Madrid office of the World Food Program (PMA), What “you have to break the legacy of hunger”, when there are people, applauded from the boxes, that trample food.

Possibly, these desclasados ​​do not know that, in our own Spain, there are 13 million Spaniards at risk of poverty and social exclusion. And to top, unsteady boxes usually sound out of time, like that of that PP spokesman in Congress, Rafael Hernando Fraile, What, when talking about child malnutrition in our country, drop that, with a hurtful insensitivity, What “that is a responsibility of the parents”.

“Qué culpa tiene tomato!”, sang the Spanish republicans in the civil war, couplet that was collected, not many years ago, by the Chilean group, musical and revolutionary, Quilapayún. It is not at fault, of course it is. If before the blame was placed on the exploiting landlords, now it is up to those who use the fruit for their lacerating and savage diversions.