In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.
It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery. As usual with this type of challenge, the entries that stood out were those that retained a crumb, however small, of plausibility. Nicholas Stone was good but his piece was written as a news report rather than a leading article and so I reluctantly disqualified it.
Bill Greenwell takes the bonus fiver. His fellow winners earn £30 each.
It cannot even be decided in polite society what species it belongs to. Its pronunciation is cause for dissent. Its name derives from a word for ‘swelling’. What kind of right-minded authority would permit the tomato to be part of a young person’s diet? Its skin is glossy, and a cheap bright red; it leans against the lips, curvaceous; it spurts seeds; its flesh is thick and rich. Everything about the tomato reeks of decadence. We desire for our young people a more edifying range of comestibles than something the colour of lipstick and the hue of shame: the firm, upstanding leek, for instance, or the more aggressive lemon. We have seen where tomato worship has led: to the use of recreational drugs, to the prevalence of fast food, to the fondling of mobile phones. A tomato is nothing more than a bordello of suggestibility.
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