Would you eat a tomato, or other garden delicacy, that some anonymous critter has gotten to first? That’s the dilemma I faced this week as I plucked a blushing red tomato from the vine only to discover that its orb-like beauty had been defaced by teeth marks.
I’m not much of a gardener, despite my surname. It’s not as if my garden produces an abundance of tomatoes, especially prized beefsteaks. I can’t spare them. Every specimen that fails to make it to my mouth, or those of appreciative friends and family members, feels like a personal blow.
So as I stood in my garden, weeds lapping at my raised beds – indeed often competing with the resident squash, cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes in the beds themselves – I debated whether I should discard the fruit in my hand or attempt to salvage it?
Who knows what diseases it might transmit, though our resident wildlife -- mice, chipmunks, birds and woodchucks -- appear eminently healthy. Some of the woodchucks, about whom I feel particular enmity considering how their tunnels despoil the landscape, are the size of bear cubs.
Speaking of bears, last fall some large mammal crashed through and destroyed the fence that my son-in-law Malcolm had recently constructed around the garden, collapsing the supporting pole. I’d managed to prop them back up but it certainly wasn’t the fortress it once had been; open season for creatures great and small who wanted to supplement their hardscrabble diets with gorgeous heirloom tomatoes.
I decided to go online and submit this question to my search engine: “Can you eat a tomato…” but before I’d completed my thought Chrome had filled in the rest. Apparently, they’d fielded the inquiry before. “Can you eat a tomato that a bird has pecked?” “Can you eat a tomato that a squirrel bit into?” “What is eating my tomatoes?” Answer: “These eleven animals.”
Indeed, I happened upon a rather erudite conversation on the subject on a home and landscape design website I’d never heard of called houzz.com. A reader had asked, “Would you eat produce in your garden critters had touched?” The featured answer consisted of an ode to the human digestive system, gently accused the questioner of biophobia and said she ought to be more concerned about all those chemicals used to produce flawless looking produce in industrial agriculture.
The writer sounded authoritative but I wasn’t convinced. In the meantime, I’d shepherded the tomato in question to our kitchen cutting board and cut the offending bit off. But might the effect of the creature’s saliva have been systemic?
Another reader confessed that if she didn’t consume her bitten avocados she’d go hungry and then went on to list all the animals with communicable diseases – bats, squirrels, in particular tree squirrels that carry a pathogen that caused digestive problems and that pregnant women best avoid.
In the meantime, my wife had come home, unbeknownst to me had helped herself to a slice of the tomato and was still standing.
Another reader volunteered that he was diabetic and while on a walk and his blood sugar levels plummeting picked an apricot off the ground that a bird had already pecked. He ate it and lived to tell about it.
I’m not sure any of these responses quieted my reservations. Perhaps the most persuasive answer I found came from a writer who observed that starving people can’t afford to be so picky and that homo sapiens wouldn’t have existed and evolved if we condescended to eat only aesthetically pleasing fruits and vegetables. My chipmunks and woodchucks might be engaged in a criminal conspiracy. But an even greater crime would be to waste an otherwise perfectly good piece of fruit.
I still haven’t eaten the tomato in question, though mostly because I harvested a few previously unsampled specimens from the garden. But the bigger question is how to protect against this desecration going forth?
The Internet had answers to that, too. Placing wire mesh or netting over your beloved tomatoes could keep birds away. Mesh cages might dissuade chipmunks and squirrels. But nothing, short of a pest control company is going to defeat woodchucks since they can tunnel underneath your fences making mesh cages pointless.
Tell me about it.
I suspect the larger problem involves my attitude towards gardening. As much as I love watching my vegetables grow and harvesting them I’ve got other, if not better, things to do. There’s only so much effort I’m willing to devote to the religion of homegrown fruits and vegetables.
My devotion certainly stops at turning the garden into a junior version of Sing Sing with industrial fencing, guard towers, and facial recognition controlled entrances and exits. So I suppose a few pieces of gnawed produce is the price I’ve got to pay for. On the other hand, if I catch the critter or critters responsible they have only themselves to blame.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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