Re: Tomato Tasting Festival ideas

**y*@sfo.com**

At 11:41 AM -0400 8/5/08, WGardenermag@aol.com wrote:
>We are hosting a Tomato Tasting Festival at a local urban farmer's  market in
>a few weeks.
>
>I'm trying to brainstorm fun activities for this, but besides cutting  up
>tomatoes and putting them out for folks to taste and vote on, I'm stuck.
>Clearly, tomato throwing will not be tolerated by TPTB, though I'm 
>game and open  for
>outside-the-box ideas -- even if a bit messy
>
>Anyone else host one of these regularly or attend them?

I went to a tomato tasting at a nursery last weekend. It was basic -- 
tomato pieces on plates, a clipboard to record ratings (1-5 scale), 
and then an assortment of "cool season" tomato plants to plant now 
and harvest starting in October (I've wondered if this really works 
here in northern Calif., so I'm trying it this year).

One thing that I'd love to see at tomato tastings is a running total 
of ratings. Ideally you could see it after you'd made your own 
choices, not before, so as not to skew the ratings. It could be on a 
portable chalkboard or whiteboard.

It would also be fun to have a blind tomato tasting, maybe 5 or 10 
selected varieties. At the tomato tasting, I found that knowing the 
name of the tomato, whether from its reputation or because I'd grown 
it, influenced my rating. I had very high expectations of, say, 
Marianna's Peace (it was so-so), and very low of Early Girl.

Can you get bakeries to donate bread? Maybe a 10-minute tomato quiz 
show: each hour or half-hour, 3 volunteers at a time, each with a 
bell, compete to answer questions about growing and eating tomatoes. 
To encourage people to volunteer, each of the 3 gets a simple tomato 
sandwich, maybe with basil and garlic, after they're done. I'd do it 
improv style: any answer is encouraged, the emcee (ideal person would 
be actor/entertainer who knows a lot about tomatoes) offers clues. 
The hard part would be coming up with a few hundred questions 
beforehand, so that you don't have to repeat the same ones each time. 
But you could ask open-ended questions such as "what tomato has the 
most unusual name?" Or it could be more of an interview format: one 
person at time is interviewed for 3 minutes about their tomato 
preferences. The whole point of this would be gathering a crowd and 
entertaining them. Or you could put together a fact sheet on tomatoes 
(growing, varieties, cooking with) and pull questions from that.

Tanya Kucak

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