Unbelievable Mutant Tomatoes

These might not look like such amazing Tomatoes, but I've never known any fruit or vegetable to be quite like them. Let me explain...

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To most ordinary folk the thought of eating green tomatoes is rather unappetising. That was true of me when I picked these during our tomato harvest last summer. In fact I wasn't even sure when I harvested them that they were even ripe for eating. These grew by accident after self-seeding in a couple of different places around the garden. 

Although I'd heard of a green variety I'd never actually tried them and was a bit hesitant about actually eating them. So I suggested Izumi use them for making chutney which she did. I thought they'd be good for adding a bit of volume to the chutney if nothing else. When we cut them up they looked like any other tomato except they were GREEN all the way through, and they had rather a firm texture.  

As the season came to an end and the number of red tomatoes in the kitchen dwindled to nothing these green tomatoes were all that was left so I felt obliged to use them. So I made a ham and salad sandwich but found them rather disappointing for both taste and texture and decided I didn't want any more.

These 2 remaining tomatoes have been sitting in the fruit bowl ever since, along with most other fruits you can think of – apples, kiwifruit, avocados, bananas, oranges, mandarins, mangos, and the odd pineapple (I'm sure I've missed a few).

Amazingly, after all these various fruits have come and gone, some even rotting in the fruit bowl without our notice right next to these things and they're still exactly the same as the day I picked them!

I ask you: WHAT KIND OF MUTANT TOMATOES ARE THESE?! 

So I decided to do a little bit of research on the internet and found the following:

As already mentioned, my green tomatoes above have been sitting in our fruit bowl with all sorts of ethylene* producing fruit for more than 4 months so far – that's 120+ days – 3 times more than mentioned in the above article! Something tells me these tomatoes will still be unchanged by next summers harvest. I'm going to hold on to them and see how long they last... 

If this is the kind of food we're consuming these days it's got me worried — very worried.

(* Ethylene is a gas that many fruits give off that will hasten the ripening of other fruits and vegies. For example, apples which produce ethylene can be used to hasten the ripening of unripe kiwifruit which are ethylene sensitive)

UPDATE! One of these freakish tomatoes finally succumbed to the forces of nature in the first week of September 2011 making it about 5 months old (see picture taken 7th Sept).

However, the smaller one is still going in mid November 2011 making it more than 7 months old (This photo was taken on the 14th Nov, the most recent newspaper I could find to prove the date was already 10 days old). 

Even though it has started changing to a reddish colour, it still doesn't look very appetising.