Dialogue: Tomatoes a symbol of a parody world

Things are not as they seem. We live in strange and savage times, a parody world best represented by tomatoes.

Tomatoes have a long and dishonourable history. The in-betweenies of greengrocery, they used to be called wolf peaches, and stuntmen travelled round rural fairs astonishing the incestuous, gap-mouthed peasants by eating the things and not dying. As a medieval marketing device, it was considerably more honest and entertaining than advertisements today, which consist of actors pretending that banks can make them happy.

But the symbolic tomatoes I'm on about are not the tomatoes of yesterday.

I'm on about the tomatoes we buy year round, or at least the things which the supermarket - with its staff of seven qualification-free school-leavers on an hourly wage of nothingpence halfpenny - is pleased to call tomatoes.

They're reddish and plumpish and make reasonable short-range missiles. As food they're unthinkable, transparent impostors, water with food colouring. We all know what a real tomato is like. It's arterial red, pip-laden, flesh like a fresh wound and it tastes emphatically of, well, tomato.

The hydroponic things that steal their good name through most of the year are no more tomatoes than I'm the Queen Mother - though, as it happens, I'm not in the least averse to swanning around in a gossamer frock and knocking back the Gordon's at someone else's expense.

But these tomatoes taste like sofa stuffing, and I don't mean good old bristly horsehair with bits of Dobbin still clinging to the roots, but rather the spine-warping, pus-coloured foam rubber that burns with richly murderous smoke.

They're parody food, and someone from the unspeakable Consumers' Institute ought to do something about them, only of course they'd make it worse, and then Jim Anderton would start growing a people's tomato in his backyard and flogging it off at 3c a kilo thanks to a billion-dollar subsidy filched from the bottomless pocket of your friend and mine - us.

Anyway, supermarket tomatoes are as good a metaphor as we are likely to find for these parodic times. I'm not, of course, alluding to that parody of a boxing match in which the fifth-former beat the tubby little second-former by the admirable expedient of placing a fist on his forehead and watching the little chubby one with the sad hair flailing around hopelessly and getting more and more amusingly annoyed, like an insect flipped onto its back and waving its legs. No, not that, though as a parody of fighting it took some beating.

Nor am I alluding to the newsreader salary saga, which is as much a parody of news as you could hope to find and which is bound to lead eventually to a news programme entirely dedicated to the subject of newsreaders, their frets and fears, their difficulties in finding larynx insurance, their worries about grooming, their nocturnal raids on the supermarket to avoid the public eye. Although the idea of self-replicating television about television is a failsafe winner as the mob disappears up its own celebrity passage in a Mobius strip of entertainment, that's not what I'm on about.

What I'm on about is the fate of the land of the free and the home of the brave, where George fry-em-good Bush and Al I-do-have-human-ancestors Gore have locked horns over a handful of votes cast by illiterate sunshine-homers with polka dots of skin cancer and a passion for line dancing. That's the real humdinger of a parody tomato.

For oh, what fun it all was before the election, the two of them masquerading as real tomatoes under the title of president-in-waiting. Coiffed by a couple of billion big-business bucks, they strutted around the country in Saks Brothers suits pretending they wanted to do Mr and Mrs America a bit of good. Oozing the abstract nouns of electioneering, they looked ripe with the promise of goodness and savour, the real thing from skin through pip to pith.

Then, whoa, the result hung in the balance and how things changed. Off came the mantle of responsible authority and out came the claws in the form of reptilian lawyers with wallets for consciences. And suddenly it was transparent that beneath the tomato skin of apparent benevolence there was nothing. Nothing that is but self-interest and greed for power. It was an enthralling glimpse of shallow hydroponic truth.

Nothing new in all that, of course. The quest for power has always been fraudulent, and the Supertom on the throne has always been an impostor. But it was nice to see it underlined in red. Though it still hasn't solved the problem of where to find an edible tomato. Or, for that matter, a decent apple. These things matter.