DATE: Saturday, August 16, 1997             TAG: 9708160305

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   54 lines

THERE'S DESIRABILITY IN UGLINESS IF YOU SHOULD JUST HAPPEN TO BE A TOMATO

Hope Mihalap, the funniest writer and speaker since Mark Twain, called here with an exotic quest. ``Tell me,'' she said, ``where I can find an ugly tomato.''

``Hope,'' I said, ``if you had asked me where you can find an ugly potato, there'd be no difficulty replying, because people often refer to me as Old Potato Head, and with good reason.

``But usually shoppers are looking for pretty tomatoes.''

Hope said she'd been going market to market in Hampton Roads, looking in vain for ugly tomatoes.

``I want them to look as ugly as they can,'' she said, ``because they taste better when they're ugly, full of lumps and calluses, funny and misshapen, with cracks in them.''

There's a pinch of truth there. One way to detect whether a locally grown tomato has been allowed to ripen on the vine is to turn it over and look at its face at the axis where the stem was attached. If the tomato's face is scarred with striations, you have found one that took its sweet time maturing, often dangling in touch with the soil.

A farmer told me there's a name - cat face - for such a tomato.

That is the paradox, as Hope observed: To identify a perfect tomato, unearth one with an imperfection. That blemish betokens beauty found in the tomato's character rather than in cosmetic appearance.

One or two such marred ones can testify to the merit of a batch.

I'd rather you keep this clue to yourself. Let people continue prizing the rounded surface without turning it over to test its character lest, 'fore long, there'd be none left for you and me.

Since the season began, Hope said, she's been finding ``immense shiny, perfect globes,'' all ``suspiciously big and beautiful, but they just don't taste as good as the ugly ones.''

She is beginning to wonder if some ``young hot-shot geneticist'' has developed a strain of beautiful tomato that has an imported look about it but is tasteless, and is persuading farmers to produce them.

On the other hand, she said, perhaps farmers withhold homely tomatoes and put out only those they think the public desires.

Late Friday she called with a bulletin. In Norfolk at the City Farmers Market on Granby Street, which shares space in a block-long Ghent Market and Antique Center, she had found gawky tomatoes.

When she asked Kenny Keeter, the proprietor, if he had fresh, ripe tomatoes, he fetched a box marked Hanover Tomatoes.

That looked promising, but they weren't ugly, she noted. Whereupon he went to the back of the market and brought out some that were so marred they were downright beautiful.

In character, that is. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Illustration]

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