A Whole Tomato

“I never seen a tomato before.”

He held the tomato gently in his hand, cradling it like an egg.

“I swear, I never seen a whole tomato before.”

I had to turn away to keep from laughing.

As you might imagine, the food served in prison is quite terrible. Our students come to class hungry, making it difficult to pay attention. This simple fact was one of the reasons why we started horticulture programming, so students could grow their own food to supplement what’s offered in the kitchen.

In the beginning, I’d bring snacks to class in between our harvests so no one would go hungry. Then the prison administration said that what I was doing wasn’t fair to the rest of the prisoners who weren’t in the program and forbade me to bring food.

I found a workaround though.

It’s useless to grow a basil or spinach plant if you don’t have anything to add it to. Spinach does not taste too good on its own. So, I asked the administration if I could bring additional food on days we were harvesting so students could learn how to actually cook with what they had grown. The administrators acquiesced.

On the first week of class this semester we harvested bok choy we’d planted in our indoor aquaponic system. I made stir fry to add the bok choy to. The kids at Burruss loved it and I received many compliments on my cooking (which made me feel pretty good). But they hadn’t really done anything other than sprinkle some bok choy leaves into their stir fry. They hadn’t learned anything.

The following week we were harvesting basil. I decided our meal would be caprese salad with bread, mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, and balsamic vinaigrette.

The morning of class, I ran into a problem. I didn’t have time to pre-slice the tomatoes or bread. So, I hustled into my car with a bunch of loose tomatoes, bread, and cheese. I brought plastic knives for the kids to cut the tomatoes themselves, hoping a guard wouldn’t deem my cutlery as contraband and confiscate it.

Following our lecture, we walked out to the greenhouse and gingerly removed the basil leaves. Back in the classroom, I apologized for not preparing the ingredients beforehand. I explained that they would have to do it themselves.

That’s when Jaiden uttered that line, he’d never seen a whole tomato before. He asked politely how he should cut it. I demonstrated.

I brought out the 2 baguettes I’d purchased from Costco. You’d have thought I’d pulled out two gold bars the way they reacted.

Buford, my teaching assistant who’s been incarcerated for 41 years hollered, “Oh Lordy, real bread!” This must be how a priest feels when holding the cup of wine before communion. You know you got something sacred in your palms.

I showed the boys how to assemble a caprese salad. Only one student assembled something that could have been served at a dinner party – by and large, most students made sandwiches – which, who cares, food is food.

The classroom went silent as they ate. A divine silence, the kind that fills your soul.

The next day I was at a women’s prison teaching horticulture. Our seedlings had been killed by a recent frost, so we had to start over.

I told the ladies we’d be digging in the dirt that morning. We didn’t have any tools, so everything had to be done by hand.

A couple weeks prior I conducted a lecture on bacteria that is naturally found in the soil. This bacteria is scientifically proven to release serotonin and dopamine. The women, many of whom were former addicts in active recovery, delighted in the knowledge that a simple clump of soil could make them feel good again. You see, drugs like fentanyl and oxycontin flood the brain with dopamine, so much to the point that your body stops producing or responding to dopamine on its own. You enter a miserable cycle, and to feel good again, you have to take more and more of the drug. It’s an endless pit of misery.

But alas, here was a way to produce those “feel-good” chemicals without a needle. Whenever a new student comes to class, the veterans giddily explain that the soil “gets you high.” Close enough for me.

After class, one woman pulled me aside. “You have no idea what this class means to me. Thank you.”

I laughed walking out of the facility. We’d played in the dirt for 2 hours. How could that possibly mean so much to someone?

I came to a simple answer: because God is in this program.

There’s God in playing in soil. There’s God in planting seeds. There’s God in a ripe, plump tomato. There’s God in everything.

You just need the eyes to see it.

In the story of the castaway Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe writes, “These three poor desolate Men knew nothing how certain of Deliverance and Supply they were, how near it was to them, and how effectually and really they were in a Condition of Safety, at the same Time that they thought themselves lost, and their Case desperate. So little do we see before us in the World, and so much reason have we to depend cheerfully upon the great Maker of the World, that he does not leave his Creatures so absolutely destitute, but that in the worst Circumstances they have always something to be thankful for, and sometimes are nearer their Deliverance than they imagine.”

Shipwrecked, alone, abandoned for dead, Crusoe finds the great Maker of the World. In many ways, our students’ situations in prison are similar to Crusoe. They are cast out, exiled to prison.

Yet still, they are closer to deliverance than they imagine.

A whole tomato. That’s it.

Thankful,

Spencer