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Atlantic
24-07-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
Tomato Season Is Different This Year
Every summer, there is a brief window—call it August—when the produce is exquisite. The cherries are at their best, as are the peaches, plums, and nectarines. The watermelon is sweet. The eggplants are glossy. The corn is pristine. And the tomatoes! The tomatoes are unparalleled. There's a reason tomatoes are synonymous with summer, staple of home gardens and farmers' markets alike. Giant, honking beefsteaks and sprightly Sungolds are begging to be transformed into salads and gazpachos, tossed with pasta and sliced into sandwiches, or eaten raw by the fistful. Enjoy them while you can. Come fall, tomato season will be over just as quickly as it began. Yes, you can obtain sliceable red orbs in virtually any supermarket, at any time of year, anywhere in the United States. But they are pale imitations of dripping August heirlooms. Out-of-season tomatoes—notoriously pale, mealy, and bland—tend to be tomatoes in name only. They can be serviceable, dutifully filling out a Greek salad; they can valiantly garnish a taco and add heft to a grilled-cheese sandwich. At the very least, they contribute general wetness and a sense of virtue to a meal. Flavor? Not so much. This year, of all years, it's worth indulging in the bounties of high tomato season. The bloodless tomatoes waiting for us in the fall are mostly imported from Mexico, and as with so many other goods these days, they are now stuck in the middle of President Donald Trump's trade war. This week, the White House imposed 17 percent tariffs on Mexican tomatoes. In all likelihood, that will mean higher prices for grocery-store tomatoes, Tim Richards, an agricultural economist at Arizona State University, told me. This will not make them better in terms of color, texture, or flavor—but it will make them cost more. Grumbling about grim winter tomatoes is a long-standing national hobby, and at the same time, their existence is a small miracle. You can eat a BLT in the snow or a Caprese salad for Valentine's Day with no effort at all. In August 1943, before Americans could get fresh tomatoes year-round, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia encouraged housewives to brace for winter by canning as many tomatoes as they could. 'They are in your city's markets and I want to see every woman can them while they are at this low price,' he announced. They wouldn't have to do it for long. By the 1960s, 'just about every supermarket and corner store in America was selling Florida tomatoes from October to June,' the author William Alexander wrote in Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World. They were visually perfect but tasted like Styrofoam, which is in many ways what they were supposed to be: durable, pest-resistant, long-lasting, and cheap. Tomatoes are famously fragile and quick to rot, so they are often picked while still green, and then gassed with ethylene. It turns them red, giving the appearance of ripeness but not the corresponding flavor. In recent years, the situation has somewhat improved: Instead of focusing exclusively on looks and durability, horticulturalists have turned their attention to maximizing flavor. There is another reason year-round tomatoes have improved: Mexico. 'Most of the nice-looking, really tasty tomatoes in the market are Mexican,' Richards said. That includes small varieties such as cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, and cocktail tomatoes, or, as he classified them, 'those little snacking tomatoes in the plastic things.' Mexico manages to produce this steady stream of year-round, pretty-good tomatoes by growing them primarily in greenhouses, which Richards said is the best possible way to produce North American tomatoes at scale. Even in winter, tomatoes sheltered from the elements can be left to ripen on the vine, which helps improve the taste. All of which is to say that an America without easy access to imported Mexican tomatoes looks bleak. Like all of Trump's tariffs, the point of taxing Mexican tomatoes is to help producers here in the U.S. Thirty years ago, 80 percent of the country's fresh tomatoes were grown in America. Now the share is more like 30 percent, and sliding. America could produce enough tomatoes to stock grocery stores year-round—Florida still grows a lot of them—but doing that just doesn't make a lot of sense. 'It's not cost-effective,' Luis Ribera, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University, told me. 'We cannot supply year-round tomatoes at the prices that we have.' Unlike Mexico, Florida mainly grows its tomatoes outside, despite the fact that it is ill-suited to outdoor tomato growing in pretty much all ways: The soil is inhospitable. The humidity is an incubator for disease. There are regular hurricanes. 'From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective,' the food journalist Barry Estabrook wrote in Tomatoland, 'you would have to be an idiot to attempt to commercially grow tomatoes in a place like Florida.' Exactly what the tariffs will mean for grocery prices is hard to say. Tomatoes will be taxed when they cross the border, so importers and distributors will directly pay the costs. But eventually, the increase will likely trickle down to the supermarket. The story of tariffs, Ribera said, is that 'the lion's share is paid by consumers.' In the short term, Richards estimated that price hikes will depend a lot on the variety of tomato, with romas hardest hit. 'That's the one we rely on most from Mexico,' he said. Beefsteaks, he added, will face a smaller increase. Compared with some of the other drastic tariffs that Trump imposed, a 17 percent price bump on Mexican tomatoes hardly portends the tomato-pocalypse. Last year, the average import price of Mexican tomatoes was about 74 cents a pound. If the entire 17 percent increase is passed on to consumers, we'd be looking at an additional 13 cents—enough to notice, but not enough for a critical mass of people to forgo romas altogether. Here's the other thing: People want tomatoes, and they want them now. 'We don't want to wait for things to be in season,' Ribera said, and we aren't about to start. For all of the many problems with out-of-season tomatoes, Americans keep eating them. It was true when winter tomatoes were a novelty: 'I don't know why housewives feel they have to have tomatoes,' one baffled supplier told The New York Times in 1954. But they did, and people still do. Season to season, our national tomato consumption fluctuates relatively little, the grocery-industry analyst Phil Lempert told me. Every burger joint in America needs tomatoes—not the best tomatoes, but tomatoes that exist. There is a whole genre of recipes about how to make the most of out-of-season tomatoes. A lesser tomato, of course, is better than no tomato at all.
Time Out
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Sandwich shop Korio opens a second outlet in Singapore at Guoco Midtown II
Popular homegrown sandwich shop Korio reopened last December in IOI Central Boulevard Towers with much fanfare, after closing for a year from 2023 to 2024. Now, you'll still catch snaking lines outside its tiny shopfront during lunch hour in the CBD, with customers eager to sink their teeth into hearty sourdough sammies and brioche doughnuts. Thanks to its overwhelming popularity, the brand has decided to open a second outlet in town, located at the new Guoco Midtown II development in Bugis. Similar to the first shop, the Bugis outlet mostly does takeaway orders, though a small dine-in space is available for those who'd like to savour their sandwiches on the spot. All-time favourites like the gruyère, cheddar and mozzarella grilled cheese sandwich ($15) and the sausage and egg sandwich ($13) will be available. But on top of that, diners can also expect outlet-exclusive items like the brisket sandwich ($18.50) featuring slow-cooked grass-fed beef brisket with pickled onions and horseradish sauce. Another newly launched item is the BLT sandwich ($16.50) with crispy bacon, avocado, melted cheese, fresh vegetables, jalapenõ ranch and a sunny-side-up egg, encased in fluffy potato buns. It's not just the sammies that fans go ham for – Korio also doles out freshly-baked brioche doughnuts each day. Each batch undergoes an 18-hour fermentation process before they're fried and coated in house-made glazes. The signature honey sea salt doughnut ($5.50), which has been around since Day 1, is a classic, but our favourite is the cinnamon sugar doughnut with a dollop of maple butter. Wash down the grease with drinks like sparkling orange espresso ($7) and a range of iced lemonades, homemade iced teas, or the signature honey sea salt latte ($6.50) Korio was first launched in 2020 at Telok Ayer by nightlife brand Zouk, which recently also introduced its first French casual dining concept, The Plump Frenchman, also located at Guoco Midtown II.
Daily Mirror
23-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Mirror
'I spent £3 on Greggs Too Good To Go Bag and was floored by what was in it'
The Too Good To Go app is perfect for those trying to do this as it connects users with local stores, cafes, and restaurants that have surplus unsold food and sells it to them for a cheaper price Many people like buying themselves a lunch or a treat now and again from one of the many high street food outlets. However, with the ongoing cost of living crisis continuing in the UK, many are doing all they can to save cash where possible. The Too Good To Go app is perfect for those trying to do this as it connects users with local stores, cafes, and restaurants that have surplus unsold food and sells it to them for a cheaper price. This means that as well as saving money, it is also helping cut food waste. A lot of people often share their Too Good To Go hauls online now on sites such as Facebook to spread the word about outlets who provide good value 'surprise bags' and ones to avoid. One woman named Charlotte decided to do exactly that recently as she posted about her Greggs bag. Charlotte told people she'd paid £2.99 for the bag and was left shocked when she saw what was inside of it. The post read: "Finally got a Greggs and well worth the wait! Awesome bag. Chicken baguette, Ham and egg roll, Steak bake, cheese and onion bake, two gingerbread men and two big yum-yums! £2.99!" She included a photo of all the goodies she got as her post racked up more than 80 likes. People agreed that she'd definitely got a good haul, as one person wrote: "Crikey best one I have seen yet." Charlotte isn't the only Too Good To Go user who has been impressed by her Greggs bag recently either. Mum-of-two Alice Nash also shared her incredible surprise bag only, where she got £33 worth of Greggs food items for just £3.15. Alice, from Wiltshire, said she received a bag crammed full of sweet treats and savoury snacks – with 14 items in total. This included three custard slices, a Margherita pizza slice, a box of two Yum Yums, a Chelsea bun, a Southern fried chicken baguette, a cheese and ham toastie, a tuna cucumber sandwich, a cheese Ploughman's roll, a steak bake, a veggie bake, a cheese, beans and sausage bake and a BLT sandwich. Speaking to What's the Jam, Alice said: "It's definitely the best bag we've received out of all the places we've purchased from, as there was such a variety. "I have been told this is a lot more than anyone normally gets since I posted my TikTok, so I know we got very lucky. My partner Kyle picked it up and immediately rang me and said he couldn't believe how much food there was. 'It was our first time getting a Greggs bag, and we didn't know what to expect. We thought we'd get maybe a sandwich and a bake – not a whole feast."
Daily Mirror
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Mum buys mystery bag from Greggs for £3.15 and contents inside leave her floored
Alice Nash's Too Good To Go bag has left social media users stunned as the mum-of-two picked up £33 worth of Greggs goodies for just £3.15 through the food waste app A mum who bought a mystery bag from Greggs has been stunned by the contents of her purchase. The Too Good To Go food bag, which offers discounted food items in a bundle bag, featured a fantastic haul of food for Alice Nash. The mum managed to grab £33 worth of Greggs food items for just £3.15, and broke down what she had received from the purchase. Alice, from Wiltshire, only just started using the Too Good To Go app and nothing could have prepared her for the impressive haul she got from the popular pastry chain. The bag she received was crammed full of sweet treats and savoury snacks. A total of 14 items were put in the mystery bag, with Alice, 28, sharing her haul on social media. The collection of items included three custard slices, a Margherita pizza slice, a box of two Yum Yums, a Chelsea bun, a Southern fried chicken baguette, a cheese and ham toastie, a tuna cucumber sandwich, a cheese Ploughman's roll, a steak bake, a veggie bake, a cheese, beans and sausage bake and a BLT sandwich. Mum-of-two Alice and partner Kyle had only wanted a light bite after their big lunch but were left with far more than they bargained for upon collecting their order. Speaking to What's the Jam, Alice said: "It's definitely the best bag we've received out of all the places we've purchased from, as there was such a variety. "I have been told this is a lot more than anyone normally gets since I posted my TikTok, so I know we got very lucky. My partner Kyle picked it up and immediately rang me and said he couldn't believe how much food there was. 'It was our first time getting a Greggs bag, and we didn't know what to expect. We thought we'd get maybe a sandwich and a bake – not a whole feast." Her food haul was shared to TikTok, where members of the public shared their envy after seeing the "best bag" from Too Good To Go. Others were left in disbelief, saying that there is "not supposed to be that much" in one bag. Another added: "You don't get all that in one bag - you must have bought four bags." Alice had the tuna sandwich, her daughter went for the toastie, and her partner tucked into a sandwich and one of the bakes. The rest was shared out the next day, including a delivery to her dad at work, who was more than happy to help finish it all off. Alice said: 'My daughter loves the surprise element to the bags, so we like to buy them, but always make sure it's from a place we know we will eat from and make use of the items. 'My dad was very happy when my partner turned up with lunch ready for them at work. Nothing went to waste, and it was all gone within two days. It felt like winning the Too Good To Go lottery. "We'll definitely be getting another Greggs bag – but I don't think we'll ever top this one."
New York Post
09-07-2025
- New York Post
NY restaurant leaves vulgar note on bill to group of elderly gals lunching
This restaurant bill was hard to stomach! An 87-year-old grandmother and six of her elderly friends were appalled when their waitress dropped a check labeling their table 'Old bitches' at an upstate restaurant. The seniors had been lunching at the casual cafe Deacon Blues in Watervliet, near Albany, on June 27 when the food fight flared up, according to a copy of the bill posted on Facebook. Advertisement 3 A group of seniors was gobsmacked when their waitress dropped a check labeling their table 'Old bitches' at Deacon Blues in Watervliet. Deacon Blues / Facebook 'My 87-year-old Mimi and her friends went to Deacon Blues for lunch — a place they've been to many times. But this time, they were completely disrespected. When the bill came, the receipt labeled their table as 'Old b*tches,'' Keira DiNuzzo, one of the women's granddaughters, fumed on Facebook. 'This is how you treat elderly women — loyal customers?' she wrote. 'Deacon Blues, you owe them an apology.' Advertisement The group of seven ordered $12.50 worth of food, including a BLT sandwich and coffee, during the Friday lunch rush at 1:30 p.m. — one indication why the server, identified as Monica, may have been miffed, according to the check. 3 The check labeled their table a check labeling their table 'Old bitches.' Keira Li DiNuzzo / Facebook The waitress first clashed with the elderly gals when she learned that three people in the group couldn't make it, prompting her to allegedly snap, 'Well, it would be nice to let me know in the future,' according to DiNuzzo. When the seniors sent back a water with 'something black floating' in it, the server allegedly 'responded with rudeness and no concern whatsoever,' according to DiNuzzo. Advertisement One of the restaurant's owners, Helen Wilkinson, apologized in a comment under DiNuzzo's post. 3 Deacon Blues serves comfort food like pizza and BLTs in Watervliet, NY. Deacon Blues / Facebook 'We at Deacon Blues profusely apologize for the actions of our employees. Please do not think we condone this behavior toward our customers,' she wrote. 'Our customer base consists of many loyal senior customers who have made our business grow and have the utmost respect for them.' Advertisement It wasn't immediately clear if the server would face consequences or get additional training. Owners of the restaurant didn't immediately return a request for comment from The Post.
