The food critic Craig Claiborne once labeled them "tasteless, hideous and repulsive." James Beard called them "an almost total gastronomic loss." The New Yorker writer Thomas Whiteside found in 1977 that one survived a six-foot fall onto the floor intact, thus easily exceeding the federal standard for automobile bumpers.

The subject of their scorn? The Florida field tomato &mdash which the Trump administration wants us to eat more of by imposing a 21 percent tariff on Mexican tomatoes starting July 14.