Tomatoes are made for ketchup (or war)
Yolo County roads turn red in the summer sun
A RED HOT MESS ... Yes, the mighty tomato still rules Yolo County, but when those beautiful trucks carrying this bright red bounty enter a freeway ramp at over 5 mph, gravity takes over and a predictable portion of this cash crop becomes a crash crop, ending up abandoned on the side of the road where even the vultures won't eat it.
Thanks to the genius long ago of several Davisites named Jack Hanna and Charley Rick and Coby Lorenzen, those tomatoes will be on that roadside for a while, given that their skins are bred to be thicker and tougher than your average chuck steak so they won't explode while being machine harvested and tossed high in air into a waiting truck trailer.
Heck, when I was playing third base for the Cubs in the Davis Little League, if we ran out of baseballs at practice, we'd just run into a nearby tomato field, find a red beauty the size of a baseball and use that instead. If you got it to splat on your bat, everyone cheered and it was an automatic home run.
When our kids were little, we'd find a lonely country road with a sharp curve that was certain to have spilled tomatoes. The kids would take turns sitting on my lap and "driving," while everyone else squealed in the back seat as we drove back and forth making ketchup.