Plum tomatoes with basil from Wegmans. 12/12/25. Blogfinger photo.
By Paul Goldfinger, MD. 12/13/25
These plum tomatoes from Wegmans look great and they are delicious. I like to bite into them and add salt for the second bite. When I was a kid, our family would gather on the beach at Coney Island. Mom would bring tuna fish (only Bumble Bee) sandwiches made with Hellman’s mayo, sliced onions, and Jewish rye bread, the kind with big black seeds. And she would also bring big beautiful Jersey tomatoes, and we would eat them like apples.
All this came back to me when Eileen brought home these tomatoes.
She also brought some fresh basil . And this inspired her to plan to make tomato soup for the first time, and with low sodium. (1/23/26–not so far.)
We are compulsive label readers, and we have been frustrated trying is to find canned or boxed tomato soup which is low in sodium. Even my favorite from childhood: Progresso minestrone (vegetable soup.) failed the salt test. Why can’t soup manufacturers make a low salt or salt free version.
When she does make her tomato soup v.1, I will take it for a soup run and then post the recipe here.
Mom used to listen to the first radio nutritionist Dr. Carleton Fredericks. He preached eating raw veggies, and she sprinkled wheat germ on everything. And if she cooked veggies, she was not to pour out the water where the nutrients live. I recall that her veggies were usually canned or frozen. Recently we learned that frozen or canned veggies contain the same nutrients as fresh, but is that true?
And when I started college at Fairleigh Dickinson University, I discovered that all freshman had to attend a nutrition course given by Dr. Carlton Fredericks. Dr. Peter Sammartino, the founder of FDU, was an admirer, and I thought that this may have been the first college to offer required attendance at a nutrition course. And I was perhaps the only student there who ever heard of Fredericks.
So getting back to tomatoes, these Wegmans plums are better than this past summer’s crop of Jerseys. But the small Camparis grown in the US, Canada and central America, and are available in winter (probably in greenhouses) are delicious. Wegmans has them: called “cocktail tomatoes.”
Wegmans Campari cocktail tomatoes.
And here is a fresh tomato from the Sunset Farm Market in Asbury–a summer treat: You can’t beat those Jerseys.
Paul Goldfinger photo at the Sunset Farmer’s market. 7/22. Click once on her to reveal the truth about Jersey tomatoes.
And don’t forget that a good meal is best consumed with good music. Here is Monty Python’s “Decomposing Composers”