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 — which the Trump administration wants us to eat more of by imposing a 21 percent tariff on most Mexican tomatoes starting July 14.

The tariff represents a double insult to consumers, assaulting both our taste buds and our pocketbooks. President Trump has told us to make do with fewer (and more expensive) imported pencils and dolls for the greater good of bringing manufacturing back to America. Fine. But tomatoes? The last thing American consumers need is a revitalization of Florida’s withering tomato industry.

Even some industry leaders admit the mediocrity of Florida field-grown tomatoes. In 2020, when I visited Lipman Family Farms, one of the largest growers of field tomatoes in the United States, its chief executive at the time, Kent Shoemaker, warned me not to expect anything like the fully red vine-ripened tomatoes our grandparents grew. “We have to get the tomato from Immokalee, Fla., to St. Louis, Mo., in February, and your grandma’s tomato wouldn’t make it,” he explained, adding, “You have to make choices.”

Those choices include breeding tomatoes not for flavor, but to survive disease, insects, shipping and Florida weather from blistering heat to tropical downpours. Some Florida tomato varieties are bred to fit perfectly on a fast-food burger patty. Or, if they are destined for Subway, to look fresh in a display case hours after being sliced.

Because high sugar levels in tomatoes attract bacteria and fungi while also reducing size and yield, Florida growers have to deliberately minimize sweetness. Finally, to survive the journey to St. Louis or anywhere else, the fruits are picked while still bright green and rock hard; they turn pink by spending several days or more in a room filled with ethylene gas.