The Real Thing
A sliced Mortgage Lifter tomato sandwicch on white bread with mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Photo Courtesy of "I Believe I Can Fry" food blog article, "Summer is a Southern Tomato Sandwich"
Special to United Methodist Insight | July 31, 2025
On the eighth day, when the heavy work was done, when the stars were hung just so, God leaned back and said, “I reckon I’m hungry.” Right then and there, with the dirt still fresh under His fingernails, God made the tomato sandwich.
Not the store-bought kind. Not something with a barcode or a best-by date. No, this was an honest-to-God, elbow-dripping, salt-sprinkled testament to summer. God took two slices of white bread (not that grainy birdseed stuff) but real white bread that stuck to the roof of your mouth and slathered them with mayonnaise so thick it curled up at the edges like a smile.
Then God reached down and plucked a tomato still warm from the sun, big as a baby’s head and red as a revival tent. The Lord sliced it thick enough to stop your heart, salted it like a sinner, and laid it on the bread with the reverence of a preacher placing a Bible on the pulpit.
When God took a bite, juice running down the divine chin and onto the holy sandals, Yahweh sighed the sigh of a deity who knew He had it right.
Down here, in the red dirt and kudzu of central North Carolina, we’ve been chasing that first tomato sandwich ever since. We wait all year for that one week in late July when the Cherokee Purples or the Mortgage Lifters come in fat and mean, and we don’t need meat or miracles, just bread, mayo, and the kind of tomato that tastes like sunshine remembers your name.
My Grandma Pauline used to say that a tomato sandwich was poor man's food. If that's poor, then count me out of rich because there ain’t nothing, no steak or caviar that can touch a tomato sandwich made by hands that know how to shell peas and shuck corn.
It’s communion, that sandwich, a reminder that the best things in life don’t come wrapped in plastic or cooked in chrome. They come from a garden row behind the house, next to the chicken wire and the rusted swing set.