The old song goes ‘You say tom-ah-to, I say to-may-to’, but however different people pronounce it, the fruit which is used in everyday cooking as a vegetable is the subject of much song and dance in Pakistan, where its price has shot up to over Rs 300 per kg, and farmers are hiring armed guards to protect the precious crop from larcenous marauders. To highlight the high cost of the comestible a Pakistani bride on her wedding day eschewed traditional gold jewellery, bedecking herself instead in a necklace, earrings, and other adornments all made of tomatoes, and confided to a reporter covering the event that as a trousseau her family had gifted her three more kilos of the prohibitively priced commodity.

While tomatoes of the rotten variety are commonly used as missiles aimed at objects of public displeasure, other members of the fruit and vegetable kingdom are frequently employed as terms of endearment. An attractive person of the female persuasion might be referred to as a peach, who can also be the apple of one’s eye. Wordsworth, whom Rumpole called the ‘dear old sheep of the Lake District’, famously addressed his dear sister Dorothy as his ‘winsome marrow’, blissfully oblivious that he had inadvertently turned her into a kaddu. However, the rising cost of veggies, in Pakistan and elsewhere, might inspire a fairy tale retold in which when Cinderella’s stately carriage turns into a humble pumpkin, the consume- friendly transformation which makes Prince Charming go bananas over her.