Abigail, a Lagos resident, has in the last three months or thereabout been making use of pressed tomatoes popularly referred to esa in the Southwest and awarawa in the Southeast for her stew and other culinary needs.

The practice, for Abigail, did not just start. It has been her way of managing her resources for years.

“It is esa tomatoes that I have been using to make stew in my house in the last three months or so because it comes cheaper than fresh ones.

“Esa has categories. It is the first grade that I always buy. There is another grade that is always an eyesore. I can’t buy that type because it can affect the taste of the stew or whatever you want to use the tomatoes for.”

Explaining what she meant by first grade, she said: “I mean freshly broken tomatoes from the basket. I always give money to the woman selling tomatoes in my area to help me select the broken ones from the basket immediately she comes back from the market.

“I give her money in advance so that some other people would not beat me to it. Those ones are fresh but it is just that they got broken in the course of transporting them from one place to another. It is as good as the fresh ones.

“The most important thing for me is that they come cheaper and are more in quantity.

“Everybody has become wise now. Tomatoes are gradually coming back to the market.

“When there is enough supply in the market, I can afford to go back to buying fresh ones.

“But as things are now, I will continue to buy first grade esa.”

Esa, whether first grade or second grade, health experts believe, is poisonous. Canada.ca Health Food and Nutrition, in a post on food poisoning, advised consumers to avoid tomatoes that have bruises or cuts on the skin, adding: “Eating tomatoes that have been contaminated with harmful bacteria can make you sick.

“Contaminated tomatoes have been linked to incidents of food poisoning caused by Salmonella.” Salmonella, according to the works of one Katherine Lee, is a group of bacteria that commonly cause food borne illness.

“An infection by the bacteria is called salmonellosis (or salmonella for short), and you can get it by consuming contaminated food products, including raw poultry, eggs, raw or unpasteurised dairy, beef, and in some cases fruits and vegetables.”

When you get salmonella, Cleverlandclinic.org says, it means enough “bacteria have gotten past your stomach acid and immune system to make you sick.

“Salmonella bacteria invade and destroy the cells that line your intestines. This makes it hard for your body to absorb water, which can give you stomach cramps.

“The water leaves your body in the form of diarrhea.”

However, the above concerns seem not to resonate with many Nigerian consumers. “We’ve been eating it all these years without any problem” is always a waiting response to advice against consumption of rotten tomatoes and other food items.

Another consumer who gave her name simply as Ify said she stopped buying fresh tomatoes a few weeks ago “after I asked my son to go and get some quantities for us to make stew.

“When he came back, I was shocked at what I saw. What he brought was nothing to write home about.

“Before, the money I gave him would get tomatoes and pepper that would last us for a week. With that, they can use the stew to cook and different things in the house.

“The stew that I made with the tomatoes that my son brought home that day would hardly take us for two days.”

Consequently, she said, “I had to put the pot of stew in the care of my first son so that he would police the pot and prevent anybody from going to tamper with the stew anyhow.

“The idea of going to buy bread and using stew to eat it was instantly prohibited. The quantity put on rice for each person was measured with strong warning that there would be no extra.

“The situation calls for drastic measures.”

Also sharing her experience, Funmi, a salary earner, said the astronomical increase in the price of tomatoes made her to adopt a different strategy in catering for her family. “I used to buy a bucket of tomatoes for about N1,500. If I add pepper and a few other things, I may end up spending about N3,000 but with the scarcity and resultant rise in price, a bucket of tomatoes from major markets, not street vendors, jumped to between N4,000 and N5,000.

“By the time you add pepper, you would have spent about N6,000 just on tomatoes and pepper. When you buy oil, fish, meat or chicken, you would have spent over N10,000 on a pot of stew that would not last more than a few days.

“How much do I earn in a month and how will I meet other obligations if I continue to spend so much on just a pot of stew?

“I had to wise up as they would say by resorting to buying esa. After all, tomato is tomato. It is the person that you tell that it is esa that you used to make your stew that will know. “It is a strategy to cut costs.”

Asked if she was not aware of the health problems inherent in consuming such tomatoes, she said: “I don’t believe that it has any health implications, because when you boil it, everything that is not good in it will die.

“I always make sure that I fry my stew very well, and I don’t think anything unhealthy will survive under such heat.”

For a food vendor, who gave her name as Ajoke, said it is an economic suicide for any vendor to be using fresh tomatoes.

She said: “How do you want me to recoup my investment and make profit if I go on to buy fresh tomatoes to make stew?

“Customers don’t want to care whether tomatoes and other ingredients are expensive or not. They will keep asking you to pour stew on their food.

“Some of them ask for stew in a manner that they would not eat it in their own homes.

“In this kind of situation, you have to be very careful not to lose your customers.

“One of the ways to wriggle out of it is to use esa tomatoes and at times esa pepper to make your stew.

“I have tomato sellers who help me to put this together.”

Continuing, she said: “When you cook it very well, using garlic and ginger to boil it, you will not have any inkling that it was made with esa tomatoes.

“Let us face the fact here: if you go to the market and buy fresh tomatoes, will some of them not be broken before you get home?”

Sharing his experience with some consumers, a colleague of our correspondent said he was shell shocked when he saw the quality of tomatoes people were buying for consumption in a Lagos market.

His words: “I went to Ile Epo, a popular market in Agbado Oke-Odo Local Council Area of Lagos, to buy tomatoes. I met two women where I wanted to buy the tomatoes.

“While I was checking some fresh tomatoes neatly packed in buckets, they were pricing some horribly perished tomatoes that were already bringing out some whitish elements.

“Immediately I started discussing the price of the fresh tomatoes with the seller, the women shifted, looking at me in shock.

“It was as if my coming to the place unsettled them. They walked away and subsequently came back.

“When they came back, I asked what they wanted to do with that kind of tomatoes, and to my chagrin, they said they wanted to use it to make stew.”

In that instance, he said, “tears gathered welled up in my eyes but I quickly controlled it.

“Looking at me, one of the women said, ‘My son, the world has turned its back on us, and that is why all we can afford is these rotten tomatoes. You, who life has turned its front to, can afford to buy the fresh and expensive ones’.

“Her remark pierced my mind and I was forced to buy a bucket of fresh tomatoes for them.

“They were extremely happy. It was as if they had won a jackpot as they joyfully danced away from the place.”

Nutritionist warns of health implications of esa

A Lagos based nutritionist, Kayode Ojewale Idimu, in a write up, warned of the dangers inherent in consuming tomatoes. He said as important and nutritious as fresh tomatoes are to the body, they can be deadly to the body if rotten ones are consumed.

“Rotten tomatoes, in local parlance here in the South-West, are called esa. Retailers of tomatoes sort out, isolate and sell these rotten tomatoes at cheap rates.

“These ‘fallen’ tomatoes are visibly soft, leaking their liquid content as they decay.

“Most rotten tomatoes also grow mold on their bodies and serve as abode for worms and maggots too.

“These worms are maggots or larvae of common houseflies which deposit their eggs when they perch on the tomatoes.

“Maggot-infested tomatoes cause bacterial poisoning when consumed.”

In September 2018, he said, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), warned Nigerians against the consumption of rotten tomatoes to forestall cancer.

The warning was given by a Deputy Director with the agency, Mrs Christiana Essenwa. She said rotten tomatoes contain microorganisms that induce cancer.

In her words: “Once tomatoes become rotten, they will have microorganisms, mostly fungi, and fungi in rotten tomatoes produce mycotoxins which are deadly and induce cancer, and cause immune deficiency in man and animals.

“Mycotoxins are deadly and can cause all sorts of poisoning in the body. Some research suggested that mycotoxins could also cause kidney damage.”

According to Mrs Essenwa, some people think that rotten tomatoes which are cheap can be consumed after washing and heating. But she stressed that toxins cannot be washed or killed by heating because mycotoxins are heat-resistant.

She advised consumers to keep off rotten tomatoes often sold cheap in the market, saying, “it is better to spend money to prolong life than to use such money to buy death.”

Continuing, he said: “Mycotoxin is a toxic substance produced by fungi and it is capable of causing disease and death in both humans and other animals.

“They are said to be naturally occurring toxins from molds which cause a variety of adverse health effects.

“The damaging effects of consuming rotten tomatoes are enormous and in fact, not instant but gradual. Four major organs (liver, kidneys, intestinal tracts and skin), responsible for eliminating toxins from the body will begin to diminish in function, and then the body’s immune system breaks down too resulting in illness.

“The body organs involved in the role of detoxification begin to fail in articulation and function when these toxic substances overwhelmingly become too much for the body to detoxify.”

He noted that some tomato sellers may argue that not all soft and wrinkled tomatoes are rotten and spoilt because some of these fresh tomatoes burst and get punctured as they are being packaged and arranged in baskets from the farm to the point of sale.

“This argument is validly true. It is common knowledge that when fresh tomatoes are exposed to heat or high temperature, they become soft and subsequently burst.

“However, it is important to state clearly that it is at this point that these fresh tomatoes are prone to infestation by houseflies which leave maggot and larvae deposits in their wake.

“Special attention should be paid to the tomatoes we buy before slicing, grinding or consuming them. It must also be noted that a fresh tomato left for days may have become rotten without growing mold on it. Such tomatoes must not be consumed.

“These rotten tomatoes are dangerous to health when consumed. We therefore implore everyone, particularly our women to desist from buying and consuming rotten tomatoes.

In order to forestall cancer, avoid the consumption of spoilt tomatoes.”

Consumers say perished tomatoes are sweeter – Mile 12 Market chairman
The Chairman of Mile 12, the most popular perishable food items’ market in Lagos State, Alhaji Shehu Usman, says there is nothing wrong with consuming esa. In fact, he said some consumers have confided in him that it is sweeter in soup or stew.

Shehu in a chat with our correspondent said: “Esa is not a poisonous tomato. It is just part of the tomatoes tha perished in the course of bringing them. That tomatoes are crushed does not mean you cannot make use of them.

“Local food vendors mostly use esa. Even some households use it too. It is not a bad tomato like I said earlier. It is not that they got spoilt but they only got crushed.

“Esa is a loss for the trader. When you are coming from the north, almost one quarter of the basket will get damaged. Instead of throwing it away, you will separate the esa and sell it to recoup your investment. ”

Continuing, he said: “Tomatoes have varieties. Some would come for the fresh ones and some people would come for esa. It depends on the individual’s capacity.

“Some even prefer the esa because they say it is sweeter in soup or stew. As it is now, people even look for more of esa because it is cheaper.

“So we don’t frown at anybody buying or selling esa.”

How Benin Republic, Ghana, others helped address scarcity
After a long period of scarcity across the country, Shehu said, tomatoes are no longer scarce.

“There are lots of tomatoes in the market right now. We have tomatoes from Benin Republic, Ghana, Osun, Ogun and many other places that are coming to Lagos.

“Tomatoes used to come from the Benin Republic and Ghana. Tomato is a seasonal product. There are no tomatoes from the north at the moment because all the farmers are on the farm now. We will start getting tomatoes from November and December.

“Now we are using tomatoes from southern Nigeria and neighbouring countries. Traders from neighbouring countries used to bring the tomatoes to us.

“During scarcity, people buy anything they see in the market. Some even buy dry tomatoes. When tomatoes are much in the north, they used to cut and dry it.

“Once tomatoes are scarce as we had two to three months ago, they will bring those dry tomatoes and sell them to people.”

Market leader denies knowledge of health implications of esa

Asked if he was aware of reports on health implications of esa, the Mile 12 Market leader said: “I am not aware of any information that esa causes health problems, but I know very well that it is only perhaps in Africa that we eat esa. I have been to some countries and seen the quality of the tomatoes that they sell.”

Explaining why there are often a large quantity of esa in the Nigerian market, Shehu said: “The problem that we have is that the tomato seedling we use here is not good. It doesn’t make our produce last long.

“Ghana’s tomato lasts longer than ours. We don’t have the kind of seedlings that Ghana uses. The seedling is very expensive and our farmers cannot bear the cost.

“The government of Ghana buys the seedlings and subsidises them for the farmers. That is why the farmers are able to get stronger tomatoes.

“Here in Nigeria, we don’t have such. This is part of my plea to the government to look into that area as well. If we have the Ghana variety of tomatoes we will not be having much of esa.”

On what he and other traders do to mitigate scarcity, Shehu said: “We couldn’t do what we wanted to do because of insecurity. If tomatoes get to this situation, we always quickly ask our farmer to look for where they can easily put something in place within a month or so.

“But nowadays, out of about five million farmers in the country, we have more than three million farmers in internally displaced persons’ camps.

“Things are getting worse, and if the government does not do anything to curtail the security challenges, I am telling you food will be more expensive beyond expectations.

“Now, with the hike in petrol pump price, farm equipment among other things coupled with the fact that there are fewer farmers in the farm, it is going to pose a big problem.”

Consumer speaks on alternative tomatoes

A colleague of our correspondent, Medinat Kanabe, provided an alternative to consuming rotten tomatoes.

She said: “You can make use of carrot. You peel the back, blend it together with pepper and with a lot of onions. You can add tin tomato if you like it. This comes out very fine and sweet. It is very, very healthy.”

Findings showed that beetroot is also used to make stew, especially among vegetarians. It may also serve as a better alternative to eating rotten tomatoes.

Ways to know your tomatoes are bad

An online post on Home Cook Basic, by one Bob, speaks on how you can detect if your tomato has gone bad even when they were not bought as esa.

The post said: “Whatever variety of tomatoes you have, they all carry the same characteristics when they have gone bad.

“The best way to know if your tomatoes have gone bad is by inspecting them first. You want to pick them up and look them over, feel them, and give them a good sniff.

“If anything is off about the way your tomato looks, feels, or smells, then you will want to toss it out.

“The most obvious signs of tomatoes that have gone bad are if they have a fuzz of white, green, or grey mold growing on them. Sometimes they will even be oozing liquid.

“Whether you are dealing with whole, sliced or diced tomatoes, these all are signs of tomatoes gone bad no matter what form they are in.

“If you notice that your tomato is starting to look like a little old person with wrinkly skin then you should discard it. It may not be to the point of mold or oozing yet but you still do not want to eat it.

“When trying to decipher if your tomato has gone bad, pick it up and give it a light squeeze. A good ripe tomato will have a slight squish or give to it.

“If the tomato is soft and squishy like a stress ball feels like it is going to pop in your hand, then it has spoilt and you should throw it away.

“Sometimes you might not notice that it is leaking liquids from inside just by looking at it, but when you pick it up and it leaks on your hand it’s time to throw it out.

“Tomatoes that look and feel fine, chances are that it is! But just to be sure, you might want to give it a quick sniff. The smell of a fresh tomato has a light earthy smell to it.

“Any musty, moldy, or sour smell you will want to discard the tomato. The same goes for tomatoes that have been sliced and then refrigerated.”

Eating tomatoes that have gone bad will make you sick and can give you food poisoning from bacteria such as Salmonella. It is not recommended to eat tomatoes that are bad.

“If you suspect that your tomato has gone bad in any way, then you should not eat it. Look it over, feel it and smell it to make sure that it is healthy.