The Solastalgia of Salsa

A bowl of tortilla chips covered in salsa and vegetables.

“Restaurant” salsa is a happy place for scads of us. In fact, we often choose restaurants for the salsa. Like Earth’s gravitational pull, certain salsas (and thus restaurants) keep us in close orbit. We come back for more. We obsess. We might even go home and attempt to make the salsa. Chances are, we’ll come up short.

Chef insiders note that our national obsession with “restaurant” salsa, both literally and figuratively, boils down to the tomatoes. A good tomato is ripe and flavorful. But our cheap facsimile attempts begin in grocery store produce sections where we hold weighty tomatoes. Dejected, we mirror what’s in our hands, internally emoting watery-laden and tasteless tears. The ultimate outcome? A homemade numbing-out salsa that echoes the old expression: “You are what you eat.”

This grocery store snapshot and the resulting sub-par salsa are Kiss the Ground moments. We know that our paltry tomato selections are a result of climate change. More specifically, droughts, flooding, chemicals, GMOs, and soil degradation. As we internalize tears, we might even blame anthropogenic meddling. But in that grocery store moment, there’s more surfacing inside us.

Let’s rewind and replay it. Holding lackluster tomatoes entails a knowledge of what could have been as well as what was — even beyond the restaurant. The restaurant salsa benchmark only serves as a memory jogger. It transports us to a time and place where far more tomatoes were good and where there was less gatekeeping on goodness. This goodness also likely existed at or nearer our own homes because soil, water, and air were cleaner.

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