I was served a meal in a restaurant last week that was topped by an anemic-looking slice of tomato. It wasn’t even red, really, and its texture was dry and grainy. Obviously, this was a tomato that had been picked weeks before its prime, and it undoubtedly came from afar through a major produce wholesaler.

While this tomato may not have been inedible in any literal sense, no one would want to eat it. I quietly moved it to the side of my plate and ate the rest of my meal. I’m used to bad tomatoes in restaurants, although this one would have won a prize.

Later, when I was preparing a salad at home and compared the red, flavorful, locally-grown tomato I was coring with the pink and green slice I remembered from the restaurant, I was deeply struck by the absurdity of what passes for fresh produce these days.

What makes this seem even more ridiculous is that the vegetable business is market-driven, but somehow the market is failing miserably. Standards of quality have disappeared from the demand side of the equation. It appears that suppliers are responding only to a demand for tomatoes, not a demand for good-tasting tomatoes.

The sad fact is that bad produce is what the market will bear, so bad produce is what we continue to get.

That’s the fault of the consumer. The restaurant customer who discretely pushes a slice of unripened tomato to the side of the plate without saying anything to the waiter. Our willingness to provide a market merely ensures more bad produce.

On Friday, I was reminded of a letter to the editor I read a couple of months ago, in which the writer complained about the quality of fresh peaches available in grocery stores. The writer was annoyed that during the summer, when peaches should be at their prime, local stores stocked nothing but mealy, flavorless, unripened fruit.

While the letter may have seemed out of place, there among opinions about local government and Iraq, the topic was clearly one of public import. I would argue, however, that the basic issue isn’t peaches — or tomatoes — but how we lost control of the quality of our food supply. After all, we’re the ones who have to eat it.

I remembered that letter to the editor when a friend walked into my office and handed me three ripe and fragrant baseball-sized peaches that had been grown in an orchard near Concordia. We never see peaches like these in local supermarkets.

Nor do we see tomatoes like Allen Fowler’s in restaurants. Allen, you will recall, is the Leavenworth County gardener I visited with in June. Allen has been e-mailing me photographs of his tomato harvest spread out on long tables and reports that his wife, Rosie, has put up more than 170 quarts of tomato juice. You can’t make juice if your tomatoes have no flavor.

A lot of people have already figured out that most store-bought produce is inferior. That’s why so many folks have home gardens or roll out of bed at dawn on weekends to go to a farmers market. But there are not enough of us yet, and we are not voicing our dissatisfaction loudly enough, to make suppliers listen.