I must have said that prayer 3000 times—from the day I could talk until I was 10 years old—at home, church, and school. Religion and mealtime were all wrapped up together in the Alabama Methodist world of my childhood. You simply couldn't eat without being thankful.

To tell the truth, I was never really thankful for squash or eggplant—not then—but I was mightily and especially thankful for tomatoes. From midsummer till frost, backyard gardens and nearby farms turned out bushels and tons of the tangy, thin-skinned, and juicy fruit. Mostly red but sometimes yellow, tomatoes were good hot from the field with a little grit on them, or cool from the Frigidaire, perfect with fried chicken and creamed potatoes at Sunday dinner, or between slices of bread thick with mayonnaise.

Back then, lots of foods were really seasonal. You had them during the local growing season and then waited a year to taste them again. Of course, you could "put them up" (home canning) but nothing out of a Mason jar was as good as the real thing, not even the tomato juice my grandmother put up for me by the quart. Whoever heard of fresh tomatoes in January?

Many of those tomatoes of yore had funny shapes, green or yellow streaks by the stem, or brown spots in a wet year. Knurly in a dry year—maybe any year—they were not always pretty but they sure were good.

Then I left the rich clay soil of northern Alabama for college and seminary and temporarily lost my passion for tomatoes. I was too busy dissecting laboratory frogs, going to fraternity parties, and reforming the world through the Methodist Student Movement. The middle years are blanks when it comes to tomatoes.

Then, one day a few years back, I again craved a tomato. To my horror, I found that the fruit as I remembered it was missing and presumed dead in my urban environment. It was replaced by perfectly round, bright red, and totally tasteless imitations with the texture of papier-mâché. What happened? Genetic "improvements"—scientific tampering in the name of economics. The fruit had been firmed up to withstand national and global travel. It was reconstituted to be blemishless, thick-skinned, tough, and dry. Maybe the imperfect tomatoes put into juice, soup, and spaghetti sauce have all the flavor.

I hear occasional rumors that you can still find real tomatoes grown in backyards across the country. My own urban efforts don't convince me. The fruit of the hothouse plants I have used is also tasteless.

"To get a good tomato, you must use old seeds," says my friend Janet, a New Jersey gardener.

I live in hope of finding some of those old seeds—unimproved stock that can revive the tomato and restore it to its full glory, perhaps imperfect to the eye but worthy of a prayer of thanksgiving.