Tomato Twitter is coming for WCCO's Mary McGuire

Left: tomatoes. Right: tomato-hater Mary McGuire.

Left: tomatoes. Right: tomato-hater Mary McGuire. Mike Mozart/WCCO

On Monday, WCCO anchor/reporter Mary McGuire came under light fire from Twin Cities Twitter (and Tomato Twitter).

What was her hot take? That the Kardashian drama was fake? Did she wade into the Gates-Manafort crimes thing?

Nope. McGuire tweeted that tomatoes are bad.

And the pro-tomato mobs descended like ants upon a fallen Beefsteak. 

Some were lifelong fans; others, recent converts. A few had serving suggestions. Some seemed disproportionately outraged by McGuire's "intensely ignorant" take.

Let's back up here. Why, exactly does she hate these weird fruits-masquerading-as-veggies?

"I would say it’s been a series of unfortunate events with the red fruit," she tells City Pages. "My dad eats tomatoes like they are apples. I was always force fed them from the garden—warm and mushy. The thought sends shivers down my spine."

Which, fair. Vegetable-adjacent childhood trauma is real—don't get me started on the Great Artichoke Incident of 1993. 

But surely it's not all tomatoes. What about cherry tomatoes! They're sweet little orbs of summertime sunshine incarnate!

Not to McGuire: "Cherry tomatoes are great if you like eating grainy eyeballs full of the water that comes out of a fresh ketchup bottle when you first open it."

If her inititial tweet is to be trusted, ketchup is fine... once that watery tomato juice is outta there. In fact: "Tomatoes in every form other form—ketchup, sauce, marinara, soup- are all good. I just think it’s silly that at some point, we, as a society, decided we had to add tomatoes to perfectly acceptable foods like hamburgers," she says.

The reporter did have her defenders. Osseo PD's official stance is, apparently, anti-tomato: "Eating a tomato raw is like pineapple on pizza," the department tweeted, opening an entirely different can of fruit. "Just shouldn't be done."

The only person who's tomato take seemed to sway the staunch anti-heirloom stance was Hennepin County Commissioner Linda Higgins: