Can a tomato have eternal significance?

I have been thinking alot lately about gardening. Don't ask why. Just another random thought bouncing around in my head. Actually the whole gardening thought stream is a small branch off a larger flow thinking about what it means live life, ALL of life, as if the gospel was truly meant to have impact. So instead of "ministry" being strictly limited to a 6AM men's Bible study or sharing the gospel with inmates at a local jail (although it is surely all of those things), what if it also looked like teaching a neighbor how to grow a fresh tomato.

I remember this past summer watching a CNN special on "Being Black in America". One lady's comment stood out to me. She said that in order for her to get a fresh tomato, she had to walk something like 6 to 8 city blocks. Now for those of us who exist solely in white collar suburbia and can drive our SUV's (or Prius') to three supermarkets within 10 minutes from our front door, this might seem odd. But drive downtown in any midrange to large urban area and count how many grocery stores there are. They have almost all followed the population flight to the suburbs leaving those who cannot afford to move with them at the mercy of whatever cheap potato chips and boxed processed foods decided to stay. Or if you have $5 and have to choose between two heads of lettuce or 5 boxes of mac and cheese to feed an entire family, what do you do? Now those statistics about heart disease and diabetes within minority communities starts to make more sense.

So what does the mission of God call us to do in response to these realities of living in a world that is so obviously broken? Well, maybe it looks like developing a small plot of land on an urban block where people gather on Saturday mornings. Maybe it looks like a group of people coming together and planting fresh vegetables in a series of pots. Maybe it looks like some of those people going home with containers that will provide a few fresh vegetables throughout the entire summer, so that instead of walking 8 blocks for a fresh tomato a person simply walks out of their back door. And maybe, just maybe at some point during all of the digging in the dirt, the planting of plants and spreading of manure, just maybe a person sees that they are not alone. That there really are others who care and (surprise, surprise) they are actually Christ followers.

So I ask the question again. Can a tomato have eternal significance?