Wagnabbit: This is ‘tomato sandwich season’ in North Carolina

Thursday, July 30, 2026

This is ‘tomato sandwich season’ in North Carolina

On a sultry summer day in North Carolina, nothing could taste finer than a juicy, ripe tomato sandwich, lathered thick with a healthy dollop of Duke’s Real Mayonnaise.

Oh, so messy, tasty and satisfying. Just the other day, an Op-Ed column in the Carteret County News-Times (published in Morehead City, N.C.), written by Donald Bryson reminded us to hustle to the farm market and pick up some German Johnson heirloom tomatoes, which are the key ingredient.

Bryson isn’t a farmer. He’s the CEO of the John Locke Foundation, a public policy think tank in Raleigh, as well as the publisher of Carolina Journal…but he knows a thing or two about tomato sandwiches.

He had a rural upbringing in Lexington, Tenn., a small city with about 8,150 residents, located about midway between Nashville and Memphis.

To make an award-winning tomato sandwich, Bryson says all you need are two slices of Merita Old Fashioned soft white bread, a scoop of Duke’s, salt, pepper and a sliced German Johnson tomato that has ripened under the North Carolina sun.

The tomato “should be slightly too soft, irregularly shaped and heavy with juice,” Bryson said. “It should require careful handling. A tomato capable of being dropped into the bottom of a grocery bag without consequence is probably not ready for this assignment.”

To avoid a mess, it’s best to eat your ooey-gooey tomato sandwich “while leaning over the kitchen sink,” Bryson recommended, because dripping and dribbling from one’s chin is inevitable.

The tomato sandwich “was not a restaurant invention or a chef’s creation,” Bryson said. “It was simply what people did when gardens were producing more ripe tomatoes than a family could reasonably preserve or give away.”

“For me,” Bryson said, “the German Johnson is hard to beat. One thick slice will often cover most of the bread, and it has the kind of sweet, tangy flavor that tastes like summer.”

General Johnsons are “big, pink heirlooms that has been grown in North Carolina…for generations, with a particularly strong following in Alamance County.

German Johnsons became the centerpiece of the North Carolina General Assembly’s “Tomato Sandwich Day,” a tradition that began in th

e mid-1990s and was initiated by the late Hugh Webster of Burlington.

(Webster was both a farmer and an accountant; he served in the state senate from 1995-2006 and died in 2022 at age 78.)

Sen. Webster wanted his colleagues to appreciate that tomatoes are an important crop in North Carolina’ agricultural mix.

In fact, the Tar Heel State is the ninth leading state in tomato production, with approximately 1,500 farms growing about 1 million pounds of fresh-market tomatoes each year. (The top eight states are California, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, South Carolina and New Jersey.)

Sen. Webster would organize and host the luncheons during the summer of odd-number years, when the General Assembly was in the midst of its “long session.”

The casual and informal event held in the courtyard on the grounds of the Legislative Building, features about 300 pounds of General Johnson tomatoes, donated by the Iseley family farm in Alamance County, located on the Haw River just north of Burlington.

State lawmakers are invited to come and build their own luncheon plates, making use of squeeze bottles of Duke’s and loaves of Merita bread.

The delicious tradition has been carried on…first by Sen. Rick Gunn of Burlington (shown above), who served in the legislature from 2011-21 (before retiring), and now by Sen. Amy Galey of Burlington (shown below), who was elected in 2021.

In recent years, Sen. Brent Jackson of Autryville in Sampson County, a watermelon grower, has provided dessert at the legislators’ “Tomato Sandwich Day.”