Cherry tomatoes in Minas Tirith??

A quiet night in, and Mr Fishwife and I were mildly at a loss so, as you do, we went for The Previously Watched Old Faithful, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. The great thing about a film you have seen a million times (well, it's big! And the special effects are amazing! And Gollum's so real!) is that you can read a book at the same time, eat a plate of roast chicken off your lap, generally fail to pay attention at all, and still enjoy it, interrupted occasionally by Mr Fishwife's nerdy cries of "Frodo? At Osgiliath? Not in my copy of the book, oh no." and "Elves?? At Helm's Deep?? I think not!!". Unless, as I did, you look up at a dramatic moment and notice, for the first time, the fact that Denethor, Steward of Gondor, while curtly sending his less-favoured son to almost certain death, is eating a plate of cherry tomatoes.

So there we have it. Photographic evidence. Now it's not the fact of the cherry tomatoes themselves, although I personally think a mouthful of rare steak would have been more apposite, and blood oozing down his chin a better (if more obvious) cinematic counterpoint to the doomed battle in which Faramir finds himself, than a mouthful of tomato juice. My point, my big thing point, is that I am now unable to watch the film without wondering where in Gondor they have the poly-tunnels necessary for the successful cultivation of cherry tomatoes in such a mountainous and rocky habitat? And given the fairly merciless appearance of the terrain, couldn't better use be made of the land than frivolously market gardening? Wouldn't potatoes be a better bet? Nobody looks that rich in Minas Tirith - are the cherry tomatoes just a perk for the Stewards? In which case Aragorn returned to take up kingship not a moment too soon.