But you might as well eat recycled cardboard as the supermarket tomatoes are grown to withstand long storage, refrigeration and rough handling during transportation.

Flavour is of little or no importance.

It's the same for fruit like plums, nectarines and pears that are so hard you could hammer nails in with them.

They're kept in controlled atmosphere storage so they can be sold out of season, and they're just as flavourless as the tomatoes.

We'd all be better off growing our own veges in the backyard.

SYDNEY councils are shutting down golf courses to turn them into sporting fields and parkland or to make way for motorway works. Golfers aren't impressed and last weekend more than 500 members at Marrickville course turned out to protest the fairway robbery.

Golf NSW boss Stuart Fraser says the moves to snatch back land from the clubs is resulting in the loss of hundreds of golfers, although the land grab is just one reason golf clubs are losing members.

It's happening in the USA so to make playing golf a hole lot easier the Americans have adopted a trial, put up by Adidas at 100 courses across the country, to boost the size of the 10-centimetre holes on the greens to a gaping 35 centimetres.

The move is designed to improve players' scores, increase the speed of the game and encourage more beginners to take up the game. The idea is if you can release some of the frustration of golf, players will be more relaxed, will enjoy their day more and will want to come back.

Thankfully there's no plans to take golf club land here, but if the crater-size holes were trialled - even as an occasional feature as a social tournament gimmick - golfers at Wentworth would be able to sink a flyer from as far away as the railway line.

Those at Duntryleague would be able to line up putts from Forbes Road, Coronation Drive or Woodward Street. And Country Club players would have no trouble sinking a shot from the hospital or Sir Jack Brabham Park, making things much easier for hackers who end up kilometres away from the green.

But then golfers are a strange lot, wandering around in small groups and belting the daylights out of little white balls, so is it any wonder they're now looking to more than triple the size of the holes to make them bigger than a frying pan?

Those bored shepherds hundreds of years ago who invented golf by hitting a few rocks with their crocks to fill in the day would turn in their graves.

HAS anything changed all these years later?

Quick-witted former Prime Minister Sir Bob Menzies after watching his first rugby league Test between Australia and Great Britain in Sydney in 1962 told his hosts: "I read the rules of this strange game last night but there are some points I don't understand.

They immediately offered to make me a referee".