Las Vegas: all the amenities of modern society in a habitat unfit to grow a tomato.

The line is a wry, compressed critique of Las Vegas as an emblem of modern technological bravado: a city that offers comfort, entertainment, and infrastructure (“all the amenities of modern society”) while existing in an environment fundamentally hostile to ordinary life (“unfit to grow a tomato”). The tomato functions as a homely benchmark for basic habitability and sustainable settlement. The contrast underscores the extent to which Vegas depends on imported water, energy, food, and labor—an oasis manufactured by engineering and capital rather than ecology. It also gestures toward a broader tension in modern urbanism: the ability to create luxury and spectacle in places where the land itself resists permanence.