The tomato, that familiar fruit that we use as a vegetable, has a long and fascinating history. Once wild, it traveled around the world, only to be condemned as a poisonous berry and to be rehabilitated by time and resourceful cooks. Its horticultural status was determined by no less than the U.S. Supreme Court and it has become the epithet of choice for bad movies. Although this humble fruit began in the wild, today its thousands of variants grow in almost every country of the world.

Time Frame

The tomato is a New World plant that can be traced back over two thousand years to Central America. It began cultivation as a crop before the fifteenth century when it was transported to Europe as a decorative vine and edible fruit.

Geography

Wild tomatoes grow to this day in the middle elevations of the tropical Andes mountains in South America. Researchers believe that the origin of the wild plants was in Central America and that they were carried south in trade by native peoples. Spanish explorers brought the plants back to Spain and traded them around the Mediterranean, most notably to the Italians who appear to have distributed them widely in Europe and, finally, to England where they were carried by colonists back to the New World and planted in colonial gardens along the East Coast of North America.

Function

Wild tomatoes bear insignificant clusters of yellow-white flowers followed by small, reddish-pink fruit. Native peoples of South American Indians and Italians, who grew tomatoes for food, cultivated plants with larger fruit. When the tomato emerged as a food, the varieties known as "heirloom" were developed, mainly in Germany and the United States. Today, the fruit's use as an ornamental is limited and hundreds of specialized hybrids are grown for sauces, soups, stews and just plain eating.

History

The tomato's progress from wild vine to popular fruit was not easy. A member of the same family as the potato and deadly nightshade, its relation to nightshade convinced many that it was poisonous. The courageous Italians and Spanish used the tomato as food to their---and the world's---culinary benefit. By the middle of the 18th century, most Europeans had discovered that the little "pome dei Moro" (Spanish), "pomme d'amour" (French) or "poma d'oro" (Italian) was tasty and versatile. The French introduced it in their colony at New Orleans and Thomas Jefferson grew tomatoes at Monticello. The tender vine was still viewed as poisonous by the less worldly inhabitants of New England who grew it as an annual ornamental. As legend has it, the myth of the poisonous fruit was finally dispelled in 1820 by one Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson who proposed to eat a bushel of tomatoes on the steps of the Boston courthouse. The crowd that turned out to watch him die in agony was no doubt disappointed. Recipes for tomatoes flooded cookbooks thereafter and by 1880, the myth was an "old wives' tale." Today, thousands of acres in hundreds of countries grow the tomato, providing a source of vitamins C and A. Research has also established that the lycopene in tomatoes may help fight certain cancers.

Misconceptions

Botanically, the tomato is a fruit---it flowers and contains seeds. An American, however, added to the mythology by attempting to have the tomato classified as such to avoid the tariff on imported vegetables. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Nix v. Hedden (1893), officially ruled the fruit a vegetable---leading to confusion that persists to this day.