Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, the history of the tomato is mired
Speaker 1: and legend and hearsay, but one thing is certain. Everybody's
Speaker 1: favorite red fruit and yes it is botanically a fruit
Speaker 1: did not originate in Italy, despite the fact that it's
Speaker 1: an essential ingredient in today's pizza and pasta sauces. The
Speaker 1: tomato comes to us by way of the Americas. Tomatoes
Speaker 1: didn't even land in Europe until the fifteen hundreds, and
Speaker 1: for a long time some people there thought they were
Speaker 1: poisonous or possibly connected to were wolves and witches. But
Speaker 1: we're getting into the aforementioned hearsay. Let's talk about what
Speaker 1: we do know about tomatoes. In its original form, the
Speaker 1: tomato was not the prolific red globe we know and
Speaker 1: love today. It was smaller, more like today's cherry tomatoes,
Speaker 1: and not necessarily red when it was ripe, maybe yellow
Speaker 1: or purple. It had been evolving around western South America
Speaker 1: four millions of years, but around five thousand BCE, Mesoamericans
Speaker 1: in what's now Mexico domesticated the fruit. Early Spanish explorers
Speaker 1: and colonizers of the area in the late fourteen and
Speaker 1: early fifteen hundreds, learned about the plant from the locals
Speaker 1: and brought seeds back to Europe. The Spanish got their
Speaker 1: word for it, Tamate, from the Nahawat language word tamat,
Speaker 1: which is said to come from the root to swell
Speaker 1: or to plump, a meaning something like the swelling fruit.
Speaker 1: The English spelling of tomato is thought to have been
Speaker 1: influenced by the word potato, which originated a bit earlier,
Speaker 1: but around the same time as both were brought back
Speaker 1: to Europe from the Americas. By the fifteen forties, Spain
Speaker 1: was producing tomatoes. They began spreading around Europe and took
Speaker 1: to some parts of what's now Italy particularly well. The
Speaker 1: first known US European description of the tomato plant comes
Speaker 1: from an Italian naturalist and physician by the name of
Speaker 1: Pietro Andrea Mattioli. In fifteen forty four. He wrote about
Speaker 1: it being eaten similarly to eggplants. Tomatoes were probably pretty
Speaker 1: rare and grown more as newfangled curiosities than anything else
Speaker 1: for another few decades, though they eventually caught on where
Speaker 1: they grew well alike around the Mediterranean coast. Mattioli called
Speaker 1: the tomato pomo doro, meaning golden apple, perhaps a reference
Speaker 1: to the myth of Eiris's golden apple, you know, the
Speaker 1: one inscribed to the most beautiful Goddess, the fight over
Speaker 1: which eventually led to the mythic Trojan War, or possibly
Speaker 1: the tomatoes he was dealing with were more yellow than
Speaker 1: red when ripe. Either way, that could well be where
Speaker 1: the modern Italian word for the fruit pomodoro comes from.
Speaker 1: Mattioli also correctly classified the tomato in the night shade family.
Speaker 1: The night shades include some plants that are toxic, like
Speaker 1: mandrake and belladonna, but some that are perfectly edible, like
Speaker 1: peppers and eggplants. And eggplants, as stated above, were already
Speaker 1: well known around Europe at this time, but it may
Speaker 1: be due to the tomato's resemblance to plants like belladonna
Speaker 1: that some other naturalists thought it was definitely not good
Speaker 1: for you, or at worst poisonous. These concerns were fairly
Speaker 1: widespread across parts of Europe for a couple centuries, but
Speaker 1: it's hard to say exactly how widespread because there are
Speaker 1: a lot of legends about how feared the tomato was like.
Speaker 1: Some Italian nobility may have used tomatoes as tabletopp decor
Speaker 1: to be edgy because they thought it was poisonous. The
Speaker 1: nickname poison apple apparently caught on in some places. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: the tomato was grown in gardens in France for a
Speaker 1: whole generation as an insect repellent before anyone was willing
Speaker 1: to try eating them. The fruit definitely got associated with
Speaker 1: like caanthropy through a tangle of misinformation. Basically, witch hunters
Speaker 1: thought that witches used night shades to turn themselves into werewolves,
Speaker 1: and also some herbalists thought that the tomato might be
Speaker 1: what the ancient Roman physician Galen had been writing about
Speaker 1: when he called a poisonous plant a wolf something. Galen
Speaker 1: certainly did not use the word like a persicon, meaning
Speaker 1: wolf peach, but that's a mistranscription that became another nickname
Speaker 1: for the tomato that one actually stuck around in The
Speaker 1: taxonomical name for the tomato that we still use today
Speaker 1: slanam like a persicum. Some pushback against tomatoes may have
Speaker 1: come down from Christian religious leaders because the fruit isn't
Speaker 1: mentioned in the Bible. Almost definitely. A legend is that
Speaker 1: some wealthier people might have gotten lead poisoning from eating
Speaker 1: acidic tomatoes off of their fancy pewter plates, and therefore
Speaker 1: so siated tomatoes with poison for that reason. The thing
Speaker 1: is leood poisoning happens really slowly, so it's unlikely that
Speaker 1: anyone would have associated any single food with the effects
Speaker 1: at the time. Whatever the case, the English were especially
Speaker 1: suspicious of tomatoes, including the English colonists who came to
Speaker 1: North America. The fruit was considered potentially dangerous or possibly
Speaker 1: just sort of gross, but the legends continued. One widely
Speaker 1: circulated story claims that in eighteen twenty, when Colonel Robert
Speaker 1: Gibbon Johnson announced that he was going to eat a
Speaker 1: basket of tomatoes on the steps of a New Jersey courthouse,
Speaker 1: and a crowd gathered to watch him slowly die and
Speaker 1: then dispersed, slightly disappointed when he didn't. Another says that
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson once horrified a local villager in Lynchburg, Virginia
Speaker 1: by snacking on a tomato. There's no proof of either incident.
Speaker 1: We do know that Jefferson enjoyed tomatoes, going back to
Speaker 1: the Revolutionary era. His meticulous records indicate that he grew
Speaker 1: tomatoes at his Monticello plantation and often sold them at
Speaker 1: Washington's markets. Different varieties commonly appear in his family's personal
Speaker 1: recipe collections. The famed French gourmand Briat Savoran wrote in
Speaker 1: his eighteen twenty five book The Physiology of Taste that
Speaker 1: the tomato was a newly popular thing in Paris at
Speaker 1: the time. He said that it had been almost entirely
Speaker 1: unknown fifteen years previous, and at first very expensive, but
Speaker 1: now common in markets. He claimed it was introduced to
Speaker 1: Paris by the influx of people from the south of
Speaker 1: France during the Revolution, and that quote tomatoes are a
Speaker 1: great blessing to good cookery. They make excellent sauces which
Speaker 1: go well with every kind of meat. Tomatoes caught on
Speaker 1: more widely here in the States with the rise of canning,
Speaker 1: and especially around the Civil War in the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 1: when canned foods became an important resource. Tomatoes are well
Speaker 1: suited to canning, and at the time, the varieties available
Speaker 1: and lack of modern shipping technologies meant that they didn't
Speaker 1: travel well fresh. In the early nineteen hundreds, farmers and
Speaker 1: the botanically curious worked on developing lots of new varieties
Speaker 1: of what we today call heirloom tomatoes. Airloom tomatoes are
Speaker 1: interesting varieties that fruit via open pollination, and their seeds
Speaker 1: generally produce the same fruit as their parents. But then
Speaker 1: around the nineteen thirties, refrigeration and shipping technologies developed such
Speaker 1: that produce could be shipped to wider regions, and lots
Speaker 1: of those interesting strains were too delicate or weird for
Speaker 1: wide distribution. Agricultural researchers set to the task of making sturdier,
Speaker 1: more uniform tomatoes, and that's where modern hybrid tomatoes come from.
Speaker 1: Hybrid tomatoes were developed by combining specific strains and must
Speaker 1: be carefully pollinated in order to produce standardized fruit or
Speaker 1: to fruit at all. Their seeds typically won't fruit true.
Speaker 1: These hybrids were developed to be more resistant to disease
Speaker 1: and to have thicker skins and brighter colors, making sure
Speaker 1: that they don't burst during shipping and do look pretty
Speaker 1: on store shelves. Supposedly, labs instructed their scientists to think
Speaker 1: of what would make a tomato a good projectile and
Speaker 1: work on developing traits from there. By the middle of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, tomatoes could be found in just about
Speaker 1: any market in both America and Europe, and they continued
Speaker 1: to spread. Today, the tomato is one of the largest
Speaker 1: and most lucrative vegetable crops in the world, second only
Speaker 1: to potatoes and up there with onions and lettuce, and yes,
Speaker 1: although it's botanically a fruit, the tomato is practically and
Speaker 1: sometimes legally considered a vegetable. As of twenty twenty, nearly
Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty seven million metric tons of tomatoes
Speaker 1: were being grown and sold every year across the globe.
Speaker 1: That's some three hundred and fifty billion pounds, which is
Speaker 1: pretty impressive for fruit that few people outside of the
Speaker 1: Americas had heard of, much less had the courage to taste,
Speaker 1: only a few centuries ago. Speaking of some of these
Speaker 1: legends about tomatoes persist to this day. Have you ever
Speaker 1: heard that the tomatoes leaves are poisonous? I grew up
Speaker 1: knowing that, but it turns out they're not, or not
Speaker 1: in any quantity that you would actually consume. I only
Speaker 1: learned about this this year, so I haven't had the
Speaker 1: chance to try them yet. But fans say to use
Speaker 1: fresh tomato leaves the way that you might use fresh herbs.
Speaker 1: You could add a few chopped towards the end of
Speaker 1: simmering apasta sauce, or blend them into a salsa, pesto,
Speaker 1: or chutney, or sprinkle some over a salad that goes
Speaker 1: for tomato blossoms too. The lesson I'm taking from all
Speaker 1: of this is too never let hearsay keep you from
Speaker 1: a good meal. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: where did the Tomato Come From? On how stuffworks dot
Speaker 1: com written by Chris Abenstine, and on an episode of Saber,
Speaker 1: my food, science and history podcast with co host Annie Reese.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
Speaker 1: dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
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