WEBVTT - Where Did Tomatoes Come From? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.560 Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff, 0:00:07.640 --> 0:00:12.879 Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, the history of the tomato is mired 0:00:12.960 --> 0:00:17.560 and legend and hearsay, but one thing is certain. Everybody's 0:00:17.600 --> 0:00:21.000 favorite red fruit and yes it is botanically a fruit 0:00:21.360 --> 0:00:25.640 did not originate in Italy, despite the fact that it's 0:00:25.640 --> 0:00:29.360 an essential ingredient in today's pizza and pasta sauces. The 0:00:29.400 --> 0:00:33.800 tomato comes to us by way of the Americas. Tomatoes 0:00:33.840 --> 0:00:36.800 didn't even land in Europe until the fifteen hundreds, and 0:00:37.040 --> 0:00:39.400 for a long time some people there thought they were 0:00:39.400 --> 0:00:44.199 poisonous or possibly connected to were wolves and witches. But 0:00:44.360 --> 0:00:48.239 we're getting into the aforementioned hearsay. Let's talk about what 0:00:48.320 --> 0:00:53.199 we do know about tomatoes. In its original form, the 0:00:53.240 --> 0:00:56.120 tomato was not the prolific red globe we know and 0:00:56.200 --> 0:01:00.160 love today. It was smaller, more like today's cherry tomatoes, 0:01:00.280 --> 0:01:03.440 and not necessarily red when it was ripe, maybe yellow 0:01:03.560 --> 0:01:07.759 or purple. It had been evolving around western South America 0:01:07.880 --> 0:01:12.280 four millions of years, but around five thousand BCE, Mesoamericans 0:01:12.319 --> 0:01:17.000 in what's now Mexico domesticated the fruit. Early Spanish explorers 0:01:17.000 --> 0:01:19.560 and colonizers of the area in the late fourteen and 0:01:19.600 --> 0:01:22.640 early fifteen hundreds, learned about the plant from the locals 0:01:22.760 --> 0:01:26.440 and brought seeds back to Europe. The Spanish got their 0:01:26.480 --> 0:01:30.360 word for it, Tamate, from the Nahawat language word tamat, 0:01:30.840 --> 0:01:33.000 which is said to come from the root to swell 0:01:33.240 --> 0:01:36.600 or to plump, a meaning something like the swelling fruit. 0:01:37.640 --> 0:01:40.680 The English spelling of tomato is thought to have been 0:01:40.720 --> 0:01:44.600 influenced by the word potato, which originated a bit earlier, 0:01:44.640 --> 0:01:47.200 but around the same time as both were brought back 0:01:47.240 --> 0:01:51.480 to Europe from the Americas. By the fifteen forties, Spain 0:01:51.600 --> 0:01:55.440 was producing tomatoes. They began spreading around Europe and took 0:01:55.520 --> 0:01:59.360 to some parts of what's now Italy particularly well. The 0:01:59.440 --> 0:02:02.160 first known US European description of the tomato plant comes 0:02:02.160 --> 0:02:04.920 from an Italian naturalist and physician by the name of 0:02:04.960 --> 0:02:09.399 Pietro Andrea Mattioli. In fifteen forty four. He wrote about 0:02:09.440 --> 0:02:14.200 it being eaten similarly to eggplants. Tomatoes were probably pretty 0:02:14.280 --> 0:02:18.080 rare and grown more as newfangled curiosities than anything else 0:02:18.240 --> 0:02:21.480 for another few decades, though they eventually caught on where 0:02:21.480 --> 0:02:26.280 they grew well alike around the Mediterranean coast. Mattioli called 0:02:26.280 --> 0:02:31.320 the tomato pomo doro, meaning golden apple, perhaps a reference 0:02:31.320 --> 0:02:33.800 to the myth of Eiris's golden apple, you know, the 0:02:33.800 --> 0:02:37.160 one inscribed to the most beautiful Goddess, the fight over 0:02:37.200 --> 0:02:41.800 which eventually led to the mythic Trojan War, or possibly 0:02:41.919 --> 0:02:44.280 the tomatoes he was dealing with were more yellow than 0:02:44.320 --> 0:02:48.040 red when ripe. Either way, that could well be where 0:02:48.040 --> 0:02:51.320 the modern Italian word for the fruit pomodoro comes from. 0:02:52.520 --> 0:02:56.640 Mattioli also correctly classified the tomato in the night shade family. 0:02:57.760 --> 0:03:00.440 The night shades include some plants that are toxic, like 0:03:00.560 --> 0:03:04.320 mandrake and belladonna, but some that are perfectly edible, like 0:03:04.400 --> 0:03:08.640 peppers and eggplants. And eggplants, as stated above, were already 0:03:08.680 --> 0:03:12.280 well known around Europe at this time, but it may 0:03:12.360 --> 0:03:16.040 be due to the tomato's resemblance to plants like belladonna 0:03:16.160 --> 0:03:19.880 that some other naturalists thought it was definitely not good 0:03:19.960 --> 0:03:25.800 for you, or at worst poisonous. These concerns were fairly 0:03:25.840 --> 0:03:29.440 widespread across parts of Europe for a couple centuries, but 0:03:29.639 --> 0:03:33.200 it's hard to say exactly how widespread because there are 0:03:33.240 --> 0:03:37.200 a lot of legends about how feared the tomato was like. 0:03:37.640 --> 0:03:41.840 Some Italian nobility may have used tomatoes as tabletopp decor 0:03:42.640 --> 0:03:46.360 to be edgy because they thought it was poisonous. The 0:03:46.440 --> 0:03:51.200 nickname poison apple apparently caught on in some places. Supposedly, 0:03:51.240 --> 0:03:53.480 the tomato was grown in gardens in France for a 0:03:53.480 --> 0:03:56.840 whole generation as an insect repellent before anyone was willing 0:03:56.880 --> 0:04:01.600 to try eating them. The fruit definitely got associated with 0:04:01.880 --> 0:04:07.520 like caanthropy through a tangle of misinformation. Basically, witch hunters 0:04:07.640 --> 0:04:11.520 thought that witches used night shades to turn themselves into werewolves, 0:04:11.840 --> 0:04:15.680 and also some herbalists thought that the tomato might be 0:04:15.800 --> 0:04:19.000 what the ancient Roman physician Galen had been writing about 0:04:19.040 --> 0:04:24.039 when he called a poisonous plant a wolf something. Galen 0:04:24.200 --> 0:04:27.440 certainly did not use the word like a persicon, meaning 0:04:27.560 --> 0:04:32.240 wolf peach, but that's a mistranscription that became another nickname 0:04:32.400 --> 0:04:36.200 for the tomato that one actually stuck around in The 0:04:36.240 --> 0:04:38.880 taxonomical name for the tomato that we still use today 0:04:39.279 --> 0:04:44.800 slanam like a persicum. Some pushback against tomatoes may have 0:04:44.839 --> 0:04:48.360 come down from Christian religious leaders because the fruit isn't 0:04:48.360 --> 0:04:52.440 mentioned in the Bible. Almost definitely. A legend is that 0:04:52.480 --> 0:04:55.880 some wealthier people might have gotten lead poisoning from eating 0:04:55.920 --> 0:04:59.640 acidic tomatoes off of their fancy pewter plates, and therefore 0:04:59.760 --> 0:05:04.000 so siated tomatoes with poison for that reason. The thing 0:05:04.120 --> 0:05:07.960 is leood poisoning happens really slowly, so it's unlikely that 0:05:08.040 --> 0:05:11.000 anyone would have associated any single food with the effects 0:05:11.040 --> 0:05:15.720 at the time. Whatever the case, the English were especially 0:05:15.760 --> 0:05:19.480 suspicious of tomatoes, including the English colonists who came to 0:05:19.480 --> 0:05:24.599 North America. The fruit was considered potentially dangerous or possibly 0:05:24.600 --> 0:05:29.200 just sort of gross, but the legends continued. One widely 0:05:29.240 --> 0:05:33.400 circulated story claims that in eighteen twenty, when Colonel Robert 0:05:33.400 --> 0:05:36.479 Gibbon Johnson announced that he was going to eat a 0:05:36.520 --> 0:05:39.600 basket of tomatoes on the steps of a New Jersey courthouse, 0:05:39.839 --> 0:05:43.960 and a crowd gathered to watch him slowly die and 0:05:44.160 --> 0:05:48.560 then dispersed, slightly disappointed when he didn't. Another says that 0:05:48.640 --> 0:05:52.400 Thomas Jefferson once horrified a local villager in Lynchburg, Virginia 0:05:52.440 --> 0:05:56.480 by snacking on a tomato. There's no proof of either incident. 0:05:57.720 --> 0:06:00.520 We do know that Jefferson enjoyed tomatoes, going back to 0:06:00.560 --> 0:06:04.640 the Revolutionary era. His meticulous records indicate that he grew 0:06:04.680 --> 0:06:07.880 tomatoes at his Monticello plantation and often sold them at 0:06:07.920 --> 0:06:13.080 Washington's markets. Different varieties commonly appear in his family's personal 0:06:13.120 --> 0:06:18.720 recipe collections. The famed French gourmand Briat Savoran wrote in 0:06:18.760 --> 0:06:21.880 his eighteen twenty five book The Physiology of Taste that 0:06:21.920 --> 0:06:24.920 the tomato was a newly popular thing in Paris at 0:06:24.920 --> 0:06:28.320 the time. He said that it had been almost entirely 0:06:28.440 --> 0:06:32.280 unknown fifteen years previous, and at first very expensive, but 0:06:32.320 --> 0:06:35.839 now common in markets. He claimed it was introduced to 0:06:35.920 --> 0:06:38.240 Paris by the influx of people from the south of 0:06:38.279 --> 0:06:42.320 France during the Revolution, and that quote tomatoes are a 0:06:42.360 --> 0:06:45.960 great blessing to good cookery. They make excellent sauces which 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:50.960 go well with every kind of meat. Tomatoes caught on 0:06:51.040 --> 0:06:53.599 more widely here in the States with the rise of canning, 0:06:53.880 --> 0:06:56.600 and especially around the Civil War in the eighteen sixties, 0:06:56.680 --> 0:07:01.280 when canned foods became an important resource. Tomatoes are well 0:07:01.320 --> 0:07:04.400 suited to canning, and at the time, the varieties available 0:07:04.520 --> 0:07:07.800 and lack of modern shipping technologies meant that they didn't 0:07:07.839 --> 0:07:13.000 travel well fresh. In the early nineteen hundreds, farmers and 0:07:13.080 --> 0:07:17.040 the botanically curious worked on developing lots of new varieties 0:07:17.160 --> 0:07:21.600 of what we today call heirloom tomatoes. Airloom tomatoes are 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:26.160 interesting varieties that fruit via open pollination, and their seeds 0:07:26.280 --> 0:07:30.520 generally produce the same fruit as their parents. But then 0:07:30.640 --> 0:07:34.800 around the nineteen thirties, refrigeration and shipping technologies developed such 0:07:34.840 --> 0:07:38.920 that produce could be shipped to wider regions, and lots 0:07:38.920 --> 0:07:42.880 of those interesting strains were too delicate or weird for 0:07:43.120 --> 0:07:48.600 wide distribution. Agricultural researchers set to the task of making sturdier, 0:07:48.720 --> 0:07:53.680 more uniform tomatoes, and that's where modern hybrid tomatoes come from. 0:07:54.240 --> 0:07:58.040 Hybrid tomatoes were developed by combining specific strains and must 0:07:58.080 --> 0:08:02.000 be carefully pollinated in order to produce standardized fruit or 0:08:02.160 --> 0:08:05.760 to fruit at all. Their seeds typically won't fruit true. 0:08:07.040 --> 0:08:09.920 These hybrids were developed to be more resistant to disease 0:08:10.160 --> 0:08:13.480 and to have thicker skins and brighter colors, making sure 0:08:13.520 --> 0:08:16.800 that they don't burst during shipping and do look pretty 0:08:16.840 --> 0:08:22.200 on store shelves. Supposedly, labs instructed their scientists to think 0:08:22.240 --> 0:08:24.840 of what would make a tomato a good projectile and 0:08:25.040 --> 0:08:29.240 work on developing traits from there. By the middle of 0:08:29.280 --> 0:08:32.400 the twentieth century, tomatoes could be found in just about 0:08:32.440 --> 0:08:35.800 any market in both America and Europe, and they continued 0:08:35.840 --> 0:08:39.960 to spread. Today, the tomato is one of the largest 0:08:39.960 --> 0:08:43.400 and most lucrative vegetable crops in the world, second only 0:08:43.440 --> 0:08:47.920 to potatoes and up there with onions and lettuce, and yes, 0:08:48.000 --> 0:08:51.840 although it's botanically a fruit, the tomato is practically and 0:08:52.080 --> 0:08:57.120 sometimes legally considered a vegetable. As of twenty twenty, nearly 0:08:57.200 --> 0:09:00.520 one hundred and eighty seven million metric tons of tomatoes 0:09:00.520 --> 0:09:03.640 were being grown and sold every year across the globe. 0:09:04.120 --> 0:09:08.080 That's some three hundred and fifty billion pounds, which is 0:09:08.200 --> 0:09:11.360 pretty impressive for fruit that few people outside of the 0:09:11.400 --> 0:09:14.560 Americas had heard of, much less had the courage to taste, 0:09:14.720 --> 0:09:19.400 only a few centuries ago. Speaking of some of these 0:09:19.520 --> 0:09:24.000 legends about tomatoes persist to this day. Have you ever 0:09:24.040 --> 0:09:28.000 heard that the tomatoes leaves are poisonous? I grew up 0:09:28.240 --> 0:09:32.120 knowing that, but it turns out they're not, or not 0:09:32.280 --> 0:09:36.120 in any quantity that you would actually consume. I only 0:09:36.160 --> 0:09:38.439 learned about this this year, so I haven't had the 0:09:38.520 --> 0:09:41.199 chance to try them yet. But fans say to use 0:09:41.240 --> 0:09:44.200 fresh tomato leaves the way that you might use fresh herbs. 0:09:44.760 --> 0:09:46.960 You could add a few chopped towards the end of 0:09:47.040 --> 0:09:50.880 simmering apasta sauce, or blend them into a salsa, pesto, 0:09:50.960 --> 0:09:54.920 or chutney, or sprinkle some over a salad that goes 0:09:55.000 --> 0:09:59.079 for tomato blossoms too. The lesson I'm taking from all 0:09:59.080 --> 0:10:01.959 of this is too never let hearsay keep you from 0:10:02.000 --> 0:10:09.080 a good meal. Today's episode is based on the article 0:10:09.200 --> 0:10:11.480 where did the Tomato Come From? On how stuffworks dot 0:10:11.520 --> 0:10:14.600 com written by Chris Abenstine, and on an episode of Saber, 0:10:14.800 --> 0:10:17.840 my food, science and history podcast with co host Annie Reese. 0:10:18.679 --> 0:10:21.760 Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks 0:10:21.760 --> 0:10:24.679 dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more 0:10:24.679 --> 0:10:28.520 podcasts from my heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:10:28.600 --> 0:10:30.600 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.