Are tomatoes fruits? Are they vegetables? Are they both? It’s one of life’s greatest mysteries, isn’t it? Per the Supreme Court, they are vegetables. Per National Geographic, it depends who you ask; a botanist will tell you they’re fruits, a chef, vegetables. And that’s the definition Encyclopedia Britannica is running with. It defines tomatoes as “fruits that are considered vegetables by nutritionists”. Still, I’m just as confused. How could it be considered both a fruit and a vegetable?
Scientifically speaking, a fruit is the seed-bearing part of a flowering plant or tree that can be eaten as food. This definition would also classify crops like cucumbers and peppers as fruits. However, the way society eats and cooks with tomatoes (and other “technical” fruits) legally classify them as vegetables. In accordance with the highest court in the United States this classification is based on “purposes of trade and commerce”. Mr. Justice Bradley, said the following about tomatoes when speaking on behalf of the court:
“As an article of food on our tables, whether baked or boiled, or forming the basis of soup, they are used as a vegetable, as well when ripe as when green. This is the principal use to which they are put. Beyond the common knowledge which we have on this subject, very little evidence is necessary or can be produced.”
When you think of tomatoes, you probably associate some sort of Italian dish with it almost immediately. And that logic is not wrong. Italians are credited with popularizing tomatoes across Europe. Some of the most popular commercialized Italian foods are tomato based – pastas, pizza, etc.
Tomatoes were actually first cultivated in South America, high in the Andes Mountains in what is now Peru. They were considered weeds and grew no bigger than about the size of a blueberry. It wasn’t a highly valued crop and was generally only consumed in season. The crop spread slowly across the world. It hadn’t even made it to the Caribbean region by the time Christopher Columbus came across land, who by the way often gets credit for introducing the tomato to America.
During this period of time, tomatoes were mostly feared across Europe. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, tomatoes were long blamed for inconspicuous deaths among Europes’s wealthiest class. The tomato’s high acidity caused it to absorb lead from pewter plates, which were commonly used among the rich. Consuming a tomato seeped in lead would then kill whoever ate it. It was thus nicknamed the “poison apple” but it would be a couple hundred years before society put two and two together. The tomato was never poisonous. The fancy plates the elites were using were actually killing them – oh the irony.
The tomato’s iffy reputation was shared across the pond in North America. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that tomatoes were commercialized in the United States, thanks to Joseph Campbell – yes, of Campbell Soup Company. In what is now a wonderful entrepreneurial lesson, he built an empire on a vastly misunderstood fruit. After discovering how well the fruit canned, Campbell popularized condensed tomato soup.
Today, tomatoes are one of the most highly valued and most consumed crops in the world. According to data from the University of Florida, China is the world’s largest producer of tomatoes, followed by the United States and India. So how exactly did tomatoes go from overlooked weeds, roughly the size of blueberries, to a domesticated produce powerhouse?
Biologists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently identified a link between the fully domesticated tomato we are all familiar with today and that of a weed like tomato group still found in Mexico. In other words, our domesticated tomatoes today may not have much to do with those blueberry like weeds from Peru. Still, even these professionals concluded that, “It’s still a mystery how tomatoes have moved northward. All we have is genetic evidence and no archaeological evidence because tomato seeds don’t preserve well in the archeological records”.
It’s apparent that it took several hundred years for tomatoes to spread across the world and even longer for people to catch on. We also know that tomatoes don’t kill people – in fact they are an incredibly versatile fruit. I mean vegetable. I mean fruit-vegetable. But other than that, tomatoes are still a great mystery in many ways.