Comprehensive Description

Introduction

Wherever you are from, it is probable that you eat tomatoes in one form or another. Tomatoes originated in South America but are now found all over the world. Without tomatoes we would have no cheese and tomato pizza; no ketchup; no baked beans on toast; no lasagne or spaghetti Bolognese; no tomato soup; no BLTs; no mozzarella, tomato, and basil salad; no tomato gazpacho; no tuna nicoise; no salsa; and no tomatoes with our fried breakfast--or any of the other hundreds of dishes that use this savoury fruit. (Although often thought of as a vegetable, tomatoes are technically a fruit. They contain the seeds from which new tomatoes plants will grow.)

Wild Tomatoes

Tomatoes are thought to have first grown in western South America, in the region of modern day Peru and Ecuador. Wild species are still found in these areas as well as farther south in Chile and Bolivia. Tomato plants are found in all sorts of environments from the deserts and dry valleys on the Western slopes of the Andes to fog-saturated cloud forests and even above the snowline on the Andean mountains. However, most wild species prefer dry conditions.

Very varied in size, colour, and appearance, most wild tomatoes don't look anything like those you would buy in a shop. They are usually about a centimetre across, green in colour, and covered with fur. What's more, their taste can be distinctly bitter and unpleasant. Which of these wild tomatoes (if any) gave rise to the modern tomato is not certain, but it probably developed from the species Solanum pimpinellifolium, which looks and tastes most like the tomatoes we are used to.

Domestication of the Tomato

At one decisive moment in the history of the tomato, someone decided to plant and grow tomatoes rather than picking them in the wild. This was the very first tomato farmer and with that move the future of the tomato was changed forever. When or where this first happened we will never know for sure. Some people have guessed tomatoes were first grown in Peru and Ecuador (around where the tomato originated thousands of years ago). This area was home to many complex civilisations, culminating in the Incas, but no evidence has yet been found that any of them farmed tomatoes. Others have suggested that tomatoes were first cultivated by humans in Mexico--around 4000 miles to the north. Certainly by the 1500s, when Europeans first arrived in Mexico, the native peoples had long been growing tomatoes for food.

Wherever it first happened, when people started farming the tomato it would have looked much like it did in the wild. However, each time they picked their tomatoes they could use the seed from the best ones (e.g. the biggest or the sweetest) to sow more tomato plants. By selecting the best tomatoes to grow, they grew plants with better and better tomatoes. This process of changing a wild plant into one that is good for humans is called domestication and it is how wild tomatoes began to change into the tomatoes we eat today.

Spread of the Tomato

Well before the 1500s the tomato plant had already travelled 4000 km north, from its origin in the Andean region of modern day Peru and Ecuador to Mexico. It may have been that tomato plants were deliberately transported north to Mexico by humans or that after eating tomatoes birds or other animals carried the seeds there in their stomachs .

In 1492, Columbus made his first landfall in the New World. This was to change the future of the tomato, as it led to the Spanish exploration and conquest of the Americas, their discovery of the tomato plant, and the eventual spread of the tomato to all four corners of the earth.

The first tomato plants to be taken to Europe probably came from Mexico, the site of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which was conquered by the Spanish conquistador Cortes in 1519. Here the Spanish discovered the Aztecs eating a domesticated form of the tomato that they referred to as Xitomatl. Bernardino Sahagun, a Franciscan priest who visited Mexico in 1529, wrote that the Aztecs combined tomatoes with chillies and ground squash seeds to make a sauce [or salsa]. Salsa made with tomatoes and chillies is still a popular relish in Mexico and the USA today. To find modern recipes for the tomato, including salsa, click here .

It is likely that tomatoes first arrived in Europe via some Spanish port. However, the first record we have of tomatoes in Europe appears in the 1544 work of an Italian herbalist called Matthioli. The tomato that Matthioli studied was around the size of a fist and a bright yellow colour so he called the tomato "pomi d' oro", or "Golden Apple". The tomato and the name 'Golden apple' spread quickly north through Europe. Tomatoes were