Spotlight on the Tomato

Matt Price

Defining Tomatoes

  • tomato is a botanical fruit, produced by the domesticated plant Solanum lycopersicum L. var. lycopersicum
  • it is a culinary vegetable, only because of our conventional eating habits
  • all of our many kinds of tomatoes are a single botanical "variety"
  • biology and culture in conflict already!

The Wild Tomato

  • about 16 species of wild (undomesticated) tomatoes grow in South America
  • Until very recently, this tiny tomato was believed to be the ancestor of our tomatoes, but now we think that wild cherry-sized tomatoes (Solanum. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme) migrated naturally from Peru to Central America (Razifard et al., 2020)
  • where it was cultivate by Aztecs and earlier peoples
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Figure 1: An 1872 illustration of Solanum pimpinellifolium
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Figure 2: early European drawing of Tomato ca. 1550 (via Daunay & Laterrot, 2007, fig. 18)

From Mesoamerica to Europe

Columbus's blundering arrival in the Caribbean (Bahamas?) was the start of a world-historical process that continued for centuries: European colonization of the Americas. (save this for another lecture!)

  • for today: among other foods, the Aztec cultivated two unrelated fruits they called tomatl and xitomatl, which were often mashed with chilis into a paste for sauce or filling
  • After the bloody destruction of the Aztec civilization 1519-1521, Spanish invaders brought back these and other plants
  • Botanists classified the yellow-red fruit as a member of Solanum, a very large plant family that includes eggplant (aubergines) but also toxic plants such as nightshade.
  • Spanish colonists spread the tomato across their new empire
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Figure 3: Spanish Empire in late 1700s (after Ostiudo, 19 C.E.)

Tomatoes in Early Modern Europe

  • cultivated largely as an ornamental plant, in part because "unhealthy"
    • some belief that tomatoes were poisonous; and in fact tomatine toxicity is fairly unpleasant
  • when eaten, mostly as a very tart condiment. Almost certainly had much lower sugar content than our tomatoes; classified as "sour and acid plant" (Gentilcore, 2009, p. 129)
  • starts to enter cuisine in late 1600s, and becomes popular first in Spain as a minor ingredient in stews such as ratatouille
  • cultivation and breeding leads to proliferation of varieties
  • preserved for winter through sun drying and, importantly, as dry paste used to season sauces

Pizza and Pasta

  • Neapolitan word pizza is likely 1,000 years old but has nothing to do with tomatoes
  • one of many flatbread recipes common in the Mediterranean, but usually sweet (!), with e.g. sweetened ricotta and custard
  • in very late c. 19, a new pizza alla neopolitana appears in cookbooks, always including tomatoes
  • simultaneously, appears as a working-class sauce for macaroni (pasta, which has its own interesting history)
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Genetic Engineering

  • new pear-shaped varieties developed for sauces in mid-to-late 19th century
    • e.g. fiaschetto and Re Umberto
  • tomato paste became a major industrial food product of South Italy, consumed domestically and esp. in the USA
  • in early c.20 paste was overtaken by canned whole tomatoes, which needed different varieties.
    • leads to "San Marzano" from southern Italy
  • mid c. 20, growth in "Italian" cuisine in the United States → American production
  • mid 1950's: "Roma" tomato – but it's from Maryland, USA!
  • Now the single most valuable fruit/vegetable market in the world
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Figure 4: Re Umberto tomato (Gentilcore, 2009, p. 132)
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Tomato as History

  • just like beer, tomato holds a tremendous amount of history
  • empires, scientists, cooks, labourers, soldiers, housewives, all helped make the objects we consume

Sources

Daunay, M.-C., & Laterrot, H. (2007). Iconography of the Solanaceae from Antiquity to the XVIIth Century: a Rich Source of Information on Genetic Diversity and Uses. Acta Horticulturae, 745. https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2007.745.3
Gentilcore, D. (2009). Taste and the tomato in Italy: a transatlantic history. Food & History, 7(1), 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.food.1.100639
Ostiudo. (19 C.E.). Español: Expansion del imperio español durante el absolutismo Borbonico. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperio_Espa%C3%B1ol_(1714-1800).png
Razifard, H., Ramos, A., Della Valle, A. L., Bodary, C., Goetz, E., Manser, E. J., Li, X., Zhang, L., Visa, S., Tieman, D., Knaap, E. van der, & Caicedo, A. L. (2020). Genomic Evidence for Complex Domestication History of the Cultivated Tomato in Latin America. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 37(4), 1118–1132. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz297