PD Tomato Festival

August 16, 2009

History of the ‘Love apple’

Tomatoes once thought poisonous

The tomato has had a curious history.

Like its relative, the potato, it originated in South America, was taken to Europe by the Spaniards in the early 1500s, and from there was brought to the American colonies.

Although Thomas Jefferson’s diary mentions “dwarf tomatas” and “Spanish tomatas come to table,” most people in this country and northern Europe were afraid to eat them until about a century ago because of their kinship and similarity to the poisonous nightshades.

Instead they were raised in old-fashioned gardens as ornamental plants and their brightly colored fruit, red or yellow but wrinkled and much smaller than our modern tomatoes, were used to decorate mantelpieces and were called “love apples.”

Today, tomatoes are one of our staple foods and we Americans eat an average of about two bushels per person per year. One bushel is processed commercially into canned tomatoes, soups, tomato juice, green pickles, relishes and ketchup. Oil from the seeds is used in soap and paint. The other bushel we buy fresh or raise in our gardens.

While the tomato has a high water content, it is an excellent food. In addition to some carbohydrate and protein, it is rich in vitamin A, nicotinic acid, and still more so in vitamin C. Six ounces of tomato juice are said to provide the average adult with his minimum daily requirement of the latter and about one-third his need of vitamin A.

Tens of centuries ago the pre-Incans in Peru began to cultivate a nightshade-like vine plant with little red sourish berries. It still grows in the highlands of that country.

There is also a shrubby tree tomato with yellow fruit which is found on the slopes of the Andes Mountains, as high as 13,000 feet above sea level, and it can withstand severe frosts. The pottery of these ancient people includes accurate models of several types of tomatoes as well as corn, potatoes, peppers, beans and squashes which they had developed from wild plants and grew as crops.

Over the centuries the tomato was carried from Peru to the Maya Indians of Central America and thence to the Toltecs of Mexico and their Aztec conquerors who called it “tomat.”

The Spaniards called it “tomate.”

Now it is grown outdoors throughout the world except in frigid and semi-frigid zones. Even in climates with short growing season, large crops are possible if the plants are started “under glass.” It will grow on almost any soil but is killed by the first touch of frost.

Something of a vegetable hobo, it often thrives on ash piles, garbage dumps and, because its small seeds are not digested, on beds of sewage sludge.

About half of the commercial yield in this country is grown in California, Indiana and New Jersey. The rich black nat land in southeastern Cook County is the principal tomato area in Illinois. In winter, some tomatoes are grown in hothouses but most are shipped from Texas and Florida, or imported from Mexico and Cuba.

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