J.D. Smith

While wallowing through the Supermarket of Too Many Choices I halted in the produce aisle and stood transfixed by four varieties of tomatoes: the beefsteak, the grape, the cherry, and the plum, all of them the pale orange hue of a dusty sunset over the Nevada Proving Grounds.

Why, I thought, are tomatoes named after animal parts and fruits? The cherry tomatoes were of no particular interest because they were the size of cherries in much the same manner as ping pong balls. The grape tomatoes would pass through a screen designed to sort grapes. The plum tomatoes fit the size and the shape criteria, but everywhere east of Great Falls these same flat tasting marinara basics are known as Romas. The beefsteak variety sported a dull pink hue and was the size and firmness of a baseball. (Note to the tomato marketing folks: Why scare off an entire vegan community with that name? Meanwhile, fire the person who came up with the idea of selling little attached pieces of tomato vine at the same per pound price as the fruit.)

A sliced tomato on white bread with mayo, salt and pepper is my favorite sandwich, but tomatoes at 45 degrees north latitude in late February will surely disappoint, so I elect to spend wages on a cluster of ten index-finger-length yellow fruit called “baby bananas” at two bucks a pound. (Another note: Baby bananas at two bucks per pound taste like regular old pit run bananas that go for 58 cents per pound, but one must eat three of the little critters in order to get the same thrill.)

I have done a few sandwich-free days’ research into tomatoes in the ongoing effort to advance human knowledge among the readers of this column, or, at very least, to provide the wallflower with cocktail party conversation. Here are my discoveries:

No one in Europe, Africa or Asia had tasted a tomato until the Spaniards, in their quest for gold, found this Latin American member of the Solanaceae family (eggplants, potatoes, deadly nightshade) under cultivation in Mexico in the early sixteenth century. The earliest mention of the tomato in European literature is found in an herbal written by Matthiolus in 1544. He wrote that they were “eaten in Italy with oil, salt and pepper.” Although not specifically documented, early tomatoes were probably yellow, small fruited, (grape) and had a rough skin.

English authors referred to the tomato as an ornamental plant as early as 1578. One English cultivator wrote in 1596, “these love apples are eaten abroad,” but went on to describe them “of rank and stinking savour.” (He must’ve been shopping at my supermarket.) The first cookbook to mention tomatoes was published in Naples in 1692. By 1700, seven types are mentioned in one article. In 1752, English cooks used tomatoes sparingly in the flavoring of soups. In 1758, a tomato recipe showed up in the popular British cookbook “The Art of Cookery” by Hannah Glass.

The tomato plant bears a good resemblance to deadly nightshade, the source of belladonna, which has been used as a hallucinogenic drug. The trippy properties of belladonna, including visions and the sense of flying, most likely led to the association of nightshade, and its cousin the tomato, with witchcraft. Old German folklore has it that witches used plants of the nightshade family to evoke werewolves, a practice known as lycanthropy. Older German texts call the tomato a “wolf peach.”

In the 18th century Carl Linnaeus (remember him from high school botany?) conjured up a way to name species and took note of the German legend when he named the tomato Lycopersicon esculentum, which literally means, “edible wolf peach.”

Tomato plants were brought to North America by colonists as ornamentals from Britain, the fruits of which were most valued for removing pustules. (I’ve not tried tomatoes on pimples.) In 1781, Thomas Jefferson brought tomatoes to his table. George Washington Carver, the peanut butter wizard, advocated tomato eating to his Alabama neighbors in an effort to improve their vitamin-deficient diet.

Early efforts to peddle tomatoes were not all that successful. One account has it that the fruit was first brought to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1802 by a vendor who had difficulty even convincing society people to taste the fruit because it was considered a poison. This was not without substance because upper class folks ate off of pewter plates, the acid in tomatoes would leach the lead out of the pewter and folks got stupid and sick. Poor folks were not affected because they ate from wooden plates.

Doubts about the safety of the tomato were put to rest in 1820, when Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson announced that at noon on September 26 (prime tomato season), he would eat a bushel of tomatoes in front of the Boston courthouse. Thousands of folks turned out to watch the poor man die after eating the poisonous fruits, and were disappointed when he lived.

Tomato production in North America began to boom in the early 1920s with the advent of industrial canning and the invention of juice extractors. Shortly after, a young entrepreneur named Joseph Campbell found a ready market for canned tomato products, and went on to make gazillions with his soups.

The top five tomato-producing countries of the world are United States, China, Turkey, Italy and India, in that order. Florida, California and Georgia are the top producing states, with about 250 square miles under cultivation per year. An estimated 35 million backyard gardens across the country grow tomatoes.

Tomatoes are health foods. They rank 16th among all fruits and vegetables as a source of vitamin A, 13th in vitamin C, and because we eat a lot of tomatoes are the most important provider of these two vitamins in the western diet. The tomato also contains significant amounts of lycopene (an anti-oxidant that snuffs out free radicals whatever they are), beta-carotene, magnesium, niacin, iron, phosphorus, potassium, riboflavin, sodium and thiamine.

Now, if we could only buy a tomato in March that tasted better than a tennis ball.