Tomatoes: A Love Story

0:00Yes, you like potato and I like potato. You like tomato and I like tomato. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let's call the whole thing off. Hmm, I wonder what this episode is about. Is it about the way I say tomato? No, but this is the perfect time to remind all you lovely listeners that Nikki is in fact British. I know, I know. She's been here for so long that she almost sounds like an American. But then there are some words that we differ on, like the tomato. Or in fact, tomato. We're definitely not going to call the whole thing off. Our relationship is solid, Cynthia, but the tomato? That's a more troubled love affair.

0:44And we've got the whole story this episode of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I am Nicola Twilley. And I'm Cynthia Graber. This episode, we're finally telling the story of one of my favorite vegetables of all time. Or wait, is it a fruit? Oh, well, the United States Supreme Court said it's a vegetable, but the reality is it's a, botanically, it is most definitely a fruit. Not the first time the Supreme Court has been wrong. By the way, the tomato is extremely beloved. I love it, the world loves it, it's up there with the potato as the most consumed item in the produce category.

1:24So why did humanity's relationship with this delightful vegetable fruit get off to such a rocky start? No one seemed to love the tomato where the wild plant originally grew, and even the Italians weren't into it for hundreds of years after they first encountered one. And as if repaying us for all this lack of love, why are most tomatoes so disappointing today? All that plus a sneak peek at the tomatoes of the future. But first, we have a quick bit of exciting news. We're getting ready to host our second ever Gastrahang. It's a super fun get-together hosted by, yes, us. We all meet online. There are games and behind-the-scenes stories and more.

2:01This year, we'll be getting together on October 8th, and invites will go out to supporters in the middle of September. If you're not a supporter yet and you'd like to get on the Gasterhang invite list, go to gastropod.com slash support. That's gastropod.com slash support. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Iter.

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3:27All right, we got a really good looking one here that's literally warm off the vine. It was in the sun about 10 minutes ago growing. This is the moment I've been waiting for since like February. Oh my gosh Starting with the big Pink and yellow one Just a little bit of salt Here we go I love it Mmm Mmm Oh my gosh Mmm Oh that's so good That's so good Mmm Mmm A little more fruity You have a slightly darker one here So good is like perfect summer. Listeners can't see, but I'm doing like a little tomato happy dance. That's it. Just leave me here. Eating tomatoes. They're so good. Okay, I'm going to eat the rest of this with some basil and some mozzarella because that's my ideal life in the summer.

4:26It is not an exaggeration to say that in summer, we here at Gastropod HQ live for tomatoes. Jeff and I eat them every day, multiple times a day. They're our producer Claudia's favorite vegetable to eat and grow, and the same is definitely true for Tim and me. And based on the statistics, we're very much not alone in our tomato consumption. If we exclude the potato, which should more properly be thought of as a starch, not a vegetable, the tomato is the most popular vegetable on the planet by far. William Alexander is the author of 10 Tomatoes That Changed the World. And just to get this Supreme Court elephant out of the way at the start, this fruit-vegetable confusion is because botanists define fruit as an ovary enclosing a plant's seeds.

5:19Which, yum! Basically, this means that a particular plant is flowered, and then the lady part of the flower turns into an ovary around the seed or seeds. Most fruit are, well, fruit, and also a bunch of vegetables fit that definition. Peppers, eggplants, squash, a whole bunch, including the tomato. But of course, people like us who are more concerned with eating than botanizing, we categorize tomatoes according to how we eat them, which is typically as a vegetable. Hence the confusion. But back to the tomato. It's kind of shockingly popular today, but once upon a time, it was just one of a bunch of random plants in the Andes.

5:54It is a plant that originated in the mountains of Peru, Ecuador, thousands of years ago. If you walk past one today, you probably wouldn't recognize it as tomato. It looked like kind of a scrubby weed, and the fruits were the size of peas. As far as we know, it was not eaten at all in South America. We haven't tasted the fruit of these wild ancestors, but like Bill says, rumor has it that the ancient Peruvians didn't bother eating or cultivating wild tomatoes because they just weren't that into them. They're not very good. Ouch. Harry Klee is an emeritus professor in the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida.

6:40But if they weren't domesticated in the Andes, then who did domesticate the tomato? Yeah, this is actually a great question because we don't know. So what we each know is that actually domestication likely mostly happened in the south of Mexico. Gabriela Toledo is an associate professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the founder of a project called the Tomatoes for Tomorrow Initiative. And she told us that somehow this underappreciated wild pea-sized fruit made its way north to Mesoamerica where the locals took the time to domesticate it. And over hundreds of years, it went from that pea-sized fruit to something closer to what we would recognize as tomato today.

7:25And not just the one most popular tomato today, that round, smooth red globe. These new domesticated tomatoes came in a huge variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1519, they were amazed at just variety and the number of them. They were reported to be green and yellow, red. You have the shapes that go from round pear shape. And you also have some, they have very specific shapes that look like a kidney somehow. Some are called, for example, pumpkin-like because they look like a pumpkin. And I have actually, in some events, used some pictures of these tomatoes without the color.

8:15And without the color, people actually cannot know if this is a pear or it's a pumpkin. Even despite all that delightful variety, Bill told us that the tomato was not the MVP of Aztec vegetables. Sure, they had cultivated a bunch of them, but did they truly adore the tomato? Maybe not. There are even some indications that the Aztecs themselves preferred tomatillas. Tomatillas, if you're not familiar with them, they look a lot like tomatoes, but they're usually hard and green when they're ripe. They grow with a kind of lantern-shaped papery coating around them that you have to remove, and you don't typically eat them raw.

8:52You cook them or roast them. They have a delicious citrusy flavor, and they're super common in Mexican sauces. And in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, the tomatillo is called the tomatol, while the thing we call a tomato these days was called a jitomatol. That overlap was way too confusing for the conquistadors. When the Spanish brought them back, they just took the root of the word for both tomatillos and tomatoes, which means a round fruit, and they called them by the same things. So when we read some of the accounts in Spain, we're not always sure which of those two they're talking about.

9:30Okay, so when the Spanish word tomate shows up in the records, we don't know whether they're referring to tomatoes or tomatillos. But whichever one, we do know that neither was the favorite among the horticultural haul that Spaniards brought back to Europe with them. There were chili peppers, chocolate, squashes they had never seen. They raved about chocolate and were fascinated with chilies. they loved a lot of the New World foods, but it doesn't seem like they were super into the tomato. The poor tomato. No one loved it. Even the first recorded tomato encounter in Italy was a big, fat meh. Tomatoes arrive in Italy on All Hallows' Eve, the holiday we now call Halloween, at the Pisa Palazzo of Cosimo de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

10:19And he gets word that a basket of a strange new fruit from the new world has arrived. And the steward summons the entire staff downstairs to witness this new fruit. So exciting. Cosimo was known for growing all sorts of cool things. He was already growing maize. He had recently founded Pisa's first botanical garden just a few years earlier. This clearly was going to be another botanical treasure. Surely everyone would soon be blanketing their pasta with tomato sauce. And the steward records the scene. this historic scene when tomatoes are first unveiled in Italy. And he says, and this is a quote, the basket was opened and they looked at each other with much thoughtfulness.

11:07That's it. Which implies that they really didn't quite know what to make of them. I'm starting to feel like someone needs to give the tomato a hug. What's more, things were only going to get worse. As more and more Europeans tried tomatoes, they were just completely panned in the press. Many, many of the contemporary writers complained about the strong smell, not just of the fruit, but of the leaves. Here's a few choice quotes. One British journal called them odious and repelling smelling berries. A Flemish herbalist said the strong stinking smell gives one sufficient notice how unhealthful and evil they are to eat.

11:47Northern Europeans hated them the most, but even in Italy, tomatoes did not get great reviews. For example, one influential Paduan doctor listed tomatoes as one of the, quote, strange and horrible things that, quote, a few unwise people were willing to eat. So why in the world did people hate tomatoes so intensely? Well, the thing that you read most commonly is that they were known to be a member of the nightshade family, which includes, of course, belladonna, which is very toxic poison. It's one of the most poisonous plants on the planet. I don't buy that because they also knew that squash and peppers and eggplants were also in the nightshades.

12:36and they were happily eating all of those things. But that's the most common reason that you hear. Tomatoes are obviously not poisonous, but even today you often hear that tomato leaves are poisonous and that's just not really true. You'd have to eat at least a pound of tomato leaves, which is a frankly ridiculous amount, to experience any ill effects at all. It's all part of this bad rap that the tomato didn't deserve. Tomatoes were likened to their fellow nightshade, the eggplant, in Italy at the time. But that association with the very edible eggplant probably didn't do the tomato any favors there, because it seems like eggplants were mostly associated with food that poor Jews ate, and Italians at the time weren't too fond of Jews, rich or poor.

13:23These were all strikes against the tomato. Another issue was that Europeans just didn't know what to do with them. I mean, they were very strange. When they came there, they didn't look like anything else Italians had. In fact, some weren't sure which part of the plant to eat. They would take a bite of the leaves and say, and pronounce them unfit. And even if they did figure out that the fruit-vegetable part was what they should cut into, they wouldn't necessarily have been too impressed when they took a bite. The tomatoes at the time weren't as sweet as a lot of the varieties today. They'd probably have been a lot more acidic.

13:58And in any case, you really need to do something to a tomato, not just eat it by itself. Maybe dress it up with some salt and oil or add it to a dish. That's where it really shines. The Europeans didn't know how to let the tomato show itself off. And then on top of all of that, the window they would have had to try to figure out their tomato consumption would have been pretty short. They go from, you know, hard green and tasteless to rotten on your windowsill in a matter of days. Plus, they didn't grow well in much of Europe, even much of southern Europe. They hadn't been bred yet to do as well in colder climates, so they only really flourished in southern Italy and parts of Spain at the time.

14:37So a lot of people just weren't familiar with them either. But one of the biggest reasons the tomato was so shunned was a guy called Galen, who at that point had been dead for more than a thousand years. He and his theories about health were rediscovered during the Renaissance. The Renaissance was all about the rebirth and revival of ancient Greek and Roman arts and architecture. Sculpture, literature. but that also extended to some of the medical writings of that time. And foremost among those were the writings of a doctor called Galen of Pergamon. The Renaissance was taking place in the 1500s and 1600s in Italy, basically when the tomato showed up.

15:18And this callback to Galen and his medical beliefs included adopting his beliefs about how food fit into your overall health. This was called humoral theory, and there were four different humors, cold, hot, wet, and dry. So all foods had a property of how wet they were or dry or how hot and cold they were. So for example, cheese was cold and dry. A lemon was hot and wet. And the idea was to kind of stay in the middle of this, not to get too cold or too hot or too dry or too wet, but to keep that balance so that your humors were in balance. And even though Galen himself could never have encountered a tomato, they didn't do well in his system.

16:09They ended up kind of where you might classify a wet basement, kind of in the coldest and the wettest corner of the chart, and thus were considered very unhealthy, pretty much to be avoided at all costs. So you'd think with all this anti-tomato sentiment that absolutely nobody was bothering to eat them. But that wasn't true. In Spain, which after all was the tomatoes first port of call in the old world, attitudes were a little bit more welcoming. The king's own botanist declared tomatoes safe to eat and good for sauces in the late 1500s. There are already some of the documents that show that as early as in the 17th century, probably the tomatoes were already part of some of the culinary traditions.

16:59The Spanish who did eat tomatoes seemed to have enjoyed them with salt and onions and in soups. So they did introduce them in similar ways that the Mexicans had done. The next place in Europe the tomatoes caught on was southern Italy, which at the time was called the Two Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and was ruled by the Spanish. Because Spain at the time had provinces that were part of Italy. These were regions whose climate was perfect for the tomato. And so even though the people in the north still feared tomatoes because they were wet and cold, by the late 1700s, early 1800s, southern Italy was ready to become tomato obsessed.

17:34By then, medicine had moved on a little from Galen's humors. And in the south, they didn't have too many other options of what to eat. Southern Italians were incredibly poor. It's hard to imagine how poor they were. And so it turns out that they grew really well in the South. They had a fairly long growing season, and they added a little color to a really drab diet. Indeed, they grew so well and became so popular that Southern Italians developed remarkably tasty ways to preserve their tomato glut so they could eat tomatoes all year round. One of the most successful ways that they did this was they cut the tomatoes in half, put a little salt on them, and put them on their roofs.

18:22They were the first ones to do sun-dried tomatoes. A few decades ago in the 80s and 90s, sun-dried tomatoes were like the hot ingredient, and they were in everything, everywhere. Then they kind of became passe. But I can assure you that they are in fact delicious and totally still worthy of a spot in your fridge. I buy them packed in olive oil and they're great chopped up in green salads. But the real southern Italian tomato hack was something that's much harder to find today, even though it sounds kind of delicious. They would make something called conserva nera, which means black preserve. So at the end of the harvest, they would harvest everything off the vines, and they would all get together in the streets and put the tomatoes into these large cauldrons and start fires up and boil them down into a thick paste.

19:18This boiling and thickening would take days. It was almost like a street fair at the time because you did it in a group. You hung out. You gossiped as you stirred and strained out the seeds. And then they would spread this thick paste onto wooden boards and leave it out in the sun for several days. And at which time then they could actually go out and roll up this thin sheet into something that probably looks like fruit leather. and they would sometimes form it into blocks. In block form, tomato conservanera would last at least a year, right through to the next harvest. And it was so concentrated that you didn't need much to flavor a soup or a stew.

20:01If you're thinking that this sounds sort of like tomato paste, it's really a different thing. They're both concentrated tomatoes, but conservanera was nearly black, as Bill said, and it was tough and you had to slice off a piece. Nikki and I actually looked for some online and there are things from Italy called conserva, but they're more like lightly sweetened tomato spread, not this hard, tough tomato leather. But if you know where we can get some, please let us know. In any case, finally, finally, the tomato had found its place in the sun, at least in southern Italy. The story of how it took pills and tins to get big in North America, coming up after the break.

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22:58In the U.S., a few brave souls were fond of tomatoes. They were better known in the South. Thomas Jefferson grew and ate them. But my fellow New Englanders were generally not fans. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared them an acquired taste. And then came tomato mania. It was kind of a quirk. It happened in 1834. A kind of failed doctor named John Cook Bennett, who had been fired from one medical school, had failed to start his own school, gave a lecture to his medical students about the health properties of tomato. In general, medicine wasn't particularly advanced at the time, so people were always looking for something to make them healthier.

23:40But Americans were particularly health-obsessed at that moment because they were in the middle of an epidemic of cholera. So after Bennett published this lecture, 200 American newspapers uncritically picked this up and printed this. Now, it didn't take long for the snake oil salesman to realize that there was an opportunity here. And one in particular, an Ohio merchant named Archibald Miles, had been peddling this worthless pill, which he called American hygiene pills. Archibald Miles encountered John Cook Bennett's viral tomato article, and it gave him a couple of ideas. Shortly after, Miles printed up some new labels, awarded himself an MD degree, and Dr.

24:32Miles' compound extract of tomatoes was born and sold like hotcakes. Were there any tomatoes in this? Probably not. If there were, it was very few. Once these compound extract of tomato pills started to get popular, they kicked off a tomato pill trend. It was like sun-dried tomatoes in the 90s. These pills were everywhere. Americans love nothing more than a health fad. The supposed wonders of tomato pills, in turn, inspired a craze for growing tomatoes. And before you knew it, the U.S. was in the grips of a full-blown tomato obsession. We have a wonderful journal entry of a British journalist who visited a hotel in Madison, in Wisconsin and complained that he was being served tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and people were eating them at breakfast with mustard, and he nearly lost his own breakfast.

25:34And I mean, people just went tomato wild. Americans grew and sold tomatoes. Everyone was eating them. But the problem was that tomatoes weren't available all the time. You know, if you've grown tomatoes, you know that their habit is they come in slowly and then all of a sudden you get a couple of hot days and they come in like gangbusters. And when that would happen, there would be a glut. And the price of tomatoes would drop so much that they would just sometimes plow them into the fields. Fortunately, at about this time, the next big breakthrough in food preservation was ready for prime time.

26:15Canning. That is a whole other story that we're coming back to in a whole other episode. But the point is, tomatoes were finally beloved. They were so beloved that people weren't content with eating the fresh ones in the summer and early fall and the canned ones in the winter and spring. No, northerners wanted their fresh tomatoes all year round. And so the answer was Florida. They grew them in the wintertime because the weather was much milder. They put them on trains and shipped them to New York and Boston. And so it basically took over. This is Harry Klee again, and he spent much of his career in Florida growing tomatoes.

26:53You know, the reality is in New England, the season for growing tomatoes really is only basically, if you're lucky, the end of July through September. So what do you do the other nine months? You import them. And so Florida filled that niche and it did it very well. In some ways, because while Florida has its charms and mild winters are certainly among them, it's not actually paradise for a tomato. So the thing about Florida is that the soil is extremely poor. Well, it's sand, very little organic matter in the soil. And so, yes, it's a good place to grow them because in the wintertime and the fall and the spring, you can grow them.

27:39You can get two crops a year, but you have to completely irrigate them. You have to flood them with nutrients constantly because there is nothing in the soil. Basically, it's almost like growing them hydroponically. The soil is an inert substrate to hold the roots in place. It's also not the greatest place to grow them because much of the year it rains a lot. It's very humid. Disease pressure is tremendous. So basically, the only thing really going for tomato is the temperature. Otherwise, it's not a very good place to grow tomatoes. But that temperature was a draw. The sandy soil didn't hold the rain, so farmers just developed irrigation systems.

28:25They also had a very intense regimen of fertilizer and pesticides and fungicides. They literally had to disinfect the soil. Not ideal environmentally, but it works. And at the same time, plant breeders worked on developing a tomato plant that could thrive in these challenging growing conditions and deliver tomatoes at industrial scale. For Florida specifically, most of the breeder programs focus on disease resistance and yield. Labor is probably the biggest single expense for growing a tomato. So you want a plant that produces fruit in very large quantities in a very short period of time. The other thing about the Florida tomato industry is that those tomatoes had to be picked before they were ripe.