From Poison to Passion: The Secret History of the Tomato

[HuckleB]

http://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/poison-pleasure-secret-history-tomato/

"...

The Civil War was a tomato game-changer. Canneries boomed, filling contracts to feed the Union army. Tomatoes, which grew quickly and held up well during the canning process, rose to the occasion. After the war, demand for canned products grew, with more tomatoes being canned than any other vegetable. And this meant more farmers needed to grow them.

Cherry, pear, and egg-shaped tomatoes were common at the time, but larger tomatoes tended to be lumpy and ridged. Enter Alexander Livingston. Livingston, who had a serious green thumb from an early age, began a seed company in 1850. The first tomatoes he ever encountered grew wild, he wrote in Livingston and the Tomato, and his mother told him they were poison: “Even the hogs will not eat them.” But the colorful, misshapen fruits enchanted Livingston.

“There was not in the United States at the time an acre of tomatoes from which a bushel of uniformly smooth tomatoes could be gathered,” Livingston said of the tomato scene in the 1860s. Livingston introduced his initial groundbreaking hybrid tomato, the Paragon, in 1870. He called it “the first perfectly and uniformly smooth tomato ever introduced to the American Public.” Before Livingston, breeders would plant the seeds of promising-looking individual fruits. Livingston took the entire plant into account and grew out hundreds of seeds from plants he deemed had potential.

...

The twenty-odd varieties of Livingston’s tomatoes still available in seed form today are considered heirlooms. For non-gardening or farming consumers yearning to forge an emotional connection with the produce they buy, the term “heirloom” can conjure up images of pristine plants springing fully formed from a pastoral field. Despite the cuddly name, heirloom plants are the result of applied scientific method. And despite our love of the gorgeous red orbs, it’s interesting to consider why Livingston felt we needed perfectly round tomatoes in the first place. This quest endures in our own times, as the desire to produce an intersection of high yield, year-round availability, long shelf life, eye appeal, and something remotely resembling flavor — one tomato to rule them all — has accelerated into a tomato-breeding arms race.

..."


I found it interesting, anyway.

[Laughing Mirror]

1. Native Americans were eating tomatoes

It is incredible they took so long to catch on with the European colonists.

[HuckleB]

2. Indeed.

It is possible that racism played a role in their initial rejection of tomatoes. I might just have to read the book that's mentioned in the piece.

[KurtNYC]

3. Mostly the Brits. Aztecs in 700AD were eating them

It was only in northern Europe that tomatoes were feared and some have pointed to the reaction between tomato acid and pewter tableware as the basis for the fear of poisoning:

Rich people in that time used flatware made of pewter, which has a high-lead content. Foods high in acid, like tomatoes, would cause the lead to leech out into the food, resulting in lead poisoning and death. Poor people, who ate off of plates made of wood, did not have that problem, and hence did not have an aversion to tomatoes. This is essentially the reason why tomatoes were only eaten by poor people until the 1800's, especially Italians.

http://www.tomato-cages.com/tomato-history.html

America is named after an Italian and Italians have been here since the 1600s. Brit-centric views of history love to ignore such things. Julia Child famously remarked "Americans are afraid of food."