Tomato

The tomato is a soft, round, usually red fruit that grows on a leafy plant. The plant is native to western South America, in the area that is now Peru and Ecuador. Today, tomatoes are grown all over the world. They are one of the most popular foods on Earth. People eat them raw in salads, cooked into sauces, dried in the sun, and squeezed into juice.

A tomato plant has soft, fuzzy stems and jagged green leaves. It grows small yellow flowers. Each flower can turn into a tomato if it gets pollinated, usually by bees or by wind shaking the plant. A single plant can grow dozens of tomatoes in one summer. Most tomatoes are red when ripe, but they can also be yellow, orange, purple, green, or even striped.

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Both answers are correct, depending on who you ask. To a scientist, a fruit is the part of a plant that holds the seeds. By that rule, a tomato is clearly a fruit. But to a cook, a vegetable is something used in main meals rather than desserts. By that rule, a tomato is a vegetable. In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court even ruled that tomatoes count as vegetables, so that traders had to pay a tax on them.

The tomato has a long history. The Aztec people of central Mexico were growing and eating tomatoes more than 500 years ago. The word "tomato" comes from their language, Nahuatl, which called the fruit tomatl. Spanish explorers brought tomato seeds back to Europe in the 1500s. At first, many Europeans were afraid to eat them. The plant is related to deadly nightshade, and people thought tomatoes might be poisonous. It took almost 200 years before they became a normal food in places like Italy and Spain.

That fear was not totally silly. The leaves and stems of a tomato plant really are slightly poisonous. They contain a chemical called solanine. The fruit itself is safe once it ripens, but green, unripe tomatoes have small amounts of solanine too. That is why most recipes call for ripe red ones.

Today, China grows more tomatoes than any other country. The United States is in second place. Worldwide, farmers grow about 180 million tons of tomatoes every year. Without them, there would be no ketchup, no pizza sauce, and no spaghetti the way most people know it.