3 Odd Things You Didn’t Need to Know About Tomatoes

1- Americans were afraid to eat tomatoes for a long time.

When the tomato made it’s way across the Atlantic during the 1500’s, the Italians and the French readily embraced them into their cuisine. The British were a bit more skeptical. The American’s followed suit and would refuse to eat them, except for Thomas Jefferson who was a visionary and planted them in his garden and put them on his dinner table.

 This entertaining fable explains the complicated relationship Americans had with tomatoes best;

Lingering doubts about the safety of the tomato were supposedly put to rest in 1820, when Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson announced that at noon on September 26, he would eat a bushel of tomatoes in front of the Boston courthouse. The story goes that thousands of eager spectators turned out to watch the poor man die after eating the poisonous fruits, and were shocked when he lived. 

-Sam Cox, “I Say Tomayto, You Say Tomahto...”

It turns out they feared tomatoes for a pretty good reason. It bared a close resemblance to the Nightshade plant which are known for their hallucinogenic and poisonous properties. Fun fact: Medieval women would supposedly put drops of the nightshade extract to dilate their eyes because it was a trending fashion in the 15th century.

Americans believed that the tomato was poisonous for a very long time, but around 15 years after the fable emerged, tomatoes were sold by the dozen in Boston markets and it only grew from there. Some people still believe that tomatoes are harmful to ingest: The nightshade eliminating diet publicized by Gisele Bundchen.

2- The Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable in 1893.

Why on earth is there a need for The Supreme Court to decide this debate? And why, if the tomato is a botanically a fruit, did the Supreme court rule that it was a vegetable?

Well, if you didn't know already, a vegetable is not a botanical term. When botanists classify plant parts, they break plants down into the following categories; roots, tubers, bulbs, leaves, stems, flowers and fruits. No vegetables.

For simplicity's sake, we lump "fruits" like tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers, etc, under the ubiquitous term: vegetable. Also, telling your children to "eat their flowers," no matter how sternly, doesn't exactly incite the kind of authority desired.

And all was fine and dandy, until 1883 when President Chester A. Arthur enacted the Tariff of 1883 which taxed all imported vegetables 10%. Unhappy with the loss of profit, The John Nix & Co. company sued Edward L. Hedden, claiming that their tomatoes was really a fruit, and shouldn’t be taxed.

The Supreme court was not amused his efforts to avoid taxes and settled this debate by ruling that a tomato is a vegetable. So, long story short, tomato is technically a fruit, nightshade vegetables are possibly poisonous (?) and I’ve officially spent 4 hours researching tomatoes.



3- NASA sent tomato seeds to orbit space for six years.

In 1984, NASA sent 12.5 million tomato seeds to orbit around earth in a satellite for six years to study the effect of cosmic radiation on these “space seeds.” In 1990, they retrieved the seeds, and compared them to normal earth seeds and concluded that there was no harmful effects of cosmic radiation on the space seeds. The creators of the experiment also sent some of the space seeds to any child who wanted to conduct their own experiments, in effort to encourage interest in STEM fields.

The Canadian Space Agency still does this program, and teachers can order space seeds to do an experiment with their students. In 2019, NASA's Space Center in Florida launched another study exploring the effects of solar radiation on tomato seed and crop production.

"The project was designed to confirm that nutritious, high-quality produce can be reliably grown in deep space, or to provide a baseline to guide development of countermeasures to protect future crop foods from radiation during missions beyond low-Earth orbit."

-States News Service

Bonus odd fact: The scientific name for tomato literally translates to "edible wolf peach."

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