Quick Take: Tomatoes have a much stranger history than most people realize, from how they were once feared to how they're grown around the world today. A few of these facts might change how you see the ones in your garden.

Imagine a World Without Tomatoes

I joke with my kids that basically every meal I cook for them has tomatoes in it: pizza, hamburgers, spaghetti, tacos, nachos, BLTs, and chicken nuggets with ketchup. It's hard to imagine that tomatoes weren't always staples in American households. Yes, really!

In honor of this delicious and now-ubiquitous fruit, let's look at some fun facts about tomatoes you might not have known before. (If you prefer to listen, tune in on Apple Podcast or Spotify.)

Fact #1: People Used to Think Tomatoes Were Poisonous

Before European botanists could make sense of new plants arriving from the Americas, like corn, blueberries, and chocolate, they leaned on a 1,000-year-old framework from an Ancient Roman physician named Galen. Tomatoes didn't fit anywhere in it, and that made people suspicious.

That suspicion wasn't entirely unfounded either. A tomato plant's leaves and stems really are poisonous, and the plant resembles the mandrake, which is toxic too.

Here's what sealed the tomato's bad reputation:

• Lead poisoning, not the fruit. Wealthy Europeans ate off lead plates. Tomato acid pulled lead out of the plate and into the food, making people sick. Poorer households with wooden plates never had the problem.
• A werewolf superstition. Some parts of Europe believed tomatoes could turn people into werewolves.
• Tomato hornworms. Early North American colonists ran into this genuinely unsettling-looking pest for the first time.

Between the lead plates, the werewolf legend, and the hornworms, tomatoes carried a bad reputation all the way into the mid-1800s.

Fact #2: We're Eating More and More Tomatoes

Tomatoes are one of the world's most consumed vegetable crops. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, around 340 billion pounds, or 170 million tons, of fresh and processed tomatoes were produced around the world in 2014. The harvested area covered is 12 million acres of farmland.

The world production of tomatoes has consistently increased over the last 20 years.

Fact #3: More Tomatoes Are Grown in China Than Anywhere Else Around the World

China is on top, followed by the United States, and then India. Other major players are the European Union and Turkey. These top five tomato producers supply 70% of the global production.

In the United States, approximately 35 billion pounds of tomatoes were produced in 2015. That's a lot of tomatoes! But only 8% of that total production was in fresh tomatoes, which sell for much higher prices. More than 92% of those tomatoes were processed tomatoes that eventually end up in things like pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, and salsa. 

Fact #4: The Word Tomato Comes from the Aztecs

Tomatoes came from South and Central America. More specifically, they originated in the Andes by 700 A.D., in what's now called Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador, where they grew wild. South Americans, in case you're wondering, ate tomatoes without fear of being poisoned (or turned into werewolves!).

The word tomato comes from the Aztec word tomatl. There have since been many names for the tomato.

Fact #5: The French Thought Tomatoes Could Make You Fall in Love

The French called tomatoes pomme d'amour, or "the love apple".

Somewhere in between thinking tomatoes would kill you or turn you into a monster every full moon, people got this idea that tomatoes were aphrodisiacs.

Look at all these pretty little love apples in my hand!

Fact #6: The First Tomatoes That Came to Europe Were Likely Not Red

Tomatoes were called pomodoro in Italian, which means golden apple. This suggests that perhaps the first tomatoes that came to Europe from South America were not red at all, but yellow.

This is interesting because it's the antioxidants inside tomatoes that give them their color. A yellow or orange hue would come from beta carotene, which is converted into vitamin A in your body. The more commonly known red color of a tomato comes from lycopene, a red pigment with many beneficial health effects.

Beta carotene, by the way, is what gives carrots their orange color. Just like tomatoes, the color we've come to associate with carrots is not their original color. The first carrots were white, yellow, and purple.

Fact #7: Europeans Grew Tomatoes as Ornamental Plants

A thousand years after tomatoes originated, Europeans showed up in South America and were like, “Oh wow! Shiny, bright fruit.”

They took tomatoes back to Europe, and people in Southern Europe tried growing them but didn't quite know what to do with this new plant. Unsure whether or not the plants were poisonous, they were mostly grown as ornamental plants.

I mean, they are pretty plants, right? That's one of the reasons why we love growing tomatoes.

Fact #8: We Have Pizza to Thank for the Rising Popularity of the Tomato

Legend has it that in 1820, a New Jersey colonel named Robert Johnson ate a tomato on courthouse steps just to prove to skeptics he wouldn't drop dead. He didn't, and the crowd took notice.

But the real turning point came from something even better: pizza.

• Pizza arrived in the US in the 1800s with Italian immigrants, finally giving tomatoes a reason to be worth the risk.
• Campbell Soup got involved by the 1890s, when Joseph Campbell realized tomatoes canned beautifully and launched condensed tomato soup.

Fact #9: Tomatoes Are Both a Fruit and a Vegetable, Depending on Your Perspective

Botanically, a fruit is the fleshy part that covers a plant's seeds, which technically makes tomatoes a fruit, right alongside cucumbers and peppers. But chefs and most of us still call them vegetables.

There's an old saying for this: "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad."

The confusion even made it to the Supreme Court. Tomatoes were once classified as a fruit to avoid taxation, until the Court ruled they should be taxed as a vegetable instead.

So depending on who you ask, the tomato has been a poisonous plant, a tax-dodging fruit, and a taxable vegetable.

Fact #10: Most of Your Tomatoes Come from One of Three Places

Florida and California grow most of America's tomatoes, together accounting for at least 70% of US production.

• California produces 95% of processed tomatoes, so most sauces and salsas trace back here.
• Florida leads in fresh tomatoes, though production has dropped 40% since 2000, largely due to a fumigant ban.
• Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia round out the other top-producing states.

California's season runs February to October, while Florida's runs October to June. So when tomatoes show up in stores in the dead of winter, they're most likely imported from Mexico, whose exports to the US grew significantly after NAFTA removed trade barriers.

Fact #11: Tomatoes Are Super Good for You

Tomatoes, which are 95% water, are generally good for you, with only 18 calories. You get a little protein, some fiber, and about 30% of your daily intake of vitamin C all in one fruit.

No bad things in tomatoes, just good things and some things that you can only get in tomatoes.

Tomatoes are a good source of several vitamins and minerals:

• Vitamin C- This vitamin is an essential nutrient and antioxidant. One medium-sized tomato can provide about 28% of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI).
• Potassium- An essential mineral, potassium is beneficial for blood pressure control and heart disease prevention.
• Vitamin K1- Also known as phylloquinone, vitamin K is important for blood clotting and bone health.
• Folate (vitamin B9)- One of the B vitamins, folate is important for normal tissue growth and cell function. It’s particularly important for pregnant women.

The main plant compounds in tomatoes, besides beta carotene and lycopene, are:

• Naringenin- Found in tomato skin, this flavonoid has been shown to decrease inflammation and protect against various diseases in mice.
• Chlorogenic acid- A powerful antioxidant compound, chlorogenic acid may lower blood pressure in people with elevated levels.

Nutrition facts from: (1Trusted Source)

Fact #12: Organically Grown Tomatoes Really Are Better for You

You've probably wondered if there's really a difference between a conventional and organic tomato.

A study on the different tomato kinds showed that the organic tomatoes were 40% smaller than those grown by conventional techniques. They also had accumulated more compounds like sugars, vitamin C, and pigment molecules like lycopene. Even though they were smaller, they were packed with more nutrients.

What’s interesting is that those are stress-related resistance compounds and nutrients. Essentially, what's happening here is that the tomatoes that are grown organically are getting attacked by pests more, all while being fed with less fertilizer to help them grow. The plants respond to all that stress by creating more sugars, more vitamins, more lycopene, and more antioxidants. How cool is that? 

When you eat those plants that are grown organically, you get those good things. I love this because it's also a metaphor for when we go through hard things; it's kind of like lifting weights, right? You do really hard work, and then your muscles, in response to that stress, grow stronger. When we eat organic tomatoes, we're literally getting to benefit from the stress that those plants have been under because they've had to fight for survival.

Another reason to eat organic tomatoes is that tomatoes are number ten on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen. That means they found the highest traces of sprays, residues, fertilizers, and herbicides on those fruits. When you eat a tomato that hasn't been grown organically, you're getting all that stuff in your body, too. It's kind of a bummer when you're trying to eat something good for you and you get bad stuff for you at the same time, don't you think? 

Fact #13: Fresh Tomatoes from the Grocery Store Were Bred to Have Thick Skin

The biggest difference between a fresh and a processed tomato is that a processed tomato is harvested when it's ripe and red. That means there's a very short window to pick it. Growers have a streamlined process to let the fruit get to the ideal level of ripeness and flavor, and then boom, in six hours that thing has to be in the can, ready to ship. 

When you buy fresh market tomatoes, those probably did not have the chance to ripen on the vine. They may be red by the time they reach the produce section, but they're almost always picked green. Some are even gassed with this natural ripening hormone called ethylene to promote consistent ripening. If you've ever grown your own, you know that tomatoes don't all turn red at the same time; they slowly change at different paces. Even if a label says “vine-ripened,” we don’t know if that’s actually true to process.

Tomatoes have been selectively bred for over 50 years to make the long journey from California to your local grocery store. This makes them quite different from the kind you might grow in your own garden, and this is pretty true for almost all trucked vegetables. Grocery-store varieties tend to have thicker skin than fresh tomatoes and can hold up under stress and still enjoy a long shelf life.

Thicker-skinned tomatoes can actually survive the weight of 25,000 pounds of tomatoes piled on top of them in a truck, without suffering much damage. During the height of the season, California tomato growers can produce 2 billion pounds of tomatoes per week. That's 40,000 tomato trucks, each carrying 300,000 tomatoes, which is crazy.

(More information about how tomatoes are transported in this article.)

Fact #14: Not All Tomatoes Grow on Vines

There are two types of tomato plants: determinate (non-vining) and indeterminate (vining).

The indeterminate type basically means never-ending. This is the vining type that's going to produce tomatoes over and over again until frost comes. If you've seen the cover page of my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, or my garden throughout that book, you'll see my vining tomatoes going across my arch. During the three or four months of their growing season in Chicago, they almost reached from one side of the garden to the other. We're talking 10 to 15 feet or more of growth in one season. In Houston, where we rarely get frost, we've had tomatoes that just never stop. They'll go all the way up a trellis and then back down. 

The other type of tomato is called a determinate, or non-vining, tomato. These bush varieties grow to a certain height, probably five or six feet, and then produce their fruit all at once. This is generally a great kind of tomato to grow if you want to make tomato paste, tomato sauce, or salsa, because you can get a bunch of tomatoes all at once.

I love to grow the vining types because I can pick a little, let it keep growing, and then pick a little bit more.

If you're growing an indeterminate (vining) variety, give it something sturdy to climb. I train mine up my Nicole Arch Trellis every summer, and by August it's completely covered. The Nicole Panel Trellis works well too if you want something a little more compact against a fence line.

→ Learn more about growing your own organic tomatoes.

Fact #15: Tomatoes Are Not Great Veggies for Beginner Gardeners to Grow

Tomatoes are part of the Solanaceae family, also called the nightshade family. This family also includes eggplant, peppers, potatoes, and tomatillos. These plants typically require a lot of work and have very specific temperature and sunlight preferences. They have deep roots, so they prefer a bigger garden, and nearly all of them need support. The plants in this family are hungry for loads of nutrients. They'll take whatever your soil gives them, and still want more, thank you.

Most are also in need of pruning and weekly care during the growing season. So, don’t plant these veggies just before you head out of town for three months.

Growing the Solanaceae plant family, I like to say, is for someone who has graduated from the beginner gardener stage. Most people jump to tomatoes right away because they're the crown jewel of the garden. But, in general, tomatoes are more difficult because growing them is kind of like running a marathon versus running a mile.

In the garden, leaves are the first things that come from all plants, so I find it's much easier to start with things like kale, spinach, and romaine or herbs like basil and oregano. You get to harvest the earliest plant parts, which usually pop up in 30 to 40 days. Tomatoes grow for about 65 to 90 days before you can harvest. When plants take longer, there's a greater chance that things can go wrong and there’s more work involved.