Tomato

Appears in
A Canon of Vegetables

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2007

  • About

Lycopersicon esculentum is the poster child of the Columbian Exchange. Before Columbus, Europe had no tomatoes and therefore pizzas were all cheesy white. Pasta sauce as we know it was impossible. And on and on. Although the Andes most likely is the tomato’s home ground, it came to Europe first from Mexico. The word “tomato” derives from Nahuatl.

For a while, in the modern history of the tomato in the West, taxonomy was destiny. As a member of the deadly nightshade family, the Solanaceae, tomatoes were shunned as poisonous. This prejudice persisted well into the nineteenth century and even later in some places, including the rural U.S.