By Joel Denker
“There’s only two things that money can’t buy—and that’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.” Where do these succulent “home grown” beauties, once exotic and now all so familiar, come from? Many associate them with Italy, so synonymous has that nation’s food been with the tomato. Is that really true?
The story of the tomato begins in ancient Mexico, where, scholars like anthropologist Sophie Coe point out, the Aztecs were already acquainted with one of its cousins, the tomatillo. They knew it as a type of tomatl’, something “round and plump.”
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To learn more about tomatoes, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
