“The tomato spent centuries as a decorated ornamental in Europe — grown in pots on windowsills for its striking fruit — while being eaten freely in its native South America. Spanish colonists carried it back to Europe in the 1500s, but most Europeans considered it poisonous (they were right about the leaves). For two hundred years it was viewed with deep suspicion, only becoming the king of summer cooking once Italian cooks made it the soul of their cuisine. American enthusiasm for tomatoes had to wait until the 1830s, when cookbooks and seed catalogs finally stopped warning readers away from them.”

Ancestral Meaning

Few foods carry the cultural weight of the tomato in summer — it is summer. Italian-American identity is partly built on the red sauce tradition that emerged in immigrant neighborhoods. The tomato's journey from ornamental to everywhere is also a story of immigrant influence on American food culture, which is exactly why so many people today grow them on porches and balconies: a living connection to something older and warmer than grocery store shelves.

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Did you know? Botanically the tomato is a fruit. In 1886 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable for tax purposes — it still legally counts as a vegetable at the border.

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