Oct 18, 2017 · Advertisement. The case, filed in 1887, made its way to the Supreme Court in 1893. There, the court disagreed with the Nixes, ruling that …
In all the ways that matter to most consumers, tomatoes are not fruit. That was the opinion of Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray, released on this day in …
In the Supreme Court decision, the justices distinguished between science and everyday life. The justices admitted that botanically speaking, tomatoes were technically fruits. But …
Jul 22, 2018 · Last night, I was cranky. We had just gotten home from celebrating our soon-to-be-born niece at a baby shower. We brought home our older niece, this baby’s big sister, to have a sleepover with her cousins. As I heard the giggles coming from
Produce merchants were called as expert witnesses. But in the end, the defense’s argument of “sure, tomatoes were biologically a fruit, but for the purposes of trade and commerce—that is, the things covered by the Tariff Act of 1883—tomatoes were really vegetables,” won the day. The Supreme Court unanimously supported this idea.
That was the opinion of Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray, released on this day in 1893. “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of the vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas,” he wrote.
During the Nazi occupation of France, many valuable works of art were stolen from the Jeu de Paume museum and relocated to Germany. One brave French woman kept detailed notes of the thefts
But in the end, the defense’s argument of “sure, tomatoes were biologically a fruit, but for the purposes of trade and commerce—that is, the things covered by the Tariff Act of 1883—tomatoes were really vegetables,” won the day.
Lobbyists wanted the tomato named the state vegetable ( which it eventually was .) Other states have taken different paths regarding the tomato’s identity, Trex writes: the South Arkansas Vine Ripe Pink Tomato is officially both the state fruit and the state vegetable, while in Tennessee, the tomato is the state fruit.
In the case, witnesses read from dictionaries, and definitions for "fruit" and "vegetable" were read in court. Also definitions of "tomato," "pea," "eggplant," "cucumber," "squash" and "pepper.". In the Supreme Court decision, the justices distinguished between science and everyday life.
In the 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court faced a similarly ridiculous question: Are tomatoes fruits or vegetables? At the time the Port Authority of New York classified tomatoes as vegetables, which were subject to a 10 percent import tax. A fruit importer argued that tomatoes were fruits, which were not taxed.
From there, the tomato was introduced to other parts of the European-colonized world during the 16th century . Tomatoes are a significant source of umami flavor. The tomato is consumed in diverse ways, raw or cooked, in many dishes, sauces, salads, and drinks.
Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés may have been the first to transfer a small yellow tomato to Europe after he captured the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, in 1521. The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in a herbal written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist, who suggested that a new type of eggplant had been brought to Italy that was blood red or golden color when mature and could be divided into segments and eaten like an eggplant—that is, cooked and seasoned with salt, black pepper, and oil. It was not until ten years later that tomatoes were named in print by Mattioli as pomi d'oro, or "golden apples".
Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum: the oldest surviving tomato fruit and leaves. Page from the En Tibi Herbarium, 1558. Naturalis Leiden.
In 1753, Linnaeus placed the tomato in the genus Solanum (alongside the potato) as Solanum lycopersicum. In 1768, Philip Miller moved it to its own genus, naming it Lycopersicon esculentum. This name came into wide use, but was technically in breach of the plant naming rules because Linnaeus's species name lycopersicum still had priority. Although the name Lycopersicum lycopersicum was suggested by Karsten (1888), this is not used because it violates the International Code of Nomenclature barring the use of tautonyms in botanical nomenclature. The corrected name Lycopersicon lycopersicum (Nicolson 1974) was technically valid, since Miller's genus name and Linnaeus's species name differ in exact spelling, but since Lycopersicon esculentum has become so well known, it was officially listed as a nomen conservandum in 1983, and would be the correct name for the tomato in classifications which do not place the tomato in the genus Solanum .
The species originated in western South America and Central America. The Nahuatl (the language used by the Aztecs) word tomatl gave rise to the Spanish word tomate, from which the English word tomato derived.
The flowers are 1–2 cm ( 1⁄2 – 3⁄4 in) across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of three to 12 together. Although in culinary terms, tomato is regarded as a vegetable, its fruit is classified botanically as a berry.
The usual pronunciations of tomato are / təˈmeɪtoʊ / (usual in American English) and / təˈmɑːtoʊ / (usual in British English ). The word's dual pronunciations were immortalized in Ira and George Gershwin 's 1937 song " Let's Call the Whole Thing Off " ("You like / pəˈteɪtoʊ / and I like / pəˈtɑːtoʊ / / You like / təˈmeɪtoʊ / and I like / təˈmɑːtoʊ / ") and have become a symbol for nitpicking pronunciation disputes. In this capacity, it has even become an American and British slang term: saying " / təˈmeɪtoʊ təˈmɑːtoʊ / " when presented with two choices can mean "What's the difference?" or "It's all the same to me".
According to Smith’s research, even Ralph Waldo Emerson feared the presence of the tomato-loving worms: They were “an object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it.”
Gerard’s opinion of the tomato, though based on a fallacy, prevailed in Britain and in the British North American colonies for over 200 years.
John Parkinson the apothecary to King James I and botanist for King Charles I, procalimed that while love apples were eaten by the people in the hot countries to ‘coole and quench the heate and thirst of the hot stomaches ,” British gardeners grew them only for curiousity and fo the beauty of the fruit.
The first known reference to tomato in the British North American Colonies was published in herbalist William Salmon’s Botanologia printed in 1710 which places the tomato in the Carolinas. The tomato became an acceptable edible fruit in many regions, but the United States of America weren’t as united in the 18th and early 19th century. Word of the tomato spread slowly along with plenty of myths and questions from farmers. Many knew how to grow them, but not how to cook the food.
Gerard considered ‘the whole plant’ to be ‘of ranke and stinking savour.’… The fruit was corrupt which he left to every man’s censure. While the leaves and stalk of the tomato plant are toxic, the fruit is not.
A nickname for the fruit was the “ poison apple ” because it was thought that aristocrats got sick and died after eating them, but the truth of the matter was that wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are so high in acidity, ...
Around 1880, with the invention of the pizza in Naples, the tomato grew widespread in popularity in Europe. But there’s a little more to the story behind the misunderstood fruit’s stint of unpopularity in England and America, as Andrew F. Smith details in his The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cooker y.
Enter Alexander Livingston. Livingston, who had a serious green thumb from an early age, began a seed company in 1850. The first tomatoes he ever encountered grew wild, he wrote in Livingston and the Tomato, and his mother told him they were poison: “Even the hogs will not eat them.”. But the colorful, misshapen fruits enchanted Livingston.
His mother told him they were poison: “Even the hogs will not eat them.”. Wrote Working Farmer editor James Mapes, of Newark, New Jersey, the tomato was “long grown in our gardens as an ornamental plant, under the name of Love Apple, before being used at all as a culinary vegetable.
The release of the Paragon, claimed Livingston, caused tomato production to “increase phenomenally, and rival the potato as a crop to grow…. With these, tomato culture began at once to be one of the great enterprises of the country.” (It’s possible that Livingston was not given to understatement or modesty.)
Livingston introduced his initial groundbreaking hybrid tomato, the Paragon, in 1870. He called it “the first perfectly and uniformly smooth tomato ever introduced to the American Public.”. Before Livingston, breeders would plant the seeds of promising-looking individual fruits.
Colonists from continental Europe had long used tomatoes for culinary applications and continued doing so in their New World settlements, especially in more urban cities along the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi River. But in isolated rural areas, settlers greeted the unfamiliar tomato with fear and skepticism.
You may have heard that tomatoes were considered poisonous by all but a few Americans until the mid-1800s. Tomato historian Andrew W. Smith set out to clarify this matter in his exhaustively researched book The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery.
Before tomatoes became America's sweetheart, they were seen as watery, tough and possibly poisonous. While grown and used throughout pre-Civil War America, tomatoes weren’t widely embraced. Tomatoes – Lycopersicon esculentum – are in the Solanaceae family, which includes deadly nightshades and other poisonous plants;