Plant histories
The history behind a number of crop plants.
Looking at where they originated, their domestication, the introduction of these crops to Europe, how European attitudes to them changed over the centuries and ultimately how our changing demands have influenced the plants themselves.
Domestication of the tomato
At one decisive moment in the history of the tomato someone decided to plant and grow tomatoes rather than picking them in the wild. This was the very first tomato farmer and with that move they changed the future of the tomato forever. When or where this first happened we will never know for sure.
Some people have guessed tomatoes were first grown in Peru and Ecuador (around where the tomato originated thousands of years ago), this area was home to many complex civilisations, culminating in the Incas, but no evidence has been found yet, that shows any of them farmed tomatoes.
Machu Pichu. Incan ruins in Peru.
Photographer: Allard Schmidt. Copyright free
Others have suggested that tomatoes were first cultivated by humans in Mexico - around 4000 miles further north. Certainly by the 1500s, when Europeans first arrived in Mexico, the native peoples had long been growing tomatoes for food.
Wherever it first happened, when people started farming the tomato it would have looked much like it did in the wild. However, each time they picked their tomatoes they could use the seed from the best ones (e.g. the biggest or the sweetest) to sow more tomato plants. By selecting the best tomatoes to grow, they grew plants with better and better tomatoes. This process of changing a wild plant into one that is good for humans is called domestication and it is how wild tomatoes began to change into the tomatoes we eat today.
