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.
Spread of the tomato
Well before the 1500s the tomato plant had already travelled 4000 km north, from its origin in the Andean region of modern day Peru and Ecuador to Mexico. It may have been that tomato plants were deliberately transported north to Mexico by man or, that after eating tomatoes, the seeds were carried there in the stomachs of birds or animals.
In 1492 Columbus made his first landfall in the New World. This was to change the future of the tomato, as it lead to the Spanish exploration and conquest of the Americas, their discovery of the tomato plant and its eventual spread to all four corners of the earth.
Urarina shaman. For a long time indigenous South Americans were known as ‘Indians’ this was because Columbus didn’t realise he had discovered an entirely new continent. Instead he thought he had sailed all the way round the globe to the Eastern side of India.
Photographer: B. Dean. Copyright: GFDL + CC Attribution 2.5
The first tomato plants to be taken to Europe probably came from Mexico, the site of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which was conquered by the Spanish conquistador Cortes in 1519. Here the Spanish discovered the Aztecs eating a domesticated form of the tomato that they referred to as Xitomatl.
Bernardino Sahagun, a Franciscan priest who visited Mexico in 1529, wrote that the Aztecs combined tomatoes with chillies and ground squash seeds to make a sauce [or salsa]. Salsa made with tomatoes and chillies is still a popular relish in Mexico and the USA today. To find modern recipes for the tomato, including salsa, click here .
A typical salsa dish
Photographer: Ano3. Copyright: CC Attribution 2.5
It is likely that tomatoes first arrived in Europe in some Spanish port. The first record, however, we have of tomatoes in Europe appears in the work of an Italian herbalist called Matthioli, 1544. The tomato that Matthioli studied was around the size of a fist and a bright yellow colour and so he called the tomato “pomi d’ oro”, or “Golden Apple”.
The tomato and the name ‘Golden apple’ spread quickly north through Europe. It was being cultivated in Germany by 1553, in Holland by 1554, in France just a few years later and by 1597 it had crossed the channel and was being grown in England.
It had also spread rapidly in the other direction and by the beginning of the 1600s the tomato was being cultivated south of the Mediterranean, in Syria, Arabia, Ethiopia and Egypt.
By 1700 Europeans had even taken the tomato as far as China, South and South East Asia. Although it is not until 1710 that the first record appears of a tomato in North America.
And so from its domestication in the Americas, and mainly by the hand of man, the tomato travelled all around the globe in less than 200 years. Since then it has continued to spread and at present the tomato is cultivated from Indonesia to Canada, from Iceland to Cameroon.
