tomatoes

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The **tomato** is a tasty, typically red fruit, as well as the plant which bears it. Originating in South America, the tomato was spread around the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and its many varieties are now widely grown, often in greenhouses in cooler climates.

The tomato fruit is consumed in diverse ways, including raw, as an ingredient in many dishes and sauces, and in drinks. While it is botanically a fruit, it is considered a vegetable for culinary purposes which has caused some confusion. The fruit is rich in lycopene, which may have beneficial health effects.

The tomato belongs to the nightshade family. The plants typically grow to 1–3 metres in height and have a weak stem that often sprawls over the ground and vines over other plants. It is a perennial in its native habitat, although often grown outdoors in temperate climates as an annual crop.



= ** history: ** = = = The tomato is native to south America. Genetic evidence shows the progenitors of tomatoes were herbaceous green plants with small green fruit and a center of diversity in the highlands of Peru.

One species, //Solanum lycopersicum//, was transported to Mexico where it was grown and consumed by Mesoamerican civilizations. The first domesticated tomato may have been a little yellow fruit, similar in size to a cherry tomato, grown by the Aztecs of Central America. Aztec writings mention tomatoes were prepared with peppers, corn and salt. The word //tomato// comes from the Aztec //**t**omatl//, literally "the swelling fruit".

Many historians believe that the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes may have been the first to transfer the small yellow tomato to Europe after he conquered the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico city, in 1521. Others believe Christopher Columbus, a Genoese working for the Spanish monarchy, was the first European to take back the tomato, as early as 1493.

Aztecs and other peoples in the region used the fruit in their cooking; it was cultivated in southern Mexico and probably other areas by 500 BC. It is thought that the Pueblo people believed that those who witnessed the ingestion of tomato seeds were blessed with powers of divination. The large, lumpy tomato, a mutation from a smoother, smaller fruit, originated in Mesoamerica and may be the direct ancestor of some modern cultivated tomatoes.



Spanish distribution


After the Spanish Colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribean. They also took it to the Philippines, from where it spread to Southeast Asia and then the entire Asian continent. The Spanish also brought the tomato to Europe. It grew easily in the Mediterranean sea, and cultivation began in the 1540s. It was probably eaten shortly after it was introduced, and was certainly being used as food by the early 17th century in Spain. The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, though the author had apparently obtained these recipes from Spanish sources. However, in certain areas of Italy, such as Florence, the fruit was used solely as a tabletop decoration before it was incorporated into the local cuisine in the late 17th or early 18th century.

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tomato varieties
There are many tomato varieties that are grown for various purposes: Heirloom tomatoes are becoming increasingly popular, particularly among home gardeners and organic producers, since they tend to produce more interesting and flavorful crops at the cost of disease resistance and productivity.

Hybrid plants remain common, since they tend to be heavier producers and sometimes combine unusual characteristics of heirloom tomatoes with the ruggedness of conventional commercial tomatoes. <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 130%; line-height: 115%;">Tomato varieties are roughly divided into several categories, based mostly on shape and size



Diseases and pests
Tomato cultivars vary widely in their resistance to disease. Modern hybrids focus on improving disease resistance over the heirloom plants. One common tomato disease is tobacco mosaic virus, and for this reason smoking or use of tobacco products are discouraged around tomatoes, although and blight are also common tomato afflictions, which is why tomato cultivars are often marked with a combination of letters which rethere is some scientific debate over whether the virus could possibly survive being burned and converted into smoke. Various forms of mildew fer to specific disease resistance.

Another particularly disease is the curly top, carried by the beet leafhopper, which interrupts the lifecycle, ruining a nightshade plant as a crop. As the name implies, it has the symptom of making the top leaves of the plant wrinkle up and grow abnormally.

Some common tomato pests are stink bugs, cutworms, tomato hornworms and tobacco hornworms, aphids, cabbage loopers, whiteflies, tomato fruitworms, flea beetles, red spider mite, slugs, and Colorado potato beetles. When insects attack tomato plants, they produce the plant peptide hormone, systemin, which activates defensive mechanisms, such as the production of protease inhibitors to slow the growth of insects. The hormone was first identified in tomatoes, but similar proteins have been identified in other species since



this were their tomatoes:

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