Tomato Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Tomato (lycopers ic on esculentum ) is a member of the genus Lycopersicon and was categorized thus by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus. Its botanical name is literally translated from ancient Greek as “wolf peach,” which reflects the once widely held belief that the tomato was poisonous. In contrast, esculentum means “edible.” The genus Lycopersicon is in the Solanaceae family of plants, which contains several species of plants of food or ornamental value, including the potato, tobacco, eggplant (aubergine), tamarillo, hot and sweet peppers (capsicum), Cape gooseberry, ground cherry, and various nightshades. The tomato is a vine that bears round or oval fleshy fruits with a high juice content. It is an annual plant whose stem grows between three to 10 feet (one to three meters). The stem is not self-supporting, so it climbs up or trails along neighboring plants in the wild or along supports when cultivated.

Precisely where the tomato was first selected as a crop plant is unknown, but it may have been the coastal Andes of Peru-Ecuador-Bolivia, a region characterized by a high diversity of tomato’s wild relatives, as is also the case for tobacco and potato. It was sufficiently useful to be introduced into Mesoamerica, where domesticated tomato was a component of the food resource. Indeed, the word tomato derives from the Aztec word xitomatl. It was being cultivated in Mexico when first encountered by European colonists in the early 1500s and there is written reference from the 1530s to recipes that include tomatoes mixed with chiles. Spanish colonists probably introduced it to Florida in the mid-1500s, from where tomatoes spread along the eastern seaboard. Portuguese explorers introduced tomato to west Africa, and Spanish explorers brought seeds to Europe, where the plants flourished in Mediterranean environments, producing irregularly shaped and rough-skinned fruits.

The first known appearance in written records in Europe dates to 1554. Tomatoes became known as pome dei Moro (Moor’s apple) and later as poma Peruviana, pomme d’amour, or in Italy as pom d’oro. They were not widely embraced outside southern Europe as suspicions about possible poison persisted, mainly due to recognized botanical links with the nightshades. The first tomato plants were grown in England in the 1590s, mainly for ornamental purposes, until the mid-1700s when tomato first began to appear in British cookbooks. Colonists from England reintroduced it to the United States, and although grown in the 1780s by estate owners such as Thomas Jefferson, it was not until the early 1800s that tomatoes were first consumed in the United States, beginning in the southern states and spreading to northern states by the 1850s. These fruits probably looked like the cherry tomatoes available today.

Today, the tomato is grown worldwide; almost 11.1 million acres (4.5 million hectares) are planted worldwide, generating an annual yield of more than 265 billion pounds (120 million metric tons). Numerous tomato types are now produced from a wide range of cultivars that have been bred for specific properties such as flavor and shape; red varieties dominate but yellow and orange varieties are also available. Nutritionally, tomatoes are about 94 percent water and are a low-calorie food; they are rich in vitamins A and C, calcium, and fiber and are a source of the antioxidant lycopene. Apart from being marketed and consumed as fresh salad or salsa ingredients, tomatoes are canned, processed to produce paste used in many prepared foods such as soups and pasta and meat sauces, and are also used to produce juice, jams, and chutneys.

The tomato made history by being the first crop plant to be modified using modern genetic engineering techniques involving the manipulation of plant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). It was modified to enhance flavor, which gave rise to the name Flavr Savr. It was produced in 1994 and sold to the general public in the United States and United Kingdom as tomato paste. No adverse effects of its consumption have been recorded, but lack of interest prompted its withdrawal.

Bibliography:

Mark Harvey, Stephen Quilley, and Huw Beynon, Exploring the Tomato: Transformations of Nature, Society and Economy (Edward Elgar, 2004);
Belinda Martineaux, First Fruit: The Creation of the Flavr Savr Tomato and the Birth of Biotech Food (McGraw-Hill, 2002);
Judith Sumner, American Household Botany. A History of Useful Plants 1620-1900 (Timber Press, 2004).