How did tomatoes get everywhere?

Do you know which vegetable humans grow more of than almost any other? The answer is a little complicated.

According to the FAO, the tomato is the most-produced crop in its global vegetable category: 192 million tonnes were grown in 2023. Potatoes actually outweigh tomatoes by a considerable margin, but the FAO files those under “roots and tubers.” And, just to make the whole question even more confusing, a tomato is not botanically a vegetable at all.

It is a fruit. Perhaps that confusion suits the tomato. Few ingredients have become so good at being whatever we need them to be.

A tomato can be a fruit you eat warm from the vine, juice running down your wrist. It can be chopped into a salad, cooked into a curry, simmered into a rasam, crushed over pasta, dried in the sun, turned into ketchup, bottled as passata or concentrated so intensely that a spoonful of tomato paste can transform an entire pot of food.

It is at home in Mexico and Italy, India and China, Turkey and the American South.

And somehow, despite being a deeply seasonal fruit, it has also become something we expect to find in the supermarket every single day of the year.

How did that happen?

A fruit that is everywhere... and good only sometimes

We have become so accustomed to the permanent supermarket tomato that it is easy to forget something important: tomatoes have a season.

This becomes very obvious when you eat a truly good one.

One of the things I have been eating on repeat this summer is the Southern tomato sandwich, something I first encountered in Georgia and immediately understood.

There isn't much to it: Bread, mayonnaise, thick slices of ripe tomato, and salt.

At home, we use our Curd Chili Fleur de Sel, which may be one of our favourite upgrades to the classic sandwich. The salt makes the tomato taste somehow even more tomato-y, while the curd chillies contribute little flashes of heat. Against the richness of mayonnaise and soft bread, it becomes an improbably complete meal.

But this is also a sandwich that is brutally honest about the quality of its ingredients. There is nowhere for a bad tomato to hide.

Make it with a tomato from the garden, one that was attached to a plant until a few hours ago, and you understand why people in the American South become evangelical about tomato season.

Make the same sandwich with a supermarket tomato in Toronto in December, and you may wonder what all the excitement is about.

The fruit might look almost identical but tt does not taste identical. Which led us, naturally, to start ranking imaginary tomatoes around the world.

The entirely unscientific PODI tomato ranking

7. Toronto supermarket, December
The tomato as administrative requirement. Red. Round. Technically present.

6. Hyderabad supermarket, August
Perfectly respectable, but August is monsoon season. Heat, humidity and abundant water do not necessarily produce the most intensely flavoured tomato.

5. London supermarket, August
Much improved. Long summer days help, and locally grown greenhouse tomatoes can be very good. But it is still a supermarket tomato, selected partly for its ability to remain a tomato through distribution.

4. Tokyo supermarket, late spring
Japan's protected cultivation and enthusiasm for carefully bred produce can produce remarkably good supermarket tomatoes. We are now firmly in tomato territory.

3. Hyderabad vegetable market, January or February
Bright sun, drier weather, and a much shorter journey between farm and kitchen. A very different proposition from an August supermarket tomato.

2. Southern Italian farm stand, August
Strong sun, generations of locally adapted varieties, and a culture that takes the tomato very seriously.

1. A tomato from somebody's garden, eaten at the right moment
Georgia in summer. Ontario in August. Hyderabad during the right dry-season window. Campania in July.

At this point geography becomes less important than immediacy. The best tomato may simply be the one that didn't have to go anywhere. And this is where tomatoes become particularly interesting.

They are fussy enough that weather, season, ripeness and handling can radically alter their flavour. Yet they are adaptable enough that we grow them practically everywhere.

How can something so seasonal be so global?

A tomato does not need twelve months of ideal weather. It needs a window.

Give it enough warmth, enough light and sufficient time without frost, and many tomato varieties can complete their life cycle and produce a crop within a single growing season.

That means Toronto can grow tomatoes spectacularly well even though a Toronto winter would kill a tomato plant almost immediately. The plant only needs Toronto to behave like tomato country for a few months.

Humans then pushed that adaptability much further.

Over centuries of cultivation, we selected tomatoes that flower under different day lengths, ripen earlier, tolerate heat, resist disease, grow compactly, produce enormous yields, survive transportation and remain firm on a supermarket shelf.

Modern breeding has made tomatoes extraordinarily good at the particular problem of being available.

Greenhouses stretched the season further. Global freight connected opposite hemispheres. Processing turned one summer's abundance into canned tomatoes, paste and sauce that could last until the next harvest.

We solved the problem of having tomato year-round.

What we didn't completely solve was the problem of having August-garden-tomato flavour year-round.

Those are two different engineering challenges.

Before Italy, there was America

This global fruit has not always been global.

Tomatoes have wild ancestry in western South America, particularly the Andean region. Their domestication appears to have been a long process involving agricultural communities stretching northwards through the Americas, with Mexico playing an especially important role in the development of the fully domesticated tomato.

By the time Europeans encountered tomatoes in Mesoamerica, Indigenous cooks already knew perfectly well what to do with them.

Sixteenth-century records from Mexico describe tomatoes appearing in sauces with chillies, salt and other ingredients. Pause there for a moment... Tomato, Chilli and Salt.

More than five hundred years later, that combination is everywhere.

It appears in Mexican salsas. It sits beneath the garlic and olive oil of an Italian arrabbiata. It turns up, rearranged through a completely different culinary grammar, in tomato rasam. It appears in chutneys, hot sauces, stews and curries across the world.

There is a sensory reason the combination is so durable. Tomatoes bring sweetness, acidity, water, savouriness and body. Chillies bring heat; salt sharpens everything. Three ingredients, and suddenly you have sweetness, sourness, umami, salt and the physical sensation of chilli heat interacting in your mouth.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that so many cuisines independently found their way back to the same trio.

Then Europe met the tomato

Spanish movement between the Americas and Europe brought tomatoes across the Atlantic during the sixteenth century.

Early European tomatoes were more diverse than the usual story suggests: surviving specimens and illustrations show different shapes and colours, and tomatoes were being grown in European botanical gardens during the 1500s.

Their reception, however, was uneven.

The familiar story that “Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous” is a little too tidy. Some people certainly regarded these unfamiliar members of the nightshade family with suspicion. Others grew them as curiosities or ornamentals.

But southern Europe began cooking with them considerably earlier than northern Europe did. And nowhere would the relationship become more consequential than Italy.

This is one of our favourite kinds of food-history facts because it feels almost impossible: There were no tomatoes in ancient Roman cuisine. No tomato on Leonardo da Vinci's table. No spaghetti al pomodoro during the Renaissance. The plant that now seems almost synonymous with Italian cooking was an immigrant from the Americas.

And Italy did something extraordinary with it. Italian farmers selected tomatoes suited to their own climates and purposes. Italian cooks discovered how beautifully their acidity and savouriness worked with olive oil, garlic, bread and eventually pasta. Southern Italy became a secondary centre of tomato diversity, developing varieties that we now think of as deeply and specifically Italian.

The tomato arrived foreign. Within a few centuries, it became difficult to imagine Italy without it.

India did something similar, but much later

The tomato's journey into Indian food is in some ways even stranger.

New World crops reached India through European maritime networks, particularly the Portuguese. Chillies were one of the great success stories: they were absorbed so completely that it is now difficult to imagine many Indian cuisines without them.

Tomatoes appear to have had a slower journey from arrival to indispensability. They were known and cultivated during the colonial period, but their widespread incorporation into Indian household cooking appears to have accelerated much later, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Perhaps part of the explanation is that India did not desperately need another source of sourness. South Indian kitchens in particular already had tamarind, raw mango, curd, gongura and other souring ingredients. Western coastal cuisines had kokum. Lime and various fermented foods did similar work elsewhere.

The tomato had to find a job. Eventually, Indian cooks discovered that it could do much more than simply make food sour. It could make gravy.

Cook a tomato down and it does several things at once. It releases moisture. It provides acidity. Its sugars balance bitterness and spice. Its flesh collapses into body. Its glutamates contribute savouriness. Put it alongside onion, ginger, garlic, fat and spices and you have the architecture behind an extraordinary range of modern Indian curries.

In South India, it could enter sambars, rasams, pachadis, chutneys and dals, sometimes replacing part of the tamarind, sometimes joining it. In the north, it became increasingly central to thick gravies. In Bengal, its sweet-sour possibilities found another life in tomato chutney. India did not simply “adopt the tomato" but it assigned the tomato several entirely different jobs.

And, rather like Italy, it eventually absorbed this foreign fruit so completely that its foreignness became almost invisible.

Why tomatoes keep getting hired

Perhaps that is the real reason tomatoes conquered so many kitchens. They are extraordinarily employable. Consider what happens when you cook one: Raw, a tomato is juicy, bright, sweet-sour and refreshing. Cook it briefly and it softens. Cook it longer and its water evaporates, its flavour concentrates and its flesh becomes sauce. Roast it and the sweetness deepens. Dry it and it becomes intensely savoury. Crush it and it can form the base of a curry, shakshuka, stew or pasta sauce. Purée it and it becomes soup. Concentrate it and a few spoonfuls become seasoning. Preserve it and something violently seasonal becomes pantry food.

Few fruits move so easily between being the thing you are eating and the thing that makes everything else taste better.

That may explain why tomatoes were able to enter cuisines without demanding that those cuisines change their basic grammar. The tomato simply entered an existing culinary sentence and discovered where it fit.

Which brings us back to the disappointing winter tomato

Human beings have been almost too successful at this. We bred tomatoes that can travel, and that stay firm. We grow them under glass and pick them early enough to survive packing. We refrigerate, warehouse and transport them enormous distances.

The global food system has made the tomato nearly seasonless.

But flavour still remembers the season. A tomato allowed to ripen in strong summer light, on a variety selected because somebody cares how it tastes, then picked and eaten nearby, is still an entirely different food from the beautiful red sphere engineered to survive a cross-country truck journey.

The latter is a remarkable agricultural achievement. It just isn't necessarily a remarkable lunch. Which is why, despite having tomatoes available twelve months of the year, summer still feels like tomato season.

And why, if you have never grown tomatoes, we recommend trying it at least once.

Not because everyone needs to become a gardener.

Because eating a tomato while it is still warm from the sun is one of the easiest ways to understand something our supermarkets have become very good at allowing us to forget: food comes from a particular place, at a particular moment. If you don't have a garden, find a farmers' market. Look for the tomatoes that are slightly misshapen, perhaps softer than the supermarket would tolerate. Ask what was picked recently.

Take them home, cut one open, add salt and perhaps chilli. Human beings spent five hundred years making the tomato belong almost everywhere. The nicest way to eat one may still be to let it belong, briefly, exactly where it grew.