Tomato facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Tomato
Cross-section and full view of a hothouse (greenhouse-grown) tomato
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Eudicots
(unranked):	Asterids
Order:	Solanales
Family:	Solanaceae
Genus:	Solanum
Species:	S. lycopersicum
Binomial name
Solanum lycopersicum L.
Synonyms
Lycopersicon lycopersicum (L.) H. Karst. Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a botanical fruit (but not a fruit as ordinary people use the word).

It is shiny and smooth. It has many small seeds. It is also very good for health. Most tomatoes are red. The tomato is green when it is unripe. It slowly changes color from green to red as it gets ripe, and as it gets ripe it gets bigger and bigger. There are many different types of tomatoes. Some kinds of tomato are yellow or orange when they are ripe. Tomatoes are used a lot in Italian food. They are also used to make ketchup. Tomatoes are called fruit, because they contain seeds. Tomato seeds are dispersed by being eaten by animals. After being eaten the seeds pass through the animal's digestive system. Although tomatoes are botanically fruits, many people consider them vegetables and treat them as such in cooking.

History

The tomato is native to western South America. Wild versions were small, like cherry tomatoes, and most likely yellow instead of red. The Spanish first showed tomatoes to Europe, where they became used in Spanish and Italian food. The French and northern Europeans wrongly thought that they were poisonous because they are a member of the deadly nightshade family. The leaves and immature fruit contains tomatine, which in large amounts would be toxic. However, the ripe fruit contains no tomatine.

Description

Tomato flower

Tomato plants are vines, initially decumbent, typically growing 180 cm (6 ft) or more above the ground if supported, although erect bush varieties have been bred, generally 100 cm (3 ft 3 in) tall or shorter. Indeterminate types are "tender" perennials, dying annually in temperate climates (they are originally native to tropical highlands), although they can live up to three years in a greenhouse in some cases. Determinate types are annual in all climates.

Tomato plants are dicots, and grow as a series of branching stems, with a terminal bud at the tip that does the actual growing. When the tip eventually stops growing, whether because of pruning or flowering, lateral buds take over and grow into other, fully functional, vines.

An unripe tomato growing on the vine

Tomato vines are typically pubescent, meaning covered with fine short hairs. The hairs facilitate the vining process, turning into roots wherever the plant is in contact with the ground and moisture, especially if the vine's connection to its original root has been damaged or severed.

Most tomato plants have compound leaves, and are called regular leaf (RL) plants, but some cultivars have simple leaves known as potato leaf (PL) style because of their resemblance to that particular relative. Of RL plants, there are variations, such as rugose leaves, which are deeply grooved, and variegated, angora leaves, which have additional colors where a genetic mutation causes chlorophyll to be excluded from some portions of the leaves.

The leaves are 10–25 cm (4–10 in) long, odd pinnate, with five to nine leaflets on petioles, each leaflet up to 8 cm (3 in) long, with a serrated margin; both the stem and leaves are densely glandular-hairy.

Their flowers, appearing on the apical meristem, have the anthers fused along the edges, forming a column surrounding the pistil's style. Flowers in domestic cultivars can be self-fertilizing. The flowers are 1–2 cm (0.39–0.79 in) across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of three to 12 together.

Although in culinary terms, tomato is regarded as a vegetable, its fruit is classified botanically as a berry. As a true fruit, it develops from the ovary of the plant after fertilization, its flesh comprising the pericarp walls. The fruit contains hollow spaces full of seeds and moisture, called locular cavities. These vary, among cultivated species, according to type. Some smaller varieties have two cavities, globe-shaped varieties typically have three to five, beefsteak tomatoes have a great number of smaller cavities, while paste tomatoes have very few, very small cavities.

For propagation, the seeds need to come from a mature fruit, and must be lightly fermented to remove the gelatinous outer coating and then dried before use.

Fruit versus vegetable

Tomatoes are considered a fruit or vegetable depending on context. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, tomatoes are a fruit labeled in grocery stores as a vegetable due to their taste and culinary purposes.

Botanically, a tomato is a fruit—a berry, consisting of the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant. However, the tomato is considered a "culinary vegetable" because it has a much lower sugar content than culinary fruits; because it is more savoury (umami) than sweet, it is typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, rather than as a dessert. Tomatoes are not the only food source with this ambiguity; bell peppers, cucumbers, green beans, aubergines/eggplants, avocados, and squashes of all kinds (such as courgettes/zucchini and pumpkins) are all botanically fruit, yet cooked as vegetables.

The confusion on whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables has led to legal dispute in the United States. In 1887, U.S. tariff laws that imposed a duty on vegetables, but not on fruit, caused the tomato's status to become a matter of legal importance. In Nix v. Hedden, the U.S. Supreme Court settled the tariff controversy on 10 May 1893, by declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use—they are generally served with dinner and not dessert. The holding of this case applies only to the interpretation of the Tariff of 1883, and the court did not purport to reclassify the tomato for botanical or other purposes.

Cultivation

The tomato is grown worldwide for its edible fruits, with thousands of cultivars. A fertilizer with an NPK ratio of 5–10–10 is often sold as tomato fertilizer or vegetable fertilizer, although manure and compost are also used. On average there are 150,000 seeds in a pound of tomato seeds.

Records

The "tomato tree" as seen by guests on the Living with the Land boat ride at Epcot, Lake Buena Vista, Florida

As of 2008^[update], the heaviest tomato harvested weighed 3.51 kg (7 lb 12 oz), was of the cultivar "Delicious", and was grown by Gordon Graham of Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986. The largest tomato plant grown was of the cultivar "Sungold" and reached 19.8 m (65 ft) in length, grown by Nutriculture Ltd (UK) of Mawdesley, Lancashire, UK, in 2000.

A massive "tomato tree" growing inside the Walt Disney World Resort's experimental greenhouses in Lake Buena Vista, Florida may have been the largest single tomato plant in the world. The plant has been recognized as a Guinness World Record Holder, with a harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes and a total weight of 522 kg (1,151 lb). It yielded thousands of tomatoes at one time from a single vine. Yong Huang, Epcot's manager of agricultural science, discovered the unique plant in Beijing, China. Huang brought its seeds to Epcot and created the specialized greenhouse for the fruit to grow. The vine grew golf ball-sized tomatoes, which were served at Walt Disney World restaurants. The tree developed a disease and was removed in April 2010 after about 13 months of life.

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  Tomato plants 7 days after planting

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  Tomato seedlings growing indoors

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  27 days after planting

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  52-day-old plant, first fruits

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  Tomatoes being collected from the field, Maharashtra, India

Uses

Culinary

Tomatoes stuffed with hard-boiled egg and Parmesan cheese.

Though it is botanically a berry, a subset of fruit, the tomato is considered a vegetable for culinary purposes. It has a strong savoury umami flavour, rather than significant sweetness (see above). Chef Heston Blumenthal observed that the inner pulp had more flavour that the flesh; a subsequent academic study in which he participated confirmed that the pulp had up to eleven times more glutamic acid, which carries umami flavour, than the flesh.

Although tomatoes originated in the Americas, the tomato is now grown and eaten around the world. It is used in diverse ways, including raw in salads or in slices, stewed, incorporated into a wide variety of dishes, or processed into ketchup or tomato soup. Unripe green tomatoes can also be breaded and fried, used to make salsa, or pickled. Tomato juice is sold as a drink, and is used in cocktails such as the Bloody Mary.

Tomatoes have become extensively used in Mediterranean cuisine as a key ingredient in pizza and many pasta sauces. Tomatoes are also used in Spanish and Catalan dishes, such as gazpacho and pa amb tomàquet.

Storage

Tomatoes keep best unwashed at room temperature and out of direct sunlight. It is not recommended to refrigerate them as they take a mealy texture and lose flavour.

Storing stem down can prolong shelf life, as it may keep from rotting too quickly.

Unripe tomatoes can be kept in a paper bag to ripen.

Tomatoes are easy to preserve whole, chopped, or as tomato sauce or concentrated paste by home canning. The fruit can also be preserved by drying, sometimes in the sun where climate permits, and sold either in bags or in jars with oil.

Nutrition

A raw tomato is 95% water, contains 4% carbohydrates, and has less than 1% each of fat and protein (see table). 100 grams (3.5 oz) of raw tomatoes supply 18 kilocalories and are a moderate source of vitamin C (17% of the Daily Value), but otherwise have low micronutrient content (table).

Related pages

• List of fruits

Images for kids

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  Grape tomatoes on the vine for sale at a market

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  Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum. Sheet from the oldest tomato collection of Europe, 1542–1544. Naturalis Leiden.

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  Tomatoes for sale in a UK supermarket

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  A variety of small tomatoes

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  Yellow cherry tomatoes

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  Tomato Production Map

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  Tomato fruitworm feeding on unripe tomato

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  A split heirloom tomato, caused by fluctuation in water availability

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  Tomato flower in full bloom, next to a young, green developing fruit

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  Tomatkarnevalen (The Tomato Festival) in Närpes, Finland, in 1993

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  Tomatoes thrown from a truck during the Spanish Tomatina festival.

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  Various heirloom tomato cultivars

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  A variety of specific cultivars, including Brandywine (biggest red), Black Krim (lower left) and Green Zebra (top left)

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  Red tomatoes with PLU code in a supermarket.

See also

In Spanish: Solanum lycopersicum para niños