Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

For the jillionth time, the tomato is a fruit. That this question went to the Supreme Court is totally silly, but then to add that the justices had to consult a DICTIONARY, well, that's just insulting! You consult your friendly neighborhood botanist to answer such questions.  That's what we're here for. Typical though that SCOTUS justices didn't know enough to know who to consult. Very simply they should have just contacted a botanist, someone like John Kress (the Indiana Jones of ginger) at the Smithsonian, and gotten an authoritative answer in 5 sec or so, if he was in the country. So the next time you get your tomato jam out (often called ketchup), remember the tomato is a fruit.

Please don't smoke the tomatoes!

How ya doin New Yawk?  The NY Boys in Blue busted a rooftop marijuana growing operation except it turned out to be tomatoes.  Yes, tomatoes.  Which of course are grown for their berries not their smokable leaves.  This is a good thing because the smoking tomato leaves is way worse than smoking tobacco leaves, both nightshades, and similar enough that you can graft tomatoes onto tobacco root stock and grow some high nicotine tomatoes (not recommended for several reason taste being the primary one), however you will not get tomato hornworms on them.  Like most nightshades, the green foliage of tomatoes contain one or more of the tropane alkaloids, primarily hyoscyamine.  It's not good for you when ingested, and European so well knew this that the edibility of tomatoes was very much in question when newly introduced from the New World. The rooftop gardeners were turned in by the building super who said it was marijuana.  The police never checked it out (good police work, boys) and came busting in on the tomato patch.  As stupid as this sounds, these be city boys.  People so far removed from the production and source of their food that they probably thought tomatoes grew on trees.  TPP remembers a college friend from Brooklyn who recoiled in total revulsion once he actually saw, up close, first hand, where milk comes from.  He was also incredulous about the actual size of a cow.  "Tings like dis belong in zoos!"  If his remark is recalled accurately.  So from TPP's perspective, in their vegetative state, neither the super nor the cops could be expected to make an accurate ID of any plant foliage.  Wonder what they'd pay for doing some plant ID work for the NYC police? 

Genomic studies confirm the tomato is a fruit. Duh!

Really?  Genomics confirms that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable?  No, probably just Gisela's lame attempt at humor.  There are a lot of good reasons for genomic research, comparing one genome to another, but it doesn't seem that this science writer touched on any of them. Genomic research wasn't needed to identify the domestic tomato's closest wild ancestor; yes, it confirmed it, but it was already known, well known.  And yes, tomato is pretty close to potato too, but that was already so well known that tomato has been transferred back into the genus Solanum, discarding its colorful genus Lycopersicon ("edible wolf peach", maybe distinguishing it from other toxic red-fruited nightshades), a triumph for Linnaeus who put it there in the first place.  So what did we learn from this fluffy bit of science news?  Not much.  

You still say tomato

Tomato, tomato (said with long and short vowel sounds), a domesticated solanaceous fruit that by any other name would still taste as good, especially while thinking about the sugo alla puttanesca the Phactor cooked last night from fresh Amish paste tomatoes. For quite some time, botanists called the tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, the juicy wolf peach, a name which added a bit of European skepticism about how esculent this neotropical, and newly arrived, nightshade might be. If you know anything about Old World nightshades, then you'll understand the skepticism. No one doubted that the tomato was closely related to the huge genus Solanum, the name sake of the nightshade family, and now relatively recent molecular studies have shown that the tomato species is part of the genus Solanum. Now what is usually done in these circumstances is that the specific epithet (esculentum) is transferred back to Solanum to produce a new combination, Solanum esculentum. Ta da! And for awhile that was the species name of tomato, but then someone remembered Linnaeus. Remember Linnaeus? The father of taxonomy. Well, the order in which taxonomic names are published counts with the first name published (the oldest) being judged correct, and no one is older than Linnaeus. Linnaeus was simply set as the starting date of plant names, and Linnaeus had named this plant Solanum lycopersicon. Subsequent to Linnaeus the specific epithet was raised to a generic level and a new specific epithet was added, but now that tomato is back in Solanum the whole thing reverts to Linnaeus' original species name. Image credit - diversely colored wild tomatoes from western S. America: Ana Caicedo, Univ. Mass.

Does the world need another plastic tomato?

Does the world really need another bad tomato? Researchers in India have engineered a tomato so that they may go up to 45 days after picking without rotting. But how is that possible? Well, it happens if the tomato never gets ripe.
Granted, ripe tomatoes are delicate things, easily prone to damage and they quickly go past their prime, so having a tomato with a long shelf life seems an improvement. But let’s face it, while they may look pretty for 45 days or so, they’ll taste just blah. Now of course in India, produce spoilage is without a doubt a greater problem, but you never see a fresh tomato in India anyways. They get cooked to a pulp in sambhars and curries, so it may not matter so much that they don’t taste good fresh. But here in the USA we already have plastic tomatoes in our markets, beautiful, pristine, long-lasting, perfectly- colored, blemish-free, and utterly awful. They regularly use a slice of these “never-ripen” tomatoes on fast food sandwiches and both the iceberg lettuce and wrapping paper have more taste. And what is a tomato anyways if not taste? Lots of interesting things happen at this stage in a flower’s life, and that’s what a fruit is, a flower at the stage of seed dispersal. Fleshy fruits develop color, odor, sweetness and flavor, a softer texture, all to signal to animals that this baby is a succulent reward. And by eating it we do the plant's bidding by dispersing the seeds. The researchers go to great length to point out that unlike some genetic engineering, no genes from a plastic ketchup bottle were inserted into tomato plants, but some of the tomato's own ripening genes were silenced. Somehow though a no-taste tomato with a 45-day shelf life seems to defeat the purpose of a tomato and maybe such research should be considered a crime against nature and BLTs anyways.

HT to the Scientific Indian.