Fun Facts 'bout the Tomato!
There are over 10,000 varieties of tomatoes, these come in a variety of colours including pink, purple, black, yellow and white.
There is no mention of tomatoes in either the bible or in the complete works of shakespeare.
The scientific name for tomato is Lycopersicon lycopersicum meaning wolf peach.
People used to be afraid to eat tomatoes, thinking its poisonous due to their relation to the belladonna or (deadly nightshade) plant.
Tomatoes increase in weight as they ripen, even after harvesting.
Tomatoes are the richest source of lycopene which is important for the health of the prostate gland in men.
They were first brought to Europe in the mid 1500’s.
The first tomatoes in Europe were yellow varieties, the Italian for tomato is pomodoro and translates to golden apple.
A tomato is a fruit. The confusion arose after the 1890s when the US supreme court named them a vegetable for taxation purposes. A fruit is the edible part of the plant containing seeds, a vegetable is stem, leaf or root.
600,000 tomato seeds traveled to the International Space Station and back before being grown in school classrooms all over Canada as part of the ‘Tomatosphere I, II, III and IV’ experiments.