Trivia # 15 : Tomatoes

• Each American eats approximately 22 pounds of tomatoes yearly. Over 1/2 of the tomato consumption is in the form of catsup and tomato sauce.
• Believing tomatoes had aphrodisiac qualities, the French called them pommes d'amour (or "love apples") from the 1600s until the modern French word tomate became more commonly used.  
• Tomatoes were thought to be poisonous when Robert Gibbon Johnson brought them to Salem, New Jersey, from Europe in the early 1800s. To disprove that notion, Johnson, a wealthy local landowner, ate an entire basket of them in front of a shocked crowd on the courthouse steps on September 26, 1820. 
• A tomato is technically a fruit because it is a ripened ovary of a plant. But for trade purposes a tomato is considered a vegetable. The identity crisis stems from an 1893 Supreme Court ruling that classified the tomato as a vegetable so it could be taxed under tariff law.  
• The largest tomato on record―a whopping seven pounds, 12 ounces―was picked in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986.
• There are at least 10,000 varieties of tomatoes.
• The smallest species of tomatoes are less than three-quarters of an inch in diameter. There are both red and yellow varieties.
• China is the largest producer of tomatoes in the world, producing over 16% of all tomatoes.
• The highest concentration of vitamin C in tomatoes is in the jelly-like substance around the seeds.
• Tomatoes are a natural source of the antioxidant 'lycopene', which may help prevent heart disease.  According to scientists, more lycopene is absorbed by the body from cooked tomatoes than from fresh tomatoes.  1/2 cup of canned tomatoes delivers more than 3 times the lycopene as found in one medium raw tomato.
• The first tomato plants were planted in Greece by a Friar Francis in 1818, in the gardens of a Capuchin monastery at the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (built in 335 B.C.) in Athens.