The tomato begins it's colorful and varied history upon the coastal highlands of western South America, where it was being enjoyed by the native peoples of South America for a long time. The Aztecs "mixed tomatos with chilies and ground squash seeds(*1) and were enjoying them when the Spanish conquistadors first came to the land. It was they that carried the seeds of this illustrious plant with them to the European continent. And there it was adopted by several cultures and peoples into their cooking. Though somewhere along the line, a misunderstanding arose when Renaissance botanists were working from botanical texts of the Greeks and Roman's. Here they were arranging everything into species and genus and placed it in the same group as Nightshade, widely known to be poisonous, hence the name of the wolf peach was attached to the humble tomato- though by no fault of its own.
Even so, people continued to cultivate and consume it in various forms all across Europe. We find it made it all the way to England by 1758 where reference to it can be found in the 1758 edition of Hannah Glasse's popular "The Art of Cookery".(*1) Here the American colonists took it with them to the new world bringing it and its prejudice with them to the new land. And early settlers were slow to take it up, but thanks in part ot such adventuresome growers as Thomas Jefferson and others, the tomato eventually founds its way to the heart of gardeners here as it had done previously in Europe and Central America.(*1)
And where did tomatoes go from there? To space and beyond. For in April, 1984 NASA sent tomato seeds up with one of its satelitte's to circle the earth for six years before being retrieved. These seeds were then sent to shool children around the country to test and see what, if any, the effects of space were on the seeds.(*1)
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