The Works in Progress Newsletter: “Creating the perfect vegetable Walk into a supermarket anywhere in the world and chances are you’ll be able to find a tomato in mere minutes. While technically a fruit, the tomato is more often grouped with vegetables because, due to its low sugar content, it is used more like a vegetable in cuisine. In fact, tomatoes have long been by far the most frequently consumed canned vegetable, as well as one of the most commonly eaten overall. In 2019, the average American ate more than 30 pounds of tomatoes, making it second to only the potato in total consumption. Tomatoes come by this popularity honestly too: their low calorie count and high vitamin content make them quite healthy. None of this would be possible, however, without thousands of years of plant breeding and genetic engineering. The wild ancestors of today’s tomatoes were much smaller than their modern-day counterparts and grew in sprawling patterns, making them ill-suited to large-scale agriculture. Extensive breeding programs created the first domesticated tomatoes, and subsequently shaped them into a food with largely uniform qualities that could be mass produced. In doing this, agronomists collectively made a series of choices that vastly improved tomatoes’ ability to feed humanity, though sometimes at the expense of secondary qualities like taste. In recent decades, breeders have also adopted new genetic tools to more precisely choose the traits they want, allowing them to reclaim these lost characteristics.

Nearly 80,000 years ago, Central and South America were home to a blueberry-sized plant called Solanum pimpinellifolium – the ancestor of modern tomatoes. Wild descendants of this plant, called currant tomatoes, can still be eaten today but are more labor-intensive to pick and less versatile in the kitchen than their domesticated cousins. Some varieties are also toxic to humans. Native Americans recognized the utility of having a larger, safer plant and began breeding accordingly. By roughly 7000 years ago they had created precisely this: Solanum lycopersicum, the common tomato.