When I think of Italian cuisine, tomatoes seem to often be an important ingredient. It turns out that Italy didn’t have access to tomatoes until a few hundred years ago. The Italians weren’t even the first European culture to regularly use them as food. Although considered a vegetable for culinary purposes, tomatoes are technically a fruit – berries to be exact.

Like many common foods today, tomatoes weren’t known to most of the world until the Spanish got the the Americas. Their origins go back to Central and South America, and were heavily used by the Aztecs. By the 16th century, the fruit was dispersed globally by Spanish ships and today the largest producers are China, India, European Union, Turkey, and the United States.

The modern English word tomato comes directly from the Spanish tomate, which explains why the British say “toh-MAH-toh” instead of “toh-MAY-toh”. Although generally thought of as relatively large, round, and red; tomatoes come in all kinds of sizes, shapes, and colors.

Before the Italians incorporated tomatoes into things like pizza and lasagna, the Spanish were eating them on a regular basis. Originally, in places like Florence, tomato plants were strictly ornamental and used simply to decorate the home.

Although they’ve been available in North America for thousands of years, it took until the 18th century for tomatoes to take hold in what would become the United States. Thomas Jefferson had eaten some in Paris and sent seeds home. Because tomatoes are part of the nightshade family, many people may have thought they might be poisonous.

You may think of Italian food or that big tomato fight in Spain, but it all started long before Europeans ever set foot in the Americas.