Tomato

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum, syn. Lycopersicon lycopersicum and Lycopersicon esculentum) is a herbaceous, usually sprawling plant in the Solanaceae or nightshade family, as are its close cousins potatoes, chili peppers, tobacco, aubergine and the poisonous belladonna. It is a perennial, often grown outdoors in temperate climates as an annual. Typically reaching to 1-3 m in height, it has a weak, woody stem that often vines over other plants. The leaves are 10-25cm long, odd pinnate, with 5-9 leaflets on petioles, each leaflet up to 8cm long, with a serrated margin; both the stem and leaves are densely glandular to hairy. The flowers are 1-2cm across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of 3-12 together. The tomato is native to South America. Genetic evidence shows that the progenitors of tomatoes were herbaceous green plants with small green fruit with a center of diversity in the highlands of Peru. These early Solanums diversified into the dozen or so species of tomato recognised today. Botanically, a tomato is the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant: therefore it is a fruit. However, the tomato is not as sweet as those foodstuffs usually called fruits and, from a culinary standpoint, it is typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, as are vegetables, rather than at dessert in the case of most fruits. Originally the controversy was that tomatoes are treated as a fruit in home canning practices. Tomatoes are acidic enough to be processed in a water bath rather than a pressure cooker as "vegetables" require. This argument has had legal implications in the United States. In 1887, U.S. tariff laws that imposed a duty on vegetables but not on fruits caused the tomato's status to become a matter of legal importance. The U.S. Supreme Court settled the controversy in 1893 by declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use, that they are generally served with dinner and not dessert.