From the Vault: Tomato, Tomato, Part 2

episode that was originally scheduled for this Saturday. We'll be back with new episodes of Weird House Cinema on Friday and Listener Mail on Monday, and then all new core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesday of next week. But for today, we hope you enjoy Part two of our series on the tomato originally published on August Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow

Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our talk about tomatoes. You know, there was a question last time that we explored at some length, which is, uh, this question you've had for a while, Robert, I think, based on reading a placard at a botanical garden, which is did the people of the past few hundred years regard tomatoes as poisonous.

Sometimes there's this generalization made that you know, it used to be that everybody thought tomatoes were poison but now we figured out that's not true. Now, of course tomatoes are not poisonous, but it's also the historical characterization is a little more complicated than that, right. Yeah, Again, it kind of depends on what part of the world you're looking at. What say, you're which European nation, and during what period of the tomatoes um rise to power as

a global food source. But I came across a great article that is by the same author as the author of a book that we talked about in in the last episode of Book about Tomatoes, Uh, Andrew F. Smith. Smith is also the author of an article that was published in nineteen in the journal Pharmacy and History called Tomato Pills Will Cure All Your Ills. And this is a fantastic article about, you know, tomato pills for your jaundice and your diarrhea. It's a wild ride and I

can't wait to get into it. Well, let's definitely get into it. But first, just your reminder, this is a part two. We do encourage you to go back and listen to part one before proceeding. By all means Part one first. Okay, So, as we discussed previously, when the tomato was first introduced to Europe from meso America. Of course, in meso America, among the waddle speaking people, it was cultivated as a food crop, and then it's spread from there to Europe and then to the rest of the world.

But when this first happened, some European writers did claim that the tomato was was not good food, it was not fit to put in his body. Uh, and they wrote as much in their their culinary and horticultural treatises. Though, as we talked about last time, a lot a lot of these writers will sort of note that, well, people in Spain and Italy somehow eat these things, but uh, but nevertheless they are not good to eat or their

poison or whatever. But this changed over time, and by the seventeen hundreds, tomato use was definitely on the rise throughout Europe, especially throughout southern Europe, though some of the

old ideas still lingered here and there. According to Smith, though within the culture of the United States specifically, and I guess this would have been you know, the British colonies in the east of the United States, and then after the Revolution in the early United States, the tomato was still pretty widely regarded as in some way, you know,

not good to eat. Definitely through a lot of the eighteenth century, though, that was changing, and then it underwent a relatively rapid transition during a few decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. Uh So, He says that around eighteen twenty, it was still a pretty widespread belief within the United States that tomatoes were somehow inedible

and maybe poisonous, is not good to eat. But um, he says, quote, within three decades after eighteen twenty, farmers cultivated tomatoes the length and breadth of the country in almost every garden from Boston to New Orleans, and Americans served them on every table from July to October. According to a British observer, Americans served tomatoes every day, prepared in every imaginable way. And we're the scenic quanon of

American existence. So that that's a pretty dramatic shift. Yeah, absolutely, to go from poison to just the thing that you eat like crazy for its entire season, yeah exactly. So what led to this change in attitudes over such a relatively short time. Well Smith notes that there were many reasons, but it seems one of the most important was quacks. I love it, I love it, I love a good

quacks for goods to worry. Okay, So, as we alluded to last time, many books and supposed botanical or horticultural experts in Europe in the colonies since the sixteenth century seemed to think there was something wrong with eating tomatoes. You know, maybe they were poisonous, maybe inedible. Clearly not everybody in Europe thought this way. Tomatoes were you know, very popular in Italy and France and Spain and Portugal and more and more. People of course were of course

cooking with tomatoes all the time. But in England, Philip Miller, who was a superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden, wrote in the seventeen fifties that small yellow love apples were starting to be directed for medicinal use by one college in their dispensatory, and Miller, even in the seventeen fifties noted that well even some English people are eating tomatoes in soup. Uh, though at the same time he says, quote, there are persons who think them not wholesome, so this

ambigue it. He still exists somewhat, but by the seventeen fifties it's clear that some doctors and medical students or trying trying experiments with tomatoes as medicine, and some English people just straight up put him in the stew uh And apparently an early evangelist for tomatoes in the British colonies in America was a doctor named John de Sequeira, who was born in London but educated in Leyden, and who Thomas Jefferson claimed had introduced tomatoes to Williamsburg, Virginia.

Jefferson also claimed that des Aquaira was fond of saying that quote, a person who should eat a sufficient abundance

of these apples would never die. Now I don't know if he meant that in, you know, with a touch of irony, or if he was serious that though it does make me think that, hey, what if the humble tomato was actually the fruit of the tree of life, Because there's always been a debate about in the story of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, what the fruits of these trees are actually supposed to be.

The Book of Genesis does not say, in this story, what the fruits of the Tree of Life and the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil we're supposed to be a lot of people have assumed them to be apples, but there it's that's not explicitly stated. So people have proposed all kinds of answers to this question.

Maybe they're apples, maybe figs, maybe pomegranate, I think unsurprisingly, Terrence McKenna said, the story was supposed to include a reference to a mushroom, but what if the forbidden fruit was a tomato? Yeah? I mean, I don't know that that actually checks out with what we know about the origins of the tomato, but I like the idea. No, it would certainly not check out, like the authors of the Book of Genesis would not have known what a

tomato was, right because it was from South America. But Smith points out that many of the early promoters of tomatoes in the colonies were doctors, and this is not all that surprising since tomatoes were becoming accepted during the eighteen century as a medical plant. For example, James Mees, who published one of the first known recipes for tomato

ketchup around the year eighteen twelve. He was a medical graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and he wrote about how he was familiar with the culinary use of tomatoes from French immigrants, who were probably creole refugees from Haiti. But beginning in the eighteen twenties, American physicians started to talk about tomatoes as a cure for what they called,

at the time billious diseases. These would be diseases that were associated with disorders of the liver or bile, which apparently sort of became a catch all category for diseases involving jaundice, nausea, and vomiting along with fever. You know, if there's something wrong with your guts, they thought you had some kind of bile problem. Smith gives a number

of examples. One is a doctor Horatio Gates Spafford, who wrote in the New York Farmer Quote that tomato sauce removed headaches, a bad taste in the mouth, straightness of the chest, painful heaviness in the liver, and improved the action of the bowels. So hey, that's an all in one. Yeah.

But probably the single largest influence on the tomatoes image as a promoter of good health was a man named Dr John Cook Bennett Robert I have attached a sketch of him, and I noticed he he really kind of looks a little bit like Adam Scott, but in a strange military uniform with epaulets and a sword. Yeah, I can see the Adam Scott. I also see a little bit of of of grandmof Tarke in here, so it's

kind of like a combination of the two for me. Absolutely. So. Bennett lived from eighteen o four to eighteen sixty seven, and he's actually probably best known for his short tenure as an associate of Joseph Smith and an early leader of the Latter Day Saints movement also known as the Mormons. Before all that, Bennett was a doctor who Andrew Smith claims founded one of the first medical diploma mills in

US history, So he's a diploma mill pioneer. Apparently, Bennett would go around the Midwest selling medical degrees for ten bucks apiece, and I'm sure that created some awesome doctors, but it seems some people didn't really like that practice. He fell under some criticism for for selling degrees like that, so instead he accepted a position as a professor of midwifery at Willoughby Medical College of Lake Erie University in Ohio,

where he jumped decisively onto the tomato train. This would have been in the early to mid eighteen thirties, and Smith writes as follows quote in his introductory lecture at Willoughby, Bennett declared that tomatoes successfully treated diarrhea, violent bilious attacks,

and dyspepsia or indigestion. He recommended that tomatoes replaced alamel because they were less harmful, predicting that quote, a chemical extract will probably soon be obtained from it, which will altogether supersede the use of calamel in the cure of diseases. Tomatoes were also good for citizens traveling to the west or to the south, as tomatoes would quote save them from the danger attendant upon those violent bilious attacks to

which almost all unacclimated persons are liable. So basically saying like travel diarrhea, right, I think so, I'm not quite sure what so is. Was there an idea at the time that if you go to the south or the west, you're gonna have bilious attacks? I've never heard of that before, but oh yeah, travel diarrhea would make sense as an interpretation. But hey, just eat your tomatoes, you know, drink some tomato sauce on the train, and you'll be right as

right now. Yeah Bash. To continue with with Smith's paragraph here, quote Bennett urged all citizens to eat tomatoes raw, cooked, or in catchup as they were quote the most healthy article of all the material alimentary Benet included recipes for tomato sauce, fried tomatoes, tomato pickles, tomato ketchup, and eating raw tomatoes. I don't know what the recipe for eating raw tomatoes is, but uh, to go back to earlier.

So so Bennett is setting tomatoes up as a foil to this substance called calamel, and this reference to calamel here. Calumel was a mineral form of mercury chloride that was widely used as medicine in the nineteenth century, even though nobody was quite sure how it was supposed to work. Apparently primarily what it did was it was what they called a purgative, basically a laxative um. But it would also cause mercury poisoning, and it tended to kill the

tissue of the mouth and gums. So they're all these stories of people taking calamel and like their teeth becoming loose and their mouths kind of rotting, And even into the twentieth century, alarmingly, calamel powder was used as a as a powder to be applied to children's gums as they were teething and led to these horrible conditions as a result. Benjamin Rush, you know, the physician and one of the so called founding fathers, he was a big

fan of calumel and uh promoted it. I think he even tried to give some to Alexander Hamilton's at some point. Calumel is just terrible medicine, extremely worth replacing with something else. For example, calumel was often used to treat dysentery, but as a diuretic itself, it could speed up the dehydration process. So as you already have dysentery, you're also taking a

laxative and this this actually did kill some people. So yeah, so this is definitely an example of a so called medicine that is not only it's not just doing nothing, it is it is actively heaping more harm on top of whatever you're trying to treat. Yeah, I mean, I guess I can't verify that it was never doing anything useful, but I think it's absolutely clear that if it was doing anything beneficial at all, the side effects were far

worse than whatever it was trying to treat. Yeah, and like other, you know, mercury based things, I think it was just generally used as a cure all. It was a panacea of the time. And anything that is supposed to cure everything probably cures nothing. So anyway, Bennett is offering up tomatoes as an alternative to calamel. He's saying, hey, tomatoes can do all the stuff that calamel does, accept it without all the side effects. And so Bennett was

on the tomato train. He was soon forced out of his professorship, but he did not give up on his tomato crusade, and in eighteen thirty five he repeated the claims of his tomato panasy a lecture in dozens of outlets. He wrote letters forwarding his address to farming and horticultural magazines, to household magazines, um and he also wrote to other influential Americans to convinced them of his claims, including somebody named Constantine Rafinesque who was a medical botanist and who

promoted a lot of diet based cures. So he got some followers other medical authorities, or at least people who were somewhat perceived as such, jumped on the tomato train with him. Uh So, I just wanted to list a couple more of Bennett's other interesting tomato claims, as as relayed by Andrew F. Smith. First of all, he said that he had studied all of the ancient texts and he his studies proved conclusively that there was nowhere on

Earth where the tomato was not indigenous. This was not true. Yeah, yeah, we we we I think we we properly debunked that notion in the first episode. Uh. He also attacked the process of staking tomatoes. So, Robert, you've got tomatoes growing in your yard right now, right, what what do you do to to get the vines standing upright? Oh, you

have to use like a metal cage and um. And then as that they grow more and more gigantic, you end up or these we have to end up reinforcing that and and they see and if if you're not totally on top of it, you'll still end up with the vines falling onto the ground and tomatoes just sitting there on the ground. Right. So, most people who grow tomatoes today, they staked them in some way. You put like a structure up and you allow the vine to hang on that off in a metal cage or a

stick of some kind. But Bennett opposed steaking because he claimed it was against God and against nature, and that God had intended for tomato vines to lie on the ground. If God had meant for them to be steaked, he would have had them stand up on their own. Though I think Bennett might be confused about the fact that the tomato, of course, being a cultivated fruit that was sort of created by humans in a way, The original natural form of the tomato is a tiny berry, you know,

it's not this big, heavy, juicy thing that we eat today. Yeah. Yeah, the fruit of the modern tomato, it's especially it's larger forms. I mean, it's it's gigantic, it's and it's breaking apart with its own juices, you know, And it's ultimately quite impressive the amount of biomass that these things produce enough to wear. You know, when you first stake up that tomato plant or or put a cage around it, you're like,

oh man, this feels like overkill. But then a month two months later and uh and whatever structure you raised might be struggling to keep all of that stuff up in the air. Yeah, it turns into a precarious tower of juice. Yes. Should we take a quick break before we come back to discuss Spinnett's encounter with the LDS Church. Let's do it, alright, we're back. We're talking about tomatoes as a miracle cure that for just about anything that at the very least was a preferable cure, all to

a calamel, which was a dangerous mercury based cure. All right. Uh, And this claim was being made in the eight third is by this doctor named John Cook Bennett. Now we talked about how he started making all these claims about tomatoes and their supposed health benefits and curative properties. Apparently in eighteen forty, after he'd been making these tomato claims for a while, he was working in Illinois and Bennett

got involved with the Latter Day Saints movement. He became friends with its leader Joseph Smith, and his claims about the health benefits of tomatoes actually proved influential within the church. But tragedy struck and in eighteen forty two Bennett got

excommunicated from the Latter Day Saints movement. He was excommunicated by Joseph Smith himself after some kind of ambiguous scandal involving a bunch of alleged sexual impropriety, including adultery and maybe some kind of unsanctioned polygamy, with what Smith viewed as as dubious spiritual or revelatory justifications. After Bennett was banned from the church, he sort of went ballistic on Joseph Smith and then published a bunch of allegations against

him in return. I think he actually accused Smith of murder and fraud and a bunch of other things, and then the two just win at each other in a full scale pr war, Joseph Smith versus John Cook Bennett. But the interesting thing was, apparently this pr war did not undermine, uh, the the Latter Day Saints movements fondness for tomatoes and acceptance of their ideas of the health

benefits that had come from Bennett. So Bennett's claims proved very popular, and they caught on and were repeated in lots of cookbooks, household manuals, farming and gardening journals, and even in Latter Day Saints literature. Uh and so so there was this whole tomato for health craze that caught on big in the eighteen thirties and continued into the eighteen forties. And uh Andrew F. Smith points out that whatever his possibly dubious medical or moral credential, Bennett was

a genuinely, very talented promoter. It seems like he probably could have been great in the twentieth century in an advertising and marketing context, and that this contributed significantly to the popularization and normalization of tomatoes in the United States. Uh So, Bennett eventually predicted that you know you're you're going to be able in the future to get the health benefits of tomatoes without even having to eat a tomato. You can just take a miracle pill that will be

made from a from a tomato extract. And this prediction actually came true. In eighteen thirty five, a doctor A. J. Holcomb of Glassboro, Alabama, started producing pills made out of a tomato extract, and other pills also came on the market. Smith quotes advertising for one brand of tomato pills from a doctor named Dr. Miles, and it goes like this, the tomato used as an article of refection is highly

medical highly medical and doubtless prevents many bilious attacks. We inferred from this fact the possibility of preparing from it a medicine of great virtue. Dr Miles and his associates have spent years and fortunes we understand and experimenting, and finally have produced the compound extract. It has been used by many in the city and out of it, and is as near we can learn, generally approved. But then

I thought this was interesting. Apparently so Smith's sites. Some of the other packaging copy, and some of this copy attacks calamel directly. So it says, for example, humane physicians deplore the sad evils resulting from the mercurial practice, and remember this because calamel is mercury chloride, and will gladly hail the introduction of an article that can safely be

substituted for calamel. And it goes on about how people just know in their hearts that mercury is ad, even if they can't explain why um, and that you may have to choose between two evils of having of taking mercury or having a torpid liver. But now they're saying, hey, you don't have to have a torpid liver, and you don't have to take mercury. You can fight your torpid liver with tomato pills. Well, that would certainly be ideal if you wanted to consume the medicinal essence of tomatoes

out of outside of tomato season. Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, you wouldn't. You wouldn't have to go through eating a mealy one in the winter if

you wanted to fight your torpid liver. Um. But but I will say that so while I think the tomato pill probably had very little actual medical merit, especially for the billious diseases that they were said to counteract, it seems to me that simply by being offered as an alternative to calamel, tomato pills or or just tomatoes might have done significant medical good just because calamel was so bad.

Like so, if you're taking something that does nothing instead of taking calamel and getting mercury poisoning and gangrenous flesh and rotting gums and all that, that that actually does seem like an upgrade, even though this is probably not useful as medicine. Plus, there's a hint of tomato to it, so it's got that going for it. Oh yeah. I mean I wonder if you you know, if you're actually eating any tomato flesh, I wonder if if you can get some placebo effect just from the fact that it

tastes nice. Maybe not, I don't know, that might be reaching, but anyways, it's still the placebo effect is powerful. So I mean, that's that's always going to be a part of any of these considerations. Oh absolutely, I mean that that might be something that was at work in calamel and in tomato and tomato pills, except uh, you know,

the tomatoes aren't full of mercury um. So it seems that some of the attacks against tomato pills did not make the accurate charge that or at least I would guess what is accurate it, which is that they probably just didn't do much, but instead accused them of, say, being inferior to calamel and effectiveness. And there were some that accused tomatoes and tomato pills of bringing on implausible side effects, side effects I would judge to be very implausible.

For example, uh, Andrew Smith sites one dcor Dio Lewis, who was a popular lecturer and a practitioner of homeopathy, who claimed to who claimed that the use of tomatoes and their extract would cause quote piles tender and bleeding gums, teeth set on edge, and loss of teeth due to salivation, which which sounds closer to the actual effects of calamel.

But anyway, despite these attacks, tomato pills proved very popular, and by eighteen forty, Smith notes that tomato extract was listed as an ingredient in lots of supposed panaceas, even pills that weren't just tomato pills. You know, you know this is doctor, doctor Rotten Bottoms, you know, excellent cure all that would list tomato extract as one of the ingredients, and this gave rise at the time to the slogan tomato pills will cure all your ills. There you go,

at rhymes. Can't argue with that, right uh. And just as an interesting side note, Smith includes a few other bizarre claims made against tomatoes, including one accusation. This is from the later nineteenth century, so not the eighteen forties period we're talking about now, but later in the century there was a doctor John Hilton who reported that quote, tomato cells were identical to cancer cells under the microscope, and that there was much cancer where tomatoes were eaten.

This does not appear to be true in any way. That sounds real. This This sounds like when um Chancellor Palpatine is telling Anakin that the the Jedi and the Sith are virtually alike in every way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And I wonder like, did this guy owned stock in a Calumel company? Yeah, But anyway, by the mid eighteen hundreds, basically at this point, there's no going back, Like tomatoes had become thoroughly uh normalized and a universally profitable crop

pretty much in a mainstay of American dining tables. So

just over the course of a few decades. Really, Smith makes the case that even though the the health craze for tomatoes was probably somewhat baseless or at least you know that if if there are health benefits to tomatoes, it wasn't exactly the benefits that these people were claiming, um, but that this health craze did help cement tomatoes as a universally accepted and extremely popular food in America and counteract some of the lingering concerns that might have been

present among some people about their toxicity. Yeah, if you're gonna basically if you're gonna take up some sort of crazy new diet or some sort of weird medication. It's better that it's not actual actually poison, right yes. Now. On the other hand, on the subject of the health benefits of tomatoes, it is worth pointing out that there are nutrients present in tomatoes that have been investigated as

possibly beneficial to health. Just one major example is lycopene, like apene, is a carotenoid that serves as a pigment, giving the tomato it's pinkish reddish color. Uh. And there are other carotenoid pigments that are nutritionally relevant, for example, beta carotene, the pigment that gives carrots and some of their vegetables their orange color, that gets metabolized in the body and turns into vitamin A, which is of course

a an essential nutrient. So dietary carotenoids are very important for supplying the body with compounds that it can't synthesize internally. And there's long been a debate in the scientific literature about what the health benefits of tomatoes and specifically lycopine

might be. So I was trying to check and see if there was a good literature review and meta analysis of of all the studies out there on on the possible effects of lycopine um the health effects of lycopine, and I found an article from seventeen published in the journal Atherosclerosis by chang at All called Tomato and Lycopine Supplementation and Cardiovascular Risk Factors a systemic review and meta analysis, and essentially the authors here found that quote consuming tomato

and tomato products is associated with potential beneficial effects to health. Current evidence indicates that consuming tomato improves some blood lipids, blood pressure, and endothelial function. Tomato consumption may potentially reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and mortality. And finally, the effects of consuming tomato on novel biomarkers of vascular risk

needs further investigation. So uh, it seems like unfortunate. Like many things studies into the health effects of food, there have been a lot of conflicting results over the years, so the picture is not always totally clear. But it looks like on balance, the existing research indicates there probably are some good health effects that follow from consumption of lycopine, a tomato product, and tomatoes in general, and a lot of it has to do with cardiovascular health and blood

lipids things like that. Well, it's it's no It should come as no surprise that not only can you still buy tomato pills from a number of different um companies, you can also buy lycopene supplements from just about everybody who is in the business of making supplements. Right. Well, I would say, based on the thing on the study that I decided, we are not advising you to go out and buy lycopine based supplements. You know, that's the

kind of thing. Consult with your doctor about that. But it looks like on balance it's probably more likely than not that lycopine does something beneficial in a cardiovascular sense.

But anyway, to come back to the report by Andrew F. Smith, one of the things that he cites, I don't have this quote pulled out, but I remember he cites a doctor writing in the late eighteen hundreds who said, look, you know, all these claims about how the tomatoes affect the liver and the bile and all that there, they probably have no basis in reality. But just go ahead and eat tomatoes because they're delicious. You don't need to

consult your liver doctor. Just fed them. Oh but Robert, I have a question as we transition to our to our next little segment here a question that I wonder if you have thoughts on or if your your house adheres to a set of conventional wisdom about And that question is should you ever refrigerate a tomato? We are

a non refrigeration house for tomatoes. Now, I don't think this is a rule that I knew about or had probably learned earlier in my life, but it was one that my wife knew, and so it's it's one we've stuck to. Yeah, that that that tomatoes they go out

on the counter or the window. They do not go in the refrigerator, though occasionally we'll get like I say, I do subscribe to a particular boxed meal company, and they'll send the ingredients in a bag, and I'll generally just stick that bag in the refrigerator, and sometimes it has tomatoes in there, and so the tomatoes will wind up being refrigerated. But like we said earlier, those are,

you know, shipped grocery store tomatoes. So perhaps nothing all that wonderful is lost in their being in the fridge. But then again, I don't have any I don't have any science backing any of this up. This is just the way. This is the way, and that's what we do. Well. That's how so much kitchen knowledge is, isn't it? Like canonical kitchen wisdom is full of these rules that you have no idea whether they have any basis in fact.

Maybe they're informed by good empirical scientific research or by by real experience, or maybe they're just a hunch some chef had a hundred years ago and it's been repeated from chef to chef ever since. Yeah, Like ultimately, I don't know. It could be that if you keep the tomatoes out on the countertop, it will keep demons out of your house. That that could be the excuse as far as I know. Uh yeah, I mean it could be one of those things like ceiling in the juices.

You know, like this totally not true that searing meat seals and the juices. I mean, you know, searing meatmates taste better. The ceiling in the juices is not real. But it does make me think of one of my favorite Onion headlines of all time, which was it was something like, uh, study finds average father thinks about ceiling

in the juices four to five hours a day. Um. You know, this question reminds me a little bit of our our invention interview with Jeff Beach Bumberry H And I believe you asked the question about uh, lemon and lime lime juice, in particular about fresh squeeze lime juice, and he mentioned that some mixologists argue that it's better if the lime juice has been squeeze east but then placed in the refrigerator for a certain amount of time

for a short period. I think he said that, like some mixologists think that the line like citrus juice is better after being refrigerated for like a day or something like that, but then after after that it starts getting bad. You have to go back to that invention interview to to to hear the exact numbers, but it was something in that ballpark. But anyway, so to bring it back to tomatoes, for a long time, the conventional wisdom has

been to go right along with your household rule. Uh, it's that you never put a raw tomato in the fridge. It ruins the fresh tomato flavor, it turns the texture meally that you know, the chefs would just say never ever do it, And it turns out there's actually been a lot of research on this. Uh So I'm gonna try to give you the basic rundown as best I

can and summarizing some of the work of other people. So, first of all, it is true that there are some measurable chemical changes that take place when a tomato is stored at fridge temperature for an umber of days instead of at room temperature. Just one example, as a study by Jong at All published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in called chilling induced tomato flavor loss is associated with altered volatile synthesis and transient changes in

DNA methylation. And so basically what they found is if you take a tomato, you pick it, and then you chill it for a week or so, and then you compare that to a fresh pick tomato, the sugar and acid content will mostly be unchanged, but there will be a marked decline in what they call certain flavor and aroma compounds. These are volatile molecules that are responsible for a lot of the distinctive tomato we smell and taste.

And they determine that this happened because when you take a tomato and you pluck it and you store it in cold storage for a week or whatever. This causes a down regulation in the expression of specific genes in the tomatoes cell. And this this down regulation of these genes slows or halts the production of these flavor and aroma compounds. And one of the authors, Harry J. Clee,

speaking to the New York Times, explain their findings as follows. Quote, remove the violins and the woodwinds, you still have noise, but it's not the same. Add back just the violins, and it still isn't right. You need that orchestra of thirty or more chemicals in the right balance to give

you a good tomato. And I think, you know, there's something to that, Like the rapturous experience of eating a really good tomato is this complex combination of kind of like earthy, grassy, juicy, you know, smells and tastes that all come together, as as the sort of accents on the basic flavors of sweetness and sourness and savoriness that are there in the tomatoes flesh. But there are some serious reasons for not just taking that research and then

running straight to the conclusion. Okay, then never put your tomato in the refrigerator, because this study is looking at sort of one narrow question and one narrow type of comparison. So, first of all, if you're buying a tomato at the grocery store, that tomato has almost definitely already been chilled

for some time during transport and storage. Because if you think for a minute about the brute physical necessities of the food supply chain, uh, and you think about the delicacy of an actually ripe tomato, how would how would you harvest actually ripe tomatoes at scale and then pack them and ship them to their destinations. I mean, you

couldn't do it. A truck or even a crate packed full of plump, ripe tomatoes would just be this slurry of moldy pulp by the time it got where it was going, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean your your tomatoes are likely coming from California or Florida. I think Indiana and Ohio were also up there in the top five. Yeah.

So often large scale tomato agriculture involves harvesting tomatoes that are still relatively hard and green and then packing them in cold storage and exposing them to ethylene gas under cold storage, which is a gas that's naturally produced by lots of fruits as they ripen, but exposure to the gas causes ripening in the storage after they've been picked, and that's how the tomatoes turn red, uh, you know,

to be read when you buy them at the grocery store. Now, a lot of people are going to say that this process is one reason why tomatoes you get at the grocery store are often extremely inferior to tomatoes that you would get at a farmer's market or that you would grow yourself or get from a friend's garden. That the process is just totally different in terms of the flavor and texture that it produces when compared to a tomato

that actually ripens on the vine. And some of these same concerns driving the supply and transport process have also driven the selection of particular tomato cultivars that are not necessarily the best eat because when a farmer is selecting what breed of tomato to grow, they don't only have to consider what's going to taste the best to the consumer. They have to consider what can I actually get to

the buyer intact? Yeah, exactly. It needs to survive the journey and and and look like something that the the the customer will actually purchase on the other end, right, But if you're able to get your hands on an unrefrigerated tomato out of a garden or maybe at a

farmer's market or something. Uh. The authors here of this paper, at least they recommend not storing it in the fridge before you eat it if you want peak tomato rapture, And that advice might be good advice, But there are a number of researchers who would say that this this type of answer is actually looking at the question a little too narrowly and in a way that's not always

useful to the actual tomato consumer. For example, there are a couple of really great in depth explorations of this question on the Serious Eats website by Daniel Gritzer and Kenji Lopez Alt, and they did a couple of investigations over this over the past few years, and so they did controlled experiments with blind taste tests on multiple ways of storing tomatoes refrigerated, unrefrigerated for different periods of time and so forth, and they concluded that basically, yes, the

absolute pinnacle tomato experience is probably letting the tomato ripen on the vine then eating it. Immediately at its moment of peak ripeness, with no refrigeration on the vine like like a goat man, with the juice flowing down your chest. Don't use your hands at all, just face. Yes, but but but they say, you know, most of the time,

that's not how you're going to be eating a tomato. Uh. And they point out that letting a tomato go past its point of peak ripeness is also very bad for flavor and texture, and in fact, we'll ruin the flavor and texture significantly more than refrigerating the tomato will. And also a lot of times they taste testers even notice all that big of a difference between a tomato that had been refrigerated and one that hadn't. It seemed to vary.

So they came up with a set of guidelines. They go like this, if your tomato has never been refrigerated, you know, so it's out of somebody's yard or a good farmer's market seller or something like that, then you want to store it at room temperature until it's ripe, and then either eat it immediately or put it in the fridge, and then you take it out of the

fridge when you're ready to eat. It, and of course storing it in the fridge will allow it to stay at peak ripeness longer than it would store it at room temperature. But they do say it's important if you have refrigerated a tomato, let it come up to room temperature before you eat it, because eating a cold tomato

is not very pleasant. Okay, that's good. That's good. But then the second half of this is if your tomato has already been refrigerated, and this would apply to almost any tomato you would get at a grocery store or any kind of mass agricultural vendor in that ace. If it's already ripe, put it in the fridge until you're ready to eat it. If it's not ripe yet, let

it ripen at room temperature. Then once it's ripe, move it to the fridge until you're ready to eat it, and once again, let it come up to room temper before you actually put it in your mouth. And I think I really respect the work they put in on coming up with these guidelines, and uh, thus saith the Lord. Okay, I got a second tomato storage trick, also confirmed through empirical testing by Kenji Lopez Ald. So you know how tomatoes often lose juiciness and partially desiccate as they sit

out and rest. You you've probably seen them, like on the tops near where the stem is, they'll get kind of wrinkly and start to sag. Yes, this is partially due to moisture evaporating out of the tomato as it rests Now. The skin of the tomato is actually very good at keeping moisture in, but the weak point is actually the stem area, a little depression where the tomato

connected to the vine. And so there's an easy way to prevent moisture escaping through this area, and it is to store tomatoes upside down on a flat surface, so the stem area is sort of sealed off by the by the soft flesh of the tomato around it, or in fact, if you want to go farther, you can even do what Kenji did to test this theory about where the moisture evaporates from. He shows in a video that he put a little piece of tape over the stem depression to seal it off, and this also kept

the tomato from losing juice over time. So if you want your tomatoes to stay ju see a storm upside down or or maybe even give him a little little sealed hat. All right, all right, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back we will explore the topic of off world tomatoes. Alright, we're back. So at this point, tomatoes that spread pretty much everywhere. As Michael Pollen pointed out in his book Cooked, the tomato is perhaps the most important vegetable crop in

the world, with onions coming in second. As we discussed in our invention episode about Ketchup the culinary invention of Ketchup, so Europeans tried to recreate Asian sauces with an imported fruit from the America's and then this weird concoction eventually

returns to Asia as well. I was reading an article titled Tomatoes and Chinese Cooking by Rhonda Parkinson for the Spruce Eat site, and the author mentions that even though tomatoes only arrived in China roughly a hundred to a hundred fifty years ago, they've managed to carve out their own niche in certain Chinese cuisines, much in the same way that chili peppers have found a home in numerous

Asian cuisines. Examples of popular dishes and I don't think I've had any of these, but it was interesting to these were pointed out. One is tomato egg drop soup, and the other is a dish called tomato beef, which is apparently a stir fry with thick tomato wedges, like really big thick pieces beef at it and then oyster sauce. Oh, that sounds like a delicious umami bomb. Of course, because a lot of natural Asian flavorings are are big umami bombs,

like soy sauce or oyster sauce. They bring a lot of the glutamate based flavors, but tomatoes are also rich imglutamates and have that rich eu mammy flavor. So yeah,

that sounds like a savory delight. It's interesting to to contemplate this kind of thing too, where tomatoes are recent enough um arrival in Chinese cuisine that they haven't completely like they still have, you know, they're still completely taken over or anything like that, but but looking at where they're utilized first, like where the successes for the tomato as opposed to something like um Italian cuisine, which it really can be kind of difficult to imagine for for

many of us anyway to imagine something like Italian cuisine without the tomato, right, because that's where a lot of our minds immediately go. Yeah. Well, I would say that's especially true of like Italian American cuisine, Like a lot of the Italian dishes that became especially popular among the Italian Americans were tomato forward. Yeah. So here's a big question. If tomatoes have essentially taken over our planet, my tomatoes go beyond being a mere international sensation. Could they become

an interplanetary sensation? Yes, the answer is yes, yea. When the aliens get here, they're gonna we're gonna be like, oh, thank you for coming to like uplift our society and share your technology, and they're like, get out of the way. We're here for your tomatoes, We're here for the golden apples. Yes. So a lot of this come back to the basic question, all right, if we're you know what we've discussed before.

A lot of a lot of very intelligent people have argued that the long term survival of the human race depends on us branching out and establishing ourselves in other worlds. But part of establishing ourselves in other worlds means first of all, just being able to survive there, being able to eat there, and then ultimately being able to survive there there in a way where we're not reliant upon

a robust supply chain from Earth. Yes, the cost of getting the food into Orbit alone is already incredibly high, compounded then by the cost of getting it the rest of the way, for example, to a lunar colony, or to a Martian colony. That means you're gonna have to grow your food at your lunar or Martian colony. Uh, at least to supplement umu costly deliveries, if not sustain colonists completely. Oh boy, I can't wait to subsist entirely on a diet of like protein that's created from algae

and incubators. Well, remember in the Silent Running, that's just what Brustern's crewmates were happy with. They're like, oh, this is great, these cubes of of of of whatever. You know, that grown strangeness is perfectly fine. Meanwhile, he's holding like a cultivated banana. This like the strangest product of modern agricultural science, and he's like, this is nature, all right.

So obviously there are a number of possibilities here. Including what you just mentioned, like figuring out, like what what grows the best that we could possibly eat, and let's make that be our diet um. But you know, basically, I guess the first possibility that comes to mind in terms of like growing things in another world is that

we just bring everything with us, Right. Certainly we need to bring the seeds, But then when you get into the issue of water and soil, things get a bit difficult because again, the cost of even bringing this stuff into orbit is so high. Right, So on one hand, we could potentially go the way of hydroponics and grow without soil. Uh, that's one less thing we'd have to bring up with us, right, and perhaps we'd even be

able to make use of local water. In fact, a paper by Elgin and Union published in the Bulleton of the American Astronomical Society argues that hydroponics might be our best option. And I'll share more on on their argument here in a bit. But what about lunar or Martian soil? What's preventing us from growing our crops just in that stuff? You know, Hey, there is there is there dirt on Mars? Is there dirt on the moon? Why don't I just

grow some tomatoes in that. Okay, I guess a major problem would be the lack of moisture, but there may be other problems as well. Well. All right, yeah, so I guess that. Think of it this way. It's like, if you're bringing water, you're bringing seeds. Could you just go out get a big bucket load of of martian or lunar regular, bring that inside. Uh, adds seeds, add water, and enjoy your your bumper crop. I don't know. Actually

that's a very good question. Uh. The answer is no. But it becomes then a question of what could you do to the soil and uh And on this subject, I was looking at another paper. This is the twenty nineteen paper titled Crop Growth in Viability of Sea on Mars and Moon Soil Simulants by Fame link at All published in Open Agriculture, and basically the paper sets out to consider whether martian or lunar regular could be used

to grow crops now. First of all, on the hydroponics front, the authors here argue that while hydroponics is certainly promising, you still need a growing medium. For instance, mineral wool is often used. It's also known as rock wool, which is a brand name. This is stuff that's also used in insulation, filtration and soundproofing, but when used as a growing medium, it has to be replaced after one or

more growing cycles. Um. Furthermore, not every crop takes to mineral wool all that well, so in other words, you'd still potentially have to ship uh this growing medium out to your colony and depend on that supply chain. So they ultimately contend that aero ponics, in which plants grow in an air or missed environment without soil as a

growing medium. Um. You know that that could be a strong possibility, and certainly that's something that NASA sponsored plant experiments have been looking into for quite a while and with good reason to. According to NASA, aero ponics systems can reduce water usage, by of fertilizer usage, by in pesticide usage by all while maximizing crop yields, and some crops like tomatoes, have been shown to benefit from increased

mineral envitamin uptake via aero ponics. According to a two thousand seven NASA released, Tomato growers traditionally start their plants in pots weight twenty eight days or so before transplanting them into the ground. However, using an aero ponics system. They can then transplant them from a growing chamber to the soil in just ten days, and this apparently allows growers to produce six tomato crops uh cycles per year

instead of the traditional one or two crop cycles. I believe aeroponics have been used in the I s s all, do you haven't they? Yeah? I believe so there've been There have been certainly been some experiments with aeroponics'. Like I say, it's something that it's not new in terms of uh NASA research uh looking at that as a solution for growing things in orbit or certainly ultimately on other worlds. Okay, but what about actually using the soil

on another rocky body like the lunar or Martian regular eath. Okay. Well, in that paper by Elgin and Guni, and they point out that there are a number of issues with the Martian regular. For example, they would have to be worked out. So for starters, the regular is full of perclorates. These are chemical compounds containing the perclorate ion which are harmful to humans and a challenge to micro organisms as well, and these would need to be stripped out of the

regular life before you could plant anything in it. Furthermore, the Martian regular is, as far as we can tell dead. Uh, that's the start difference from the soil we depend on here on Earth, which is a rich environ of microbial life, fung gui, arthropods, organic nutrients. So they argue that you need to add something, you know, you need to essentially resurrect that soil. I mean you'd resurrect that regular to make it soil. You would need to add something like

worm castings to the mix. Now that's essentially the refuse of earthworms that are just packed with bacteria, enzymes and remnants of plant matter and excrement. And you can actually this is stuff you can buy for your own garden at gardening supply stores. You just get a big container of earthworm poop. Well it's got it says worm castings, but that's essentially what it is. Yeah. Nice. So anyway, Yeah, the Martian soil is sterile, and this would be a

way to sift some life into it. Anyway. They go on to explore hydroponics in greater detail. Uh. And but then to come back to tomatoes for a second, we should note that the golden apples of terra can be grown via high hydroponics and aero ponics, so both of the If if either of those turned out to be the way, as opposed to UH doing something to the soil on on the Moon or on Marsh, it sounds

like the tomatoes future would be bright. Now. To come back to the fame link paper UM that study, Basically, they wanted to see, if we're gonna use regularly, what

plant species might grow their best. Um Now, since there is no regularly available here on Earth, we don't have any you know, you can't go and get an actual pot of Lunar or Martian soil to experiment with, UH, they decided to use the next best thing, which is NASA's Mars Regular Simulant j s C Mars one A. Okay, there's actually there are actually several different versions of regulars simulant out there, like this one is j s C Mars one A, but there's also one called j s

C one A that is the lunar version, and there are some other varieties out there. UM Mars one A is based on info gathered from the Viking Landers and the Mars path Finder rover, and it's pretty interesting stuff in and of itself. This one in particular is gathered from the pooh Nena cinder cone on the Big Island of Hawaii, Okay, So that would be it would be

like a volcanic soil base. Yeah. So anyway, the researchers in this study they used a nutrient solution made from a grass used as a cattle fodder to enrich the soil, and they cultivated ten different crops uh garden crests, rocket, tomato, radish, rye, keenwah, spinach, chives, pas and leak, and they assimilated the properties of lunar and Martian regular and also normal soil potting soil from Earth as a control. And if the tin crops of spinach was the only one that was a complete dud. Uh.

Chives and leaks grew steadily but didn't produce much. Keenoa didn't produce seeds, which is a bummer because you want your off world crop to also produce seeds for the next generation. Again, you want to be as removed from that supply chain back to the home world as much as possible, right, so you can eventually succeed from Earth and declare independence. Yeah. Uh. Total biomass was highest for the Earth control trays obviously, but also the Mars trades

were pretty high. Lunar tray was the worst, and the seeds of three species radish, rye and garden crests were tested successfully each for German nation. So those worlds only the most promising in terms of of um you know, continuing to to grow without more seeds coming from home. Well, I know you're You've got to get to the tomatoes. How did they do? The tomatoes did pretty well. They were the top biomass producer and lead author here of Vigor of om Link is quoted as saying that they

were thrilled when the Martian tomatoes actually turned red. Whoa. And there are other studies and programs looking at space tomatoes as well. One I came across is an operation known as space UM an acronym. It's an acronym. Yes, it's probably one of the more amusing acronyms I've run

across recently for the show. It is the Small Plants for Space Expeditions program UM uh So it's from the University of California, Riverside, and it's what they've done is they've developed a tiny tomato plant uh that feature minimal leaves and stems, but produce a normal amount of fruit, though in smaller packages. So in other words, more biomass is invested into the edible portions of the plant. And they also this also minimizes resources and energy consumption by

producing fruit more quickly than conventional plants. Oh yeah, I hadn't even really considered this, but it makes sense that if you were trying to take crops to colonize, uh you know, on a space station or another planet, you could probably work back home to try to engineer sort of the perfect version of the organism to take with you. Yeah.

And they also point out that this this is not only something we can be utilized in am you know, orbital or otherworldly environment, but also it's ideal for vertical farming here on Earth. Again, think to those big tomatoes, you know, because we end up trying to do some forms form of vertical farming, uh sometimes via our steaks and tomato cages, and they're just so dern heavy, right. Uh. The idea here is is make everything else about the plant smaller, focus on the tomato itself, but also the

tomato is less hefty as well. Well. Hey, I got no problem with small tomatoes. As I've said before, I mean, uh often the best tomatoes you can get under less than ideal conditions, such as like the supply chain that gets tomatoes to a grocery store are gonna be cherry or grape tomatoes that they may be small, but they get a lot of flavor for their size. Now that one of the interesting things about this is the Space team developed these tomatoes not via selective breeding, but via

Crisper case nine gene editing technology. Yeah. I don't know if we've really gotten into their into the use of crisper gene editing in uh in agriculture, but obviously this would be huge. Yeah. We often when we're talking about crisper and when I say we, not just us, but you know, just sort of media in general and the public were generally asking the question what about humans though? What about humans though? But we should occasionally say we

had stop and ask the question what about tomatoes? And here we are. So on top of those the biomass tweaks, they're also looking at a couple of other tweaks. Um for an example, in an increase in the photosynthesis rate, because this would help replace c O two in an enclosed environment with fresh oxygen, which would be ideal for

any onboard animals such as human beings. So there seems to be a lot, you know, interesting possibility in all this tweaking alien soils to better support terrestrial food plants, and also tweaking those plants to better capitalize on those environments and better serving the innerge demands of the humans who bring them there. Robert, I just thought of a complication here. So we're talking about on on the surfaces

of other planets with normal gravity. But if you were to try to grow tomatoes in micro gravity, say on the on the I S S, then potentially you could grow tomato plants with big fruits that you wouldn't have to steak or put in a cage, right because they wouldn't be dragged down by gravity. Well that's true, yeah, um, But I guess on on that front, I wonder about you know, because we've all seen those tomatoes. It just

get so big, they're just bursting. But I guess on the other hand, you'd probably be keeping a pretty close eye. And I mean on the I S S they run a pretty tight ship, and I imagine that would um, that would also be the case with any kind of tomato garden up there. Oh yeah, I wonder if the tomato would be kind of bouncing around and whatever its enclosure is. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Keep it in mind.

I also wonder, though, how gravity affects um So there's something about the shape of a tomato that seems like it would somehow be influenced by the presence of gravity, and that it's a very heavy fruit and it's got a lot of moisture in it, and I wonder if, like you know, that it's necessary for the moisture to be weighing down towards the bottom of the tomato for its morphology to resemble the tomatoes. We know that's true, and so we might end up with a more spherical tomato,

is that what you're saying. I don't know, maybe or more maybe a more top heavy tomato, I wonder, or maybe it'll be, you know, ultimately where we we missed the point made years ago, and that it's going to be Mickey Mouse shaped watermelons. Like that's that's the future of fruit and space. I love it, all right, So there we have it. As we said, you know, we did not have space in these episodes to discuss the

entire history of human and tomato interaction. Nor did we even really get to touch on everything that's going on with tomato science, tomato research, etcetera. I mean, it's a massively juicy field. I'm sure there's a lot we could come back to, that's right. So anyway, hopefully know it gives because everybody a lot more to think about when they inevitably engage with tomato based cuisine, and hopefully as you enjoy some fresh tomatoes or at least reasonably fresh

tomatoes this growing season. Yeah, it's a short window every year. It's a precious time, so so get them while you can, all right. In the meantime, if you want to listen to more episodes of stuff to blow your mind, you know where to find them. Wherever you get your podcasts, that's where they are and wherever that happens to be. Just make sure your rate, review and subscribe if you have the ability to on those platforms. Huge things. As

always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, or to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my radio. This is the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.