Jumat, 11 Juni 2010

Tomato

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), also called the love apple, is a herbaceous, usually sprawling plant in the nightshade family widely cultivated for its edible fruit. Savory in flavor, the fruit of most varieties ripens to a distinctive red color. Tomato plants typically reach to 1–3 metres (3–10 ft) in height and have a weak, woody stem that often vines over other plants.

The leaves are 10–25 centimetres (4–10 in) long, odd pinnate, with 5–9 leaflets on petioles,each leaflet up to 8 centimetres (3 in) long, with a serrated margin; both the stem and leaves are densely glandular-hairy. The flowers are 1–2 centimetres (0.4–0.8 in) across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of 3–12 together. It is a perennial, often grown outdoors in temperate climates as an annual.

History

The tomato is native to South America. Genetic evidence shows the progenitors of tomatoes were herbaceous green plants with small green fruit and a center of diversity in the highlands of Peru. One species, Solanum lycopersicum, was transported to Mexico where it was grown and consumed by Mesoamerican civilizations.

The exact date of domestication is not known. The first domesticated tomato may have been a little yellow fruit, similar in size to a cherry tomato, grown by the Aztecs of Central Mexico. Aztec writings mention tomatoes were prepared with peppers, corn and salt. The word tomato comes from the Aztec [Nahuatl] tomatl, literally "the swelling fruit".

Many historians believe that the Spanish explorer Cortés may have been the first to transfer the small yellow tomato to Europe after he captured the Aztec city of Tenochtítlan, now Mexico City, in 1521. Others believe Christopher Columbus, a Genoese working for the Spanish monarchy, was the first European to take back the tomato, as early as 1493.

The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in an herbal written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist who named it pomo d’oro, or "golden apple".

Aztecs and other peoples in the region used the fruit in their cooking; it was cultivated in southern Mexico and probably other areas by 500 BC. It is thought that the Pueblo people believed that those who witnessed the ingestion of tomato seeds were blessed with powers of divination. The large, lumpy tomato, a mutation from a smoother, smaller fruit, originated in Mesoamerica and may be the direct ancestor of some modern cultivated tomatoes.



Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato


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