Who Invented the Cherry Tomato?

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My name is Anna Wexler.

I'm a PhD student in the science, technology, and society program at MIT.

And how did you first get interested in the topic of cherry tomatoes?

Ooh, tomatoes, not tomatoes.

Oh, don't worry.

I'll be saying tomatoes.

It's okay.

Well, I was living in Israel for a number of years and working as a freelance science writer.

And on one trip, I think I was going to Greenland or Iceland, and I was at the airport, at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport, and I came across these pamphlets.

And they were geared towards Israelis, basically.

explaining to them how to talk about their country to citizens of other countries.

And they were really strange.

So some of them said, you know, like, or make eye contact.

They said, speak concisely.

Long speeches are likely to lose your audience's interest.

Use humor.

It helps.

And there was a page that had some talking points that basically said, Israel developed the famous cherry tomatoes.

But basically, Israel was trying to show or present itself as a very technologically advanced society.

So along with cherry tomatoes, Israel claimed to have invented drip irrigation, ICQ, and epilady.

So basically Israel was trying to present itself to the world as a technologically advanced and innovative society.

Wait, so Anna is saying that Israel is saying it invented the cherry tomato.

And the epaulette.

Many of you might not have heard of this famous contraption that rips your body hair out by its roots, but some of you have felt the pain.

Uh-huh.

But we are not a show about body hair.

We are Gastropod, the show that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this week, we have a mystery to solve.

Did Israel invent the cherry tomato?

We were introduced to the story of the cherry tomato by Anna Wexler.

She's now finishing up her PhD at MIT, but before that, she was a science and travel writer living in Tel Aviv.

And she recently wrote an article in Gastronomica all about this question.

Did Israel invent the cherry tomato?

It was a crazy rabbit hole.

Let me tell you.

This was like a rabbit hole with multiple rabbit holes extending from the main rabbit hole.

We are teetering on the brink of the cherry tomato super rabbit hole here.

But before we dive in headfirst, there is another mystery, at least for me.

What is with putting out pamphlets to teach your citizens how to talk to other people about your country?

So the pamphlets were part of this larger campaign called Hasbara, which is Hebrew for explanation, where basically Israel was trying to improve its image worldwide.

I also lived in Israel for a few years.

I don't think I need to tell you, Nikki, that there are parts of the world where Israel isn't exactly the most popular, hence the pamphlets, you know, to give Israelis some talking points, because who doesn't love cherry tomatoes?

Okay,

I guess.

But so then the next question is, is it true?

Did the Israelis invent cherry tomatoes?

I mean, surely cherry tomatoes are just little tomatoes, and I don't think Israelis invented tomatoes.

So, tomatoes are, you know, all of the, I'd say, encyclopedic sources point to South America as the true, and the Americas generally, as the true origin of the tomatoes.

Experts agree.

South America is the home of the tomato.

We double-checked with Arthur Allen.

He's a health reporter at Politico, and he's also the author of the book Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato.

So they're from Peru and Ecuador and possibly northern Chile.

That's where the wild tomatoes grow.

That's where the original plants came from.

And those original tomatoes?

They were tiny.

Teeny, tiny little tomatoes that otherwise look like a regular tomato, but they're they're like almost the size of a pea and they're like a persicon pimpinellifolium, they call them.

And they are very sweet, the ones that I had anyway.

It makes sense that they were so tiny.

Wild tomatoes were supposed to be spread by birds.

But we eat domesticated tomatoes of whatever size.

We don't eat wild tomatoes.

And therein lies another mystery, because tomatoes were first domesticated in Mexico, not South America.

There's no representation of tomatoes in ancient Peruvian art or pottery or anything like that that sort of shows that they used them or that they cultivated tomatoes.

As it happens, nobody knows the answer to that mystery.

Why tomatoes were finally domesticated in Mexico and not in their home region further south, or how they even got to Mexico in the first place.

We certainly can't solve that one today.

We have a smaller but no less important mystery, a cherry-sized one.

And so my next question is, did the native people in pre-conquest Mexico breed cherry tomatoes from these wild ancestors?

All I know is that by the time the Spaniards got there, the Mexicans were eating tomatoes of all kinds of sizes and colors and shapes.

And so, really, almost not the entire diversity of the tomato, but a great deal of it was developed by Mexican farmers, you know, before the Spaniards arrived.

In his book, Arthur has a great bit written by a conquistador in the 1500s describing an Aztec tomato cellar at a market.

There's large tomatoes and small tomatoes, and thin tomatoes, and large serpent tomatoes, and leaf tomatoes, and of course, nipple-shaped tomatoes.

Take that, Whole Foods.

And in that huge mix, Arthur is pretty sure that the Aztecs had cherry-sized tomatoes.

In fact, there's some evidence that the cherry came first.

Someone recently did some genetics on these tomatoes and showed that the gene that took the tomato from cherry form to our kind of normal, if you will, size now is basically very similar to a gene that in mammals causes tumors.

And so it's basically

a gene that causes massive uncontrolled growth so that you get this

bizarre fruit, which is now not considered bizarre at all, but rather a normal tomato.

So basically, Arthur's saying that a tomato is an overgrown, tumor-sized cherry tomato.

Which is weird to think about.

But this seems conclusive.

The cherry tomato was invented in Mexico.

Okay, so here's the thing though.

When I was a little kid growing up in England, there was no such thing as a cherry tomato to be seen.

You chopped up big tomatoes for your salads.

That's true in the U.S.

too.

My mom never brought home cherry tomatoes.

I called her to check.

Thank you for being willing to come back on Gastropod as a recurring character.

Any time.

Awesome.

I appreciate it.

So I have some questions for you about tomatoes.

Okay.

Do you remember when cherry tomatoes started becoming more popular?

You probably were grown up or at least in high school.

So it must be, I don't know, 20 years.

Are you admitting to people how old I am?

Sorry about that, but you know.

So, well, so you're saying that maybe like the late 80s, early 90s.

Yeah.

I think that's right, because I don't really remember you putting cherry tomatoes in salads.

No, I never did when you were growing up.

It wasn't available.

And then all of a sudden it was.

So I started putting them in because they tasted okay and they looked pretty and it was red.

My mom told me she always needs red in her salads.

I'm with her.

And I also don't remember cherry tomatoes at all until the 80s, early 90s, maybe.

And then they were everywhere.

So what happened between Aztec Mexico and the 1980s?

Is this the key to our mystery?

Perhaps it's a thing where the cherry tomato got forgotten and then reinvented by the Israelis.

Anna wondered that too, so she tried to find out whether the Spanish brought cherry tomatoes with them when they sailed back to Europe from the New World.

They packed tomatoes and a whole bunch of other crops, but were cherry tomatoes on the boats?

And the short answer is they must have been, because Anna found some mentions of cherry tomatoes in European books in the early 1600s.

There's a Swiss botanist named Caspar Bohin,

and the first direct reference to the cherry tomato seems to come in 1623 in a work that he wrote called Illustrated Expositions of Plants.

It's in Latin.

And in that work, he describes and classifies about 6,000 species.

And there's a section on Solanum, nightshades.

And in that section, he writes about a variety.

And there's a Latin phrase there, but it translates to nightshades that are full of clusters in the form of cherries.

So yeah, it's unclear whether these words refer to what we know of today as cherry tomatoes.

But because Bohin described a lot of other different kinds of tomatoes in that same work, you know, the fact that he describes this one specific kind as clusters in the forms of cherries seems to point to the fact that cherry tomatoes did exist in the mid-early 1600s.

So obviously, cherry tomatoes were on at least one boat from the New World, but were a lot of people eating them?

Were they a normal part of people's diets?

It's always hard to know.

There just aren't great historical records of what people were eating.

So there seems to be, you know, through the next several hundred years,

mentions here and there.

It doesn't seem to be very common.

But there's one place in Europe where they were definitely growing cherry tomatoes by at least the 1800s.

And they were pretty excited about them, too.

Santorini.

Santorini is a Greek island, and they are very much connected to the cherry tomato.

So in fact, they recently had this protected designation of origin status approved for the cherry tomato for Santorini.

Protected designation of origin, or PDO, that means that the Santorini cherry tomatoes are protected by law.

They can only be called that if they're actually grown in Santorini.

PDO is usually given to a product that's been bred or developed or invented in a particular region.

Champagne was invented in the Champagne region.

Cheddaring was invented in Cheddar, England.

So they have that for their cherry tomato, which is called Tamatiki Santorini.

And so there's, I would call them unsubstantiated claims that the cherry tomato tomato appeared there in the 1800s.

Okay, so does this PDO imply that the European version of the cherry tomato was invented in Santorini, just like the metaux champonnoise in champagne and cheddaring and cheddar?

Maybe not.

When you plant a regular variety of tomato, you know, what we think of is, let's say, it's called the apple-size tomato.

When you plant them in Santorini, they actually just grow really small.

So they're just a small variety of the tomato fruit.

So if you would take those same seeds and plant them elsewhere, you'd get an apple-sized tomato, not a cherry tomato.

So in fact, the Santorini cherry tomato is just a stunted version of a regular tomato.

It just doesn't get enough nourishment from the volcanic soil and limited water to grow up to its full size.

That doesn't count.

So at least in the 1800s in Greece, we do know that people were eating cherry-sized tomatoes that weren't real cherry tomatoes.

But so is anyone else eating cherry tomatoes at this time, either in Europe or in the U.S.?

Yeah, so again, it's hard to say, right?

Because

how do you know if anybody's eating them?

I mean, this is the question that just keeps popping up.

So, what you have are these little fragments of information, you know, little mentions that you could find in a newspaper or a journal or an article here and there.

And so, you basically just have to do your best to infer from what you find.

There are mentions of some people growing them in their gardens or bringing them to a market or being used for pickling, I think in the early 1900s, or as a garnish, but they don't seem to be very common.

There is one source that notes that they appear to just have been grown as a curiosity and not cultivated for the market.

They're not really seen in big cities, they're not easy to come by, but again, there's these small mentions here and there.

You know, they're at a supermarket in Canada.

There's one mention in the New York Herald Tribune in 1936 that says that cherry tomatoes are not so easy to come by and that it's only, you know, occasionally and then usually in an Italian neighborhood that one discovers them.

You know, from that you can kind of infer that they're, you know, in the early 1900s, they're certainly not everywhere.

This is the status of cherry tomatoes throughout the first half of the 20th century.

You might grow them in your back garden, maybe, but you wouldn't find them in a grocery store.

They really weren't very common.

Arthur Allen agreed.

There was a guy named Charlie Rick who's really Mr.

Tomato.

I mean he did more research and breeding of tomatoes and introduction of like tomato germlines from Peru and places like that than any scientist before or since.

And he was working in UC Davis, University of California Davis in the 50s and 60s, 70s.

And he had a huge home garden and he grew a lot of cherry tomatoes.

And his son, who is about my age and so

is really, I guess, describing the 60s, said that

it would be very unusual.

His father would have dinner parties and serve a lot of cherry tomatoes, and that that was kind of unusual at the time.

So I think in the 60s, probably they weren't widely used.

Okay, so now I'm intrigued.

Cherry tomatoes seem to have gone from super rare to super popular at some point after the 1960s.

What happened?

I'm so glad you asked.

In the 1970s, everything changed for the cherry tomato, thanks to President Nixon.

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Yeah, you have this article in 1971 in the News and Courier about President Nixon and his wife having a lobster dinner with their newly married daughter, Tricia.

And she cooks them a meal that includes stuffed potatoes and a cherry tomato salad.

Anna found more and more mentions of cherry tomatoes leading up to President Nixon, and then, of course, even more after his lobster and cherry tomato dinner.

You do start to see more mentions of the cherry tomato in the 70s and 80s.

So you really start to see the mentions increase dramatically.

So now the mystery is, what is fueling this cherry tomato craze?

I can't imagine that Tricia Nixon Cox deserves all of the credit.

Is this perhaps where the Israelis come in?

So, Israel was making a big push to develop varieties of vegetables that worked in their climate, not just the European climate.

This is only a few decades after the country was founded.

Israel already had a really solid reputation for breeding fruits and vegetables, and in particular for tomatoes.

And this is the part of Anna's story where my people come in, too, in the form of Marks and Spencer's, a staple of the British high street.

So, Marks and Sparks, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is sort of a combination food hall and clothing shop.

Every British woman buys their underwear there.

And one of the two families who founded the company was Jewish.

Their chief food technologist was a guy named Nathan Goldenberg, who first came to Israel in 1959 and he visited a few, you know, every few years afterwards.

And by his own admission, he was a Zionist who was really interested in the development of the Israeli food industry.

And Marks and Spencer had been using cherry tomatoes as a decoration in the grocery section of their store.

And Goldenberg came to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and he went to the Faculty of Agriculture with the idea of selling the cherry tomato as a food item, not just as a decoration.

So he came to these two Israeli scientists, Chaim Rabinowicz and Nachum Kedar, who had been working on tomatoes generally and developing long shelf-life tomatoes.

And so with tomatoes, they slowed down the ripening process.

So that that allowed the tomatoes to stay on the vine for longer, accumulate more sugars, and also it allowed them to last longer in shipments.

So, Goldenberg came to Rabinowicz and Kedar and basically, you know, asked if they were interested in developing a long-shelf-life cherry tomato.

And the way Rabinowicz puts it is that the interest in developing these long-shelf-life cherry tomatoes is mutual.

So, Marks and Spencer's and these two Israeli scientists, Rabinovich and Kadar, they start working together in the late 70s.

And the partnership worked.

The Israelis were able to breed tomatoes that not only stayed on the vine longer and shipped better, they also grew in neat rows rather than clusters.

The scientists called the rows a fishbone.

Because it's just easier to

email the files so that they don't get too big.

So, okay, you've hit record on your cell phone, just tell me.

Okay.

I already did, but I'll do it.

That sounds like the perfect commercial cherry tomato.

So, Nikki, okay, maybe this means the Israelis did invent the cherry tomato, at least the modern variety.

Nice try, Cynthia, but here's the thing.

These fishbone long-life cherry tomatoes bred in Israel, according to Anna, they became popular in the mid-1980s.

But in England, there were cherry tomatoes on the supermarket shelves by the early 1980s.

And the person who gets the credit for introducing them is Bernard Sparks.

We tracked him down in his sort of semi-retirement.

He's been in the tomato biz for a very long time.

Goodness me.

Well, probably since I left college, which was in 1962.

When Bernard started out, tomatoes were crap.

They were described then as sort of round and eight to the pound.

They were sort of a 47, 57 millimeter size, sort of a classic tomato.

That's about one and three-quarters to two and a quarter inches.

Many of them pick, sort of, slightly underripe.

And dare I say it, the flavor was sometimes wanting.

And cherry tomatoes?

Well, cherry tomatoes were probably not on the scene at that time.

They probably, in the amateur sense, they were, but commercially they weren't.

In the 1970s, Bernard was supplying Marks and Spencer's with vegetables.

He was a tomato grower in Kent.

The chairman of Marks and Spencer's, Marcus Seif, of a famous Seif family, had put pressure on his executives to get tomatoes, and I quote, to taste like grandfather used to grow them.

So at the same time as Marks and Spencer's heads to Jerusalem to work with scientists there, they also reach out to their homegrown breeder.

So the executives and in one in particular a chap called Brian Deppy who was a senior technologist at Marks and Spencer's was charged with finding tomatoes with flavor.

And Brian sort of worked tirelessly across the whole sector of fruit and vegetables in M ⁇ S and he was in a

vegetable trial in Essex.

I can remember the story quite clearly.

And he saw Gardener's Delight being grown literally as a bush tomato outside.

He tasted it and said, My goodness me, this has got the potential to be a real flavorsome tomato.

Gardener's Delight, the variety that Brian, the Marks and Spencer's executive, got so excited about, that was a cherry tomato variety.

It was originally developed for home gardeners in East Germany.

But Gardner's Delight, an old-fashioned variety, I think bred in the 1950s, was a very mixed bag, really.

It tasted great, but it wasn't ready for prime prime time.

It just wasn't reliable enough.

So Bernard got to breeding.

So I selected seed from the best three plants and grew them as separate clones.

And the following year, I sowed those seeds and selected the best plants from those.

And over a period of sort of several generations, we did a lot of trials with Marks and Spencer's, with their Spanish growers, with several of their English growers.

And we chose one of the clones and called it GD41.

And that became the

seed source for Marks and Spencer's cherry tomatoes grown sort of really around the world.

Because we grew them not only in England, we grew them in Spain, we grew them in Cyprus, and eventually in South Africa to supply Marks and Spencer's on a year-round basis.

So Bernard invented the modern cherry tomato.

Not so fast, Nikki.

Let's get back to the Israelis.

Because their breeding program at the university, that made a big difference too.

Anna checked out the story with YeSum.

That's the tech transfer office of Hebrew University.

One, I guess, crucial piece of data in supporting the Israeli scientists' claim or the story is that it seems that this technology transfer arm has actually generated or has received a lot of revenue for the sales of these tomato seeds.

So when I actually, so I met with two representatives from YSUM

and they basically told me that the number, you know, the sales figures were confidential.

But I did come across two things online that they were actually surprised that I found.

One was this World Intellectual Property Organization report.

And in it, the vice president of intellectual property at eSUM wrote that eSUM attributes its revenue to three main products.

The first being the cherry tomato seeds.

And the report lists revenue for eSUM at $50 million a year.

So if a large part of the revenue is coming from cherry tomatoes, that implies that we're talking at least figures in the tens of millions annually in terms of revenue for cherry tomato seeds for the Hebrew University.

And then I found another undated page on the Faculty of Agriculture website that said that the sale of the fruit or tomato seeds are bringing in more royalty to the Hebrew University than all other commercialized university discoveries combined.

That is amazing.

Cherry tomato seeds brought in more money to the Hebrew University than all other commercialized discoveries combined.

Yeah, that actually kind of makes sense of the other claim on the airport Hasborough pamphlets that 40% of tomato seeds grown in European hothouses come from Israel.

So, okay, the Israelis bred cherry tomatoes that could ripen more slowly on the vine, and they could ship better and they were easier to pick.

And clearly these cherry tomatoes become the cherry tomatoes, right?

Because the Israelis made millions and millions of dollars off them.

But in terms of which cherry tomatoes made it onto the shelf first, in England it was Bernard's.

He may have started working on cherry tomatoes at the same time as the Israeli scientists, but his clone of that East German variety was commercialized first.

And those first cherry tomatoes, they caught on.

They,

I mean, it became very big business, very big indeed, because this was, I won't say it's the first time we had flavored tomatoes, that would be arrogant to say that.

But these were really

very, very flavorsome.

And here's where this whole tangled story starts to make sense.

Because the Israeli government claims that Israel invented the cherry tomatoes.

But the actual Israeli scientists, Nachem Kedar and Chaim Rabinowicz, they have a different take on it.

And Kedar is, you know, no longer actively working at the Hebrew University.

He's in his 90s, but I talked to Chaim Rabinowicz over email on and off for about a year.

And probably the most interesting thing was that they don't claim to have, these two Israeli scientists don't actually claim to have invented the cherry tomato.

This is what happens when science gets translated by politicians.

So Khaimer Binowich basically said we never claimed to have invented the cherry tomato.

The cherry tomato was there before we started.

He said what that what he did, him and Kedar and others who he was working with, he said that the cherry tomato prior to the 1970s and 1980s was not a marketable product.

It wasn't on the shelves of grocery stores.

And what he did was introduce genes that slowed down the ripening of the fruit and basically made it into a a marketable product.

And back in England, Bernard recognizes the Israeli contribution too.

His cherry tomatoes may have made it onto Marks and Spencer's shelves first, but they weren't the only ones there for very long.

Everyone jumped on the cherry tomato train, breeding better and even more commercial varieties.

Israeli breeders have the Hazira and Zeram Gadira, backed up by the Volcani Institute and some magnificent breeders in Israel, have bred new varieties which have been taken up by growers.

But alongside that, I have to say you've got the Dutch breeders, you've got the Japanese breeders, you've got the French breeders, equally or just as successful, in some cases even more successful.

So to go back to our original question, which is who invented the cherry tomato?

We know that the original breeders, the inventors you could say, those were the native peoples in Mexico.

Our real question now is, who made cherry tomatoes into a commercially successful product?

And that is much harder to answer because lots of people contributed.

It's constant improvement rather than a single invention at this point.

Bernard explained, there's no such thing as the perfect commercial cherry tomato.

Remember that what we're looking for commercially

is a quality fruit.

It's got to look good, it's got to taste good, and it's got to have yield because let's be very clear about it, growers have to make a living.

You know, profit is not a dirty word in my view.

So

we have to go for this sort of midway utopia, as it were, where

if you go for the very best flavor, the ultimate flavour, then you do reduce the yield.

So you have to go for the midway point where you optimise the yield and optimize the quality.

And that's not all.

Cherry tomatoes also need to be bred to last long and ship well.

Shelf life is a big deal.

That means that tomato breeders are constantly tweaking all these variables.

It's a balancing act.

Which quality is optimized in any particular variety.

And what that means is that there is no single cherry tomato inventor.

But what there definitely was is a cherry tomato movement in the 1980s and 90s.

These new commercial varieties swept the nation's salad bowls.

They came along at the right time.

In the 1960s and 70s, Americans and Brits, at least, had started to wake up to the fact that their tomatoes tasted like crap.

Again, my mom confirmed it.

The ones that you can get in a supermarket are horrible.

They taste like rubber.

the skin is very tough.

And I s I hated them.

There's actually a reason tomatoes tasted that bad.

Arthur explained it.

Mostly had to do with how they were grown.

For years, you know, we got a lot of our tomatoes during the off season in the United States from Florida where it was warm, but they would be picked green and then gassed with with gradual amounts of ethylene so that they would sort of ripen or rather turn red in time to be sold at the supermarket although when you pick them that young they don't actually ripen properly and they're missing a lot of the flavors that that you get if you ripen them on the vine.

Cherry tomatoes provided a solution in a smaller package but then cherry tomatoes came and they at least tasted

they still didn't taste like tomatoes but they they tasted okay.

Yeah because cherry tomatoes regardless of the variety usually are sweeter than other than bigger tomatoes and this is because they have a larger volume of the inner sort of liquidy part of the tomato which is called the locule compared to the fleshy parts and it's that locule that that sort of uh

liquid goopy area where the seeds are that has more of the sugars than the flesh and so cherry tomatoes are almost always sweeter if grown in the same way say that a regular sized tomato and so cherries are a shortcut to flavor to me that's the really interesting thing about this mystery this shortcut industrial tomatoes could be grown at scale and shipped and stored forever and they tasted like rubber and people

like your mom Cynthia people were not cool with that they wanted tomato flavor but rather than change the industrial system grocery stores and tomato breeders worked together to create a shortcut a commercial long-life tomato that was guaranteed to have more flavor because it was small.

Smaller fruits and vegetables nearly always have more flavor and often more sugar because the plants concentrate those flavor chemicals in the smaller varieties.

Plus, they're portable, they're poppable, they have that fun squirt.

Our Leibowitz went into Harvard Square for us and asked people how they became cherry tomato converts.

Well, I think they're more sweet, more flavorful, because they're smaller.

Like, I think, yeah, they just taste better, I guess.

Actually, it is small, yep.

So,

especially the women, it is uh the green.

They take uh to anywhere, so it is it is easy to eat.

They're practical.

Cherry tomatoes by themselves are more practical to eat.

No one really just goes, like, mmm, I just want a tomato.

You know, you don't just

also I think it has to do a lot with like uh a lot of like fast food salads use cherry tomatoes.

Cherry tomatoes, of course, are sweeter, which is why they well the varieties we've grown have all been sweeter, which is why uh they do appeal to the younger generation of children in particular, and it's seen the sales increase dramatically.

I can grow a cherry tomato that someone would want to eat in my back garden that gets crappy sunlight, and I'm a total black thumb.

That's all I ever grow is cherry tomatoes.

You know, when I think of a cherry tomato, the one thing that always comes to my mind is how it always, like, pop, you know, you just have to be careful eating it, because it always pops in the wrong way.

You know, if it pops in the wrong way, like, it could squirt tomato seeds out onto the person sitting next to you.

Of course, now I've got grape, I'm sorry, now I've got, we've got grape tomatoes now, which I guess are

further evolution.

I guess next they're going to have pea tomatoes or something like that.

Be careful what you wish for.

Tinier and tinier tomatoes, little current-sized ones.

They're the new thing now.

Which is funny because it's like we've come full circle to the tomato's wild ancestor again.

Well done, humans.

We've reinvented nature.

We're brilliant.

But Nikki, we started this episode with Anna's quest.

So let's give her the last word here.

Anna, did Israel invent the cherry tomato?

That's the question of the day.

Well, you know, from what I found from going down these multiple rabbit holes over the course of many years,

I would say that the evidence is consistent with these two scientists making the genetic modifications to the cherry tomato

that made the cherry tomato the marketable product that it is today.

Sorry, that's not a yes or no.

No, no.

That was the political answer.

I like it.

You'll still be allowed to visit Israel.

I hope so.

You know, Nikki, the thing that I find kind of crazy about this whole story is how huge a role Marks and Spencer's played.

Do not underestimate the power of Marks and Spencer's.

Someday I'll tell you all about the chicken Kiev file.

I am looking forward to that one.

But I guess the story of the cherry tomato remains somewhat mysterious.

Lots of people, lots of countries, lots of different and delicious varieties.

It's not a linear story.

There is nothing linear about the cherry tomato.

Thanks, this episode to Anna Wexler, whose article, Seeding Controversy, Did Israel Invent the Cherry Tomato?

is in the summer 2016 issue of Gastronomica.

She led us down this rabbit hole.

And I think, out the other side, you know where to look for us.

Thanks also to Arthur Allen, author of the book Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato.

And to Bernard Sparks, tomato grower and manager extraordinaire.

He's also responsible for introducing the British public to something called the Straw Matto, a strawberry tomato thing that you serve dipped in chocolate.

I'll leave you to investigate that one on your own time.

Thank you to Ari Leibowitz, who helped us out with some tomato taping.

And remember, if you support us at the $5 per episode level on Patreon or $9 a month through our website, gastropod.com, you'll get a special email full of all the cherry tomato trivia we couldn't squeeze into this episode.

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And come back in two weeks for more Gastropod Goodness.

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