Tomato, Tomato, Part 2

While the so-called “golden apple” has at times been viewed with suspicion, it has become a staple of summertime cuisine and may one day follow us to farms on other worlds. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the tomato.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
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

(00:23):
explored at some length, which is 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

(00:44):
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 what say, you're which European nation, and during what
period of the tomatoes um rise to power as a

(01:07):
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,
a 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

(01:29):
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,

(01:51):
as we discussed previously, when the tomato was first introduced
to Europe from meso America, of course, in meso America,
among the waddle speaking p bowl 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

(02:14):
fit to put in one's 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

(02:35):
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

(02:57):
was still pretty widely were ard it 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. So he
says that around eighteen twenty, it was still a pretty

(03:18):
widespread belief within the United States that tomatoes were somehow
inedible and maybe poisonous, 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

(03:42):
to a British observer, Americans served tomatoes every day, prepared
in every imaginable way, and were the scene a 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

(04:03):
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 good story. Okay, So, as we alluded to
last time, many books and supposed botanical or horticultural experts
in Europe and the colonies since the sixteenth century seemed

(04:25):
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

(04:45):
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 call in
their dispensatory, and Miller even in the seventeen fifties noted that, well,
even some English people are eating tomatoes in soup. Uh,

(05:08):
though at the same time he says, quote there are
persons who think them not wholesome. So this ambiguity still
exists somewhat, But by the seventeen fifties it's clear that
some doctors and medical students are trying trying experiments with
tomatoes as medicine, and some English people just straight up
put him in the stew uh. And apparently an early

(05:31):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:14):
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,

(06:36):
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

(06:59):
have known what a tomaked 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 eighteenth century as a medical plant.
For example, James Meece who published one of the first

(07:20):
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

(07:44):
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, naza, and vomiting along
with fever. You know, if there's something wrong with your guts,

(08:05):
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

(08:27):
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 the sword. Yeah,

(08:51):
I can see that Adam Scott. I also see a
little bit of of of Grand mof Tarke in here,
So it's kind of like a combination of the two
for me. Absolute lutely 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

(09:13):
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

(09:35):
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

(09:59):
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 replace calamel because
they were less harmful, predicting that quote, a chemical extract

(10:20):
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

(10:44):
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 each year tomatoes, you know, drink some
tomato sauce on the train and you'll be right as right. Uh.

(11:05):
To continue with with Smith's paragraph here, quote Bennett urged
all citizens to eat tomatoes raw, cooked, or in ketchup,
as they were quote the most healthy article of all
the material alimentary. Bennett included recipes for tomato sauce, fried tomatoes,
tomato pickles, tomato ketchup, and eating raw tomatoes. I don't

(11:26):
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

(11:49):
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

(12:10):
kind of rotting, And even into the twentieth century, alarmingly,
calumel 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 calamel and

(12:33):
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 dysenterry, you're also taking a laxative and this

(12:56):
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

(13:19):
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

(13:39):
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 to Aato Panacey a lecture in dozens of outlets.

(14:02):
He wrote letters forwarding his address to farming and horticultural magazines,
to household magazines, um. And he also wrote to other
influential Americans to convince 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

(14:24):
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

(14:47):
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 of steaking 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,

(15:09):
you have to use like a metal cage and um.
And then as that they grow more and more gigantic,
you end up or at least 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.

(15:31):
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 Ben it might be confused

(15:54):
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 the
fruit of the modern tomato. It's especially it's larger forms.
I mean, it's it's gigantic, it's swollen, it's breaking apart

(16:16):
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

(16:37):
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 or

(17:00):
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 eighteen thirties by this
doctor named John Cook Bennett. Now we talked about how

(17:20):
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

(17:42):
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 and involving a
bunch of alleged sexual impropriety, including adultery and maybe some

(18:05):
kind of unsanctioned polygamy, with what Smith viewed as as
dubious spiritual or revelatory justifications. After Bennett was banished 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

(18:25):
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

(18:47):
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

(19:09):
uh Andrew F. Smith points out that whatever his possibly
dubious medical or moral credentials, 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

(19:30):
of tomatoes in the United States. Uh So, Bennett eventually
predicted that you know you're you're gonna 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

(19:50):
eighteen thirty five, a doctor A. J. Holcomb of Glassboro, Alabama,
started producing pills made out of a tomato extra act,
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

(20:11):
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

(20:35):
the compound extract. It has been used by many in
the city and out of it, and is as near
we can learn, generally approve. 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

(20:58):
evils resulting from the murph curial practice. And remember this
because calamel is mercury chloride, and we'll 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 bad, even if they can't
explain why. Um, and that you may have to choose

(21:20):
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

(21:40):
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 billiest disease eas is
that they were said to counteract, it seems to me

(22:03):
that simply by being offered as an alternative to calamel.
Tomato pills 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

(22:24):
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 could get some placebo effect
just from the fact that it tastes nice. Maybe not,

(22:45):
I don't know, that might be reaching, but anyway, 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

(23:07):
the attacks against tomato pills did not make the accurate
charge that or at least I would guess what is accurate,
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

(23:27):
of bringing on implausible side effects, side effects I would
judge to be very implausible. For example, uh Andrew Smith
cites one dctor 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,

(23:52):
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 forties,
Smith notes that tomato extract was listed as an ingredient
in lots of supposed panacea is even pills that weren't
just tomato pills. You know, you know this is doctor

(24:16):
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

(24:37):
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 were tomato those were eaten. This

(25:01):
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
they're 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,

(25:23):
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

(25:44):
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 universe, silly accepted, and extremely popular food in America
and counteract some of the lingering concerns that might have

(26:07):
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

(26:29):
are nutrients present in tomatoes that have been investigated as
possibly beneficial to health. Just one major example is lycopene.
Likecopene 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,

(26:50):
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

(27:12):
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

(27:35):
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,

(27:57):
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 bio markers of vascular
risk needs further investigation. So, uh, it seems like, unfortunately,
like many things studies into the health effects of food,

(28:18):
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

(28:40):
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 lycope based supplements. You know, that's the

(29:02):
kind of thing. Consult with your doctor about that. But
it looks like, on balance it's probably more likely than
not that lycopene 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 I don't
have this quote pulled out, but I remember he cites
a doctor writing in the late eighteen hundreds who said, look,

(29:24):
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

(29:46):
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
propably learned earlier in my life, but it was one

(30:07):
that my wife knew, and so it's it's one we've
stuck to that that that tomatoes they go out on
the counter or by 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

(30:27):
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

(30:49):
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

(31:10):
chef had a hundred years ago and it's been repeated
from chef to chef ever since. Yeah. 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

(31:32):
seals in 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.

(31:54):
You know, this question reminds me a little bit of
our our invention interview with Jeff Beach bone Berry and
I believe you asked the question about uh, lemon and
lime juice, in particular about fresh squeze lime juice, and
he mentioned that some mixologists argue that it's better if
the lime juice has been squeezed but then placed in

(32:16):
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'll
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,

(32:39):
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 text you're
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

(33:01):
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 a number of days instead
of at room temperature. Just one example, as a study
by Jong at All published in Proceedings of the National

(33:24):
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

(33:46):
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

(34:06):
in cold storage for a week or whatever, this causes
a down regulation in the expression of specific genes in
the tomatoes cells. 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,

(34:30):
remove the violins and the wood winds, 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 that's nice and I think, you know,
there's something to that, Like the rapturous experience of eating

(34:52):
a really good tomato is this complex combination of kind
of like earthy, grassy, juicy, you know, mells 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

(35:15):
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 with the grocery store, that tomato has almost definitely
already been chilled for some time during transport and storage.

(35:38):
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

(36:01):
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 are also up there in
the top five. Yeah. So often the large scale tomato
agriculture involves harvesting tomatoes that are still relatively hard and
green and then packing them in cold storage and exposing

(36:25):
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

(36:47):
you get at the grocery store or 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

(37:08):
transport process have also driven the selection of particular tomato
cultivars that are not necessarily the best to 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,

(37:29):
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

(37:51):
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 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

(38:11):
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,

(38:35):
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,

(38:56):
that's not how you're going to be eating a tomato. Uh.
And they've in 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 didn't even
notice all that big of a difference between a tomato

(39:18):
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

(39:40):
the fridge, and then you take it out of the
fridge when you're ready to eat. 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. That's good, that's good. But then the second

(40:03):
half of this is if your tomato has already been refrigerated,
and this would apply to almost any tomato you would
get it a grocery store or any kind of mass
agricultural vendor. In that case, 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

(40:25):
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

(40:47):
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 sages. This is partially due to moist you're
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,

(41:11):
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

(41:31):
want to go farther, you can even do what Kinji
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 them

(41:51):
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. Thank alright, we're back. So at this point,
tomatoes a spread pretty much everywhere. As Michael Pollen pointed

(42:13):
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.

(42:37):
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,

(42:59):
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 added.
And then oyster sauce. Oh, that sounds like a delicious

(43:21):
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,

(43:42):
where tomatoes are recent enough um arrival in Chinese cuisine
that they haven't completely 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 are the
successes for the tomato as opposed to some thing like
um Italian cuisine, which it really can be kind of

(44:04):
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 Italian Americans were tomato forward. Yeah. So here's

(44:25):
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.
When the aliens get here, they're gonna we're gonna be like, oh,
thank you for coming to like uplift our society and

(44:45):
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, 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.

(45:08):
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. The cost of getting
the food into orbit alone is already incredibly high, compounded

(45:31):
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 um costly deliveries, if not sustain colonists completely.

(45:51):
Oh boy, I can't wait to subsist entirely on a
diet of like protein that's created from algae and incubators.
I'll remember in the Silent Running that's just what Bruce
Dern'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

(46:13):
cultivated banana, 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

(46:37):
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 with out soil. Uh,

(47:01):
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

(47:22):
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.

(47:44):
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

(48:05):
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 and Viability of Seeds 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.

(48:28):
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,

(48:48):
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,

(49:11):
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,
aeroponics systems can reduce water usage by of, fertilizer usage

(49:34):
by and 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

(49:58):
ponics system, they can then hands plant them from a
growing chamber to the soil in just ten days, and
this apparently allows growers to produce six tomato crops cycles
per year instead of the traditional one or two crop cycles.
I believe aeroponics have been used in the I s
s already, haven't they? Yeah? I believe so there've been
There have been certainly been some experiments with aeroponics. It's

(50:20):
like I say, it's something that it's not new in
terms of uh NASA research 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
eth Okay, Well, in that paper by Elgin and Guni,

(50:42):
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 regulars is
full of perclorates. These are chemical compounds containing the perclorate
ion which are harmful to humans and a challenge to
my grow organisms as well, And these would need to

(51:02):
be stripped out of the regular if before you could
plant anything in it. Furthermore, the Martian regulars 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 environment of microbial life, fung gui, arthropods,
organic nutrients. So they argue that you need to add

(51:24):
something that you need to essentially resurrect that soil. I
mean you 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

(51:45):
for your own garden at gardening supply stores. You just
get a big container of earthworm poop. Well it's got it.
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,

(52:07):
we should note that the golden apples of Terra can
be grown via high hydroponics and aero ponics, so both
of the 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 Mars, it sounds
like the tomatoes future would be bright. Now. To come
back to the fime link paper um that study, basically,

(52:30):
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

(52:51):
NASA's Mars regular simulant j s C Mars one A. Okay,
there's actually they're actually several different versions of Regulus similant
out there, like this one is j s C Mars
one A, but there's also one called j SC one
A that is the lunar version, and there are some
other varieties out there. Um Mars one A is based

(53:14):
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 Nene 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

(53:36):
as a cattle fodder to enrich the soil, and they
cultivated ten different crops uh garden crests, rocket, tomato, radish, rye, keeno, spinach, chives,
pas and leak and they assimilated the properties of lunar
and Martian regulars and also normal soil potting soil from
Earth as a control. And if the tin crops. Uh.

(53:59):
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

(54:19):
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
trays 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

(54:42):
on 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

(55:03):
turned red whoa. And there are other studies and programs
looking at space tomato is as well. One I came
across is an operation known as space UM 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

(55:28):
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.

(55:48):
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 it crops to colonize, uh,
you know, on a space station or another planet, you
could probably work back home to try to engineer sort

(56:09):
of the perfect version of the organism to take with you. Yeah.
And they also point out that this this is not
only something to could be utilized in aum, 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

(56:31):
and tomato cages, and they're just so dern heavy, right.
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

(56:53):
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 side. Now that
one of the interesting things about this is the Space
team developed these tomato is not via selective breeding, but
via Crisper case nine gene editing technology. Yeah. I don't

(57:13):
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

(57:34):
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

(57:54):
any onboard animals such as human beings. So there seems
to be a lot, you know of 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 energy demands of the humans
who bring them there. Robert, I just thought of a

(58:15):
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 the cage, right because they
wouldn't be dragged down by gravity. Well that's true, yeah, um,

(58:39):
But I guess on on that front, I wonder about,
you know, because we've all seen those tomatoes 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, one, or if the

(59:00):
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,

(59:21):
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 missed the

(59:43):
point made years ago, and it's going to be Mickey
Mouse shaped watermelons. Like that's that's the future of fruit
in 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 hmen and tomato interaction, nor did we even really
get to touch on everything that's going on with tomato science,

(01:00:06):
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 though, it gives it gives
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

(01:00:29):
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 Boil 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 you rate, review, and subscribe if you
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(01:00:49):
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
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(01:01:12):
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