Tomatoes, the Sacred and the Profane

The tomato’s story did not begin in Italy. It began in the Andes, small and defiant, growing wild long before it ever met olive oil. The Aztecs called it xitomatl — the navel fruit — for its rounded shape and the dimple at its base, and in the markets of Tenochtitlan it appeared in every shape and colour — large, small, serpent-shaped, nipple-shaped; red, very red, yellow, almost gold. The pulp was crushed with chiles and ground squash seeds, worked into sauces and ladled over fish and shellfish. Further north, among the Pueblo, its seeds were eaten in the belief that they might bring on visions like the future flickering just beyond sight.

As the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has pointed out, staples are almost always sacred because people depend on them: they possess divine power. And the fact that staples, in their turn, usually depend on people for cultivation does not seem to compromise their sacred status. Elizabeth Morán traces this same idea through Aztec ritual life in Sacred Consumption - how plants could structure the relationship between the individual, the divine, and the natural world.

Europe, however, did not share that cosmology, at least not at first. When the Spanish carried the tomato back across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, the continent simply did not know what to make of it. The old world was skeptical. It looked too similar to deadly nightshade and mandrake, plants already known for poison and delirium, and it certainly wasn’t mentioned in the Bible, which did little to calm anyone down. In 1597, an influential English herbalist John Gerard went so far as to describe it as ”corrupt” and “of rank and stinking savor”. It would take time for Europe to change its mind and treat the tomato as something that could be grown and trusted.

The tomato crossed oceans again. In North America it arrived with the same questions trailing behind it. Many farmers knew how to grow it, but not what to do with it once it ripened. By the 1820s, recipes began appearing in local newspapers, but rumors of poison still clung to the plant. Then came the hornworm. By the 1830s, tomato patches were being raided by a thick-bodied green caterpillar, “an object of much terror” three or four inches long, with oblique white streaks down its sides and a horn sticking out from its back that, according to The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs and Cultivator Almanac (1867),  could kill you with a touch and poison the fruit by crawling over it. But in time, the panic passed and it was understood for what it was: a worm eating leaves.

Familiarity, repeated long enough, becomes its own kind of faith. I grew up Catholic. I understand the comfort of ritual. The repetition. The quiet endurance of belief. The small gestures performed with conviction. You kneel. You stand. You kneel again. You return to the same mutterings “pleeeeeease”, the same movements, even when certainty wavers. Especially when it does. Some habits are just another form of prayer. For three years now, I have tried to grow tomatoes. Most years, I lose them. The blight comes first, blackening the leaves almost overnight. Or the cold lingers too long in spring. Sometimes the vines stretch tall and promising and then collapse before they ever set fruit. I’ve pulled up more failed plants than I care to admit. And yet, every March, I start again.

Seed catalogs describe tomatoes with a kind of reverence usually reserved for saints. “Resilient.” “Faithful producer.” “Reliable even in adverse conditions.” You would think they were describing a person. And perhaps that is the point. We have always preferred our plants to carry a little more meaning than they strictly need to. Perhaps that is the real continuity in the tomato’s long migration. Not sauce. Not superstition. But the ritual of it — the way it keeps asking for belief.  The stubborn hope of planting again, even when last year’s failures are still fresh, is its own liturgy.A seed pressed into soil. A season entrusted to weather. A gardener behaving the same way across centuries: to plant first, and rationalize later.