Tomato Truths!
1.Believe it or not, tomatoes aren’t always red. They can be yel-low, pink, purple, black and even white!
2.The biggest tomato fight in the world happens each year in the small Spanish town of Buñol. The festival, called La Tomatina, involves 40,000 people throwing 150,000 tomatoes at each other.
3.Tomatoes are the official state vegetable of New Jersey. Tomato juice is the official state beverage of Ohio.
4.Tomatoes are rich in lycopene, an antioxidant that is good for the heart and effective against certain cancers. Tomatoes are also packed with vitamins A and C, calcium and potassium.
5.Think of tomatoes as quintessentially Italian? Actually they origi-nated in the South American Andes of Peru. They were first used as a food by the Aztecs in Southern Mexico.
6.Tomato seedlings have been grown in space.
7.There are around 10,000 varieties of tomatoes worldwide.
8.According to the Guinness World Record (as of 2013) the heavi-est tomato weighed 7 pounds, 12 ounces and was grown in Ok-lahoma.
9.Heinz Tomato Ketchup has a speed limit! If the sauce pours at more than 0.028 miles per hour it is considered too runny and rejected!
10.The first tomatoes in Europe may originally have been yellow and they were called ‘pomo d’oro, meaning ‘golden apple.’
By Laura Cox
