Hey thatsa some plump tomata!
My Boss, his name is Tom, walks in one morning, announces "You know, Reynoldsburg Ohio, is the birth place of the tomato." and pretty much leaves. I, of course, keeper of the Mediterranean position on such important issues, am stunned. How could anyone claim that the birthplace of the tomato is in Ohio. The very thought of it made me laughed. I laughed!
I think about the fact that colonists in New England thought that the tomato was poisonous. Wasn't Plymouth Rock before Johnny Appleseed was a dream in his mother's core let alone marching through Ohio spewing his seed. Think about it? Birth place of the apple maybe! But how could Ohio be the birthplace of the tomato. Weren' t they putting a fine marinara on all that spaghetti that Marco Polo and his Uncles brought back from the Orient? That was Italy and a couple centuries short of Ohio!
But he, Tom, and his son tell me they have both seen the sign, Birthplace of the Tomato, that adorns the City of Reynoldsburg or is it a Corporation? A little geography please. Reynoldsburg is an eastern suburb of Columbus. And wasn't that city named after the glorious Italian Explorer Christopher Columbus who discovered India, okay so he was half a world away, but there was no AAA back in those days to provide a Triptych showing heavy construction delays around the Canary Islands. Nor did he have a GPS that could plot his location on the earth to within the skin of a that self-same tomato that concerns us here today.
Nor does he have a high speed cable internet connection at 1.5 Gbps download, sadly only 100 kbps upload to keep me from being a server. So I look up The History of the Tomato. It irks me! Tom is kinda right. I hang, as I'm sure you do, expectantly on "kinda".
The True Story of the Tomato. Here is what I remember. I'm not looking it up again.
The tomato a product originally of Spain was an ugly small football shaped orange thing with spines that ran the length of it. Looking a lot like a wrinkled plum tomato only not nearly so healthy. It was eaten and sauced in Spain, in France and in Italy. Remember Columbus and the really swell bunch of guys that followed him looking for El Dorado and killing whole populations of Yucatan and Mexico Indians. Well those Grandees brought this sick little tomato with them.
It took some time about three or four centuries but the sickly icky little tomato wended it's way north. Let's skip forward to about 1870 when a man named Alexander W. Livingston (Mr. Livingston, I presume) bred and horticultured our wild growing tomato into a variety he called Paragon and five years later he invented the Acme tomato. Why, I am thinking to myself at this moment, a glass of fine Chianti at the ready (at least, Ohio doesn't claim the grape), didn't they call him Alex Tomatoseed? History clearly needs some revision! I know I haven't made it manifestly clear, but old Livingston was the pride of Reynoldsburg Ohio. And if you go to the web site, (I could not resist) not only does a tomato flash fly around for a little, but Reynoldsburg is proclaimed the Birthplace of the Tomato. But subtle reader look under the address of the municipal building and read: and I copy and paste: Birthplace of the Domestic Tomato! Exclamation mine. For proof I give you the URL http://www.ci.reynoldsburg.oh.us/ and I rest my case. What was my case? I forget! But I like Joe Colombo who got shot down by the mob in New York City at a rally proclaiming that Italians are not, as apparently he, mobsters and second class citizens, will not be pushed around. As for Tom, well, I'll make him an offer!