Who Invented the Cherry Tomato?

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2016

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1960s, cherry tomatoes were nearly impossible to find in the grocery store. By the 1990s, it was hard to get a salad without them. Somehow, within a couple of decades, the tiny tomatoes had taken over. Where did they come from? And who lay behind their sudden rise to glory? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Anna Wexler. I'm a PhD student in the Science, Technology and Society program
0:07.4	at MIT.
0:08.4	And how did you first get interested in the topic of cherry tomatoes?
0:12.9	Oh, tomatoes, not tomatoes.
0:14.7	Oh, don't worry. I'll be saying tomatoes. It's okay.
0:19.4	Well I was living in Israel for a number of years and working as a freelance science
0:23.8	writer. And on one trip, I think I was going to Greenland or Iceland and I was at
0:29.8	the airport at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport. And I came across these pamphlets and they
0:36.3	were geared towards Israelis basically explaining to them how to talk about their country, to
0:43.0	citizens of other countries. And they were really strange. So some of them said, you know,
0:47.5	like, or make eye contact, they said, speak concisely, long speeches are likely to lose
0:53.6	your audience's interest, use humor, it helps. And there was a page that had some talking
1:00.8	points that basically that said Israel developed the famous cherry tomatoes. But basically
1:06.0	Israel was trying to show or present itself as a very technologically advanced society.
1:12.8	So along with cherry tomatoes, Israel claimed to have invented drip irrigation, ICQ and
1:19.8	epilates. So basically Israel was trying to present itself to the world as a technologically
1:24.0	advanced and an innovative society.
1:26.7	Wait, so Anna is saying that Israel is saying it invented the cherry tomato and the epilate.
1:35.3	Many of you might not have heard of this famous contraption that rips your body hair out
1:38.6	by its roots, but some of you have felt the pain. But we are not a show about body hair.
1:43.6	We are gastropod, the show that looks at food, to the lens of science and history. I'm
1:48.0	Nicola Twilly and I'm Cynthia Graber. And this week we have a mystery to solve. Did Israel
	...

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