The earliest tomatoes were little sour berries. They grew among low bushes in dry, sunny places in the Andes Mountains in South America. It was about 350 million years ago.
Tomato plants are relative to nightshade (茄属植物), which has poison. The leaves and stems of tomato plants have poison, but the berries are good to eat. The berries are red so that animals can find them easily and eat them. The animals carry the seeds to other places. That was how earliest tomato plants found new places to grow. Tomatoes are also relative to tobacco, chili peppers and potatoes.
When people first came to South America about 20,000 years ago, they ate these tiny wild tomatoes. Travelers brought a few kinds of wild tomato plants from the Andes to Central America. there the ancestors of the Maya began to far them. Nobody knows exactly when people began farming tomatoes, but it probably was much later than corn and beans, and it was surely before 500 BC. These Central American fanners bred tomatoes to be bigger and sweeter than the wild ones.
By the time Spanish explorers got to Tenochtitlan in Mexico in 1521 AD, the Aztec people ere eating a lot of tomatoes. made a sauce of chopped (剁碎的) tomatoes, onions, salt and chili peppers that was a lot like our salsa. The word "tomato" comes from their Nahuatl word "tomato".
Because tomatoes weren't farmed until pretty late, farmers further north had not yet been able to adapt heir growing season to working in North America. Even today, it's pretty hard to get your tomatoes ripe in the northern parts of North America before the growing season ends.
