we hate tomatoes. we want to eradicate the seed from the earth.
the internet's most comprehensive list of antitomato facts — 16 of them. these are not opinions: they are facts, and the world is simply too dumb to see them yet. each one carries the argument for it underneath, because a one-line jab never convinced anybody.
the entire world knew this at one point in time and some of you still eat them! the tomato is a nightshade — the same plant family as deadly nightshade and tobacco — and it defends itself chemically. tomatine sits in the leaves, the stems and the unripe green fruit; solanine sits in the rest. europe refused to touch the fruit for two hundred years on exactly that basis. they were not being stupid. they read the plant correctly and then blamed the wrong part of dinner.
a tomato is a sealed bag of wet, seeded gel inside a skin that bursts when you look at it. it has a unique texture separating it from all other natural food vegetation on earth — that particular squeak, and then the slump. it is as much food as a twinkie is cake: a manufactured texture wearing a vegetable's clothes.
red is the colour of evil. blood is red and it triggers fear. reptiles with red are venomous. stop signs and red lights are warnings. every animal that has ever needed to be taken seriously has been issued red, and the tomato — unprompted — chose it, and grew it in a shiny skin so that you would notice. do not ever wear red.
a tomato seed carries a gluing effect, sticking to anything and everything it touches — skin, cloth, fur, the sole of a shoe. it is the reason a dropped tomato does not merely fall: it attaches, then travels, then grows. that is not a fruit. that is an infection with a stalk, spreading like a deadly virus.
tomatoes are weeds. they grow in any climate, in any earth, in any direction, and they do not stop. they volunteer in cracks, in compost, in the gap between a wall and a path. a plant that grows where nothing was invited is not a crop. it is an infestation with a harvest date — a nuisance that feeds you so that you will carry it somewhere new.
tomatoes are berries. they are wrongly taxed as vegetables and wrongly kept as fruits. vegetables give seed through flowering, fruit comes from a tree, and the tomato does neither of those things properly. it has been mislabelled since the beginning: the argument was taken to the highest court in the land, and the court decided against the botany, on purpose, for the tariff. in fact, tomatoes are poisonous berries.
tomatoes expel an aromatic odour produced from dangerous folic acid gases. it comes off the leaves and the stems, it is released on contact, it hangs in the room and it settles on your hands. it is the plant telling you what it is. people call that smell fresh. it is not fresh. it is a warning.
tomato leaves are eaten by one species of caterpillar — the tobacco hornworm, and i love these little guys. it eats the poison, stores the poison, and becomes toxic to every bird that tries it. the tomato's leaves are so bad that the only creature willing to eat them has to turn itself into a weapon to survive the meal.
haul them down any bumpy road in harvest season and they come off the truck. tomatoes rotting on roads, lost in transport, will torture locals and unsuspecting travellers — they land, they split, they sit in the sun, and the smell settles over the shoulder of the road and stays there. be very careful on those roads. tomatoes can kill.
tomatoes account for 15% of all food allergies — roughly one in seven. not the most common, but nothing like the footnote it is treated as either. the tomato is one of a short list of ordinary foods that a doctor will simply tell you to stop eating, and nobody argues about whether it was worth it.
tomatoes are more wretched than skunk spray — and that is why tomatoes are used to bathe in to clean off skunk. the tomato's smell does not remove the skunk's, it out-competes it. you cannot beat a stink with a smell unless the second smell is worse, and everybody already knew which of the two was worse. that is why the tomato was the thing they reached for.
a goat will eat a tin can. a goat will eat the drywall off the inside of a shed. put a tomato pie in front of one and it will refuse — and if it does not refuse, it will regret the decision inside the hour. we are not the only species that has worked this out. we are only the species that keeps eating it anyway.
tomatoes are thrown at horrific stage performances because there is nothing more humiliating available at short notice. the whole history of the theatre rests on the assumption that the tomato is the most insulting object a person can legally throw. everybody knows this. nobody disputes it. it is the one thing the audience and the performer have ever agreed on.
tomatoes are not ketchup, catsup or catchup — those are 60% sugar with tomato as the flavouring. the tomato has never once been the point of it; it was only ever the vehicle that carried the sugar to your mouth. nobody in the history of eating has ever had ketchup for the tomato.
tomatoes do not prevent, cure, or increase the causes of cancer. the lycopene industry would prefer a different sentence. this is the one the evidence supports: the tomato is neutral to your health, and it does not deserve one minute of the devotion it gets.
tomatoes are not used in east asian cooking. those cuisines are very good food, they have been cooking for a very long time, and they have never needed it — and the people who eat that way live longer than anyone. the tomato is a western problem, grown westward and exported outward, and everybody who could have stopped it was too polite.
if you're using these facts for research projects in school, you're insane.