Indiana State Fair named 2009 as "the Year of Tomato". Click for knowledge, fun facts, recipes, and activities presented on Indiana state government website.

Tomato & Definition:
a fruit in science, but a vegetable in legislation

Botanically, a tomato is the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant: therefore it is a fruit or, more precisely, a berry. However, the tomato is not as sweet as those foodstuffs usually called fruits and, from a culinary standpoint, it is typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, as are vegetables, rather than at dessert in the case of most fruits.

This argument has had legal implications in the United States. In 1887, U.S. tariff laws that imposed a duty on vegetables but not on fruits caused the tomato's status to become a matter of legal importance. The U.S. Supreme Court settled the controversy on May 10, 1893 by declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use, that they are generally served with dinner and not dessert (Nix v. Hedden (149 U.S. 304)). The holding of the case applies only to the interpretation of the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883, and the court did not purport to reclassify the tomato for botanical or other purposes other than for paying a tax under a tariff act.

Tomato & Health
Cancer Protector VS Salmonella Outbreak Source

Tomatoes is believed to benefit the heart among other things. They contain lycopene, one of the most powerful natural antioxidants, which, especially when tomatoes are cooked, has been found to help prevent prostate cancer. Lycopene has also been shown to improve the skin's ability to protect against harmful UV rays. Tomato varieties are available with double the normal vitamin C (Doublerich), 40 times normal vitamin A (97L97), high levels of anthocyanin (P20 Blue), and two to four times the normal amount of lycopene (numerous available cultivars with the high crimson gene).

Click to search in the nutrients database from USDA.

However, on October 30, 2006, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that tomatoes might have been the source of a salmonella outbreak causing 172 illnesses in 18 states. As of July 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suspected that the contaminated food product was a common ingredient in fresh salsa, such as raw tomato, fresh jalapeño pepper, fresh serrano pepper, and fresh cilantro. The CDC maintains that "it is likely many more illnesses have occurred than those reported." Applying a previous CDC estimated ratio of non-reported salmonellosis cases to reported cases (38.6:1), one would arrive at an estimated 40,273 illnesses from this outbreak.

Click to view the investigate report by CDC, updated on Aug 28, 2008.

Tomato Pickers: Slave Labor
45 cents per bucket, a rate that has remained unchanged for thirty years in Florida

"According to the Florida Tomato Committee, during the 2005-2006 growing season, Florida farmers were paid $10.27 per twenty-five-pound box of tomatoes. The migrants who pick the tomatoes, however, are paid an average of 45 cents per bucket, a rate that has remained unchanged for thirty years.

To earn $50 in a day, an Immokalee picker must harvest two tons of tomatoes, or 125 buckets. Each bucket weighs about thirty-two pounds. Once a worker has picked enough tomatoes to fill it-about fifty, depending on the size-he must then hoist the bucket onto his shoulder and walk/run across soft, spongy, lumpy soil to the dumpeador, an overseer who checks each bucket for ripeness. The worker then raises his bucket, dumps its contents into a central bin, and runs back to the tomato plant, anywhere from a few yards to a hundred yards away."
-- from sample text of "Nobodies : modern American slave labor and the dark side of the new global economy" by John Bowe.

Click to see more information on Tomato Pickers from Senator Sander's website.