Tomato Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
48 free tomato trivia questions with answers. The tomato is a berry that a Supreme Court called a vegetable, a nightshade Europeans were afraid to eat, and a fruit the Aztecs sold in nipple and serpent shapes. This quiz covers the whole story: the Nahuatl name, Cortés and the Columbian exchange, Mattioli's 'golden apples', the first Neapolitan recipes, San Marzano and true Neapolitan pizza, Alexander Livingston's Paragon, the Flavr Savr and the Heinz 1706 genome. It also takes in the kitchen and the culture: lycopene, tomatine, gazpacho, the Bloody Mary, Campbell's soup, the strange history of ketchup, La Tomatina's greased ham pole, Ohio's official beverage and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Easy questions ask what pigment makes tomatoes red; the hard end wants who wrote Nix v. Hedden and which cookbook printed the first American ketchup recipe. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia entry, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Botanically, what kind of fruit is a tomato?
A berry
A berry: botanically the tomato is a fleshy fruit formed from a single ovary with its seeds embedded in the pulp, the definition of a berry, as are grapes and bananas.
Q 02The tomato belongs to which plant family, alongside potatoes, tobacco and chili peppers?
Nightshade
Nightshade: the family Solanaceae also includes deadly nightshade and mandrake, which is why many early Europeans assumed the new fruit was poisonous and grew it only as an ornamental.
Q 03From which language does the word 'tomato' ultimately come?
Nahuatl
Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, gave Spanish 'tomate' from 'tomatl'; Nahuatl speakers distinguished the large red fruit as 'xitomatl'.
Q 04The wild ancestor of the tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium, is native to which region?
Western South America
Western South America: the currant-sized wild species grows along the Pacific coast of Peru, Ecuador and northern Chile; domestication probably passed through a cherry-sized intermediate form.
Q 05Which conquistador's 1521 capture of Tenochtitlan set the tomato on its way to Europe?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés took Tenochtitlan in 1521; the friar Bernardino de Sahagún later described Aztec markets selling large, small, sweet, serpent and nipple-shaped tomatoes in colours from red to yellow.
Q 06Who wrote the earliest known European mention of the tomato, in a 1544 herbal?
Pietro Andrea Mattioli
Pietro Andrea Mattioli, a Sienese physician, described the new fruit in his 1544 commentary on Dioscorides as a kind of eggplant; his 1554 edition coined the name 'pomi d'oro'.
Q 07Bread rubbed with ripe tomato and olive oil is the signature snack of which Spanish region?
Catalonia
Catalonia: pa amb tomàquet, bread rubbed with ripe tomato and dressed with olive oil and salt, is the everyday Catalan snack served across Barcelona's bars.
Q 08The earliest known cookbook with tomato recipes was published in 1692 in which city?
Naples
Naples: Antonio Latini's Lo scalco alla moderna, published there in 1692, includes a 'Spanish-style' tomato sauce, the earliest known tomato recipes in a European cookbook.
Q 09The San Marzano tomato is grown near which volcano?
Vesuvius
Vesuvius: San Marzano tomatoes grow in the volcanic soils of the Agro Sarnese-Nocerino at its foot; legend says the first seed arrived in 1770 as a gift from Peru to the Bourbon kingdom of southern Italy.
Q 10Tomato, mozzarella and basil top which classic Neapolitan pizza?
Margherita
Margherita: legend credits Raffaele Esposito with making it for Queen Margherita of Savoy during her visit to the city, its tomato, mozzarella and basil echoing the Italian flag's red, white and green.
Q 11Which justice wrote the unanimous Nix v. Hedden opinion?
Horace Gray
He held that 'fruit' and 'vegetable' in the Tariff Act carried their ordinary, not botanical, meaning.
Q 12What percentage of a raw tomato is water?
95%
95%: raw tomato is about 94 to 95 grams of water per 100 grams by USDA measurement; carbohydrates make up most of the rest, at about 4 percent.
Q 13Which pigment gives ripe tomatoes their red colour?
Lycopene
Lycopene, a red carotenoid, colours ripe tomatoes; unusually, cooking breaks down cell walls and makes more of it available for the body to absorb.
Q 21Which tomato cultivar had its complete genome published in Nature in 2012?
Heinz 1706
Heinz 1706, a processing variety from the ketchup maker, was the reference plant whose genome the international Tomato Genome Consortium reported in Nature in May 2012.
Q 22What did the 'u' mutation behind uniformly red modern tomatoes cost the fruit?
Sweetness and flavour
Sweetness and flavour: the mutation disables the GLK2 gene, so fruit chloroplasts make less sugar and fewer flavour compounds; growers accepted the trade for fruit with no green shoulders.
Q 23Who moved the tomato into its own genus in 1768, naming it Lycopersicon esculentum?
Philip Miller
Q 14Which gas, released by the fruit itself, triggers tomato ripening?
Ethylene
Ethylene, a gaseous plant hormone the fruit produces, triggers ripening; commercial green tomatoes are gassed with it, and a paper bag traps it to ripen tomatoes at home.
Q 15Which country led world tomato production in 2023, growing about 36 percent of the 192 million tonnes?
China
China grew roughly a third of the world's 2023 tomato crop, far ahead of any other country; within the US, California's processing crop and Florida's fresh-market crop dominate.
Q 16Which plant breeder introduced the Paragon in 1870, the first of many commercial tomato varieties?
Alexander Livingston
Alexander Livingston released the Paragon in 1870 and went on to develop more than a dozen varieties; his hometown of Reynoldsburg holds an annual Tomato Festival and calls itself the Birthplace of the Tomato.
Q 17Which US state made the tomato its official fruit in 2009 and tomato juice its official beverage in 1965?
Ohio
Ohio adopted tomato juice as its official beverage in 1965 and the tomato as its official fruit in 2009, honouring a crop that Reynoldsburg breeders helped commercialise.
Q 18Which state made its Vine Ripe Pink Tomato both state fruit and state vegetable in one law?
Arkansas
Arkansas designated the South Arkansas Vine Ripe Pink Tomato its official fruit and official vegetable in 1987, citing both the botanical and the culinary classification.
Q 19What was the first commercially available genetically modified food, licensed in 1994?
Flavr Savr
Flavr Savr was engineered to ripen without softening so it could stay on the vine longer; the FDA cleared it in May 1994, but high costs killed it off by 1997.
Q 20Which Californian company developed the first GM tomato in the 1980s?
Calgene
Calgene, based in Davis, used Agrobacterium to insert an antisense copy of the polygalacturonase gene, blocking the enzyme that softens ripening fruit.
Philip Miller, head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden, coined Lycopersicon esculentum in his 1768 Gardener's Dictionary; genetics later vindicated Linnaeus's Solanum, so it is Solanum lycopersicum again.
Q 24Which vegetable is the tomato's closest relative, forming a tight clade with it inside Solanum?
Potato
Potato: the two share a recent common ancestor within Solanum, and a 2025 genomic study found the potato lineage arose from an ancient hybridisation involving a tomato-line ancestor.
Q 25Which insects are cultured in greenhouses to pollinate tomatoes?
Bumblebees
Bumblebees buzz-pollinate, vibrating their flight muscles to shake pollen loose, which tomato flowers need; before hives were sold commercially in the late 1980s, growers vibrated plants by hand.
Q 26Handling which product can spread a common virus to tomato plants?
Cigarettes
Cigarettes can carry tobacco mosaic virus, which survives curing; smokers' hands pass it to tomato plants, mottling and wrinkling the leaves, since tomato and tobacco are close relatives.
Q 27Which thick-walled tomato type, favoured for paste and sauces, has few small seed cavities?
Plum
Plum tomatoes such as Roma have thick, meaty walls and only a couple of small seed cavities, which suits them to paste and sauce; beefsteaks have many cavities.
Q 28What is the term for open-pollinated, non-hybrid tomato varieties like Brandywine and Cherokee Purple?
Heirloom
Mortgage Lifter, Green Zebra and Black Krim are others; British growers say 'heritage'.
Q 29What is the traditional Californian method of growing Early Girl tomatoes without irrigation called?
Dry-farming
Dry-farming: plants are established on winter-moistened soil and given no summer irrigation, forcing deep roots; the stress yields smaller, intensely flavoured Early Girls prized by Bay Area restaurants.
Q 30La Tomatina, the giant tomato fight, takes place in which Spanish town?
Buñol
Buñol, a town of about 9,000 near Valencia, has staged the fight on a Wednesday each summer since the mid-1940s; Franco's regime banned it in the 1950s for lacking religious meaning.