50 free Tomato trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Botanically, what kind of fruit is a tomato?
A berry
It is eaten as a vegetable, and in 1893 the US Supreme Court agreed to treat it as one, at least for tariffs.
Q 02The tomato belongs to which plant family, alongside potatoes, tobacco and chili peppers?
Nightshade
Early Europeans assumed the new fruit was poisonous for exactly that reason and grew it as an ornamental.
Q 03From which language does the word 'tomato' ultimately come?
Nahuatl
Spanish 'tomate' came from the Aztec 'tomatl'; the Aztecs called red ones 'xitomatl'.
Q 04The wild ancestor of the tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium, is native to which region?
Western South America
It grows in Chile, Peru and Ecuador; the domesticated plant was probably first a cherry-sized tomato.
Q 05Which conquistador's 1521 capture of Tenochtitlan set the tomato on its way to Europe?
Hernán Cortés
Bernardino de Sahagún described Aztec markets selling large, small, sweet, serpent and nipple-shaped tomatoes in every colour from red to yellow.
Q 06Who wrote the earliest known European mention of the tomato, in a 1544 herbal?
Pietro Andrea Mattioli
He thought it was a new kind of eggplant; ten years later he named it 'pomi d'oro', golden apples.
Q 07What does the Italian word for tomato, 'pomodoro', literally mean?
Golden apple
The first European tomatoes described were often yellow; English herbals called it the 'love apple'.
Q 08The earliest known cookbook with tomato recipes was published in 1692 in which city?
Naples
The author seems to have taken the recipes from Spanish sources; in Florence the fruit stayed a table decoration until the 1700s.
Q 09The San Marzano tomato is grown near which volcano?
Vesuvius
Legend says the first seed arrived in 1770 as a gift from Peru to the Kingdom of Naples; it carries an EU protected designation of origin.
Q 10Which two tomato types are the only ones permitted for 'true Neapolitan pizza'?
San Marzano and Piennolo del Vesuvio
Both come from the volcanic soils around Naples.
Q 11In Nix v. Hedden (1893), the US Supreme Court ruled the tomato a vegetable for the purpose of what?
Import tariffs
The 1883 Tariff Act taxed vegetables but not fruit; the court said tomatoes are served with dinner, not dessert.
Q 12Which 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 13What percentage of a raw tomato is water?
95%
Carbohydrates make up most of the rest, at about 4 percent.
Q 21Which Californian company developed the first GM tomato in the 1980s?
Calgene
It used a modified Agrobacterium to insert an antisense gene that blocked a rotting enzyme.
Q 22Which tomato cultivar had its complete genome published in Nature in 2012?
Heinz 1706
The ketchup company's own processing variety was chosen as the reference plant.
Q 23Modern uniformly red tomatoes carry the 'u' mutation. What did it cost the fruit?
Sweetness and flavour
The mutant chloroplasts make less sugar, cutting it by 10 to 15 percent, in exchange for no green shoulders.
Q 14Which pigment gives ripe tomatoes their red colour?
Lycopene
Unusually, cooking tomatoes increases the amount of it your body can absorb.
Q 15Which mildly toxic alkaloid is found in tomato leaves, stems and green fruit?
Tomatine
Domestication selected for fruit that converts the bitter compound away as it ripens; large amounts of foliage can be toxic to dogs.
Q 16Which country led world tomato production in 2023, growing about 36 percent of the 192 million tonnes?
China
In the US, Florida and California dominate thanks to long, hot growing seasons.
Q 17Which Ohio plant breeder introduced the Paragon in 1870, the first of many commercial tomato varieties?
Alexander Livingston
His hometown of Reynoldsburg holds an annual Tomato Festival and calls itself the Birthplace of the Tomato.
Q 18Which US state made the tomato its official fruit in 2009 and tomato juice its official beverage in 1965?
Ohio
Arkansas hedged, declaring its pink tomato both state fruit and state vegetable in one law.
Q 19Which state made its Vine Ripe Pink Tomato both state fruit and state vegetable in one law?
Arkansas
The law cited both the culinary and the botanical classification.
Q 20What was the first commercially available genetically modified food, licensed in 1994?
Flavr Savr
Calgene engineered it for longer shelf life; costs sank the company and Monsanto bought it.
Q 24Who moved the tomato into its own genus in 1768, naming it Lycopersicon esculentum?
Philip Miller
Genetics later proved Linnaeus right to keep it in Solanum, and it is Solanum lycopersicum again.
Q 25Which vegetable is the tomato's closest relative, forming a tight clade with it inside Solanum?
Potato
Lab hybrids of tomato and diploid potato are partially fertile, and a 2025 study suggests the potato line arose from a tomato-lineage hybrid.
Q 26Which insects are cultured in greenhouses to pollinate tomatoes?
Bumblebees
Growers otherwise use artificial wind or vibrate the plants.
Q 27Handling which product can spread a common virus to tomato plants?
Cigarettes
Tobacco mosaic virus wrinkles the plant's top leaves; tomatoes and tobacco are cousins.
Q 28Which type has few, very small locules (seed cavities), while beefsteaks have many?
Plum
Globe-shaped varieties usually have three to five, and small ones as few as two.
Q 29What 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 30What is the traditional Californian method of growing Early Girl tomatoes without irrigation called?
Dry-farming
The stress concentrates flavour; California grows tomatoes for both the fresh market and canning.