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["Don Bowen" <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

After the comment about the Tomato and its origns in Peru I found this.
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~samcox/Tomato.html

"The United States Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1883, a rather
innocuous piece of legislation requiring a 10% tax on imported vegetables,
in response to growing international trade. Just a few short years later, a
tomato importer evaluated the law closely, and decided to challenge it on
the botanical grounds that a tomato was in fact technically a fruit, not a
vegetable, and should therefore be exempt from said tax. John Nix's case
posed merit enough to land the case before the Supreme Court in 1893. In Nix
vs Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), Justice Gray wrote, "Botanically speaking,
tomatoes are fruits of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and
peas. But in the common language of the people...all these are vegetables,
which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw,
are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage,
celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup,
fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not,
like fruits generally, as dessert [1]." The court rejected the botanical
truth that the tomato is in fact a monstrously sized berry, and deferred to
the culinary vernacular of vegetable to describe it. Thus is tax yet paid on
imported tomatoes."

" Where did the tomato come from? For more than a century, tomatoes have
been grown in gardens from Kazakstan to California, and in many locales
cultivation of the red fruit goes back centuries. Pinpointing where it all
began is not always easy. Vavilov was a renowned Russian scientist who
conceived the idea that if one wants to locate the very center of origin for
any crop species, look for the area which still has the highest diversity of
that crop [2]. This is grounded on the idea that only a portion of the wild
plant gene pool will be incorporated into a domesticated plant line, such
that the cultivated crop will represent only a portion of the genetic
variety found in the wild ancestors which presumably are still inhabiting
the area, in more or less the same form, to this day.  By that logic, one
would look closely at the western coast of South America, in present day
Peru (Fig 1), where eight species in the tomato genus still grow wild in the
Andes Mountains (Table 1) [3]. The current range of wild tomato relatives
extends from the northern tip of Chile on the south, to Ecuador on the
north, and reaching inland from the Pacific 100-200 miles, also including
the Galapogos Islands."

Don Bowen  KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html