Tomato Trivia
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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, is a fleshy fruit grown from the ovary of a single flower with its seeds in the pulp, so tomatoes, grapes and bananas qualify, while strawberries and raspberries do not.
Q 02The tomato belongs to which plant family, alongside tobacco, petunias and chili peppers?
Nightshade
Nightshade relatives include deadly nightshade and mandrake, so botanists in northern Europe long distrusted the tomato as food and grew it mainly as an ornamental.
Q 03From which language does the word 'tomato' ultimately come?
Nahuatl
Nahuatl, the Aztec language, gave Spanish 'tomate' from 'tomatl'; in Mexico the red fruit is also called jitomate, from 'xitomatl', and plain 'tomate' can mean the green tomatillo.
Q 04The wild ancestor of the tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium, is native to which region?
Western South America
Western South America is home to the currant-sized wild species, mainly in Peru and Ecuador, yet the tomato is thought to have been domesticated far to the north, in Mexico.
Q 05Which conquistador's 1521 capture of Tenochtitlan set the tomato on its way to Europe?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés took the Aztec capital in 1521; within a generation Spaniards were growing tomatoes at home, and they carried the plant on to the Caribbean and the Philippines.
Q 06The Italian word for tomato, pomodoro, comes from a 16th-century name that literally meant what?
Golden apple
Golden apple, or pomo d'oro, is the name Pietro Andrea Mattioli printed in 1554, which has led to speculation that the first tomatoes seen in Italy were yellow.
Q 07Bread rubbed with ripe tomato and olive oil is the signature snack of which Spanish region?
Catalonia
Catalonia claims pa amb tomàquet as its own; one food historian traces it to farm kitchens, where a glut of ripe tomatoes was used to soften bread that had gone hard.
Q 08The earliest known cookbook with tomato recipes was published in 1692 in which city?
Naples
Naples was under Spanish rule when Antonio Latini, steward to the viceroy's first minister, printed a tomato sauce 'in the Spanish style' there, a sign the recipes had come from Spain.
Q 09The San Marzano tomato is grown near which volcano?
Vesuvius
Vesuvius looms over San Marzano sul Sarno, where this long, pointed tomato was first grown in volcanic soil; its thick, sweet flesh and few seeds make it a favourite for pizza sauce.
Q 10Tomato, mozzarella and basil top which classic pizza?
Margherita
Margherita: legend says pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito made it for Queen Margherita of Savoy in 1889, its tomato, mozzarella and basil echoing the red, white and green of Italy's flag.
Q 11The Supreme Court's 1893 ruling that tomatoes are vegetables settled a dispute over what?
Import tariffs
Import tariffs: the 1883 Tariff Act taxed imported vegetables but not fruit, so the Nix family sued New York's customs collector to recover duties on Caribbean tomatoes, and lost unanimously.
Q 12Which food is about 95 percent water, like a raw tomato?
Cucumber
Cucumber and raw tomato are both about 95 percent water, against roughly 86 percent for an apple, which is why 100 grams of tomato has only 18 calories.
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, an inbred processing tomato, supplied the reference genome; it revealed two ancient triplications of the whole genome that helped shape fruit traits such as colour and fleshiness.
Q 22What did the 'u' mutation behind uniformly red modern tomatoes cost the fruit?
Sweetness and flavour
Sweetness and flavour suffered because the mutation switches off a gene that builds chlorophyll in the young fruit, so it makes less sugar; breeders had picked it for evenly red tomatoes with no green shoulders.
Q 23Whose 1753 decision to class the tomato in the genus Solanum was eventually vindicated by genetic studies?
Carl Linnaeus
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 grew the most tomatoes in 2023, roughly a third of the world's crop?
China
China grew roughly a third of the world's 2023 tomato crop, far ahead of India and Turkey, although the tomato is not native to Asia at all.
Q 16Sliced tomato, mozzarella and basil make up which salad named after an Italian island?
Caprese
Caprese takes its name from Capri; its red, white and green are often said to salute the Italian flag, though the dish may not have begun on the island at all.
Q 17Which US state made the tomato its official fruit in 2009 and tomato juice its official beverage in 1965?
Ohio
Ohio made tomato juice its official beverage in 1965 and the tomato its state fruit in 2009; at Reynoldsburg, seedsman Alexander Livingston had bred the Paragon of 1870 and other varieties that made it a commercial crop.
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 19Which tomato, cleared for sale in 1994, was the first commercially grown genetically engineered food?
Flavr Savr
Flavr Savr was judged by the FDA in May 1994 to be as safe as ordinary tomatoes, but it cost far more to grow than it sold for and was gone from the shops by 1997.
Q 20Which agrochemical giant bought Calgene, maker of the first genetically modified tomato, in 1997?
Monsanto
Monsanto paid more than $200 million for the rest of Calgene in 1997, after the mounting costs of its pioneering tomato had kept the smaller firm from turning a profit.
Carl Linnaeus placed the tomato in Solanum; Philip Miller soon moved it to a genus of its own, Lycopersicon, but genetic evidence sent it back, so botanists again call it Solanum lycopersicum.
Q 24Which vegetable do genome studies place closest to the tomato on the family tree?
Potato
Potato and tomato form a tight branch within the genus Solanum, and a 2025 genome study suggests the potato line itself arose when an ancient tomato relative hybridised with another species.
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 include the Roma, which despite its Italian name was bred by US government scientists in Maryland in the 1950s to resist a wilt disease.
Q 28What is the term for old open-pollinated tomato varieties such as Brandywine and Cherokee Purple?
Heirloom
Heirloom varieties breed true from saved seed, unlike hybrids, so families could hand them down for generations; British growers call them heritage tomatoes.
Q 29Which growing method gives California's Early Girl tomatoes an unusually concentrated flavour?
Dry-farming
Dry-farming means no watering after transplanting, which forces roots deep in search of moisture and concentrates the flavour; the tomatoes are a farmers'-market favourite around San Francisco.
Q 30La Tomatina, the giant tomato fight, takes place in which Spanish town?
Buñol
Buñol has staged the fight since the 1940s; it was banned in the early 1950s until townsfolk paraded a giant tomato in a coffin in 1957 and the authorities relented.