Half the pizza places around here are run by Iranians. Welcome to America.
I’m not quite going to flag that for moderation but it does seem a bit off?
I like to discover culinary traditions that I hadn’t previously known about.
That’s because they were invented here - or more accurately, the first modern strains of commercially viable cherry tomatoes were developed in Israel, in the 1970s.
I’m not sure what makes a tomato commercially viable, but if you just let tomato plants grow and reproduce on their own, cherry tomatoes are what you end up with.
I don’t know much about botany, but I’m pretty sure that the cherry tomatoes you can buy at the market were specifically cultivated to grow that way.
I eat a tomato every day, mostly in a salad.
… and they are good. Also, if you add some hot sauce onto half sliced cherry tomatoes, they are really good. Also, although most people already know this, a half sliced cherry tomato… speared into a fork with a small slice of Mozz…is also very good.
And a cherry tomato Caprese salad with balsamic vinegar and Buratta cheese is heaven.
Cherry tomatoes are indeterminate, while something like a Roma or Early Girl is determinate, I thought.
How important, culturally, are the breakfast dishes shakshouka (N Africa, Middle East) and mememen (Turkey)? Both dishes are variations on poached eggs in tomato sauce.
What does this mean? Cherry tomatoes are a distinct variant of the tomato species, Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme. They have named cultivars, every bit as much as full-sized tomatoes.
“Indeterminate” means the vine keeps growing. Most cherry tomatoes are indeterminate, while most bush varieties stop growing. I don’t think bush tomatoes grown from seed become cherry tomatoes. I could be wrong.
What are you talking about? I was pointing out that it’s an unwarranted assumption (in the US or wherever this Walmart is) that Middle Eastern men only make Middle Eastern food.
Oh, I must apologise. I had completely misread the post as a complaint about immigrants taking jobs from americans. Context is tricky.
In my defence, the ‘Welcome to America’ phrase was perhaps a little unfortunate?
“Welcome to America” just means that immigrants to this country have never had to limit themselves to the culture they bring with them.
Fair enough. But in some contexts it could be taken as a sarcastic remark?
No need to beat this to death. Let’s move on. Peace.
YOU are the one who saw sarcasm. Maybe next time ask for clarification before making an extremely hurtful accusation. Sorry if I am making too much of this but in my 27 years on the board I have fervently decried immigrant scapegoating. I’m married to one.
[Moderating]
And with that, it looks like the misunderstanding is resolved, so let’s move on, shall we?
I have apologized. I do think your wording could have left room for misinterpretation, though it was accidental.
Let us drop this now. Please. I am not going to respond further.
All varieties of tomatoes were selected to grow the way they grow… cultivation can impact yield and the crop quality, but it doesn’t change the type.
There are very old Mexican tomato varieties which would definitely be classed as cherry tomatoes- even my 1970 published UK gardening book lists some cherry varieties among their recommendations, though they describe them as ‘marble size’ instead of cherry. The major development allowing commercial production was the plant size and the yield per plant- older cherry varieties were often small, compact plants; nice for a hanging basket or a pot on the patio, rubbish for growing on a large scale. People who had space generally grew bigger, more productive plants.
The tomatoes that appear to be the closest to the ancestral type are actually tiny- sometimes known as currant tomatoes, because they’re the size of a currant, maybe 5mm diameter, but tomatoes have been selected for loads of different sizes over the millennia they’ve been grown in Mexico- in fact the diversity of Mexican traditional tomatoes is huge compared to what’s commercially produced, as most selections were actually made from those which went to Europe.
Sadly, the more popular commercial cultivars are more financially profitable *, so a lot of this diversity is being lost. I happen to know a Mexican plant scientist who’s trying to run a project to reverse the decline…
*at least initially.. unfortunately the home of tomato diversity is also the home of tomato disease diversity, so switching from a traditional mixed crop to a monoculture of the most popular commercial variety also increases the risk of a complete crop loss and the problem is getting worse.
Umm, bush varieties stop growing by definition… that’s why they’re bush type 
There’s actually no real connection between cherry tomatoes being vine type and larger tomatoes being bush types though, except that more recent breeding has tended to focus on indeterminate varieties, because these are better for commercial production (meaning that’s where the research money is), and the widely available cherry types are also often quite recent, while there are more older types available for larger fruit. There are plenty of large tomatoes that are vining indeterminate types, and also bush cherry types.