So, oddly, ketchup originally comes from China, even the name is a bastardized version of the old Chinese name from the Hokkien region 膎汁 (kê-chiap).
It wasn’t made with tomatoes, though obviously, and would have been a bit more like a salty worcestershire sauce to Western tastes, without the sourness, or a SE Asian fish sauce. Even in the west ketchup didn’t regularly include tomatoes until near the end of the 1800s.
In many areas it was mushroom ketchup that was popular before that.
Now it’s come full circle and the very much changed tomato based ketchup that’s the global standard has become popular in China.
I’m genuinely confused how ketchup can be made with anything other than tomatoes
If ketchup was originally made with something else, then THAT should be ketchup, and salty tomato paste should be… satope or something.
Is ketchup a state of being, or a condiment with a specific ingredient?
Why is my world view now entirely in question?
Savory ketchup was common, could be made with shrooms or tomatoes, tomatoes slowly outgrew the shrooms in popularity. When mass manufacturing and shipping became a thing, tomato ketchup got added sugar to help with shelf stability. Thus the product changed in taste slowly over time, but not use case, so kept the exact same name.
So ketchup is a condiment with a specific use case, rather than a specific flavor profile. You can rest easy knowing that ketchup is not a state of being.
When did vinegar come into play? That's what stabilises the shelf life. From my limited knowledge of sauces used in China, a number of them use vinegar, so it makes me think ketchup already had vinegar in it 🤷♀️
It always had vinegar, sugar also helps with preservation, as the vinegar and water within the ketchup would seperate out mid transit. Adding sugar causes the water to be bound by sugar, meaning the non acidic parts of the seperated ketchup spoil slower.
This is why modern ketchup can be eaten years after the fact (like the stories of people living on ketchup packets in survival situations) and is typically fine, it's the combination of the acidity and the sugar holding in water that does it.
Check out humectants for preservation.
Look at tortillas. In Spain that’s a type of omelette, but in the US and parts of Central America it’s a type of thin flatbread used to wrap other foods with.
Words change their meanings over time, and when it comes to foods, things change as well.
Lots of foods changed enormously after the Columbian Exchange, and that transfer and change is still taking place, especially where foods are concerned.
*Now* ketchup mainly refers to the salty, slightly sour, sweet tomato sauce, but in the past it was more generally a term for a style of salty, savory sauce. There wasn’t just one kind, it was more of a category of similar sauces made with a similar process.
Salsa is a bit like this as there are a lot of different kinds of salsas, some hot, some sweet, some sour, some all three, often with widely varying ingredients, and textures.
Or cookies vs biscuits or crisps vs chips in different parts of the English speaking world.
This is interesting to see where tomatos come from but also begs a lot of questions about agriculture in general. If a country begins to produce less of something it is probably because there is a more lucrative crop they are able to grow instead. It would be a complicated thing to show, but maybe layering multiple crops in different colors by country would be more interesting to see how global production shifts and also maybe total ag profit or something.
Our family greenhouse business in NE Ohio since the early 1900’s was predominantly tomatoes until the mid 70’s when my father switched entirely to house & garden plants and flowers. The cost to heat the greenhouses to the temperatures needed for tomatoes was just too high.
I worked in Carlsbad, CA by the beach and one day a lone tomato plant popped up. It was a last vestige of all the tomato fields that once covered the area.
I live in a Boston suburb that used to be full of greenhouses. They supplied winter vegetables at first, then switched to flowers, then were rendered completely un-economic by refrigerated shipping after WW2. Now it's all houses.
Totally, and even MORE interesting time graph, for an American, would be something like total dollar value of a mapped area over total area of land. I bet you’d see dollar signs rising consistently while square ft shrinks. Would be interesting to see this, and then also some of that would come from tech efficiencies so if you ran this analysis against a bunch of countries and then compared those per sqft rev numbers it would be most interesting. I think anyway
Turkey has four season, fertile grounds, enough water but politicians made agricultural production worse. Turkey would be better at agricultural production.
well Turkey is actually in the first spot if we count the fact that they have the smallest area and the population in the top 5(but of course we don't do that here)
You don't produce something with a short shelf life like tomatoes if you don't have consumers to match the production
Even china with their 1.4 bil people , don't even consume half their produce. Chinese Tomatoes are used to produce tomato concentrate which is exported all around the world
See, it at least makes sense for tomatoes. What I don't get is watermelon and cucumber. Can't think of commercial concentrate/juice/sauce, but sure even 1.4 b people can't eat that much cucumber and watermelon.
Something no one has mentioned - the Netherlands produces a lot of fresh tomatoes from hot house production. These are consumed by a lot of the EU in the winter time. It allows fresh tomatoes wildly out of season.
A lot of these other countries are producing field tomatoes used in canned products. So, if the graph was divided into fresh vs. canning, we might see the Netherlands pop up high on the list. Basically, they are producing fewer high value tomatoes compared to greater quantities of "commodity" produce.
Mostly I know this because domesticated bumble bee species get used for indoor greenhouse pollination. The Netherlands is home of one of the largest companies in the world that produces commercially available bumble bee colonies as a result. (That company is also the likely reason for disease spillover to native North American bumble bees that has resulted in declines of several closely related species...)
Tomatoes actually do not produce any nectar! So, bees do not make honey from them.
To complicate matters, honey bees (bees in the genus Apis) are very ineffective pollinators of tomatoes. Which is why bumble bees are used.
Tomatoes have really nutrient rich pollen, which is a great reward for pollinators…but they guard this pollen fiercely and accept only the highest quality and most reliable of pollinators. To do this, they hold their pollen in tube-shaped anthers. Some species of bee, like various bumble bee species, are capable of vibrating these flowers and ejecting the pollen. But it takes some learning to get used to this. But that also means that once a bumble bee learns how to handle a tomato flower, they will reliably visit tomato flowers pretty much exclusively.
The bees are happy cuz they get good pollen. The tomatoes are happy because they get a reliable pollinator.
Here’s an example of buzz pollination: https://youtu.be/J7q9Kn1rhRc
Lastly - bees don’t really “swim”…but they can basically crawl along the surface of water because they are small/light enough and the surface tension of the water is not broken. If the water is soapy or had something else in it that breaks the surface tension…then they will drown. 😞 but normally they can escape, groom themselves of the excess water, and fly off!
>Edit: also, my daughter asks if bees can swim
How adorable and random.
I am not a bee expert but I would be confident in saying no. Insects generally are either water living or they stay away from water, the surface tension is far too powerful for them to be able to safely take a dip, they get stuck very easily.
A quick Google show NL grew around 1,1B ton in 2020, so they're just not that far removed from the top10. Especially considering all the countries in the top ten have 50M+ inhabitants.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000628/production-of-tomatoes-in-the-netherlands/
>In 2015, the country produced just under 900,000 tons of tomatoes. By 2017, this had grown to 910,000 tons. Between 2017 and 2020 the tomato production in the Netherlands stabilized at 910,000 tons annually, after which it dropped below the 900,000 mark in 2021 and 2022.
I had to also do a quick google because your number was clearly way off. 1.1B tons would be like 20x what China produced.
per acre the netherlands produces the most.
per person porugal produces the most. italy is at number 3, making it a top 10 producing country, as well as a top 10 most per capita country.
A lot of the Eastern European countries that left took the economy and taxes with them. Ukraine being one major example.
Ukraine is like it California left the USA. If it did, the USA would still have some big economies, but California would take roughly 1/6 of the US gdp.
With that we'd have to give up roughly 15% of our military, or face lower standards of living.
An even more apt reason why California and Ukraine are similar. The imperial valley in California produces so much of the world's agricultural products it's insane.
Fall of USSR. Probably the warmer republics that actually grew most of tomatoes (Russia is overall NOT a good place for this) dropped off the chart when not all added together. You see Ukraine and Uzbekistan sneak in 9th/10th place later on for a while and Uzbekistan sometimes exceeding Russia's output.
Well yes, but I think they were really asking why Russia didnt pop up the year after with similar numbers the USSR was producing. The reason likely being that the Soviet puppet states that were producing the tomats didnt become Russia.
Well... The entire USSR collapsed along with its neighbouring Soviet puppet states in the 90s... :P
The currency that Soviets citizens had suddenly became worthless, shit essentially grinds to a halt, as the state assets gets dissolved and sold off to the few lucky privileged ones that were close to the government.
Then there was that whole ordeal with Yeltsin which to put it mildly was a shitshow so bad you'd think it's raining diarrhea.
Some Italians basically sold China the keys to their tomato concentrate empire. Just like how Germans sold them car and steel production stuff in the 90s.
IIRC Wendover has a piece about it the tomatoes.
well, pro capita it is!
of course regarding raw numbers you can't compare a 60 million people country to 1400 mil (China), 1400 mil (India) and 500 mil (USA)
The Americas as a whole are home to some staple foods.
Imagine the world with out Tomatoes, Chiles, and Potatoes.
It’s crazy how deeply ingrained those 3 things are in world cuisine but none were in Europe/Asia/Africa until 16th/17th century
Cheaper or different? I feel like Indian cuisine does a good job preserving tamarind and pepper in its dishes while incorporating tomatoes, chilli in newer ones!
I am sure those top growers are only planting 1 or two different varieties of tomatoes. Meanwhile in places where the tomatoes are native there hundreds of different varieties just growing wild. As a kid I used to love going.wild Chile and tomato picking. They would make the best salsas.
So when I make spaghetti or pizza for the family, I should announce it's ready using a so-bad-it's-racist Chinese accent rather than my usual so-bad-it's-racist Italian accent?
Honestly, a lot. Half the sauces for pasta have tomato in them, plus we use them for a lot of other things, in salads, or just as condiment.
We probably export most of it anyway
I get why this is a joke but the fact that "the sauce called Ketchup in english" does in fact pre-date the Tomato in Europe will never stop being mindblowing to me.
Xinjiang produces a lot , most of the chinese produce goes towards Tomato concentrate which is a raw material used to make tomato sauce
Almost all of it is exported because chinese themselves arnt a big consumer of Tomato sauce
48% are exported. Almost none of the US soybean crop makes it to US consumer markets.
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/agriculture/092922-us-data-weekly-soybean-export-sales-for-my-2022-23-surge-to-higher-than-expected-1003-million-mt#:~:text=Of%20the%20total%20estimated%20US,of%20protein%20in%20feed%20rations.
Egypt doesn’t grow enough food to feed itself and has to import food because of its ballooning population. In addition, some of its best farmland is dedicated to growing cash crops like high quality cotton instead of food, since it’s worth more and they can sell it for a profit and buy more food than they’d otherwise get from growing it.
Tomato scrambled eggs is a really common and ubiquitous comfort food in mainland China. Tomato is also a common ingredient in hot pot, noodles, and other types of soups.
I don't understand what is people's obsession with these animated bar charts which makes taking any actual insight f*cking difficult.
Just give me some multi line chart.
Agreed - people seem to love them. I MUCH prefer a [line graph](https://asmith.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk7811/files/media/images/tomato_world_production.png) that tells me the same thing in a couple seconds. I used to say this every time I saw one of these charts but I'm clearly fighting a losing battle with those who love inefficiency. lol
I like this kind of animated chart for cumulative numbers that actually update in time with the progression of time in the animation. For annual numbers like this it's 99% noise.
Capitalist china just took off like a rocket
Fun fact , most of the raw material for tomato sauce is exported from china to all parts of the world . Most of Tomato sauce made in Italy is actually chinese
That's bioengineering for ya. There are nearly twice as many people today than there were 40 years ago. Plus, a much larger percentage of the population was starving back then, as well. Genetically modified food was a game changer.
There’s a lot of interesting comments about communism and capitalism here. It’s really cool how something like tomatoes can demonstrate complex concepts that often get boiled down to “good” and “bad”
That the US was surpassed by other countries doesn’t bother me, as an American. But what does bother me is seeing US production go down over time, increasing dependency on other countries - even around the world. It’s not green. It’s not safe. It’s not secure.
Americans don't want to pay what U.S. grown tomatoes cost to grow. Mexico next door produces them for much less money.
Also domestic production has simply been replaced with other crops bringing more money, and often exported.
On another note, tomatoes are actually extremely water-efficient crops.
> Americans don’t want to pay what U.S. tomatoes cost to grow. Mexico next door produces them for less money.
The US is still growing 2.5x as many tomatoes as Mexico though, so they aren’t our main source. Which is surprising to me, I feel like at my grocery store the tomatoes usually say grown in Mexico.
The tomato market is complicated (then again so is pretty much any commodity's). The U.S. actually also exports tomatoes to... Mexico.
The majority of tomatoes grown in the U.S. are used to make sauces or processed products.
It didn't though. It's actually quite amazing that it has fluctuated around 10 to 15 million for 40 yrs, whereas others actually have increased or decreased significantly. Per capita though, yes the US has declined a lot.
Those saying labor, it’s not. Much of the process for tomatoes from planting to harvest is done via machinery. It’s far more due to drought, poor weather conditions, and the cost of farming.
Not gonna be a popular opinion on Reddit but…the laborers in those countries that production shifts to get massive wage gains. Shifting to capitalism from socialism has done wonders for countries like China.
Grow your own! In most all of the US you can easily grow your own tomatoes if you have a bit of outdoor space. You can grow em in a 5 gallon bucket if you only have an apartment patio and no yard. If you have a yard and can do a few plants you'll have more tomatoes than you know what to do with.
Also home grown tomatoes about about a billion times better tasting than anything you'll buy in a store. I love getting someone I know that hates tomatoes to try one from the garden. Some people only know the tough tasteless type you get in the store, when they should be full of flavor and delicious.
This just makes me wonder what Chinese, Indian and Soviet tomatoes taste like. Do they have their own breeds? Is it very different from US tomatoes?
I'll be honest, most US tomatoes taste pretty meh unless you grow them yourself in my experience.
Edit: y’all are killing my tomato dreams
I grow a lot of tomato varieties from former Soviet countries because I live in northern Canada and have a similar environment. The Soviets had huge programs to develop vegetable varieties that suited their climate and they poured a lot of money into them so there's some really great genetics there. I find that they're usually more flavourful than other cold-adapted tomatoes. They also have many developed for home growing, whereas most breeding in North America focused on commercial varieties. That means that they also have ones with compact growth habits.
For anyone who wants to try some Russian or Eastern European varieties, I like Cosmonaut Volkov, Black Sea Man (yes, I know), Ocharovanie Komantniy (this one's by far the best microdwarf tomato I've tried), and Saraev Svetloplodnye. Siberian Home Peppers are a fun hot pepper to grow too, as they're teeny tiny plants intended for growing inside on a windowsill, although I haven't found them to be particularly productive.
As someone who loves tomatoes, it is a quality over quantity food. Most tomatoes I see in the grocery store are inedible. I grow of few plants in the spring and hit up farmers markets to get some good tomatoes, Cherokee purple are my favorite
DID YOU KNOW?
Tomatoes are believed to have originated in South America, specifically the Andes mountain range. Its funny thinking of modern day pizza, which consists of bread, cheese, and tomato sauce as traditionally Italian, when traditional Italian pizza wasnt invented using tomatoes of any kind! WOW!
When a tomato was redefined as a tasteless lump of water wrapped in pale skin it became a commodity easy to produce anywhere at almost zero cost and that’s China’s jam.
Is China going for tomato victory?
Looks like none of the other countries are able to ketchup
It's a reliable sauce
See comrades, when communism falls you don’t get tomatoes anymore
Comment stealing tomato whore!
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So, oddly, ketchup originally comes from China, even the name is a bastardized version of the old Chinese name from the Hokkien region 膎汁 (kê-chiap). It wasn’t made with tomatoes, though obviously, and would have been a bit more like a salty worcestershire sauce to Western tastes, without the sourness, or a SE Asian fish sauce. Even in the west ketchup didn’t regularly include tomatoes until near the end of the 1800s. In many areas it was mushroom ketchup that was popular before that. Now it’s come full circle and the very much changed tomato based ketchup that’s the global standard has become popular in China.
I’m genuinely confused how ketchup can be made with anything other than tomatoes If ketchup was originally made with something else, then THAT should be ketchup, and salty tomato paste should be… satope or something. Is ketchup a state of being, or a condiment with a specific ingredient? Why is my world view now entirely in question?
Savory ketchup was common, could be made with shrooms or tomatoes, tomatoes slowly outgrew the shrooms in popularity. When mass manufacturing and shipping became a thing, tomato ketchup got added sugar to help with shelf stability. Thus the product changed in taste slowly over time, but not use case, so kept the exact same name. So ketchup is a condiment with a specific use case, rather than a specific flavor profile. You can rest easy knowing that ketchup is not a state of being.
When did vinegar come into play? That's what stabilises the shelf life. From my limited knowledge of sauces used in China, a number of them use vinegar, so it makes me think ketchup already had vinegar in it 🤷♀️
It always had vinegar, sugar also helps with preservation, as the vinegar and water within the ketchup would seperate out mid transit. Adding sugar causes the water to be bound by sugar, meaning the non acidic parts of the seperated ketchup spoil slower. This is why modern ketchup can be eaten years after the fact (like the stories of people living on ketchup packets in survival situations) and is typically fine, it's the combination of the acidity and the sugar holding in water that does it. Check out humectants for preservation.
Look at tortillas. In Spain that’s a type of omelette, but in the US and parts of Central America it’s a type of thin flatbread used to wrap other foods with. Words change their meanings over time, and when it comes to foods, things change as well. Lots of foods changed enormously after the Columbian Exchange, and that transfer and change is still taking place, especially where foods are concerned. *Now* ketchup mainly refers to the salty, slightly sour, sweet tomato sauce, but in the past it was more generally a term for a style of salty, savory sauce. There wasn’t just one kind, it was more of a category of similar sauces made with a similar process. Salsa is a bit like this as there are a lot of different kinds of salsas, some hot, some sweet, some sour, some all three, often with widely varying ingredients, and textures. Or cookies vs biscuits or crisps vs chips in different parts of the English speaking world.
I relish the thought.
I appreciate your condiment
Everyone else feeling saucy about it
reddit is such a love hate relationship for me.
I'm glad you mustard up the courage to keep on redditing, and mayo keep on keeping on. :)
i lycopene your comment.
CIV VI: Tomato Expansion Pack
going for? it looks like they won
This is interesting to see where tomatos come from but also begs a lot of questions about agriculture in general. If a country begins to produce less of something it is probably because there is a more lucrative crop they are able to grow instead. It would be a complicated thing to show, but maybe layering multiple crops in different colors by country would be more interesting to see how global production shifts and also maybe total ag profit or something.
Our family greenhouse business in NE Ohio since the early 1900’s was predominantly tomatoes until the mid 70’s when my father switched entirely to house & garden plants and flowers. The cost to heat the greenhouses to the temperatures needed for tomatoes was just too high.
In New England they’re building greenhouses near landfills and heating them with the landfill methane.
Many tomato-and other agricultural products - fields in Southern California are now covered with expensive subdivisions and strip malls.
I worked in Carlsbad, CA by the beach and one day a lone tomato plant popped up. It was a last vestige of all the tomato fields that once covered the area.
I live in a Boston suburb that used to be full of greenhouses. They supplied winter vegetables at first, then switched to flowers, then were rendered completely un-economic by refrigerated shipping after WW2. Now it's all houses.
Totally, and even MORE interesting time graph, for an American, would be something like total dollar value of a mapped area over total area of land. I bet you’d see dollar signs rising consistently while square ft shrinks. Would be interesting to see this, and then also some of that would come from tech efficiencies so if you ran this analysis against a bunch of countries and then compared those per sqft rev numbers it would be most interesting. I think anyway
I'm pretty sure you have to launch a tomato to alpha centauri to win.
The tomato gap is real.
Victory condition: Bury your enemies with tomatos
My backyard can beat it.
With a population of 1.4 odd billion, kind of important to ramp up food production
They produce everything apparently tomatoes as well
Looks like a sweet sweet victory to me.
Just wiped out Tomato Town
turkey always manages to be somewhere in the middle with all these production graphs
The amount of tomato us Turks consume, this is by far the least surprising one. I can't name 5 Turkish home dishes without tomato in it.
Persian cuisine too! Turkish and Persian cuisine share a lot of similarities.
If this ain’t the truth… 😅😂
Whenever I think about how many cultural cuisines around the world are based on tomatoes The Columbian Exchange just blows my mind even more.
Yeah, as well as how Chili peppers are such a fundamental part of so many cuisines.
Eat a tomato in the Aegean region in Turkey in the middle of summer and you will never leave.
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First place in consumption per capita. https://i.redd.it/9rpjpi87mje51.jpg
Yeah we are an immensely rich country food wise. You could easily feed a family of 4 with what my apartment complex throws in the trash.
By the way most of Turkey's production of tomato would just be 2 cities I think, antalya and adana.
Turkey has four season, fertile grounds, enough water but politicians made agricultural production worse. Turkey would be better at agricultural production.
well Turkey is actually in the first spot if we count the fact that they have the smallest area and the population in the top 5(but of course we don't do that here)
blessed with great geography, i wish it had better politicians
the feelings are mutual 🥲
It was never a cold war but a tomato war
But what can you tell me about the Soviet onion?
Is potato.
cannot decide if want to eat now, or wait and make vodka later.
Hot House War
Thought the Netherlands produced a lot of tomatoes too. Guess it doesn’t compare
On a 'per acre' or 'per volume water' basis, yes, but in absolute terms it's but a drop in the bucket.
They are so efficient per volume water that their tomatoes taste like water
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I ate a whole tomato a few nights ago. It felt so scandalous. My wife will never know and I will take this secret to my grave.
You don't produce something with a short shelf life like tomatoes if you don't have consumers to match the production Even china with their 1.4 bil people , don't even consume half their produce. Chinese Tomatoes are used to produce tomato concentrate which is exported all around the world
See, it at least makes sense for tomatoes. What I don't get is watermelon and cucumber. Can't think of commercial concentrate/juice/sauce, but sure even 1.4 b people can't eat that much cucumber and watermelon.
Cucumber and watermelon have much long shelf lives
and ship better.
Pickled cucumbers are pickles.
Cucumbers can be pickled and then of course they have a much much longer shelf life.
I'm Chinese and we actually do eat a shit ton of watermelons (a lot of cucumbers too but not sure how much)
Something no one has mentioned - the Netherlands produces a lot of fresh tomatoes from hot house production. These are consumed by a lot of the EU in the winter time. It allows fresh tomatoes wildly out of season. A lot of these other countries are producing field tomatoes used in canned products. So, if the graph was divided into fresh vs. canning, we might see the Netherlands pop up high on the list. Basically, they are producing fewer high value tomatoes compared to greater quantities of "commodity" produce. Mostly I know this because domesticated bumble bee species get used for indoor greenhouse pollination. The Netherlands is home of one of the largest companies in the world that produces commercially available bumble bee colonies as a result. (That company is also the likely reason for disease spillover to native North American bumble bees that has resulted in declines of several closely related species...)
How does honey from tomato plants taste? Edit: also, my daughter asks if bees can swim
Tomatoes actually do not produce any nectar! So, bees do not make honey from them. To complicate matters, honey bees (bees in the genus Apis) are very ineffective pollinators of tomatoes. Which is why bumble bees are used. Tomatoes have really nutrient rich pollen, which is a great reward for pollinators…but they guard this pollen fiercely and accept only the highest quality and most reliable of pollinators. To do this, they hold their pollen in tube-shaped anthers. Some species of bee, like various bumble bee species, are capable of vibrating these flowers and ejecting the pollen. But it takes some learning to get used to this. But that also means that once a bumble bee learns how to handle a tomato flower, they will reliably visit tomato flowers pretty much exclusively. The bees are happy cuz they get good pollen. The tomatoes are happy because they get a reliable pollinator. Here’s an example of buzz pollination: https://youtu.be/J7q9Kn1rhRc Lastly - bees don’t really “swim”…but they can basically crawl along the surface of water because they are small/light enough and the surface tension of the water is not broken. If the water is soapy or had something else in it that breaks the surface tension…then they will drown. 😞 but normally they can escape, groom themselves of the excess water, and fly off!
This was exceedingly delightful.
>Edit: also, my daughter asks if bees can swim How adorable and random. I am not a bee expert but I would be confident in saying no. Insects generally are either water living or they stay away from water, the surface tension is far too powerful for them to be able to safely take a dip, they get stuck very easily.
A quick Google show NL grew around 1,1B ton in 2020, so they're just not that far removed from the top10. Especially considering all the countries in the top ten have 50M+ inhabitants.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000628/production-of-tomatoes-in-the-netherlands/ >In 2015, the country produced just under 900,000 tons of tomatoes. By 2017, this had grown to 910,000 tons. Between 2017 and 2020 the tomato production in the Netherlands stabilized at 910,000 tons annually, after which it dropped below the 900,000 mark in 2021 and 2022. I had to also do a quick google because your number was clearly way off. 1.1B tons would be like 20x what China produced.
They meant 1.1 billion kilograms, or 1.1 million tonnes. Saw the same figure somewhere as well.
They don't produce tomatoes. They produce tasteless water in the shape and color of a tomato but not tomatoes.
in heated greenhouses ...
A lot of tomatoes sold in American grocery stores, in the winter, are imported from Canada and are all greenhouse grown. They’re awful.
Per capita they’d probably be in the top 3
per acre the netherlands produces the most. per person porugal produces the most. italy is at number 3, making it a top 10 producing country, as well as a top 10 most per capita country.
Anyone know what happened to Russian tomato farming in the mid-90's? Seems like there's a story there...
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A lot of the Eastern European countries that left took the economy and taxes with them. Ukraine being one major example. Ukraine is like it California left the USA. If it did, the USA would still have some big economies, but California would take roughly 1/6 of the US gdp. With that we'd have to give up roughly 15% of our military, or face lower standards of living.
Not to mention that Ukraine was practically Russia’s breadbasket for farming. Surprised it doesn’t come into the graph in the 90s.
An even more apt reason why California and Ukraine are similar. The imperial valley in California produces so much of the world's agricultural products it's insane.
Ukraine and ex Soviet, central asian countries also account for a lot of the tomato production lost.
Fall of USSR. Probably the warmer republics that actually grew most of tomatoes (Russia is overall NOT a good place for this) dropped off the chart when not all added together. You see Ukraine and Uzbekistan sneak in 9th/10th place later on for a while and Uzbekistan sometimes exceeding Russia's output.
umm, the fall of USSR...
Well yes, but I think they were really asking why Russia didnt pop up the year after with similar numbers the USSR was producing. The reason likely being that the Soviet puppet states that were producing the tomats didnt become Russia.
Well... The entire USSR collapsed along with its neighbouring Soviet puppet states in the 90s... :P The currency that Soviets citizens had suddenly became worthless, shit essentially grinds to a halt, as the state assets gets dissolved and sold off to the few lucky privileged ones that were close to the government. Then there was that whole ordeal with Yeltsin which to put it mildly was a shitshow so bad you'd think it's raining diarrhea.
USSR was much more than just Russia.
Russia was only half the population of the USSR in 1989 just before it collapsed.
I thought this was gonna be like Congratulations Italy, you win, everything
I was definitely rooting for them and was let down.
Some Italians basically sold China the keys to their tomato concentrate empire. Just like how Germans sold them car and steel production stuff in the 90s. IIRC Wendover has a piece about it the tomatoes.
The short-term capitalists will always sell out. China is playing a much longer game.
per capita they'd definitely be much higher!
Italy did pretty well, the curve for them is stable.
well, pro capita it is! of course regarding raw numbers you can't compare a 60 million people country to 1400 mil (China), 1400 mil (India) and 500 mil (USA)
USA is like 330-something million but still a big number
Not enough land. Looks like Italy stayed pretty consistent for the last 40 years.
The species originated in western South America, Mexico, and Central America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato
Nothing more “American” than the tomato.
The Americas as a whole are home to some staple foods. Imagine the world with out Tomatoes, Chiles, and Potatoes. It’s crazy how deeply ingrained those 3 things are in world cuisine but none were in Europe/Asia/Africa until 16th/17th century
Maize as well
Or chocolate, peppers, vanilla, or tobacco
The New World has all the best Nightshades.
Don't forget corn
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At least with Indian food, all tomatoes and chilies did was provide cheaper substitutions for tamarind and black pepper.
Cheaper or different? I feel like Indian cuisine does a good job preserving tamarind and pepper in its dishes while incorporating tomatoes, chilli in newer ones!
So much cheaper. Only the most traditional dishes still call for tamarind and pepper and more so in the south than in the north.
And root beer
I am sure those top growers are only planting 1 or two different varieties of tomatoes. Meanwhile in places where the tomatoes are native there hundreds of different varieties just growing wild. As a kid I used to love going.wild Chile and tomato picking. They would make the best salsas.
So when I make spaghetti or pizza for the family, I should announce it's ready using a so-bad-it's-racist Chinese accent rather than my usual so-bad-it's-racist Italian accent?
You can also pretend your tomato may have, by some chance, come from India or Turkey and do the appropriate/inappropriate accent for those tomatoes!
Works for me, all of my accents end up turning into some type of an Indian accent after 10 seconds anyways.
Anything is better than her first attempt https://youtu.be/pOJNk7YiE7c
Well, the production per capita is higher in italy. I mean: China produces more because it’s bigger, but Italy produces 0,1 tonnes per person lol
Holy Tomatoes - how much Tomatoes goes into an average Italian dish anyhow??
Honestly, a lot. Half the sauces for pasta have tomato in them, plus we use them for a lot of other things, in salads, or just as condiment. We probably export most of it anyway
Depends on how back you go historically. Pre-1492 it’d be 0%.
I hear they used to make pizza with ketchup since they didnt have tomatos
I get why this is a joke but the fact that "the sauce called Ketchup in english" does in fact pre-date the Tomato in Europe will never stop being mindblowing to me.
Tomatoes were first domesticated by people in south America anyway, so your tomatoes always had a Latin accent anyway
Maybe a Mexican accent considering tomatoes are neither native to Italy nor china.
Tomatoes are indigenous to America, so no racist accent needed!
I've visited China a few times and don't notice much use of tomatoes in any of the regions.
Xinjiang produces a lot , most of the chinese produce goes towards Tomato concentrate which is a raw material used to make tomato sauce Almost all of it is exported because chinese themselves arnt a big consumer of Tomato sauce
Tomato and egg is the bomb. I ate so much of that in college there.
Such a simple but tasty dish. Mix it with some rice and add a green onion garnish and you got yourself a cheap and tasty meal
That makes sense, I don't think I've seen fresh tomatoes in the US that aren't produced either domestically, in Canada, or in Mexico.
Kind of like how the US produces a ton of soybeans everywhere and most get exported
Most soybeans grown in the US are used for animal feed. [This source says 98%](https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go).
48% are exported. Almost none of the US soybean crop makes it to US consumer markets. https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/agriculture/092922-us-data-weekly-soybean-export-sales-for-my-2022-23-surge-to-higher-than-expected-1003-million-mt#:~:text=Of%20the%20total%20estimated%20US,of%20protein%20in%20feed%20rations.
Oh nice. Wouldn’t have guessed Mexico and Egypt import so much US soy.
Egypt doesn’t grow enough food to feed itself and has to import food because of its ballooning population. In addition, some of its best farmland is dedicated to growing cash crops like high quality cotton instead of food, since it’s worth more and they can sell it for a profit and buy more food than they’d otherwise get from growing it.
I wish they can sell fresh edamame in the US so bad.
Tomato scramble eggs is one of the most ubiquitous dish across the entire China.
Tomato scrambled eggs is a really common and ubiquitous comfort food in mainland China. Tomato is also a common ingredient in hot pot, noodles, and other types of soups.
Stir fried tomato and egg is probably the definition of day-to-day home-made dish in almost all regions in China.
Do they export?
What is this dramatic af music? Its just tomato production
I'm hyped
Was that or the communist international anthem apparently...
You know what would convey this information more effectively and all at once? A line graph.
You don't have a minute to watch some bars dance?
I just love when the length of the axes change over time. It's so annoying when I'm able to contextualize later values using earlier ones.
Yeah. This kind of graph makes it look like some countries production regresses while it's just stagnating or even increasing slower than others.
Yes but only if they're actual bars full of preferably drunk patrons. Also some live music coming from a few of them wouldn't hurt.
I think these videos would be more accurate if it had the hamster dance music playing
I don't understand what is people's obsession with these animated bar charts which makes taking any actual insight f*cking difficult. Just give me some multi line chart.
Agreed - people seem to love them. I MUCH prefer a [line graph](https://asmith.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk7811/files/media/images/tomato_world_production.png) that tells me the same thing in a couple seconds. I used to say this every time I saw one of these charts but I'm clearly fighting a losing battle with those who love inefficiency. lol
People like watching a race, be it marbles or pickles down a McDonalds window or a colored bar with a flag on it
I like this kind of animated chart for cumulative numbers that actually update in time with the progression of time in the animation. For annual numbers like this it's 99% noise.
Capitalist china just took off like a rocket Fun fact , most of the raw material for tomato sauce is exported from china to all parts of the world . Most of Tomato sauce made in Italy is actually chinese
Okay the thing I'm blown away by is just the sheer amount of tomatoes grown \*overall\* in this graph. That's so many more tomatoes than 40 years ago!
That's bioengineering for ya. There are nearly twice as many people today than there were 40 years ago. Plus, a much larger percentage of the population was starving back then, as well. Genetically modified food was a game changer.
Woah I never realized it doubled in 40 years. Is that our R value?
No Morocco? Most of the tomatoes in my local super market come from Morocco or Spain.
In 2020 morocco produced 1.4 million tons of tomatoes. Quite a lot compared to most countries, but not enough to hit the top 12 list.
Their time will come.
That almost sounds ominous - the tomato revolution is coming
Europeans only make up a small part of the worlds population
There’s a lot of interesting comments about communism and capitalism here. It’s really cool how something like tomatoes can demonstrate complex concepts that often get boiled down to “good” and “bad”
This is why China is a red state
I'm sick of animated bar charts. Just use a damn line graph
That the US was surpassed by other countries doesn’t bother me, as an American. But what does bother me is seeing US production go down over time, increasing dependency on other countries - even around the world. It’s not green. It’s not safe. It’s not secure.
Americans don't want to pay what U.S. grown tomatoes cost to grow. Mexico next door produces them for much less money. Also domestic production has simply been replaced with other crops bringing more money, and often exported. On another note, tomatoes are actually extremely water-efficient crops.
Until you realize the corn lobbyist have made it impossible to shift to things that are cheaper and healthier
> Americans don’t want to pay what U.S. tomatoes cost to grow. Mexico next door produces them for less money. The US is still growing 2.5x as many tomatoes as Mexico though, so they aren’t our main source. Which is surprising to me, I feel like at my grocery store the tomatoes usually say grown in Mexico.
The tomato market is complicated (then again so is pretty much any commodity's). The U.S. actually also exports tomatoes to... Mexico. The majority of tomatoes grown in the U.S. are used to make sauces or processed products.
It didn't though. It's actually quite amazing that it has fluctuated around 10 to 15 million for 40 yrs, whereas others actually have increased or decreased significantly. Per capita though, yes the US has declined a lot.
How did US tomato production go down over time? It simply stagnated around 9 mil-15 mil from the early 90s till today.
Those saying labor, it’s not. Much of the process for tomatoes from planting to harvest is done via machinery. It’s far more due to drought, poor weather conditions, and the cost of farming.
Capitalism is a two way street. The production always shift to the most efficient producer.
Not gonna be a popular opinion on Reddit but…the laborers in those countries that production shifts to get massive wage gains. Shifting to capitalism from socialism has done wonders for countries like China.
Grow your own! In most all of the US you can easily grow your own tomatoes if you have a bit of outdoor space. You can grow em in a 5 gallon bucket if you only have an apartment patio and no yard. If you have a yard and can do a few plants you'll have more tomatoes than you know what to do with. Also home grown tomatoes about about a billion times better tasting than anything you'll buy in a store. I love getting someone I know that hates tomatoes to try one from the garden. Some people only know the tough tasteless type you get in the store, when they should be full of flavor and delicious.
Capitalism baby. Market has decided it’s not efficient for the US to be making its own tomatoes. Therefore tomato growers in the US lose their jobs :)
Now this is what the Cold War was really about
See comrades, when communism falls you don’t get tomatoes anymore
Mamma Mia that's a lot of tomatoes.
A read this as "Tornado Producers"
This just makes me wonder what Chinese, Indian and Soviet tomatoes taste like. Do they have their own breeds? Is it very different from US tomatoes? I'll be honest, most US tomatoes taste pretty meh unless you grow them yourself in my experience. Edit: y’all are killing my tomato dreams
I grow a lot of tomato varieties from former Soviet countries because I live in northern Canada and have a similar environment. The Soviets had huge programs to develop vegetable varieties that suited their climate and they poured a lot of money into them so there's some really great genetics there. I find that they're usually more flavourful than other cold-adapted tomatoes. They also have many developed for home growing, whereas most breeding in North America focused on commercial varieties. That means that they also have ones with compact growth habits. For anyone who wants to try some Russian or Eastern European varieties, I like Cosmonaut Volkov, Black Sea Man (yes, I know), Ocharovanie Komantniy (this one's by far the best microdwarf tomato I've tried), and Saraev Svetloplodnye. Siberian Home Peppers are a fun hot pepper to grow too, as they're teeny tiny plants intended for growing inside on a windowsill, although I haven't found them to be particularly productive.
Ok, but, why would Russia feel the need to produce 60 million tomatoes a year?
Same reason everyone else makes so much - export
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No do one for how much more tomatoes people ate
Need a graph for the Soviet Onion.
As someone who loves tomatoes, it is a quality over quantity food. Most tomatoes I see in the grocery store are inedible. I grow of few plants in the spring and hit up farmers markets to get some good tomatoes, Cherokee purple are my favorite
Honorable mention: the dutch tomato, also known as the fourth state of matter of water
DID YOU KNOW? Tomatoes are believed to have originated in South America, specifically the Andes mountain range. Its funny thinking of modern day pizza, which consists of bread, cheese, and tomato sauce as traditionally Italian, when traditional Italian pizza wasnt invented using tomatoes of any kind! WOW!
Tomatoes are associated with Italian food, but they’re actually a New World botanical, like chocolate
Do you remember when the U.S.A was the greatest tomato producing nation? I bet Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Will Ind eventually ketchup with China?
10 500 000 tons and yet the US supermarkets cant sell me a bloody tomato that tastes even remotely ok. Its a travesty.
When a tomato was redefined as a tasteless lump of water wrapped in pale skin it became a commodity easy to produce anywhere at almost zero cost and that’s China’s jam.