Short answers, pulled from the story.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Nix v. Hedden on the 10th of May 1893 that the tomato is a vegetable for the purposes of the Tariff of 1883. The decision rested on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use, since tomatoes are served with dinner and not dessert. Botanically, the tomato is a fruit, specifically a berry.
The tomato originated from western South America, with the red-fruited Solanum pimpinellifolium as its likely wild ancestor. Genomic analysis predicts the cultivated tomato originated around 7,000 years ago, about 5,000 BCE. By 500 BCE it was already being cultivated in southern Mexico.
Tomatoes were assumed poisonous because they belong to the nightshade family, which includes deadly nightshade, tobacco, and the mandrake. In England the barber-surgeon John Gerard believed the tomato was poisonous in his 1597 Herbal, and his views kept it considered unfit to eat for many years in Britain and its North American colonies.
Modern tomatoes lost flavor because breeders selected a mutant u phenotype in the mid-20th century so fruit would ripen uniformly red without a green ring around the stem. The u mutation produces defective chloroplasts that reduce sugar in the ripe fruit by 10 to 15%.
Alexander W. Livingston, who lived from 1821 to 1898, developed the tomato as a commercial crop aiming for fruit smooth in contour, uniform in size, and sweet in flavor. He developed over seventeen varieties, introducing the Paragon in 1870 and the Acme in 1875.
World production of tomatoes reached 192 million tonnes in 2023. China led with 36% of the total, followed by India, Turkey, and the United States.