You like tomatoes, right? Of course you do. It's been a long time since people thought tomatoes were rank and poisonous fruits of evil. (Though tomatoes are in the nightshade family -- the goths of the gardening world.) Odds are, though, that you haven't had any true tomato goodness unless you grew some yourself. Why? The answer is about 20 percent science and 80 percent racism.

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Which could honestly be the motto for America.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the average American uses nearly 90 pounds of tomatoes a year, and I have to stop here for a second. How the hell does the USDA track what everyone in the U.S. eats? Are there chips implanted in our chips, or food spies monitoring the Mickey Dees? No, that's crazy talk. The USDA tracks food disappearance -- how much food leaves the system. As far as they're concerned, you could be flushing those tomatoes down the toilet when you bring them home from the supermarket, eliminating the middleman.

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Now, these tomatoes nearly all suck. The USDA splits them up into two categories: market tomatoes (the pallid, tasteless ones you get at the supermarket) and processing tomatoes (tomatoes used for things like ketchup and pizza sauce and that mysterious can in the cupboard that was there when you moved into the apartment). Almost every market tomato is handpicked, while almost every tomato used in processing is picked by machine. There's no possible way a machine could be racist, right?

Rogers State University

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Nope, they want to kill all humans equally.

Wrong. See, those tomatoes are picked by machines by design. This goes back the 1940s. Then, as now, most of the tomatoes that went into cans or ketchup or tomato juice were grown in California. It was the same time in California when Japanese-Americans were sent off to internment camps and Mexican-Americans were beaten for inventing steampunk 50 years too early. With every able-bodied American man headed off to war, jail, or a detention camp, however, the United States devised a program with its neighbor to the south to import temps to fill the crap farm job gap. These braceros did the tomato picking for wartime America's insatiable ketchup habit.

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No one really liked this solution, in large part because Californians of the time feared that the Golden State would become exactly what it is in 2017. Enter Gordie C. "Jack" Hanna -- not the zookeeper from those old television shows, but a plant breeder at UC Davis. In 1942, Hanna had a dream: a world that no longer needed anyone toiling in the tomato fields, but which instead used machines to pick out those blood-red jewels from the bushes.

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When telling others, he wisely left out the part of the dream where he was suddenly naked and the tomatoes all turned to boobs.