Tomato Emoji

A red tomato with a green stem. Simple fruit (yes, botanically it's a fruit), massive cultural footprint.

🍅 is most recognizable as the symbol of Rotten Tomatoes, the movie review aggregation site that has become the default way people decide whether to watch a film. A fresh red tomato (🍅) means critics liked it; a green splat means they didn't. The site's Tomatometer score has become so influential that studios have accused it of hurting box office performance. When someone texts '🍅?' about a new movie, they're asking for the score.

The tomato-as-disapproval tradition predates the internet by centuries. Throwing tomatoes at bad performers was a common audience response in 19th-century theater. It's where the Rotten Tomatoes name comes from, and it's why 🍅 can mean 'booo' in digital conversation.

Then there's the eternal debate: is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Botanically, it's a fruit (a berry, specifically). Culinarily, it's a vegetable. Legally, it's a vegetable: the US Supreme Court ruled so in 1893 in Nix v. Hedden to impose vegetable import tariffs.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010).

On film Twitter and Letterboxd, 🍅 is the Rotten Tomatoes reference emoji. 'What's the 🍅 score?' is shorthand for 'what do critics think?' Review accounts and movie podcasts use it constantly. The fresh/rotten binary has become so embedded in how people discuss movies that 🍅 alone triggers the association.

In food communities, 🍅 is a staple of Italian cooking content. Tomato sauce recipes, caprese salads, bruschetta, pasta: the tomato is foundational to Italian cuisine and 🍅 appears across food Instagram and TikTok whenever red sauce is involved. 'Nonna's 🍅 sauce' is a genre unto itself.

The fruit-vs-vegetable debate surfaces perpetually on social media. Every few months, someone posts the question like they've discovered a secret, and thousands of people reply with the same arguments. It's the 'is a hot dog a sandwich?' of the produce section. 🍅 sits at the center of this evergreen discourse.

The tomato is native to western South America, where it was domesticated by the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish brought it to Europe in the 16th century, where it was initially feared to be poisonous (it's related to deadly nightshade). Italians finally embraced it in the 18th century, and the rest of the world followed.

The tomato's great cultural irony is that the country most identified with it (Italy) didn't have it for most of its culinary history. The first Italian tomato cookbook wasn't published until 1692. Before that, pasta sauce was made without tomatoes. Pizza, as we know it, didn't exist until the 18th century in Naples.

In 1893, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Nix v. Hedden that tomatoes are vegetables for tariff purposes, despite botanical evidence that they're fruits. The case was brought by a tomato importer trying to avoid the Tariff Act of 1883's vegetable tax. He lost. The decision has never been overturned.

Rotten Tomatoes launched in 1998, founded by UC Berkeley student Senh Duong to collect reviews for Jackie Chan movies. It grew into the dominant movie review aggregator and turned 🍅 into a universal symbol for film quality judgment.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F345U+1F345 TOMATO. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. One of the original food emojis. Platform designs consistently show a red tomato with a green stem or calyx.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F345 TOMATO. One of the original food emojis alongside 🍆, 🌽, and 🍇.↗
2. 1893Pre-emoji but culturally central: the US Supreme Court rules in [Nix v. Hedden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden) that tomatoes are vegetables for tariff purposes. The ruling still stands.
3. 1998[Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/) launches. The tomato becomes the default symbol for movie-quality judgment online, 12 years before the emoji ships.
4. 2019Apple redesigns 🍅 in iOS 13 with more visible surface texture and a shinier highlight. Google keeps theirs flatter and more storybook.

• •The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1893 that tomatoes are vegetables, not fruits, for tariff and trade purposes. The botanical classification (fruit) was acknowledged but overridden by common culinary usage.
• •Rotten Tomatoes was founded in 1998 by Senh Duong, a UC Berkeley student who wanted to collect reviews for Jackie Chan movies. It grew into the most influential movie review aggregator in the world.
• •The tradition of throwing tomatoes at bad performers dates to at least the 1800s. Audiences in American and European theaters would hurl produce at acts they disliked. Tomatoes were favored because they were soft enough not to injure but messy enough to humiliate.
• •The Pomodoro Technique was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, named after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer. "Pomodoro" means tomato in Italian.
• •La Tomatina in Buñol, Spain uses roughly 150,000 overripe tomatoes and draws 20,000 attendees every August. It's been running since 1945 and is now a regulated, ticketed event.
• •Italians didn't have tomatoes until the 16th century. For most of Italian culinary history, pasta sauce had no tomatoes. The first Italian tomato cookbook wasn't published until 1692. Pizza didn't exist in its current form until the 18th century.
• •The tomato was initially called a "love apple" (pomme d'amour in French, pomodoro in Italian from "pomo d'oro," apple of gold). Early European aristocrats thought it was an aphrodisiac, and some feared it was poisonous because it's related to deadly nightshade.
• •San Marzano tomatoes, the gold-standard variety for Neapolitan pizza, are grown only in a specific volcanic-soil region near Vesuvius and carry EU Protected Designation of Origin status. They're to pizza what Champagne is to sparkling wine.

• •Rotten Tomatoes (1998-): The review aggregator that redefined how audiences judge movies. Founded by UC Berkeley student Senh Duong to collect Jackie Chan reviews, now the default quality metric for films. Its logo made 🍅 synonymous with film judgment.
• •The Pomodoro Technique: Francesco Cirillo's 1980s time-management method named after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomodoro = "tomato" in Italian). 25-minute work sprints, 5-minute breaks. The tomato timer is why developers and students know 🍅 as a productivity symbol.
• •La Tomatina: Every August in Buñol, Spain, about 20,000 people pelt each other with 150,000 overripe tomatoes. The festival started in 1945 (reportedly from a food fight that spiraled) and is now a globally televised event.
• •Killer Tomatoes (1978): Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is one of the most enjoyable bad B-movies in the horror-comedy canon. It spawned sequels, a cartoon series, and cemented the tomato's place in cinematic camp.
• •Nonna's sauce / Italian grandma genre: A vast genre of Instagram and TikTok cooking content showing Italian-American grandmothers making red sauce from scratch. 🍅 + 🍝 is the iconography.
• •Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine: Heirloom tomato varieties have their own subculture and Saveur-style pilgrimage coverage. Farmer's market tomato discourse is its own TikTok genre in late summer.