tomato shoots growing inside tomatoes?

cmore

cmore

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I had some tomatoes that were a couple weeks old, but with
no outward signs of spoilage. So I washed one off and cut it
open and found new shoots growing inside.
Is this common? I had never heard of it before. Safe to eat?
And yes, I am a bachelor.
 
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Yes, that's normal. It's nature and where baby tomatoes come from on their own.
The tomatoe is just a seed pod and food for the sprouts.
You can take those sprouts and plant them but they may have been treated so they won't produce fruit. That's just for job security.
You can eat them if you want, nothing toxic there.
 
I've seen that a couple times in the last couple months; my sense is it's happening with tomatoes imported from far away places, tomatoes that through some process are kept from spoiling for the long transit times, but the periods are so long that some start to sprout from within. I doubt any of us have seen it with fresh local tomatoes.
 
I've had it happen with some out of my garden.
I believe tomatoes that are shipped are usually picked on the green side to keep them firm for shipping, then allowed to ripen enroute.
Thus, the bland flavor.
If they picked them ripe and shipped them, they would arrive as paste unless they're specially packaged.
That's also why fresh local vine ripened are far superior to any shipped across the country.
 
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Commercially-harvested tomatoes are often picked green for handling, then gassed with ethylene to ripen.

You can approximate this process by placing banana peels in a bag with unripened fruit. The C2H4 given off by the peels accelerates the ripening dramatically.
 
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