The history of food is extremely fascinating because it allows us to discover the true origins of products we consume every day: one example is the Pachino tomato. We usually attribute it to the town of Pachino, in the province of Syracuse, at the southern tip of eastern Sicily. In reality, as discovered and demonstrated by Professor Alberto Grandi, the Pachino tomato was invented in Israel in 1989 by Hazera Genetics, a leading company in agricultural genetic research. Using the Marker Assistant Selection (Mas) technique, the Pachino tomato was obtained through cross-breeding and hybridisation, which accelerated processes that would naturally take thousands of years. As Grandi pointed out, the Pachino tomato is an "F1 hybrid": this wording indicates that the seeds from the cultivated fruits cannot keep over time and therefore an expedition to Israel each year was necessary to obtain seeds before the start of the growing season. Although reticent at first, because of this innovation produced by an Israeli company, Sicilian farmers were forced to adapt once they considered the advantages generated by this type of tomato, created in a laboratory. In fact, one of the greatest strengths is, as Grandi writes, the "overcoming of the seasonality problem": as we all know, Pachino tomatoes are available all year round and this means that the farmers who produce them gain a lot. As Eric Hobsbawm also recounts in his essay The Invention of Tradition, this is yet another tradition invented with the aim of attributing centuries-old origins to a very recent product. There are in fact many culinary traditions that have been invented in our country, and this is yet another example where tradition is invented and the past is manipulated for the use of the present.