My Mom, both grandmothers, all the female relatives, and women we went to church with were all big time cooks and I never had or heard of a FGT until I was grown. People always would pick green tomatoes just as they began to turn and put them indoors by a window to ripen so that bugs, worms, birds, and squirrels attracted by the red color would not mess them up out in the garden. They would still have the good "home grown" taste even though they were not vine ripened.
Maybe it is because this far down south, the heat of summer usually kills tomatoes or halts production months before frost could hit a producing plant leaving you with a bunch of green tomatoes to deal with.
