Why Europeans Once Believed Tomatoes Were Poisonous

The name “tomato” comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl. Tomatoes originated in the Americas and were brought across the Atlantic Ocean during the 16th century by Spanish colonial networks.

While Europeans were still toying with the idea of whether this strange new plant was safe to eat, Indigenous peoples in the Americas had already been harvesting tomatoes for food for a long time. To be sure, the history of the tomato is a complex one. It has been domesticated in many places, and gradually improved over time by indigenous people.

What color is a tomato? You might say it’s a reddish orange color, and picture a nice round, plump, juicy fruit. You’ve seen them often, after all. But what if someone asked you in the 1500s? You might actually be inclined to answer yellow. The tomato is known as a pomodoro in Italian, which translates as “golden apple.” This does not mean, of course, that in sixteenth-century Europe the tomato was always yellow. They were a variety of colors and shapes. However, the yellow variety was so prominent that it likely inspired the name.

Contrary to popular belief, not all Europeans shied away from the tomato. Some were eating it happily well before others grew suspicious. The earliest known reference to the fruit in Europe comes from Italian physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, who wrote about it in 1544. He noted that some people ate it fried in oil with salt and pepper, the same way they ate eggplant.

And tomatoes? When everyone wasn’t eating them as food, what the heck were they doing with them? Well, they were an import from the new trade routes. Tomatoes and many other exotic plants were collected and added to botanical gardens and elite plant collections. The ultimate bragging rights: Records even show a shipment of tomatoes sent as a gift to the Medici household in Tuscany in 1548. Compared to today, when you can walk into your local grocery store and buy a bag of tomatoes for a couple bucks.

Tomatoes are part of the nightshade family of plants, Solanaceae, and this could have been the source of some wariness around tomatoes when they first appeared in Europe, considering the family does include deadly plants like deadly nightshade and henbane, and Europeans would already have been very well acquainted with their fatal potential. However, since Solanaceae also include perfectly edible and useful plants like potatoes and eggplants, the family should probably be considered exonerated.

One of those associations was that early botanists lumped the tomato in with mandrake, which had hundreds of years of connections to poison and medicines and fertility and strange folklore to overcome. Tomatoes, for their part, were probably never thought of as particularly magical by most ordinary Europeans. Being linked to “that creepy poisonous plant,” however, was not exactly good marketing for a new food.

The mandrake had already been linked to folklore about love and fertility, so it is not completely inconceivable that the tomato’s “love apple” name comes from there. In later lore, it was even said to have aphrodisiacal properties (which you should probably take with a grain of salt), so the tomato ended up holding a reputation for both danger and romance. No historian is certain of where the name comes from, though.

In fact, there was no “European” attitude at all towards the tomato, not nearly. The tomato was embraced in Spain and parts of Italy as an edible much earlier than in England and other northern areas. There were just as many variations of attitudes within countries, depending on climate, commerce, and local cuisines. What was a humble dish in Naples was a suspicious botanical object in northern climes.

The 1597 appearance of John Gerard’s influential Herball painted the tomato in negative terms as un-nutritious and perhaps harmful. Interestingly, Gerard was clearly aware that tomatoes were eaten regularly in Italy and Spain; however, this information seems to have done little to impress him, and he continued steadfastly to warn his readers away from the fruit. One has to smile at this, and wonder at the mysteries of the human psyche.

Tomatoes were probably avoided for centuries for a number of reasons: out of date medical beliefs, lack of familiarity, and probably a difficulty of growing them well in the English weather. Pinning the whole thing on the shoulders of one man, even one who wrote a book on it, gives Gerard more credit than is probably warranted; the book merely reinforced the doubts that people probably already had.

Now before you jump on Gerard and label the tomato as “toxic,” remember that he’s working within a system of early medicine which doesn’t define foods in terms of toxicity, but rather the balance of heat, coldness and moisture within the human body. He would never have thought, “Will this poison me?” He simply thought, based on the world in which he lived, that the tomato would not be good for him.

Okay, so Europeans weren’t totally making this stuff up. It turns out tomato leaves and stems contain naturally occurring glycoalkaloids, which are chemicals definitely not meant for human consumption. But hey, it’s fine to eat tomato fruits as long as they’re ripe. The rest of the plant isn’t harmless, but dose makes the poison and it’s not like you’re going to die if you brush against a vine. The early skeptics had a grain of truth.

One of the most popular versions of this story is false, or at least unsupported by evidence. The story is that in Europe, only the wealthy could afford to eat the acidic tomato. This led to the poisoning of many, as the acid leached the lead from the pewter plates it was served on. While this is a perfectly fun theory, there is little evidence that any aristocrats died during or after their tomato-filled meal.

There is little evidence to support the claim that Europeans called tomatoes “poison apples.” You’ve no doubt seen numerous articles stating with full confidence that they did; it has been repeated so often that it is accepted as fact. But apart from that repetition, historical evidence suggests it’s just folklore. But then, the myths and legends surrounding tomatoes’ history do seem to breed.

While people in some northern regions still discussed what the heck a tomato was, the Spanish were already using them in food. By the 17th century, tomatoes were becoming part of the Spanish diet and used regularly in cooking. While others were still asking, “Is this safe to eat?” the Spanish cooks thought, What should we put this in?

In 1692, Antonio Latini published the first known printed recipe for tomato sauce in Europe, which he described as being in the Spanish manner. So that ubiquitous sauce which is seen today as quintessentially Italian is not without antecedents.

Now for the really good one: Have you ever thought about how long the pasta-with-tomato-sauce union has been around? You’d think it was inevitable, but actually, in 1790, a man named Francesco Leonardi (or so it is credited) was the first to publish a recipe for pasta with tomatoes. By that time, Italians had had both pasta and tomatoes — which arrived in Italy in the 1500s — for almost two centuries, yet had never combined them.

Over time, however, tomatoes become easier to farm, making them a less expensive crop, and the fruit became more palatable through familiarity and simple shifting tastes. There was no “eureka” moment where the verdict on tomato safety was overturned, no scientist stood before the masses and proclaimed that the tomato was not only edible, but delicious.

The story did not make its way into print until much later, but supposedly Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a whole basket of tomatoes in 1820 on the steps of a New Jersey courthouse. A crowd supposedly looked on in horror, awaiting his death from said tomato. It’s a good story, but likely untrue.

This content was created with the help of AI.