The Two-Hundred-Year Trial of the Tomato
A fruit took the blame for what wealthy Europeans were quietly doing to themselves at dinner.
A ripe tomato is a profoundly unthreatening object. It sits on the counter, glossy and red, the color of ketchup and pizza sauce and the salsa that anchors half the world’s casual meals. We slice it without ceremony. We eat it raw, off the cutting board, the way no one would dare with most foods we suspect of being dangerous. There is nothing about a tomato that signals risk.
And yet for roughly two centuries, a great many educated, wealthy Europeans regarded this fruit as something close to a slow assassin. They grew it in their gardens as a curiosity, admired its bright fruit, and refused to put it anywhere near their mouths. They called it, among other things, the poison apple. Aristocrats reportedly fell ill and even died after dinners that featured it, and the tomato took the blame each time.
The strange part is not that people were afraid. Fear of unfamiliar plants is ancient and often sensible. The strange part is that the tomato was innocent. It was not poisoning anyone. The deaths were real, the suffering was real, but the cause was sitting on the table the whole time, gleaming in the candlelight, mistaken by everyone present for a sign of wealth rather than a source of harm. To understand how a harmless fruit spent two hundred years on trial, it helps to start where the tomato itself began: not in Italy, not in Spain, but in the foothills and coastal valleys of South America, where it was barely a fruit at all.
A weed before it was a delicacy
The ancestor of the modern tomato grew wild along the western edge of South America, through what is now Peru and Ecuador. These wild tomatoes were small, often no larger than a marble, and they were bitter rather than sweet. They were the sort of thing a hungry traveler might taste once and not bother with again. Nobody who encountered the plant in its native state would have predicted that it would one day underpin the cuisines of Italy, Mexico, India, and the American South.
The transformation happened far to the north, in Mesoamerica. The peoples of the region, and the Aztecs in particular, domesticated the plant and selected over generations for larger, sweeter, more palatable fruit. They had a word for it, tomatl, the root that survives in nearly every language that names the fruit today.1 They ate it without apparent anxiety, combining it with chili peppers and salt in dishes that were, in spirit if not in exact recipe, the ancestors of salsa. For them the tomato was simply food: useful, ordinary, eaten and forgotten between meals.
Then, in the early sixteenth century, the Spanish arrived. Conquistadors and the merchants and clergy who followed them encountered the tomato in the markets and gardens of the New World and did what Europeans of the age tended to do with novelties: they collected seeds and sent them home. By the middle of the 1500s the tomato had crossed the Atlantic and entered the gardens of Europe, where it met a culture entirely unprepared to understand it. It arrived without its context, without the Aztec recipes and the centuries of casual consumption that had made it safe and familiar. It arrived as a stranger.
The botanist who compared it to a poison
Europe had a method for dealing with unfamiliar plants. The learned men of the day, the botanists and herbalists, examined a new specimen, compared it to plants they already knew, and slotted it into the existing order of nature. This was a reasonable approach, but it carried a danger. A plant could be condemned not for anything it did, but for the company it appeared to keep.
This is precisely what happened to the tomato. In 1544 the Italian physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli described the new fruit, and in doing so he reached for a comparison that would haunt it for generations. He noted its resemblance to the mandrake, a plant deeply entangled in European folklore with witchcraft, sleep, and death.2 To a modern reader the comparison is almost arbitrary, a matter of leaves and fruit shape. To a sixteenth-century European, linking a new plant to the mandrake was nearly an accusation.
The association deepened when botanists recognized which family the tomato belonged to. The tomato is a member of the Solanaceae, the nightshades, and the nightshades included some genuinely lethal relatives.3 Deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, contains potent alkaloids that can race the heart and stop it. Mandrake and certain other family members carried their own dangers. By the logic of guilt by association, a logic that governed a great deal of early botany, the tomato was suspect simply for its lineage. It looked like trouble, and it kept bad company.
The consequence was a peculiar compromise. Europeans cultivated the tomato, but as an ornamental. It was pretty enough to grow for the eye, and dangerous enough, they believed, to keep away from the stomach. For decades it lived in this limbo, admired and feared in equal measure, a decoration that no respectable household would dream of cooking.
The herbal that fixed the fear in English
Reputations spread through books, and few books did more to cement the tomato’s bad name in the English-speaking world than John Gerard’s Herball, published in 1597. Gerard was a barber-surgeon and gardener whose enormous compendium of plants became one of the most widely consulted botanical references of its era. When Gerard pronounced on a plant, English readers listened.
Gerard pronounced unfavorably on the tomato. He described the plant as having a rank and stinking quality, and although he acknowledged that people in hotter countries did in fact eat the fruit, he made clear that he considered this a foreign habit unsuited to the English.4 His verdict mattered far beyond his own garden. For roughly two centuries afterward, English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic inherited a suspicion of the tomato that traced, in large part, back to the pages of his herbal. A single influential text had managed to wall off an entire food from an entire culture.
Meanwhile, the rumors gained a horrifying kind of confirmation. Across Europe, at the dinner tables of the wealthy, people who ate the bright red fruit sometimes sickened and died. The pattern seemed undeniable. The rich, who could afford fashionable novelties and elaborate meals, were the ones eating tomatoes, and the rich were the ones falling ill. To anyone watching, the conclusion wrote itself. The tomato killed. The evidence was right there on the plate.
The killer was the plate
The evidence was right there on the plate, but not in the way anyone believed. The crucial clue was not the fruit. It was the dish beneath it.
The wealthy of early modern Europe dined from pewter. Pewter was the tableware of status, the gleaming metal that distinguished a fine household from a humble one, and it carried a hidden flaw. Much of the pewter of the period contained substantial amounts of lead.5 Under ordinary conditions the lead stayed put. But lead is leached out of such alloys by acid, and the tomato is notably acidic. When a slice of tomato or a tomato-based dish sat on a pewter plate, the fruit’s acidity slowly dissolved lead from the metal and carried it into the food, and from the food into the diner.6
The result was a textbook case of lead poisoning, mistaken for the work of a poisonous fruit. Lead does not kill quickly or cleanly. It accumulates in the body and produces a long, grim catalog of symptoms: abdominal pain, nausea, weakness, damage to the nervous system, organ failure, and over time, death.7 These were exactly the kinds of slow, mysterious declines that wealthy Europeans suffered and attributed to the tomato. The fruit was present at the scene of the crime, but it was an accomplice at most. The lead was the murderer, and the diners had paid handsomely for the murder weapon.
The most telling evidence sat at the other end of the social scale. The poorer classes could not afford pewter. They ate from wood, from ceramic, from earthenware, none of which surrendered lead to an acidic meal. And the poor, in regions where the tomato had taken hold, ate it freely and suffered no special harm. Peasants in southern Europe consumed tomatoes with no idea they were courting death, because they were not. The very poverty that denied them fashionable dishware also protected them from the poison that the wealthy were unknowingly serving themselves. The class that could afford the best plates was being killed by them.
How the south quietly fell in love
While northern botanists fretted and aristocrats died over their pewter, something altogether different was happening in the warmer, poorer regions of the Mediterranean. There the tomato thrived in the climate, and the people who grew it had no herbal warning them off and no fashionable tableware to poison them. They simply cooked with it.
The written record catches up with this quiet culinary revolution in Naples. The first known European recipe explicitly using tomatoes appears in a Neapolitan cookbook published in 1692, describing a tomato sauce in the Spanish style, paired with oil and aromatics.8 It is a modest entry in an old book, but it marks a turning point. In southern Italy, among people who could not have cared less about the anxieties of English herbalists, the so-called poison apple was becoming the foundation of a cuisine. The tomato sauce that would one day define pizza and pasta was being invented not in a palace but in poverty, by cooks who had every reason to make cheap ingredients delicious and no reason at all to fear them.
This is one of the quieter ironies of the tomato’s history. The food that elite Europe shunned as deadly was being lovingly perfected by the people elite Europe ignored. By the time the rest of the world came around, southern Italians had already built an entire culinary tradition on the fruit that their betters had spent centuries refusing to touch.
America’s long, slow acquittal
The European fear crossed the Atlantic intact. American colonists inherited the same suspicion, the same vague sense that the tomato was beautiful and dangerous, and for a long while they too kept it at arm’s length.
The most famous story of the tomato’s American rehabilitation centers on a man named Robert Gibbon Johnson, who, according to legend, stood on the steps of a courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, in 1820 and ate an entire basket of tomatoes in front of a crowd that had gathered to watch him die.9 He did not die. He finished the basket and walked away unharmed, and the spell, the story goes, was broken. Historians treat the dramatic particulars of this tale with considerable skepticism. The detailed account seems to have been embellished long after the fact. But the underlying truth it dramatizes was real enough: Americans genuinely feared the tomato, and that fear genuinely faded.
It faded because evidence, and appetite, slowly overwhelmed superstition. Thomas Jefferson grew tomatoes at Monticello and treated them as perfectly ordinary food, recording their cultivation without a hint of alarm.10 By the 1830s American cookbooks were printing tomato recipes openly, and within a few decades the fruit had completed its journey from feared ornament to beloved staple. No single dramatic moment did the work. It was the accumulation of countless private meals that did not end in death, set against a fear that had never had a real foundation in the first place. The tomato did not have to prove its innocence so much as outlast the accusation.
The assumption, not the apple
The verdict, when it finally came, was complete. The tomato was never poisonous. The plates were the killers. For two hundred years people blamed a fruit for a harm they had manufactured themselves, mistaking the acidity that made the tomato delicious for the agent of their own slow poisoning.
The tomato today is among the most consumed foods on the planet, grown by the hundreds of millions of tonnes each year and woven into cuisines on every continent: pizza and pasta in Italy, salsa in Mexico, ketchup on nearly everything in between.11 The poison apple turned out to be one of the most beloved ingredients humanity has ever cultivated. Its long disgrace looks, in hindsight, almost absurd.
But the absurdity is instructive, because the mistake was not stupid. It was logical. People observed a real pattern, real deaths following real meals, and they reached for the most visible suspect. The bright red fruit was new, foreign, related to known poisons, and present at every fatal dinner. The lead in the pewter was invisible, familiar, and trusted, a marker of wealth rather than a cause for suspicion. Faced with a genuine mystery, the diners of early modern Europe pointed at the stranger and overlooked the thing they had always taken for granted. They were not foolish. They were simply wrong in the particular way that confident people often are, certain they had identified the cause when they had only identified the most obvious one. The next time the knife goes through a tomato, it is worth remembering the centuries it spent on trial for a crime it never committed, while the real culprit gleamed quietly on the table.
Sources
- Smith, A. F., The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery, University of South Carolina Press, 1994. — https://www.amazon.com/Tomato-America-Early-History-Cookery/dp/1570032866
- Mattioli, P. A., Commentarii in Libros Sex Pedacii Dioscoridis, 1544 (botanical description of the tomato). — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Andrea_Mattioli
- Knapp, S. et al., Solanaceae: A model for linking genomics with biodiversity, Comparative and Functional Genomics, 2004. — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2447482/
- Gerard, J., The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, 1597. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herball
- Hernberg, S., Lead Poisoning in a Historical Perspective, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 2000. — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10940962/
- Smithsonian Magazine, Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years, 2013. — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-was-feared-in-europe-for-more-than-200-years-863735/
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health Effects of Lead Exposure. — https://www.cdc.gov/lead-prevention/about/index.html
- Latini, A., Lo Scalco alla Moderna, Naples, 1692 (early tomato sauce recipe). — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Latini
- Monticello / Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Tomatoes at Monticello. — https://www.monticello.org/house-gardens/farms-gardens/center-for-historic-plants/twinleaf-journal-online/tomato/
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAOSTAT crop production data (tomatoes). — https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/
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