Why Europe Was Terrified of the Tomato for 200 Years

Tomatoes are in our salads, our sauces, our sandwiches, and our soups. It's hard to imagine pizza without it, or a summer garden without a few tomato plants growing in the corner. 

But this wasn't always the case. For hundreds of years, the tomato was feared, avoided, and even blamed for killing people. It was called the "poison apple." It was linked to witchcraft. And in some places, it took over two hundred years before people were willing to put it on their plates.

This is the story of how a small, sour, yellow fruit from the mountains of South America became one of the most beloved ingredients in the world. 

Episode artwork: 1909 Bolgiano's Tomato- sourced from Wikimedia commons

Transcript

Tomatoes are in our salads, our sauces, our sandwiches, and our soups. It's hard to imagine pizza without it, or a summer garden without a few tomato plants growing in the corner. 

But this wasn't always the case. For hundreds of years, the tomato was feared, avoided, and even blamed for killing people. It was called the "poison apple." It was linked to witchcraft. And in some places, it took over two hundred years before people were willing to put it on their plates.

This is the story of how a small, sour, yellow fruit from the mountains of South America became one of the most beloved ingredients in the world. 

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The story starts in the Andes Mountains of western South America, in what is now Peru. Long before any European had crossed the Atlantic, wild tomato plants grew there. Indigenous peoples cultivated them and, over time, carried the plant north through Central America and into Mexico.

By the time the Aztecs encountered the tomato, it had changed quite a bit from its wild ancestor. The Aztecs are credited with growing, naming, and eating the tomato. They called it "tomatl," a word in the Nahuatl language. It's this word that eventually gave us "tomato" in English.

It's worth pointing out that the earliest tomatoes looked nothing like the round, red fruit we buy at the supermarket. They were small, about the size of a pea, and most of them were yellow rather than red. Their flavor was more sour than sweet. If you've ever eaten a tomatillo, you have a rough idea of what those first tomatoes might have tasted like.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early 1500s, they found the tomato growing in the gardens of the Aztec ruler Montezuma the Second. The explorer Hernán Cortés is said to have taken tomato seeds back to Spain, and from there, the plant began its journey across Europe.

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You might expect that a new, flavorful fruit would be welcomed with open arms. Instead, the tomato spent its first two centuries in Europe treated mostly as a curiosity, or worse, as a threat.

Part of the problem was color. Red was associated with danger, sin, and the supernatural, so a bright red fruit made people uneasy from the start. But the bigger problem was the plant family the tomato belonged to.

Tomatoes are part of the nightshade family. Their relatives include deadly nightshades: belladonna, and mandrake, both of which have a long history as poisons. It's actually true that the leaves, stems, and roots of the tomato plant contain a substance called solanine, which is toxic. So while the fruit itself is perfectly safe, its cousins in the plant world had a frightening reputation, and the tomato inherited some of that fear by association.

In 1544, an Italian herbalist named Pietro Andrea Mattioli classified the tomato as a kind of mandrake, a category of plant believed to work as an aphrodisiac. This is where the tomato picked up the nickname "love apple." In France, it became "pomme d'amour," and people whispered about its supposed romantic effects, though there was never any real evidence behind the claim.

In England, things got worse i. In 1597, the English botanist and herbalist John Gerard  wrote about the tomato in his book "Herbal’’. He described the plant's smell as "rank and stinking" and called the fruit "corrupt." Gerard's harsh words had a lasting impact. His writing helped seal the tomato's bad reputation in Great Britain, and that suspicion carried over to the American colonies as well.

By the 1700s, the tomato had earned a new and much scarier nickname across parts of Europe: the "poison apple." Stories spread of aristocrats falling ill or dying after eating them.

That nickname ‘poison apple’ stuck for a reason. As it turns out, the deaths were real. The explanation behind them was not what anyone expected.

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So why was the tomato branded the 'poison apple'? Here's where it gets interesting.

Wealthy Europeans at the time often ate off pewter plates, and antique pewter contained lead. Tomatoes are naturally acidic, and when an acidic food sits on a pewter plate, it can pull lead out of the metal and into the food. People who dined on pewter, and who happened to be eating tomatoes, were absorbing lead with every bite. Some of them got sick. Some of them died.

Nobody suspected the plates. The fruit got the blame instead.

It's a strange twist of history. Meanwhile, the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America had been eating tomatoes safely for centuries. The danger was never in the fruit. It was in the utensil.

Fear doesn't always follow logic, though. Once the tomato had this deadly reputation, it stuck around for generations and the "poison apple" scare was only one piece of a much larger web of tomato superstition.

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The tomato's arrival in England lined up with a period of intense fear over witchcraft, particularly during the reign of King James the First. In a climate where people were suspicious of unfamiliar plants and unfamiliar remedies, a strange new fruit from a foreign land was an easy target.

The tomato's connection to poisonous nightshades didn't help matters. And then there was the scientific name itself. In 1753, the botanist Carl Linnaeus classified the tomato as "Solanum lycopersicum," which translates roughly to "wolf peach nightshade." The word "lycopersicum" sounds a lot like "lycanthrope," the term for a werewolf. For people already primed to be suspicious, that similarity didn't do the tomato any favors.

Even fear of tomatoes didn't end with the witch trial and lycanthropy. As recently as 1990, there was a public panic in the United States after NASA sent tomato seeds into space as part of an experiment. When the seeds returned and were grown into plants, some people worried the resulting tomatoes might be toxic, irradiated, or mutated. NASA actually advised against eating them, worried about the possibility of a lawsuit, even though there was no real evidence of any danger.

 Old fears about tomatoes, it turns out, have a way of resurfacing even centuries after the witch trials that first fueled them.

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No discussion of tomato folklore would be complete without the story of Robert Gibbon Johnson, a farmer and horticulturist from Salem, New Jersey.

According to legend, in 1820, Johnson stood on the steps of the Salem courthouse and ate an entire basket of tomatoes in front of a crowd of onlookers, who were reportedly certain he would drop dead on the spot. When he didn't, word spread that tomatoes were safe to eat, and the fruit's reputation in America began to turn around.

It's a great story. There's just one problem: there's no historical record that it actually happened. The tale first appeared in a 1937 book by a local postmaster and amateur historian named Joseph Sickler, more than a hundred years after the supposed event. From there, it spread and became a local legend.

What we do know is that Johnson really did grow tomatoes, so it's possible his farming and enthusiasm played some small part in encouraging others to try them. But he almost certainly wasn't acting alone. Many other farmers were growing tomatoes around the same time, and the fruit's popularity grew gradually rather than through one dramatic act of bravery of one person.

The town of Salem embraced the story anyway. From 1989 until 2022, it held an annual Salem Tomato Festival, complete with costumed reenactments of Johnson's legendary act. The festival was eventually put on hold after it came to light that Johnson had been a slaveholder. 

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While the tomato struggled to earn trust in England and colonial America, it found a much warmer welcome in southern Europe, especially in Italy.

Tomato seeds made their way from Mexico to Spain with early explorers, and from Spain the plant spread to Italy by the mid-1500s. The first recorded mention of the tomato by name in Italy comes from Tuscany in 1548, where it was called "pomi d'oro," meaning golden apple. Today, that name has become "il pomodoro," the modern Italian word for tomato, and it hints at the fact that many early tomatoes were yellow rather than red.

At first, Italians treated tomatoes mostly as ornamental curiosities rather than food, the same as much of the rest of Europe. But the warm, near-tropical climate of southern Italy turned out to be ideal for growing tomatoes, and little by little, they made their way into the kitchen. By 1692, tomatoes were showing up in a cookbook from Naples, likely borrowing recipes and ideas that had come from Spain.

The real turning point came in the late 1700s, when peasants in Naples began putting tomatoes on top of flatbread. This simple combination was an early ancestor of pizza. The dish caught on with locals and, eventually, with wealthy European travelers passing through Naples on their Grand Tour of the continent.

Pizza's most famous moment came in 1889. Italy had only recently become a unified nation, and the King and Queen traveled to Naples to try to win over a population still unhappy about losing its independence. Queen Margherita, tired of the French-style food served everywhere else in Europe, called for Naples's most famous pizza maker, a man named Raffaele Esposito. He prepared three different pizzas for her. One was topped simply with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil, arranged to echo the colors of the Italian flag. The Queen loved it, and Esposito named the pizza in her honor. Thus Pizza Margherita was born, and it remains one of the most iconic dishes in the world today.

By this point, the tomato was no longer a suspicious outsider. It was part of the national identity.

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Here's one of the most interesting parts of the tomato's journey: it actually became popular in the Americas by way of Europe, rather than directly from its original home in Mexico and South America.

As tomatoes became a major crop in southern Italy, farmers began producing far more than could be eaten fresh. To avoid waste and to reach new markets, they turned to canning.

 Because tomatoes are naturally high in acid, they happen to be one of the few foods that can be safely preserved in a simple boiling water bath, which made large-scale canning practical. The Italian company Cirio began canning tomatoes in 1875, and the industry grew quickly from there.

When large waves of Italian immigrants came to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they brought a taste for tomatoes with them, along with olive oil and other foods that reminded them of home. Canned tomatoes became a staple in Italian neighborhoods across American cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Italian immigration, more than any single event, is credited with driving the widespread American love of tomatoes and tomato-based dishes.

Meanwhile, back in the colonies and the early United States, tomatoes had a slower, quieter path to acceptance. 

Thomas Jefferson is known to have grown and enjoyed tomatoes in his garden at Monticello, and after taking his own version of a Grand Tour through Europe, he brought back seeds and recipes. Still, it wasn't until the early 1900s that tomatoes became truly widespread and popular throughout the United States. 

Tomato soup played a major role in helping the company Campbell’s develop its groundbreaking soup-making process. While the first recipe for tomato soup was published in an 1872 cookbook, Campbell’s changed everything in 1897 by inventing the condensed version and introducing it to kitchens nationwide.

Between Italian immigration and homegrown enthusiasm, the tomato had finally found its place at the American table.

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Beyond the history and folklore, research also links tomatoes to some health benefits.

Some studies suggest that eating tomatoes often may lower the risk of certain problems, like cancer, osteoporosis, and heart disease. People who eat tomatoes regularly also tend to show lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, steadier blood sugar, and less cell damage over time. These are patterns observed in research, not guarantees for any one person.

Tomatoes have also been linked to other possible benefits: helping balance the body's acidity, easing migraines, supporting the immune system, and giving some natural protection against sun damage. Other studies point to possible links with stronger bones, better blood flow, less harm from lead exposure, eye health, and faster wound healing — though how strong the evidence is varies from claim to claim.

Much of this comes down to lycopene, a natural pigment in tomatoes that's considered one of the more powerful antioxidants in our diet. Antioxidants are believed to help protect cells from damage, and diets rich in lycopene have been linked in some studies to a lower risk of diseases like cancer and heart disease.

Not bad for a fruit people once thought could kill them.

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The tomato's story is a reminder of how fear and misunderstanding can shape the way we see something completely harmless. For two hundred years, this small, sour fruit was treated as dangerous, tied to witchcraft, poison, and superstition, all because of a plant family it belonged to and a type of dinnerware it happened to react with. It took science, curiosity, and a lot of hungry people willing to take a chance before the tomato earned the trust it has today.