Tomatoes are as ingrained in Italian culture as Potatoes are to Ireland. But just like the mighty potato, it originally came from South America and it took several hundred years to be even accepted as food, let alone loved. Aztec Indians gifted Spanish Conquistadors with tomatoes when Hernan Cortez visited them in 1519, and by that I mean when Hernan Cortez killed everyone and stole anything that wasn’t nailed down…then they stole the nails. The name tomato comes from the Aztec word “Tomatl” which means “tomato.” (Actually it means swollen fruit)
People’s relationship with tomatoes were varied depending when and where you lived. In Italy tomatoes were used as a decorative plant or garnishment for your table. While Italians have certainly been enjoying tomatoes for a very long time, the word “tomato sauce” didn’t conjure up visions of the hills of Tuscany or whatever until the 19th century. The boring truth is tomatoes are well suited to grow in Italy’s climate and when food preservation and shipping entered the modern era tomato sauce was a valuable export for Italy. Since it made money, they made a lot. Since there was a lot, they were linked, then it just kind of got out of control until it was a matter of national pride; kind of like Columbia and coffee and America and school shootings. Also, because pizza is delicious.
Thomas Jefferson was introduced to tomatoes on a trip to paris. He sent some seeds back and started growing them at his estate. Meanwhile they were already popular in places like Louisiana, which was colonized by France.
In 1820 a guy in New Jersey, named Robert Gibbon Johnson was trying to get a tomato growing contest going. For some reason, none of the townsfolk wanted to join a poison growing competition. Johnson, (to the absolute horror of everybody) ate a basket of tomatoes on the courthouse steps to prove they wouldn’t kill him. Around that same time tomatoes were accepted in neighboring New York but gardens were getting infested with green horned tomato worms. A doctor was quoted in the Syracuse Standard that the worms were “deadly as a rattlesnake” and a “new enemy to human existence.” Even the famous naturalist Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “an object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it.”
Early tomatoes were small and yellow, almost identical to mandrake nightshade berries, which were used as an aphrodisiac, earning tomatoes the nickname “love apples” in France. It also looked like the berries from the atropa belladonna nightshade, which will fucking kill you. Both of the aforementioned nightshades were widely believed in the witch-hunting community of the Catholic church to be ingredients for ointments that witches rubbed on their brooms to make them fly and tingle their cooters. In the 1500’s people could (and absolutely did) get burned at the stake for having a tomato plant in the garden.
In 1597 an English barber-surgeon named John Gerard published a comprehensive book (called an Herbal) detailing various plants and their uses. It is important to note that he stole most of the work in the book and mistranslated a lot of it from its original Latin. On the subject of tomatoes, he said, “the whole plant is of a ranke and stinking savour… they yeelde very little nourishment to the bodie, and the same naught and corrupt.” Not exactly a glowing endorsement.
Rejection of tomatoes wasn’t as unreasonable as it sounds now. Tomatoes at the time were tiny, ugly, acidic as hell, and not super tasty unless you dressed em up right. Things started to turn around for the tomato in 1870 though, when Ohio seed wizard Alexander W. Livingston unveiled a new variety of tomato he had been cultivating for the last five years, which he called “THE PARAGON!.” You have to read that like an announcer at a monster truck ralley. SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! ITS PARAGON TIIIIIIIIIME! It was bigger, more symmetrical, redder, and most importantly; delicious. Your welcome world. Sincerely, America. Actually, scratch that. We also fucked the tomato up. All the sugary sweet goodness was systematically bred out of tomatoes over the next hundred and fifty years in favor of something that can sit on a grocery shelf for weeks.
If you aren’t sure if tomatoes are a fruit or a vegetable, don’t worry. The supreme court of the United States of America settled that question in 1893. Some fruit importers took the New York Port Authority to court to get their money back because they had been getting charged a 10% import tax that applied to vegetables, but not fruit. The case made it all the way to the Supreme court, who ruled…
“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.”
So there you go. Tomatoes are fruit... unless the United States can tax it; then it’s a vegetable.
During my research for this topic, I came across more than a few resources that were pretty adamant the whole tomato scare thing was an old wife’s tale, which had me questioning if I should just move on to something else. I put a lot of effort into not spreading bullshit. Facebook has that covered. I just so happened to talk to my mom and told her what I was working on. She immediately said, “Oh, did you know people used to think tomatoes were poison?” I thought that was interesting since I never heard that until I started on this. Then she was like, “Yeah, back in the 60’s my Aunt brought over this new dish she heard about from Italy called ‘lasagna’. It took an hour to convince my mother to eat a bite because she said tomato sauce was poisonous. Then a goddamn dragon tore the roof off and ate the lasagna!” I think she was drunk, or maybe that was me. I can’t remember. I was drunk. Either way, that closed the book on whether the tomato scare was real or not because my mom is a goddamn saint and she would never lie unless it was to get out of trouble.
