August 7, 2026 • 10 mins
The tomato originated in the Americas and spread during European colonization. But was it really thought to be poisonous (or cause lycanthropy) when it first came to Europe? Learn about the legends behind tomatoes -- and how we got the sturdy ones sold in stores -- in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/where-did-the-tomato-come-from.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, the history of the tomato is mired
and legend and hearsay, but one thing is certain. Everybody's
favorite red fruit and yes it is botanically a fruit
did not originate in Italy, despite the fact that it's
(00:25):
an essential ingredient in today's pizza and pasta sauces. The
tomato comes to us by way of the Americas. Tomatoes
didn't even land in Europe until the fifteen hundreds, and
for a long time some people there thought they were
poisonous or possibly connected to were wolves and witches. But
we're getting into the aforementioned hearsay. Let's talk about what
(00:48):
we do know about tomatoes. In its original form, the
tomato was not the prolific red globe we know and
love today. It was smaller, more like today's cherry tomatoes,
and not necessarily red when it was ripe, maybe yellow
or purple. It had been evolving around western South America
four millions of years, but around five thousand BCE, Mesoamericans
(01:12):
in what's now Mexico domesticated the fruit. Early Spanish explorers
and colonizers of the area in the late fourteen and
early fifteen hundreds, learned about the plant from the locals
and brought seeds back to Europe. The Spanish got their
word for it, Tamate, from the Nahawat language word tamat,
which is said to come from the root to swell
(01:33):
or to plump, a meaning something like the swelling fruit.
The English spelling of tomato is thought to have been
influenced by the word potato, which originated a bit earlier,
but around the same time as both were brought back
to Europe from the Americas. By the fifteen forties, Spain
was producing tomatoes. They began spreading around Europe and took
(01:55):
to some parts of what's now Italy particularly well. The
first known US European description of the tomato plant comes
from an Italian naturalist and physician by the name of
Pietro Andrea Mattioli. In fifteen forty four. He wrote about
it being eaten similarly to eggplants. Tomatoes were probably pretty
rare and grown more as newfangled curiosities than anything else
(02:18):
for another few decades, though they eventually caught on where
they grew well alike around the Mediterranean coast. Mattioli called
the tomato pomo doro, meaning golden apple, perhaps a reference
to the myth of Eiris's golden apple, you know, the
one inscribed to the most beautiful Goddess, the fight over
which eventually led to the mythic Trojan War, or possibly
(02:41):
the tomatoes he was dealing with were more yellow than
red when ripe. Either way, that could well be where
the modern Italian word for the fruit pomodoro comes from.
Mattioli also correctly classified the tomato in the night shade family.
The night shades include some plants that are toxic, like
mandrake and belladonna, but some that are perfectly edible, like
(03:04):
peppers and eggplants. And eggplants, as stated above, were already
well known around Europe at this time, but it may
be due to the tomato's resemblance to plants like belladonna
that some other naturalists thought it was definitely not good
for you, or at worst poisonous. These concerns were fairly
(03:25):
widespread across parts of Europe for a couple centuries, but
it's hard to say exactly how widespread because there are
a lot of legends about how feared the tomato was like.
Some Italian nobility may have used tomatoes as tabletopp decor
to be edgy because they thought it was poisonous. The
(03:46):
nickname poison apple apparently caught on in some places. Supposedly,
the tomato was grown in gardens in France for a
whole generation as an insect repellent before anyone was willing
to try eating them. The fruit definitely got associated with
like caanthropy through a tangle of misinformation. Basically, witch hunters
(04:07):
thought that witches used night shades to turn themselves into werewolves,
and also some herbalists thought that the tomato might be
what the ancient Roman physician Galen had been writing about
when he called a poisonous plant a wolf something. Galen
certainly did not use the word like a persicon, meaning
wolf peach, but that's a mistranscription that became another nickname
(04:32):
for the tomato that one actually stuck around in The
taxonomical name for the tomato that we still use today
slanam like a persicum. Some pushback against tomatoes may have
come down from Christian religious leaders because the fruit isn't
mentioned in the Bible. Almost definitely. A legend is that
(04:52):
some wealthier people might have gotten lead poisoning from eating
acidic tomatoes off of their fancy pewter plates, and therefore
so siated tomatoes with poison for that reason. The thing
is leood poisoning happens really slowly, so it's unlikely that
anyone would have associated any single food with the effects
at the time. Whatever the case, the English were especially
(05:15):
suspicious of tomatoes, including the English colonists who came to
North America. The fruit was considered potentially dangerous or possibly
just sort of gross, but the legends continued. One widely
circulated story claims that in eighteen twenty, when Colonel Robert
Gibbon Johnson announced that he was going to eat a
(05:36):
basket of tomatoes on the steps of a New Jersey courthouse,
and a crowd gathered to watch him slowly die and
then dispersed, slightly disappointed when he didn't. Another says that
Thomas Jefferson once horrified a local villager in Lynchburg, Virginia
by snacking on a tomato. There's no proof of either incident.
(05:57):
We do know that Jefferson enjoyed tomatoes, going back to
the Revolutionary era. His meticulous records indicate that he grew
tomatoes at his Monticello plantation and often sold them at
Washington's markets. Different varieties commonly appear in his family's personal
recipe collections. The famed French gourmand Briat Savoran wrote in
(06:18):
his eighteen twenty five book The Physiology of Taste that
the tomato was a newly popular thing in Paris at
the time. He said that it had been almost entirely
unknown fifteen years previous, and at first very expensive, but
now common in markets. He claimed it was introduced to
Paris by the influx of people from the south of
France during the Revolution, and that quote tomatoes are a
(06:42):
great blessing to good cookery. They make excellent sauces which
go well with every kind of meat. Tomatoes caught on
more widely here in the States with the rise of canning,
and especially around the Civil War in the eighteen sixties,
when canned foods became an important resource. Tomatoes are well
suited to canning, and at the time, the varieties available
(07:04):
and lack of modern shipping technologies meant that they didn't
travel well fresh. In the early nineteen hundreds, farmers and
the botanically curious worked on developing lots of new varieties
of what we today call heirloom tomatoes. Airloom tomatoes are
interesting varieties that fruit via open pollination, and their seeds
(07:26):
generally produce the same fruit as their parents. But then
around the nineteen thirties, refrigeration and shipping technologies developed such
that produce could be shipped to wider regions, and lots
of those interesting strains were too delicate or weird for
wide distribution. Agricultural researchers set to the task of making sturdier,
(07:48):
more uniform tomatoes, and that's where modern hybrid tomatoes come from.
Hybrid tomatoes were developed by combining specific strains and must
be carefully pollinated in order to produce standardized fruit or
to fruit at all. Their seeds typically won't fruit true.
These hybrids were developed to be more resistant to disease
(08:10):
and to have thicker skins and brighter colors, making sure
that they don't burst during shipping and do look pretty
on store shelves. Supposedly, labs instructed their scientists to think
of what would make a tomato a good projectile and
work on developing traits from there. By the middle of
the twentieth century, tomatoes could be found in just about
(08:32):
any market in both America and Europe, and they continued
to spread. Today, the tomato is one of the largest
and most lucrative vegetable crops in the world, second only
to potatoes and up there with onions and lettuce, and yes,
although it's botanically a fruit, the tomato is practically and
sometimes legally considered a vegetable. As of twenty twenty, nearly
(08:57):
one hundred and eighty seven million metric tons of tomatoes
were being grown and sold every year across the globe.
That's some three hundred and fifty billion pounds, which is
pretty impressive for fruit that few people outside of the
Americas had heard of, much less had the courage to taste,
only a few centuries ago. Speaking of some of these
(09:19):
legends about tomatoes persist to this day. Have you ever
heard that the tomatoes leaves are poisonous? I grew up
knowing that, but it turns out they're not, or not
in any quantity that you would actually consume. I only
learned about this this year, so I haven't had the
chance to try them yet. But fans say to use
(09:41):
fresh tomato leaves the way that you might use fresh herbs.
You could add a few chopped towards the end of
simmering apasta sauce, or blend them into a salsa, pesto,
or chutney, or sprinkle some over a salad that goes
for tomato blossoms too. The lesson I'm taking from all
of this is too never let hearsay keep you from
(10:02):
a good meal. Today's episode is based on the article
where did the Tomato Come From? On how stuffworks dot
com written by Chris Abenstine, and on an episode of Saber,
my food, science and history podcast with co host Annie Reese.
Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
(10:24):
podcasts from my heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, the history of the tomato is mired
and legend and hearsay, but one thing is certain. Everybody's
favorite red fruit and yes it is botanically a fruit
did not originate in Italy, despite the fact that it's
(00:25):
an essential ingredient in today's pizza and pasta sauces. The
tomato comes to us by way of the Americas. Tomatoes
didn't even land in Europe until the fifteen hundreds, and
for a long time some people there thought they were
poisonous or possibly connected to were wolves and witches. But
we're getting into the aforementioned hearsay. Let's talk about what
(00:48):
we do know about tomatoes. In its original form, the
tomato was not the prolific red globe we know and
love today. It was smaller, more like today's cherry tomatoes,
and not necessarily red when it was ripe, maybe yellow
or purple. It had been evolving around western South America
four millions of years, but around five thousand BCE, Mesoamericans
(01:12):
in what's now Mexico domesticated the fruit. Early Spanish explorers
and colonizers of the area in the late fourteen and
early fifteen hundreds, learned about the plant from the locals
and brought seeds back to Europe. The Spanish got their
word for it, Tamate, from the Nahawat language word tamat,
which is said to come from the root to swell
(01:33):
or to plump, a meaning something like the swelling fruit.
The English spelling of tomato is thought to have been
influenced by the word potato, which originated a bit earlier,
but around the same time as both were brought back
to Europe from the Americas. By the fifteen forties, Spain
was producing tomatoes. They began spreading around Europe and took
(01:55):
to some parts of what's now Italy particularly well. The
first known US European description of the tomato plant comes
from an Italian naturalist and physician by the name of
Pietro Andrea Mattioli. In fifteen forty four. He wrote about
it being eaten similarly to eggplants. Tomatoes were probably pretty
rare and grown more as newfangled curiosities than anything else
(02:18):
for another few decades, though they eventually caught on where
they grew well alike around the Mediterranean coast. Mattioli called
the tomato pomo doro, meaning golden apple, perhaps a reference
to the myth of Eiris's golden apple, you know, the
one inscribed to the most beautiful Goddess, the fight over
which eventually led to the mythic Trojan War, or possibly
(02:41):
the tomatoes he was dealing with were more yellow than
red when ripe. Either way, that could well be where
the modern Italian word for the fruit pomodoro comes from.
Mattioli also correctly classified the tomato in the night shade family.
The night shades include some plants that are toxic, like
mandrake and belladonna, but some that are perfectly edible, like
(03:04):
peppers and eggplants. And eggplants, as stated above, were already
well known around Europe at this time, but it may
be due to the tomato's resemblance to plants like belladonna
that some other naturalists thought it was definitely not good
for you, or at worst poisonous. These concerns were fairly
(03:25):
widespread across parts of Europe for a couple centuries, but
it's hard to say exactly how widespread because there are
a lot of legends about how feared the tomato was like.
Some Italian nobility may have used tomatoes as tabletopp decor
to be edgy because they thought it was poisonous. The
(03:46):
nickname poison apple apparently caught on in some places. Supposedly,
the tomato was grown in gardens in France for a
whole generation as an insect repellent before anyone was willing
to try eating them. The fruit definitely got associated with
like caanthropy through a tangle of misinformation. Basically, witch hunters
(04:07):
thought that witches used night shades to turn themselves into werewolves,
and also some herbalists thought that the tomato might be
what the ancient Roman physician Galen had been writing about
when he called a poisonous plant a wolf something. Galen
certainly did not use the word like a persicon, meaning
wolf peach, but that's a mistranscription that became another nickname
(04:32):
for the tomato that one actually stuck around in The
taxonomical name for the tomato that we still use today
slanam like a persicum. Some pushback against tomatoes may have
come down from Christian religious leaders because the fruit isn't
mentioned in the Bible. Almost definitely. A legend is that
(04:52):
some wealthier people might have gotten lead poisoning from eating
acidic tomatoes off of their fancy pewter plates, and therefore
so siated tomatoes with poison for that reason. The thing
is leood poisoning happens really slowly, so it's unlikely that
anyone would have associated any single food with the effects
at the time. Whatever the case, the English were especially
(05:15):
suspicious of tomatoes, including the English colonists who came to
North America. The fruit was considered potentially dangerous or possibly
just sort of gross, but the legends continued. One widely
circulated story claims that in eighteen twenty, when Colonel Robert
Gibbon Johnson announced that he was going to eat a
(05:36):
basket of tomatoes on the steps of a New Jersey courthouse,
and a crowd gathered to watch him slowly die and
then dispersed, slightly disappointed when he didn't. Another says that
Thomas Jefferson once horrified a local villager in Lynchburg, Virginia
by snacking on a tomato. There's no proof of either incident.
(05:57):
We do know that Jefferson enjoyed tomatoes, going back to
the Revolutionary era. His meticulous records indicate that he grew
tomatoes at his Monticello plantation and often sold them at
Washington's markets. Different varieties commonly appear in his family's personal
recipe collections. The famed French gourmand Briat Savoran wrote in
(06:18):
his eighteen twenty five book The Physiology of Taste that
the tomato was a newly popular thing in Paris at
the time. He said that it had been almost entirely
unknown fifteen years previous, and at first very expensive, but
now common in markets. He claimed it was introduced to
Paris by the influx of people from the south of
France during the Revolution, and that quote tomatoes are a
(06:42):
great blessing to good cookery. They make excellent sauces which
go well with every kind of meat. Tomatoes caught on
more widely here in the States with the rise of canning,
and especially around the Civil War in the eighteen sixties,
when canned foods became an important resource. Tomatoes are well
suited to canning, and at the time, the varieties available
(07:04):
and lack of modern shipping technologies meant that they didn't
travel well fresh. In the early nineteen hundreds, farmers and
the botanically curious worked on developing lots of new varieties
of what we today call heirloom tomatoes. Airloom tomatoes are
interesting varieties that fruit via open pollination, and their seeds
(07:26):
generally produce the same fruit as their parents. But then
around the nineteen thirties, refrigeration and shipping technologies developed such
that produce could be shipped to wider regions, and lots
of those interesting strains were too delicate or weird for
wide distribution. Agricultural researchers set to the task of making sturdier,
(07:48):
more uniform tomatoes, and that's where modern hybrid tomatoes come from.
Hybrid tomatoes were developed by combining specific strains and must
be carefully pollinated in order to produce standardized fruit or
to fruit at all. Their seeds typically won't fruit true.
These hybrids were developed to be more resistant to disease
(08:10):
and to have thicker skins and brighter colors, making sure
that they don't burst during shipping and do look pretty
on store shelves. Supposedly, labs instructed their scientists to think
of what would make a tomato a good projectile and
work on developing traits from there. By the middle of
the twentieth century, tomatoes could be found in just about
(08:32):
any market in both America and Europe, and they continued
to spread. Today, the tomato is one of the largest
and most lucrative vegetable crops in the world, second only
to potatoes and up there with onions and lettuce, and yes,
although it's botanically a fruit, the tomato is practically and
sometimes legally considered a vegetable. As of twenty twenty, nearly
(08:57):
one hundred and eighty seven million metric tons of tomatoes
were being grown and sold every year across the globe.
That's some three hundred and fifty billion pounds, which is
pretty impressive for fruit that few people outside of the
Americas had heard of, much less had the courage to taste,
only a few centuries ago. Speaking of some of these
(09:19):
legends about tomatoes persist to this day. Have you ever
heard that the tomatoes leaves are poisonous? I grew up
knowing that, but it turns out they're not, or not
in any quantity that you would actually consume. I only
learned about this this year, so I haven't had the
chance to try them yet. But fans say to use
(09:41):
fresh tomato leaves the way that you might use fresh herbs.
You could add a few chopped towards the end of
simmering apasta sauce, or blend them into a salsa, pesto,
or chutney, or sprinkle some over a salad that goes
for tomato blossoms too. The lesson I'm taking from all
of this is too never let hearsay keep you from
(10:02):
a good meal. Today's episode is based on the article
where did the Tomato Come From? On how stuffworks dot
com written by Chris Abenstine, and on an episode of Saber,
my food, science and history podcast with co host Annie Reese.
Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
(10:24):
podcasts from my heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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