Tomato, Tomato, Part 1

While the so-called “golden apple” has at times been viewed with suspicion, it has become a staple of summertime cuisine and may one day follow us to farms on other worlds. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the tomato.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
I was going to start off today by saying that,
of course it's the most wonderful time of the year,

(00:23):
but I think I'm actually already on record saying October
is the most wonderful time of the year. And of
course October is because that's you know, monster madness, but
monster season aside, I think tomato season is the second
most wonderful time of the year, and we're right in
it now. Tomato season is pretty wonderful. Um. We're we're
big tomato fans here in the house. Given the confines

(00:45):
of imposed by the pandemic, we're actually growing more tomatoes
at the house than ever before. Um, and yeah, it's
been fabulous. We're big fans of panzanella, which is a
I think a Tuscan chopped salad or originally but it's
like soaked or soaked stale or toasted bread. We throw
in basil and then of course the tomatoes. Uh. Similarly,

(01:08):
we really love a good caprice salad because yeah, a
great tomato just elevates anything. In my opinion. You know,
you can do a great tomato. All you need is
just a little salt and pepper, maybe a drizzle of
olive oil, and you're good to go. A great tomato
is I think, in the same class where people think
of like a great steak. It is just like a
complete food in itself that is so good, you know,

(01:31):
it kind of makes people moan when they eat it.
And I definitely grew up thinking that I did not
like tomatoes. I thought I hated tomatoes. I'd always pick
them off of a sandwich if if they were on there.
But I realized later in life the issue was just
that I hated bad tomatoes. And almost every tomato you
get in a you know, in a subway or what.
I don't mean to single them out, but you know,

(01:52):
any sandwich shop, whatever, it's almost never going to be
a good one. It's going to be kind of a white, mealy, tough,
flavorless thing that doesn't have all of the beautiful aromatic
tomato ee compounds, that doesn't have that perfect juicy texture,
A ripe, home grown or or you know, farmer's market
summer tomato that has never been refrigerated, never had to

(02:14):
be shipped on a big truck any of that stuff.
It is a thing of beauty. And if you've never
experienced a tomato that way, you don't know what you're
missing yet. Yeah, absolutely, you just you're not going to
get the same thing with a grocery store tomato generally,
unless you know they are actually servants selling like local
airlimb tomatoes. I'm a big fan of box meal kits.

(02:35):
I'm a subscriber to one of them right now. But
you're just not gonna You're not gonna get a wonderful
tomato through the mail like that. It's gotta it's got
to come from your own garden. It's got to come
from a local um garden. It and when you get
to dig into it, it is like nothing else. It's
just miles above uh, the sort of mundane canned tomato

(02:56):
grocery store tomato experience. Yeah. And I think one reason is, uh,
just the sheer mechanics of like shipping products. Right, have
you ever had a really good ripe summer tomato As
soon as you handle it, you know, like this would
not survive the like the rough process of getting from
a farm to the grocery store to my house. It's

(03:17):
a delicate baby bird. It's the thing that that you know,
it's it's barely going to survive the trip from the
vine to your kitchen counter. Oh yeah, and again speaking
is a very amateur tomato grower here. But the ones
we bring in from the backyard, like they we have
to like knock the bugs off of them. They're already
oozing a little bit. Yeah, this is a very delicate

(03:39):
balance between the plate and the compost heap. You've got
to get there just the right time. But on the
other hand, I'm also actually I'm a pretty big fan
of canned tomatoes for cooked applications. If if it's a tomato,
you know, if you're making tomato sauce or something like that,
a decent can of of whole peeled tomatoes that you
puree yourself from ash to whatever consistency you want works

(04:02):
just fine. I mean, you know that they're picked when
they're ideal, and you know they go ahead and can them.
It's much better than trying to make a say, a
tomato sauce from tomatoes that are fresh in the off season. Yeah. Yeah,
it it ultimately depends, like what is the role of
the tomato in the dish is is this a starring
vehicle for a fresh tomato. If so, nothing but a
really good fresh tomato is going to work. But if

(04:24):
it's something where the tomato is more of a supporting player,
then perhaps one of these other things will work. And then,
of course there's not just one tomato. Obviously, there's so
many different types. For my own purposes, I find that
when it's not tomato season, those little like grape tomatoes
are pretty good if you have to get some of
the store. Absolutely, I'm a hundred percent in agreement, cherry tomatoes,

(04:47):
grape tomatoes are the much better option if you need
fresh tomatoes in the off season. So listeners, as you
can probably tell, we're going to be talking about tomatoes
not for one episode, but for two whole episodes. And
if you're thinking, well, the tomato is just so mundane,
it's so every day, this is gonna be a you know,
two episodes of of backyard um um like hoakery here

(05:09):
that I can just skip on stuff to blow your mind.
Nothing could be further from the truth, because there is
so much weirdness in these episodes. There's quackery, there's myth making,
they're tall tails, and there's all space colonizations, yes, space colonization.
It's going to cover really like a broad area of
stuff to blow your mind content, even though at the

(05:31):
center of it is this fruit that has become just
such a staple of most of our diets in one
form or another. So maybe we should start off just
by looking at the tomato plant as an organism. What
what is this organism and how did we end up
with the modern cultivated tomato. Yeah, this is a great,
great place to start, because this is another one of

(05:53):
those stories where if you don't think about it too close,
if you don't research it yourself, you just might think, oh, well,
tomatoes have always been everywhere, they have always been a
part of our diet because they're just so ubiquitous now.
But this is not the case. Okay, So, first of all,
you've probably just heard us say the word fruit. This
is one of those facts I think most people know

(06:14):
at this point. You probably learned this before. But in
biological terms, a tomato is a fruit rather than a vegetable,
and part of this comes down to the different ways
that we use the term fruits and vegetables in a
sort of culinary or nutritional sense versus in a botanical sense.
Um like we in a culinary or nutritional sense, we
intuitively sort things into categories of fruits and vegetables, I think,

(06:36):
largely based on sugar content and whether they're primarily used
in sweet or savory preparations, So plants that are savory
or vegetables plants that are sweet or fruits. However, even
this is somewhat arbitrary as a cultural convention, because there
are ways in which these these types of groupings can
vary widely from culture to culture. One example is avocad

(07:00):
oos our avocados a sweet food or a savory food.
I think for me and for most Americans, the answer
overwhelmingly would be its savory food. They go in guacamole,
you pair them with lime and salt, you put them
on toast, you put them in a burrito. But for
millions of people in like South America and Asia, avocados
are primarily a sweet food, used more often in dessert dishes,

(07:22):
which seems very strange to us. But I don't know.
If you think of it as kind of basically just
a buttery substance, it starts to click in place. Yeah, yeah,
I agree. I always grew up thinking of it certainly
something you add a little salt and pepper two against
some olive oil two and you have a great dish.
But we're big fans of going to local like bubble

(07:43):
tea places, uh and Asian dessert places, and you will
find like avocado smoothies as a as a you know,
a standard item you encounter on menus and I've tried
it before. It's it's delicious, But yeah, you wouldn't you
wouldn't necessarily think about it from a Western perspective of
being the dessert item. But either way, these culinary distinctions
often just don't have a biological basis. In fact, other

(08:05):
culinary vegetables things we think of as vegetables in a
cooking sense, are biologically fruits. Cucumbers, chili, peppers, eggplants, all fruits.
But to go even better, the tomato is not only fruit,
it is technically a berry and one thing that I
think you could probably even into it just looking at say,

(08:26):
you know, if you're growing a variety of heirloom tomato
in your backyard and you see this monstrous fruit hanging
off of a vine that you have to prop up
on a steak or a cage or otherwise, this gigantic
fruit is just gonna make it drooped down on the ground. Uh.
And it's the you know, it looks like a thing
that should not be in a way. Um. So you

(08:47):
might be able to into it that tomatoes have not
always been this way, like many of the modern fruits
and vegetables we eat, it had to be adapted from
a naturally occurring fruit or vegetable that did not necessarily
grow as large in the edible part um. And it
appears that modern cultivated tomatoes, which have the scientific name

(09:09):
Solanum lycopersicum, are descended from a wild berry that grew
in northwestern South America, maybe around the area of Peru
or a little farther north. And the research tracing these
biological origins has been summarized in a few sources. I
looked at, for example, in the Oxford Companion to Food,

(09:30):
which was edited by Alan Davidson. Uh. They looked at
studies by, for example, Sophie co in N and other
researchers over the years that found that the wild ancestor
of the tomato was very likely. They identify a couple
of species, one Lycopersicon seraciform. And then another one, so

(09:51):
Lantum pimpanellifolium, which is today known as the current tomato.
Not current as in timely, but current as in the
fruit a current. And it's called this because in a way,
these these wild tomatoes, the Slanum pimpanilla folium, sort of
resemble currents. They're these tiny little berries, almost kind of
current or blueberry sized. Yeah, So some of the examples

(10:15):
I was reading was that if you went back to
pre Columbian Peru, you would encounter, if you knewhere to look,
you would find these wild growing, essentially yellow berries that
were the predecessor, the likely predecessor to the modern tomato. Yes,
now exactly how it went from that wild berry to
the cultivated varieties that people eat that that's still um.

(10:37):
We know some things, but it's still a somewhat open question.
That there have been some genomic studies that I'll talk
about in just a minute, but we know that such
a thing as the cultivated tomato existed by the time
the Spanish arrived in Mesoamerica. By that time, the az
tech people are the no waddle speaking people, were eating

(10:58):
tomatoes that they grew as crops, and they were eating
them in dishes, often prepared in conjunction with chili peppers.
But of course we we know that this wild ancestor
of the tomato, this berry grew in northwest South America.
It was you know, this wild fine and so there's
still a question of how exactly that wild fruit made

(11:19):
its way up north to Meso America in order to
be cultivated as a food crop by the Aztecs. Yeah,
there's already even at this early stage in the history
of of the global tomato. It's kind of a botanical
game of telephone, right. Uh. So I was trying to
look up what is some of the most recent scientific
work on this, and there was a new study about

(11:41):
the domestication history of the tomato that was published just
this year, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution
by Razafard at All. And so what they present is
a little complicated. I'm going to try to do the
simplest version I can. So the authors say that before research,
our best guess about the domestication history of the tomato

(12:04):
went like this, So you had this wild berry in
South America. It's growing up in the andes up in
the northwest corner of South America, and this is Solanum
pimpanella folium. Here again, this is the one we mentioned earlier.
The fruits are going to be about the size of
a blueberry. Then in this older understanding, this was transformed
into the semi domesticated plant Clanum Lycopersicum saraciform or SLC.

(12:31):
But if you see SLC and tomato literature, don't confuse
that with Salt Lake City. It means this species, and
this would have happened within South America. These fruits would
have been about the size of a cherry, so kind
of similar to cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes that you
could buy at the store today. Obviously somewhat different, but
similar somewhat in in look, in size. And then finally,

(12:52):
this middle species, the s l C, was transformed into
the larger, fully domesticated clandum Lycopersicum very lycopersicum. And this
was the Aztec food crop that was developed into the
tomatoes that people eat all around the world today. And uh,
strange fact lyco persicum. I think Robert you might have
a note about this later, but it means literally wolf peach. Yes, um, yeah,

(13:16):
and yeah that it's this is interesting because this was
some sort of a fruit that was described by Galen
who lived two hundred C, which obviously as well before
tomatoes actually came to uh To, uh To to Europe,
so obviously Galen was not describing a tomato. But this

(13:38):
just this description ends up getting wound up in the
classification of tomatoes in the West later on. Yeah, but
so anyway, the authors of this study from US population
genomic methods to try to reconstruct a genomic map of
the modern tomatoes domestication history, and they conclude quote A,
results suggest that the ore gen of SLC may predate domestication,

(14:03):
and that many traits considered typical of cultivated tomatoes arose
in South American SLC, but we're lost or diminished once
these partially domesticated forms spread northward. These traits were then
likely re selected in a convergent fashion in the common
cultivated tomato prior to its expansion around the world. So

(14:24):
a little complicated. Basically, they're saying that the semi domesticated
breed of tomato that may have been used as as
not not a cultivated crop but a semi domesticated food
by some people in South America. It had some traits
that arose naturally, and then those traits were re selected
and emphasized by growers in meso America before the tomato

(14:46):
finally spread all over the world. Interesting, Now, we've already
touched on the fact that the tomato isn't the only
case of this. There there's a whole thing about what
you call breeds of plants and how to and how
to know whether you talking about the same fruit or plant.
When you're using different names throughout history, it can become
very confusing. Um. But just about the history of the

(15:08):
word tomato itself. The English word tomato, of course comes
via the Spanish tomate, which was adapted from the original
now Wattle word tomadel. Now I've seen a lot of
sources claimed that to model was simply the Noattle word
for the fruit for the tomato. But the entry and
the Oxford companion actually goes a little deeper. And this

(15:29):
is kind of interesting again about linguistic confusion. So apparently
in the now Wattle language, tom model simply meant plump fruit.
So to indicate the ancestor of our tomato you had
to add the prefix z. So the word was z
to model that was the ancestor of the tomato we
have today, and this distinguished it from the husked ancestor

(15:52):
to modern tomatos, which the as texts called meal to model,
and then the Spanish ended up using the word tomata
for both tomatillo in Spanish that just means little tomato,
though they are not actually large and small versions of
the same fruit. They're totally different species but that but
they are related. Um these are all in the nights

(16:13):
shade family, and we'll get into to that. Um into
that in a bit. But the authors of the Oxford
Companion point out this led to a bunch of confusion
for Spanish chroniclers who just didn't always seem to understand
which fruit was being talked about. Uh. THEO and I
have mentioned this before, But they also point out that
in as Tech cuisine, tomatoes were consistently linked with chili peppers,

(16:37):
and I gotta say it's a good combination. Tomatoes and
chili peppers are are two fruits that go well together. Absolutely.
But here once we have contact between the hemispheres, this
opens up the doors of of of spread of this
plant all over the world, and eventually it does spread.
Now I have to say that the way that the
tomato spreads uh through and around the world is it

(17:01):
both is it was it once alarming, like it's really
it's really a success story. But it's also not one
of these situations where you can say, oh, well, this
individual brought the tomato to Europe and then it was
an enormous success and here we are like, it's not
that simple and uh and and we we certainly encourage
people are interested in this to seek out some of

(17:21):
the books were going to mention here in a bit
because they'll get into a lot more detail about this.
It is um, I guess you would say it is.
There's a lot of touch and go uh, false starts, um.
And as we'll discuss a little bit too, there's some
myth making involved in some some legend regarding just how
the tomato takes off and what is standing in its way.

(17:42):
I would also say that the tomato has a somewhat
complicated and murky uh. If it were a text, we
would call it the reception history. Yeah. Absolutely, So we're
gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
we are going to dive into some of the issues
of its spread through Europe. And then paradoxically like back

(18:02):
into North America. Alright, we're back. So, uh, we may
have talked in the past, you and I about doing
a tomato episode, Uh, doing something about the tomatoes. Tomatoes
have definitely come up on the show before, but my
wife this summer had had specifically mentioned She said, you
guys should do tomato episode. You should do it, you should,

(18:25):
you should really dive in there. And I think something
that helped encourage this is that we encountered a sign
at a botanical garden that was describing tomatoes. Then it
mentioned that in the past people thought they were poisonous.
So I have to admit that that was like, that
was a real key area of interest for me going
into this episode, getting into you know, just just discussing
whether people ever actually considered the tomato to be poisonous

(18:49):
and what does that mean, because it just seems ridiculous
on the face of it, Right, the tomato has conquered
the planet. We know the tomato is not poisonous, and
the idea of people being afraid to eat it because
they think it is poisonous, Uh, it just seems completely looney. Well,
and it's funny because even once you investigate it, I
would say that this irony remains, because the irony remains

(19:12):
because we are going to encounter people who are saying
the tomato is poisonous, but they're not saying it at
a time when nobody was eating tomatoes because everybody thought
they were poisonous. They'd be like, well, some people eat them,
but they're poisonous, right, Yeah, you didn't have like single
voices with a global reach saying we do not eat

(19:32):
tomatoes or no one should eat tomatoes, because you have
a lot of um, you know, a lot of division
based on like who's talking about it, what country they're in,
what you know, what levels of society they're at, etcetera.
And then on top of additional legends that pop up.
But but this basic idea that people specifically, you'll see
like Europeans or Americans used to be afraid to eat

(19:55):
tomatoes because they thought they were poisonous. You see this everywhere.
You see this again it but uncle gardens. You see
this popping up in um news stories about the tomato,
and it is often just presented as just a straight
up fact. Uh. But again, when I started looking into it,
I became increasingly less sure because on one hand, yeah,
it sounds too good to be true, and then you
do encounter these um these are these, these wrinkles in

(20:18):
the description that really um drive home that Okay, not
everybody thought this at the same time. So again we're
not going to cover the entire history of the tomatoes
um influx into Europe and then it's um it's acceptance
by European societies. But the first known European reference to
tomatoes comes in four from Italian herbalist Peito Andre Matthioli,

(20:46):
and he wrote of the mala aria the golden apples
we she described as ripening from green to yellow. Now
he classified the tomato with the man drake, which was
of course part of this big night shade family. And
this is, of course this is accurate. I mean they
are in this family. We consider the tomato to be

(21:07):
a night shade, along with things like the eggplant. Um.
But this is often held up is one aspect of
the poisonous reputation that tomatoes gathered in European society, with
botanists signifying that they were a part of this family
that contained things um uh like deadly nightshade or like
like the man drake. Root, which of course has all

(21:29):
these connotations with various medicinal and sort of magical practices,
but at the same time, at the only discussed how
tomatoes were cooked and eaten at the time much in
the same way as eggplants, which were another imported food,
only this this eggplants came from Asia um And and
they were again part of the night shade family. And

(21:49):
this has to be this seems to be a major
sticking point for a large portion of of the tomatoes
European tradition uh with it and the related egg plant
not traveling all that well into New European cuisines, or
not all of them anyway, because of their association with
man brakes and poisons as well as I would imagine

(22:10):
just sort of a a general hesitation to take up
new plants into a into a pre existing culinary tradition.
One one really interesting example of this UHM. I was
reading about UH regards the seventeenth century German garden. I
was reading when the tomato was purely ornamental considering New

(22:30):
World foods in seventeenth century Berlin. And this was by
Millie Taylor Pulaski, published in Transatlantic Trade and Global Cultural
transfer since fourteen. This was published in twenty nineteen. So
the author mentions that tomatoes were purely ornamental summer plants
in most Berlin gardens in sixteen fifty six, and this

(22:51):
was due in large part to a German naturalist by
the name of Johann uh Sigismund el schotz Um, who
highlighted its connections first of all to the vile eggplant
which uh um, which was also present in the gardens
of Berlin, but not consumed, just grown so you could
look at it. But Taylor at Polinski also points out

(23:14):
that el Schultz didn't argue that either of these plants
was poisonous, only that they were unhealthy. And he also
seems to mention with some disdain that Italians eat them
and Spaniards did too at the time. So um, the
idea is that there was likely um a large amount
of anti Catholic sentiment here as well, Like this is

(23:37):
this is a plant. Yes, you can eat it, the
Italians eat it, the Catholics eat it, but Protestant Germans
should not eat it because it's bad for you. Yeah,
that seems to go along with some of the things
I was reading. And and and this is interesting because we
see a similar trend actually if you look at potatoes,
which are also part of the large night shade family. Again,
where a new food is destined just destined for widespread

(23:59):
popularity and ultimately is going to have a life sustaining success. Um.
You know. With the potato particularly, it ends up being
embraced by um lower levels of the socio economic um
uh ladder first and those communities that take up the
potato benefit from them like nutritionally uh and and and

(24:19):
dietarially um and then of course ultimately it it just
takes over. But initially something like the potato as well,
it's grown only for decoration before it is ultimately embraced
by everybody for decoration. Potato for decoration. Yeah, I mean,
you know, I could I guess I could see it.
I see it less with the two with with the potato,
but certainly to tomato is a bright plant. It is

(24:42):
pleasing to look at. But it's impossible for for me
to really imagine like a guarden, walking into a garden
where you have ripe tomatoes and eggplants and you're just
gonna stand back and say, oh, look at that. Isn't
that isn't that beautiful. Isn't that nice? No, you need
to harvest that stuff and make a raditui. Yeah. Now,
one of the really wonderful text that we were both

(25:04):
looking at for for this pair of episodes, uh is
a book by Andrew F. Smith titled The Tomato in America, which, again,
if you if you're tantalized by our discussions in these
episodes and you want more about the tomato, this is
the book for you. Highly recommended. But Smith points out
that some Renaissance herbalist when they were considering the the tomato,

(25:28):
they looked at these other sources, one of which is
Galen and the idea of the wolf peach. And that's
again when we have the scientific name that we have
for the tomato. But also there were descriptions of um
of of glossium by Pedanius Dioscorides who lived forty through nineties,
and this was a Syrian herb that was so named

(25:50):
because it was recommended as a treatment for eye ailments.
Um So that was another sort of pre existing classification
that helped inform how we thought about tomatoes, or certainly
how naturalists and botanists thought about them at the time.
But neither of these, Uh is the tomato, just to
be clear, but they do tie into some of the

(26:11):
they frequently mentioned associations that were made at the time
with tomatoes. Now, to get into some of the myth
making a little bit, here's another frequently mentioned tail that
I imagine a number of you have heard, and this
is how it goes. Uh, this is the story. I'm
not saying this is this correct. We'll get into that
in a second. But the story goes that when the
tomato originally found its way onto European plates, you had

(26:36):
aristocrats who were like, oh, I'm gonna try out this.
This sounds great, and they started eating these tomatoes. But
then they started becoming very sick, and they end up
pronouncing the fruit to be poisonous. But it would turn
out that the acid in the tomatoes was leaching lead
out of the plates they were served on, which incidentally
made poorer members of society um less susceptible to the
poison because they would be eating off of the wooden

(26:58):
plates or earthenware plates. Now, whether or not this claim
is true, it is actually true, of course, that that
acidic fruits and vegetables, when cooked in or eaten on
certain types of pots, of pans or plates can actually
react with the material. One example is if you cook
overly acidic foods, including tomato based foods, in for example,

(27:20):
aluminum cookware. Sometimes this isn't great, like they can react
with each other. The food can pick up a kind
of nasty metallic taste from the aluminum. The acid can
sort of damage the surface of the aluminum. So so
there are reactions like that that can't happen, right, And
we have discussed lead making its way into food and
lead poisoning in at least a couple of episodes in

(27:43):
the past. I know we did Cupids leaden Arrow, which
discussed lead quite a bit, and then we also did
one of one of our three or four Dangerous Foods
episodes touched on lead poisoning. But anyway, this idea of
tomatoes sucking the lead out of your your your plate
where uh. This ended up being circulated in the United
States as well, um, with commentators highlighting the lead issue,

(28:04):
and there were also concerns over the general effect of
the acidity of the tomato on the stomach, with some saying, oh, well,
the you know, the the acidity and the tomatoes dangerous
to the stomach, others saying no, no, it's really beneficial.
Another thing I've read, Actually, I don't know if this
overlaps with the lead issue or not, but the specific
substance I saw mentioned was pewter plates. Was that like

(28:25):
that they would discolor. When you put tomatoes on a
pewter plate, it would allegedly discolor the plate, and this
led to concerns. Yeah, now, Andrew F. Smith does right
that the acid content of tomatoes was a topic of
concern in Europe and the United States for a while.
The Paris Society for Horticulture published a paper warning about
the possibility of leaching with metal plates uh including copper,

(28:50):
recommending that you should use wooden and earthenware plates instead.
But but I looked into this a bit more, reading
from a book titled Death by petticoat American His Three
Myths Debunked by Mary Miley Theobald, and the author points
out that in British barber surgeon published a botanical book
that claimed tomatoes were actually poisonous, while also noting that

(29:12):
the French and Italians did eat them. So I guess
it was like, these are dangerous to humans unless you're French.
Or Italians somehow, I don't know. Apparently this uh that
this was this was no expert um, this particular barber surgeon.
I guess it would be like the modern equivalent of
say a a like a YouTube based dietary expert. I'm

(29:33):
not positive, but I think that's referring to somebody who
cited in another paper by Andrew F. Smith. Not that
book we're looking at, but a paper I'm gonna sighten
a bit. I think that is John Girard, a barber
surgeon and the superintendent of the gardens of the College
of Physicians in Holborn. And Smith says of of of
this barber surgeon guy, that in addition to repeating the

(29:56):
claims of others that the tomatoes poisonous, he also made
strange comments such as quote the temperature of the tomato
was in the highest degree of coldness, which he said
was left quote to every man's censure. What does that mean?
I don't know, well, I know about the censure. It

(30:16):
just seems like, okay, yes, disdain in the tomato alright, Well,
at any rate, Um theobald of contends that quote this
book set the state for the negative view of tomatoes
among the English that lasted more than a century. However,
by the end of the seventeen hundreds, tomatoes had overcome
this bad press. Yeah, that seems in line with a

(30:38):
lot of what I was reading as well, that it's
not that everybody thought that tomatoes were poisonous, but that
there were some prominent writers that had made or repeated
these allegations that the tomato was in some way potentially
poisonous or unhealthy, and that these misimpressions trickled down to
some people in society, but not everybody. So some people

(30:58):
were reading tomatoes, other people we're saying, no, that's dangerous,
don't do that, And over time the non dangerous faction
grew in numbers. Yeah, I think, you know, it's easy
to look back at history and assume that there would
be sort of weirdly to think there would be some
sort of consensus at the time about whether you know
wrong or correct about particular foods. But obviously we just

(31:21):
look around the world today and we see how um are,
our understanding of the nutritional values of various foods shifts
with our understanding, and also just sort of the popular
idea of what we should be eating, what is good,
what is tasty, what is stylish, and even what is
healthy shifts as well. Yeah, you're exactly right, and and
there is a grain of truth here at least in

(31:42):
the fact that, uh that plants in the soul and
a C family, including you know, say potatoes for instance,
to do sometimes in some parts of the plant have
do accumulate toxins that can be dangerous. For example, if
you consume the leaves or something, or even um, we've

(32:02):
talked before about there there are ways that toxins can
accumulate in potatoes if they say, left out for a
long time, if you have a really old potato, it
can get a lot of soulanine in it, which can
lead to potato poisoning. Yeah, it turns green on the
sunlit countertop, that sort of thing. Um. Yes. Smith points
out that well, first of all, as far as um

(32:23):
acidity goes, it's gonna very quite a bit across the
varieties of tomato. But then in terms of um potentially
dangerous alkaloids, those are going to be mostly in the
leaves and stem. That's where the highest concentrations are going
to be in a tomato plant. And there have been
cases where say a child consumed a tea made from

(32:45):
those leaves, and it has resulted in severe reactions. But
as you can guess from the like billions of pounds
or whatever of catchup and other tomato products that people
eat around the world every day, the tomato itself is
over elming le safety. There's just yeah, there's nothing to this,
right and and certainly any of these cases where we're

(33:06):
discussing a place or a people or a community that
was afraid of the tomato, or did not eat the tomato,
or only grew it ornamentally, there was an all likelihood
um people or a place not too far away where
it was just a part of the It had already
become part of the culinary tradition. So yeah, you would
have english people or Germans that were not eating the tomato.

(33:29):
But meanwhile, in Italy and Spain and France and Portugal
they were already all in I mean, it was already
a food crop when Europeans first encountered it. Yeah. Absolutely. Now,
there's a really interesting paper I mentioned a minute ago
by also by Andrew F. Smith, from from the nineteen
nineties that was about the history of how perceptions of

(33:49):
the tomato changed in the United States during the first
half of the nineteenth century, and there are some some
interesting reasons involved in that transition that Smith gets into.
I think we're probably gonna explore that paper in the
second episode here, but it's got a lot of fun
quackery in it, so so pulled on for that one.
I'd say one of the stumbling blocks to understanding the

(34:13):
idea of the tomato as is being received as poisonous
or beneficial is that sometimes the best seeming examples, the
best stories about about this are actually just legends, so
you know, are completely apocryphal, uh, such as the this
famous story that I imagined a lot of people have heard, uh,

(34:33):
the apocryphal legend of Robert Gibbon Johnson. Uh. So they
are multiple versions of this, and they concern a real
life individual named Robert Gibbon Johnson who have seventeen seventy
one through eighteen fifty and he was a notable farmer
and horticulturist in Salem, New Jersey. He was an actual
tomato grower, uh and is sometimes credited with having introduced

(34:55):
the crop into the area in eighteen twenty, and certainly
they become a major crop around that time. In southern
New Jersey. But this is was discussing a second like,
this doesn't seem to be the case either. He didn't
didn't actually introduce the crop. But in this particular story, Um,
the idea is that he said he was defending the
tomato and he announced I will publicly eat a basket

(35:17):
of tomatoes on the old Salem County Courthouse steps. Uh
that this is the uh in order to demonstrate that
they are not poisonous. And then and then the town's
folk burned him as a witch. Wrong Salem. But um,
but you know, the idea is that people were like, oh,
he's gonna eat a basket and tomatoes and die publicly.
I've got to see that. So people gather to watch

(35:39):
the spectacle. They come from far and wide. And then
he eats the tomatoes and does not die. That's the story,
and it makes for a great story. But everyone seems
to agree that this is just not true as uh.
And Andrew F. Smith actually gets into this in the
first few pages of the book, um, pointing out that
there's some pretty good records from the time in Salem

(36:01):
and Johnson being a prominent citizen was mentioned quite a
bit for his other activities and exploits, like he was
also in the military and so forth, like he was
a major deal at the time. But there's nothing about
him introducing the tomato. There's nothing about him um uh,
you know, eating tomatoes and as a matter of public
spectacle to to to prove that they're not poisonous. And

(36:23):
it just seems like that would be written up if
he had done that, Like the papers were not shy
about writing about about this guy at the time. Anyway.
Smith goes on to note that as far as the
the idea of him introducing the tomato, this is just
one of some five hundred different myths about tomato introduction
in America, and that they often end end up involving

(36:43):
the the Great Man trope, in which someone such as
Thomas Jefferson, He's another individual that sometimes is erroneously cited
as being the introducer of tomatoes is responsible. But in
reality we don't know who is responsible, you know, specifically
for introducing tomato. There is no actual American King Tomato

(37:04):
to credit. I do love the idea though, that if
this story were true, I mean, so imagine this guy
sits out in front of the courthouse and eats a
bushel basket of tomatoes. Like, I don't think that would
kill him because they're not poisonous, but surely that would
give him just like horrible diarrhea. What you eat a
basket of tomatoes with nothing else? Yeah? Maybe so, I

(37:29):
don't know. Supposedly this whole incident has even been um
recreated in various past documentaries, but I didn't get a
chance to look them up and see how they presented it,
if if, because there are different versions of it. So
maybe in some versions it's just like one tomato, uh,
and in others it's a whole bushel. I don't know.
So I've got another story like this about the supposed

(37:51):
reputation of tomatoes as poisonous, And this is the rumor
about the George Washington assassination attempt. Okay, so one version
of the story, as collected in the Snopes article on
this rumor quote. I remember one of my junior high
history teachers reading us a suicide note by George Washington's cook.

(38:13):
The author of the note said that he could not
forgive Washington's treason against the British and had therefore decided
to poison him then kill himself. The poison he used
on Washington was a tomato. That's great story, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's it's comedic, it generates laughter, and it ties into
this this ridiculous idea that people once thought that the

(38:36):
tomato was harmful and and exaggerated to the point where
it could be used as a lethal weapon. Yeah. Unfortunately,
as great of a story as this is, this one
is fiction in a literal sense. It comes from a story,
a short story called the Murder of George Washington by
Richard im Gordon, which was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery

(38:57):
magazine in April nineteen fifteen. Mine, I think the author
is this guy, Richard Gordon, who was also a surgeon
and uh an enthusiologist who who wrote historical fiction underpen names.
But anyway, in the story, uh this, this cook wants
to kill Washington because he's a British loyalist, and so
he waits until Washington is quote afflicted with a cold

(39:21):
in his head which has seriously impaired his sense of taste. Okay,
so perfect opportunity, right, He's not going to be able
to taste the poison that the cook adds to his stew,
which comes in the form of quote the scarlet flesh
of a fruit of a variety of the deadly nightshade.
And then, after serving what he assumes to be the

(39:42):
deadly poison, the cook writes a ps to his suicide
note quote. As a cook, I have a prejudice against
dying by poison. I am too corpulent to hang. But
by reason of my calling, I am expert with a
carving knife. So it is alleged that he takes his
own life somehow with the aid of a carving knife.
And then, of course, I think the reader is just

(40:04):
left to assume that this guy's scheme does not work
because the poison does not work, because it is a tomato.
That's great, but no basis in history whatsoever. It sounds
like the author was merely having fun with some of
these very these very topics that we've been discussing here.
All right, on that note, we're going to take one
more break, but when we come back, we will discuss

(40:25):
the killer tomato worm. Than all right, we're back now, Robert.
Before we went to the break, did you say something
about a killer tomato worm. Yes, killer tomato worms, which
is another interesting area that combines like actual um actual
in this case entomological fact with a fair amount of

(40:50):
myth making here. Uh and and just uh you know superstition,
I guess. So it is a fact of life that
if you're going to raise some crops, uh, you're going
to have to deal with other organisms that also want
to eat said crops. And uh. Again, we've been growing
some tomatoes in our own backyard here, so so we've
gotten used to this. As again we're growing tomatoes. We

(41:12):
also have some volunteer summertime pumpkins from our compost. We
didn't know what they were gonna be. It turns out
they're useless pumpkins, but they're still fun. Are pumpkins useless? Well,
most of these are those little ornamental pumpkins. Uh, you
know the kind uh that you you you buy around
um Halloween and you set out for decoration and you

(41:34):
put on the basket on the dining room table. Um.
That's what's been growing in our backyard. But can you
can can you imagine a future culture that looks back
on us with the same disdain that we had for
people who would have grown tomatoes and eggplants only as decorations,
and they think that about us about pumpkins. It's true,

(41:54):
I may be completely off on this. I could be
wasting these um Like. It does remind me of a
time time when I was helping deliver for a C.
S A here in in our area, and you know,
so I would vote, we would volunteer, and we would
would get like a free basket of vegetables in return
for our service. But we would deliver baskets of fresh

(42:15):
vegetables to various households, and there's a lot of good
stuff in there. There's stuff like sun chokes that I
don't think I've ever had before. Um. But then we
would also have a lot of squash, and one of
them I particularly remember they were acorn squash, which can
be quite delicious. And I delivered one week to this household,
and then the next week when I came back, there

(42:36):
were the acorn squash, uh, not served up inside in
a dish, but on the porch as decorations. And I
was thinking, oh my god, those are so delicious and
you're just gonna use them as porch decorations. Did they
carve a jackal interface and do them at least? No? No,
just they just set them out there. But it's possible
I'm doing the same thing with my summertime pumpkins. Um

(42:58):
so I do I do not know. Um, But at
any rate, growing all this stuff in the backyard, um,
other organisms are interested. Various bugs make a go at it.
The squirrels, I think, get a little bit bored and
we'll eat like part of something here and there. And
we've also even had a rabbit shown up, show up,
which has been a lot of fun because you get
anytime you get to watch a rabbit in your own yard. Uh,

(43:19):
that's kind of magical, at least for me. Yeah, they'll
they'll gnaw on your fruits, but they bring bunny magic
with them in return. Yeah, they're they're fun to watch,
they're cute. Um. But but then there's but there's a
different pest we're gonna be talking about here and um
and it's uh, it's quite interesting. According to Smith, there's
no beating the large green tomato worm, an alarming pest

(43:41):
that is three to four inches long or can grow
the three to four inches long. And it has this
weird horn sticking out of its back, kind of out
of the final portion of its body. And uh, I've
included a picture here for you to look at. Joe.
It's It's really quite impressive, right, it is generally not spiky.
It just has one giant buttthorn. Yeah, that has kind

(44:02):
of a crimson or scarlet color to it, as if
it has already like stabbed a muppet or something. Anyway,
it is is, so it's pretty impressive. It's closely related
to the tobacco worm. So if you've seen one or
the other, you may have an idea what I'm talking
about here. Smith points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson even

(44:22):
bemoaned these quote young entomologies that we're eating up his
tomato plants. So this particular, these particular worms, they are
the larval stage of the five spotted hawk month and
it is in fact a different species from the tobacco hornworm.
But they're closely related. And the confusing thing is that

(44:43):
both organisms feed on a variety of species that include
both tomato and tobacco leaves. Oh interesting, but they got
what different kind of specialties? Uh? Yeah? Or just one
is in one is more associated with tomatoes and one
is more associated with tobacco. But the you know, either
one will eat the leaves of both plants now, will

(45:04):
will strip your nerves screamingly raw? Yes, apparently so, or
at least that seems to have been the panic around
them back in the uh certainly the mid nineteenth century.
Apparently in eighteen forty five New York Farmers Club report
described them as quote positively shocking to weak nerves. Well,

(45:24):
I think there were a lot of weak nerves back then.
Smith has a bit more on this, you just have
to read in in the book. But but he includes
these quotations where people were talking about how like the
worm just ruins tomatoes for them forever, Like they're just
like they're just too gross. I'm not even going into
my tomato garden ever again. Oh I see you like

(45:45):
you see the worm once and it like turns you
off of the entire fruit. Right. But on top of that,
some even considered it to be poisonous as well, including
such claims that the bite could cause instant death, or
that the spittle, the mere spittle from one of these
creatures could kill a small child dead. Um, so it's

(46:06):
it's like it's not only is is it like a
foul creature to behold? Budd It befouls the entire tomato
garden and makes it a dangerous place in which to venture.
So is there any truth to this? Where's this coming from? Uh?
The thing is apparently not. The idea ran rampant through
the late nineteenth century until you had an Illinois based

(46:26):
intomologist by the name of Benjamin Walsh who pointed out
and apparently this made the papers and all saying like, look,
this is hard, this is harmless to humans, This is
not going to kill you. This is it's a past. Yes,
it's maybe a little big, it's a little maybe alarming
to look at, but it's not going to poison you. Uh. Though,
as Smith points out, you still you had publications uh

(46:47):
in um Illinois based papers pointing out Walsh's um uh
facts here. But then you had other columns where people
were saying, oh, there was a girl that was killed
by one of these tomato worms. So it took a
while for this idea to really go away. Yeah, my
roommates cousin's friend died from a tomato hornworm. Yeah, now

(47:09):
I've got another poison tomato rabbit hole to run down here.
Because I was trying to think, okay, well, what if
you do want to poison somebody with a tomato allah.
The you know, the early European misunderstandings, or or the
fictional account of George Washington's cook I do have a
possible candidate for you. It's not confirmed how lethal this

(47:29):
tomato would be, but it's at least suspected with good reason.
And that candidate is the tomaco Now. Weirdly, whereas the
George Washington story takes a historically factual misunderstanding as the
inspiration for fiction, this story takes a modern fiction as
the inspiration for a fact. So there's an episode of

(47:53):
The Simpsons that aired in called Ei Ei annoyed grunt
as an e I e I dough uh. And in
this episode, Homer I guess he's trying his hand at farming,
and he attempts to farm tomatoes and tobacco plants, but
he fertilizes his crops with plutonium from the nuclear power plant,

(48:14):
and this produces a hybrid plant that is basically a
tomato stuffed with tobacco, which tastes bad but is highly addictive.
I think Bart says it's so refreshingly addictive, and he
sells it as tomacco, and everybody gets addicted to it.
And then I think there's some calamity where where all
his crops are destroyed. Okay, I'd forgotten about this episode,

(48:36):
but now that you summarize it, I do remember it.
But apparently reality caught up because I was reading a
report in Wired from November of two thousand three by
Kristen Philip Cooski, and it was about a man named
Rob Bauer of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Now Bauer, I believe
he worked in wastewater management, and he had some scientific training, uh,

(48:59):
and he remembered reading about a similar procedure when he
had been in college, when I think when he was
in graduate school, and he decided to try to create
such a plant in reality, which he did by grafting
together a tomato plant and a tobacco plant. Apparently, he

(49:20):
initially experimented with with grafting in in one direction, which
was putting a tobacco plant on a tomato root, but
the graft didn't take and when he removed the wrapping
that held them together, the plant kind of fell apart
and died. But the inverst grafting procedure did work. He
put a tomato plant on a tobacco root, and Bauer

(49:40):
claims that this process was successful and the tomato plant
with the tobacco roots actually bore fruit, though nobody ate
the fruit, because he suspected it was at least possible
that one of these tomatoes could contain a lethal amount
of nicotine. Wow. Well, on one hand, that's alarming, But
on the other hand, it's I guess it's not completely

(50:01):
surprising because tobacco is a part of this large night
shade family. Yeah, exactly, and that's probably why, yeah, why
the grafting worked out. Uh. So, to be clear, I
don't I couldn't find any evidence that it was ever
confirmed that the tomato itself would have been poisonous with
the lethal amount of nicotine. But it seems like a
reasonable thing to worry about, at least good reason enough

(50:22):
not to eat the tomato. Uh And Bower, speaking to Wire,
had said, quote, I've got this one plant growing and
it's blooming again. I accidentally left the tobacco on the
kitchen table, and my wife yelled at me, get that
thing out of the kitchen, you knuckle head, because it
looks like a regular tomato. Yeah, don't leave your secret

(50:44):
poison tomatoes just laying around. But but as I mentioned earlier,
Bauer was apparently not the first person to try this
plant hybridization. He He mentioned that he had actually read
about this when he was in college, I think in
an article that was published in Scientific American in nineteen
forty nine that described a similar procedure to what end.
I'm not exactly sure. I don't know what what you

(51:08):
really gain by creating a tomato that possibly has nicotine
in it. I mean, and that's probably ultimately the reason
you don't see a tremendous amount of effort go into this, right,
I mean, like, what is the payoff? What's the incentive?
Perhaps there's some I just don't know. I couldn't find
anything else about that. But hey, if you know of
a good reason to create a tomato tobacco hybrid right in,

(51:28):
let us know. All right, Well, we we've reached the
point we're gonna have to stop and uh and come
back in another episode to continue our exploration of the tomato.
But but real quick, Joe, Uh, fresh tomatoes are in
your kitchen. What's what's one of the first dishes you
you think you'll you would try to make? Like what
something is popular right now in your household with tomatoes? Oh?

(51:48):
Answer to that is extremely easy. Um toast with a
little bit of mayonnaise with tomato on top, salt and pepper,
I mean, unbeatable, Like just tomato sandwich with mayonnaise is
the most delicious thing if it's a good ripe summer tomato.
Also just a good ripe summer tomatoes sliced with like
olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe a bit of torn
basil leaves. I mean, keep it simple. A good ripe

(52:11):
summer tomato is it's like a steak. It's a dish
unto itself. Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. I mean it
reminds me that one of the things we like to
do here at our house is make a sort of
b LT. We don't. We don't eat bacon anymore, but
we will will use um like store bought soysage like
you get from like Morning Star or t J's. Put

(52:32):
that on there instead of bacon, and with a really
good tomato, it's fabulous. I've actually been wondering about trying
to create a vegetarian version of a b LT, and
some of the ideas that came across for the bacon
substitute were like, um uh, sort of dried out charred
strips of eggplant or smoked strips of eggplant, but then
also just the idea of using like smoked tempe. That

(52:54):
sounds good, It sounds good. All right, we're gonna we're
gonna close out then, but obviously we want you to
come back for the next episode on tomatoes, and in
the meantime you can certainly right in and give some
feedback on the journey thus far, share some insight based
on your own experience with tomato growing with tomato consumption.

(53:15):
We'd love to hear from you. If you want to
check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you know where to find us absolutely anywhere you get
your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. Make sure
you rate, review and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for

(53:36):
the future, just to say hello, you can email us
at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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(53:57):
favorite shows, The Three four thou