From the Vault: Tomato, Tomato, Part 1

But anyway, these were fun. These were some some nice food based botanical explorations, and I believe we got to gush a lot about just how good a tomato can be. Hey, and they're in season again. 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, 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 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 pensanella, 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, 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 it you know, 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, 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 text.

You're a ripe, home grown or or you know, farmer's market summer tomato that has never been refrigerated, never had to 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 serve as selling like local air limb tomatoes. I'm a big fan of box

meal kits. 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 got it's gotta 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 grocery store tomato experience. Yeah, and I think one reason is,

uh just the sheer mechanics of like shipping products. Right if 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 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 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 or mash to whatever consistency you want, where it's just fine. I mean, you know that they're picked when they're ideal, and you know they go ahead and canum. 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 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 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 all 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, 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 like hoakery here 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 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 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 to say

the word fruit. This is one of those facts I think most people know 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 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 avocados. Are avocados a sweet food or a savory food? I think for me and for most of 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, 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 again some olive

oil two, and you have a great dish. But we're big fans of going to local like bubble tea places, uh in Asian dessert places, and you will find like avocado smoothies as as a you know, a standard item you encounter on menus and I've tried it before and it's delicious, But yeah, you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily think about it from a Western perspective of being the dessert item, right. But either way, these culinary distinctions often just don't have

a biological basis. In fact, other alinary 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, 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 going to 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 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 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, which was edited by Alan Davidson.

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 Lantum pimpanellifolium, which is today known as the current tomato. Not current as in timely, but current

as in like the fruit a current. And it's called this because in a way, these these wild tomatoes, the Slanum pimpanella folium, sort of resemble currents they're these tiny little berries, almost kind of current or blueberry sized. Yeah, some of the examples I was reading was that if you went back to pre Columbian Peru, you would encounter, if you knew where 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, 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 meso America. By that time, the az Tech people are the no waddle speaking people were eating 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 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 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 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 their research, our best guess about the domestication history of the tomato 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 Solanum lycopersicum saraciform or SLC. 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, this middle species, the s l C, was transformed into the larger, fully domesticated clandum Lycopersicum variant Lycopersicum, and this was the Aztec food crop that was developed into the tomatoes that the 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, yeah, that it's This is interesting because this was some sort of a fruit that was described by Galen who lived two dred 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 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 used population genomic methods to try to reconstruct a genomic map of the modern tomatoes domestication history, and they conclude quote A. Results suggests that the origin of SLC may predate domestication, and that many traits considered typical cole 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 a

little complicated. Basically, they're saying that the semi domesticated breed of tomato that may have been used as a 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 Mesoamerica before the tomato 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 and how to know whether you're 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 word tomato itself. The English word tomato, of course comes via the Spanish tomate, which was adapted from the original no 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 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 to modern tomatios, which the Aztecs called meal to model, and then the Spanish ended up using the word tomate for both tomatio 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. Yeah, but that but they are related. These are all in the night 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, 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 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 the books we're 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. 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 into North America. All right, 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, 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 and 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 and what does that mean, because it just seems ridiculous on the face of it, right,

but 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, in this money, because even once you investigate it, I would say that this irony remains, because the irony remains 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 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 tomatoes because they thought they were poisonous. You see this everywhere. You see this again at botanical gardens, you see this popping up in news stories about the tomato and it is often just and it is 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 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 Pito Andre Matthioli, and he wrote of the mala aria the golden apples we described as ripening from green to yellow. Now he classified the tomato with the man drake, which was of course part of this big nightshade family. And this is, of course this is accurate. I mean they

are in this family. We consider the tomato to be a nightshade, 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 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 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 or association with man drakes and poisons as well as I would imagine

just sort of a general hesitation to take up new plants into a into a pre existing culinary tradition. One one really interesting example of this um I was reading about UH regards the seventeenth century German garden. Uh I was reading when the tomato was purely ornamental considering New World foods in seventeenth century Berlin. And this was by Millie Taylor Pulaski, published in Transatlantic Trade and Global Cultural

Transfer since fourteen nine two. 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 was due in large part to a German naturalist by the name of Johann uh citismund El schotz Um who highlighted its connections, first of all, to the vile eggplant which UH, which was also present in the gardens of Berlin, but not consumed, just growns so you could

look at it. But Taylor at Polinsky also points out that el Schultz didn't argue that either of these plants was poisonous, only that they were unhealthy U. 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 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 this is interesting to 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

popularity and ultimately is going to have a life sustaining success. Um. You know, with the 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 dietarially um. And then of course ultimately it it just takes over. But initially something like the potato as well, is 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 pleasing to look at. But it's impossible for for me to really imagine like a garden, 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 ratatui. Yeah. Now. One of the really wonderful text that we're both looking at for for this a 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, 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 of of Glossium by Pedanius Dioscorides who lived forty through nineties, and this was a Syrian herb that was so named

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 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, um. 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 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 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 or pans or plates, can actually react with the material. One example is if you cook overly acidic foods, including tomato based foods, and for example, 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 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, and they were also conser turns 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 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, 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 History Myths Debunked by Mary Miley Theobald, and the author points out that in Brittish barber surgeon published a botanical book that claimed tomatoes were actually poisonous, while also noting that 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 not positive, but I think that's referring to somebody who's cited in another paper by Andrew F. Smith. Not that book we're looking at, but a paper I'm going to sit in 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 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 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 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 were reading tomatoes, other people were 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 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 the fact that 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 talked before about there there are ways that talk sins 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 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 key made from 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 overwhelmingly safety. There's just yeah, there's nothing to this, right, and and certainly any of these case is we we're 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.

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 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 the 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 idea of the tomato as being 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, the apocryphal legend of Robert

Gibbon Johnson. Uh. So they're 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 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 of tomatoes on the old Salem County courthouse steps uh, that this is the twenty 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 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 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, and Johnson being a prominent citizen, was mentioned quite a bit for his their 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 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 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 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 the tomato. There is no actual American King Tomato 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 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 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 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. 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 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 magazine in April nineteen fifty nine. I think the author is this guy, Richard Gordon, who was also a surgeon and an 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 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 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 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 the killer tomato worm. Thank alright, 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 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 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 buy around um Halloween and you set out for decoration and you put

on the basket on the down 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, I may be completely off on this. I could be wasting these um like. It does remind me of a time when I was helping deliver for a c. S

A here in in our area. And you know, so I would 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 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 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 into 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. 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, 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. They're they're fun to watch, they're cute. Um. But but then there's there's a different pest we're gonna be talking about here and um, and it's it's quite interesting. According to Smith, there's no beating the large green tomato worm, an alarming pest 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 of a crimson or scarlet color to it, as if it has already like stabbed a muppet or something. Anyway,

it is, so it's pretty impressive. It's closely related to the tobacco worms, So if you've seen one or the other, you may have an idea where I'm talking about here. Smith points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson even 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 moth, and it is in fact a different species from the tobacco hornworm. But

they're closely related. And the confusing thing is that 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 they'll, you know, either one will eat the leaves of both plants. Now, will will

strip your nerve 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, I think there are 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 you see the worm once, 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 it's like, it's not only is is it like a foul creature to behold? Buddy? 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 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 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 tomato hornworm. Yeah, now 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 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 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 arming, and he attempts to farm tomatoes and tobacco plants, but he fertilizes his crops with plutonium from the nuclear power plant, 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, 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, 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 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 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. Oh wow, Well, on one hand, it's alarming, but on the other hand it's I guess it's not completely surprising because tobacco is a part of this large night shade fan point. 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 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 tomacco 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 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 fifty nine that described a similar procedure

to what end. I'm not exactly sure. I don't know what what you 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 going to 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, let us know. All right, well 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 think you'll you would try to make? Like what something is popular right now in your household

with tomatoes? Oh? 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 summer tomato is it's like a steak.

It's a dish unto itself. 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 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, where 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 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. We'd love to hear from you. If you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind? Do 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 the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

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