How the Misrepresentation of Tomatoes as Stinking ‘Poison Apples’ That Provoked Vomiting Made People Afraid of Them for More Than 200 Years
The long and fraught history of the plant shows that it got an unfair reputation from the beginning
History has had it out for the tomato. One of the earliest-known European references to the food was made in 1544 by the Italian herbalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, who first classified it as a nightshade and a mandrake—a category of food known as an aphrodisiac. Mattioli’s classification of the tomato as a mandrake had later ramifications. Like similar fruits and vegetables in the Solanaceae family, such as the eggplant, the tomato garnered a reputation for being both poisonous and a source of temptation.
In Mesoamerica, the tomato, which originated in South America, was eaten by the Aztecs before the Europeans arrived and called the tomatl, its name in Nahuatl. It’s believed that the tomato wasn’t grown in Britain until around the 1590s. In the early 16th century, Spanish conquistadors returning from expeditions in Mexico and other parts of Mesoamerica were thought to have first introduced the seeds to southern Europe. Eventually, around 1880 with the invention of the pizza in Naples, the tomato grew widespread in popularity in Europe.
Garden historian Elisabeth Whittle wrote in 2016 that, in the 1540s and 1550s, the tomato was grown in Europe “mainly as an exotic curiosity and only by a few people.”
According to Whittle, Mattioli described the tomato as being eaten in the same manner as eggplants. And, Whittle continued, in a later Latin edition of his classification in 1554, “it is first called ‘pomi d’oro,’ or golden apple, in print, a name that quickly gained general currency and remains in use in Italy to this day.”
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“There seemed to be confusion as to whether the tomato was edible or not,” Whittle wrote. “This may have arisen in part from the fact that the leaves are poisonous. Even though it was recorded by Mattioli as eaten in Italy, further afield there were doubts.”
As Andrew F. Smith details in his 1994 book The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture and Cookery, before the fruit made its way to the table in North America, it was classified as a deadly nightshade, a poisonous family of Solanaceae plants that contain toxins called tropane alkaloids.
But what really did the tomato in, according to Smith’s research, was John Gerard’s 1597 publication of his Herbal, a history of plants, which drew heavily from the earlier agricultural works of the botanists Rembert Dodoens and Charles de L’Ecluse. Per Smith, most of the botanists’ information (which was apparently inaccurate to begin with) was plagiarized by Gerard, a barber-surgeon.
Smith notes Gerard’s thoughts: “Gerard considered ‘the whole plant’ to be ‘of rank and stinking savor.’… The fruit was corrupt, which he left to every man’s censure. While the leaves and stalk of the tomato plant are toxic, the fruit is not.”
Gerard’s opinion of the tomato, though based on a fallacy, prevailed in Britain and in the British North American colonies for over 200 years.
In the 1600s, doctor Richard Surflet translated into English the Maison Rustique, or The Country Farm, a husbandry guide by Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault. The translation says of the tomato, “This plant is more pleasant to the sight than either to the taste or smell, because the fruit being eaten provoketh loathing and vomiting.”
By the 1700s, many Europeans feared the tomato. According to one theory, the “golden apple” became the “poison apple” because it was thought that aristocrats got sick and died after eating them—but wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are so high in acidity, when placed on this particular tableware, the fruit would leach lead from the plate, which was said to result in illness from lead poisoning. No one made this connection between plate and poison at the time; the tomato was picked as the culprit.
But Joe Schwarcz, director of the Office for Science and Society at McGill University in Montreal, dismisses this story as not possible. In a video for the Montreal Gazette published in 2023, he said, “the amount that would be leached out would be trivial, and you’d never get sick from it.” He added that another explanation is more realistic: Tomatoes were small and grew like berries did on the poisonous belladonna plant, another name for deadly nightshade. “So herbalists just assumed that because of this resemblance, tomatoes were poisonous,” Schwarcz said.
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The first known reference to the tomato in the British North American Colonies was published in herbalist William Salmon’s plant history Botanologia, in 1710, which places the tomato in the Carolinas. The tomato became an acceptable edible fruit in many regions, but word of it spread slowly in North America along with plenty of myths and questions from farmers. Many knew how to grow them, but not how to cook the food.
Around the 1820s, many tomato recipes had appeared in local periodicals and newspapers, and still, fears and rumors of the plant’s potential poison lingered. And by the 1830s, a new concern emerged: A green worm, now known as the tomato hornworm, measuring three to four inches in length with a horn sticking out of its back, began taking over tomato patches across the state. According to The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs and Cultivator Almanac (1867) edited by J.J. Thomas, it was believed that a mere brush with such a worm could result in death. The description is chilling: “The tomato in all our gardens is infested with a very large thick-bodied green worm, with oblique white streaks along its sides and a curved thorn-like horn at the end of its back.” The worm was “an object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it.”
But, Thomas continued, the concern was eventually assuaged. “Now that we have become familiarized with it these fears have all vanished, and we have become quite indifferent toward this creature, knowing it to be merely an ugly-looking worm which eats some of the leaves of the tomato,” he wrote.
With the rise of agricultural societies, farmers began investigating the tomato’s use and experimented with different varieties. Smith wrote that back in the 1850s, the name “tomato” was so highly regarded that it was used to sell other plants at market. By 1897, innovator Joseph A. Campbell figured out that tomatoes keep well when canned and popularized condensed tomato soup.
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Today, the tomato is a cooking staple and consumed around the world in countless varieties, from grape to cherry. Smith’s book noted that globally, more than one and a half billion tons of tomatoes are produced commercially each year. Research from 2022, based on statistics compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, notes that “globally, about 180 million tons of tomatoes are grown annually, an amount that has increased by 165 percent over the last two decades.” But some of the plant’s night-shady past seems to have followed it in pop culture, making it a worthy villain. In the 1978 comedy-horror Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, giant red blobs terrorize the country.
