Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today's Vault episode
Speaker 1: is the first part of the two part series we
Speaker 1: did about the humble tomato. Why why did I say
Speaker 1: humble tomatoes, not humble the beautiful, glorious, majestic tomato. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is a part one of our episode Tomato tomato,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was tomato tomato or tomato tomato or
Speaker 1: tomato tomato. I'm not sure. Did you say tomato tomato?
Speaker 1: Was that tomato tomato? Um? I love you tomato. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But anyway, these were fun. These were some some nice
Speaker 1: food based botanical explorations, and I believe we got to
Speaker 1: gush a lot about just how good a tomato can be. Hey,
Speaker 1: and they're in season again. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I was going
Speaker 1: to start off today by saying that, of course it's
Speaker 1: the most wonderful time of the year, but I think
Speaker 1: I'm actually already on record saying October is the most
Speaker 1: wonderful time of the year, and of course October is
Speaker 1: because that's you know, monster madness, but monster season aside,
Speaker 1: I think tomato season is the second most wonderful time
Speaker 1: of the year, and we're right in it now. Tomato
Speaker 1: season is pretty wonderful. Um, We're we're big tomato fans
Speaker 1: here in the house. Given the confines of imposed by
Speaker 1: the pandemic, we're actually growing more tomatoes at the house
Speaker 1: than ever before. Um, and yeah, it's been fabulous. We're
Speaker 1: big fans of pensanella, which is a I think a
Speaker 1: tuscan chopped salad or originally but it's like soaked or
Speaker 1: soaked stale or toasted bread we throw in basil and
Speaker 1: then of course the tomatoes. Uh. Similarly, we really love
Speaker 1: a good caprice salad because, yeah, a great tomato just
Speaker 1: elevates anything. In my opinion. You know, you can do
Speaker 1: a great tomato. All you need is just a little
Speaker 1: salt and pepper, maybe a drizzle of olive oil, and
Speaker 1: you're good to go. A great tomato is I think
Speaker 1: in the same class where people think of like a
Speaker 1: great steak. It is just like a complete food in
Speaker 1: itself that is so good it you know, it kind
Speaker 1: of makes people moan when they eat it. And I
Speaker 1: definitely grew up thinking that I did not like tomatoes.
Speaker 1: I thought I hated tomatoes. I'd always pick them off
Speaker 1: of a sandwich if if they were on there. But
Speaker 1: I realized later in life the issue was just that
Speaker 1: I hated bad tomatoes. And almost every tomato you get
Speaker 1: in a you know, in a subway or what. I
Speaker 1: don't mean to single them out, but you know, any
Speaker 1: sandwich shop, whatever, it's almost never going to be a
Speaker 1: good one. It's going to be kind of a white, mealy, tough,
Speaker 1: flavorless thing that doesn't have all of the beautiful aromatic
Speaker 1: tomato ee compounds, that doesn't have that perfect juicy text.
Speaker 1: You're a ripe, home grown or or you know, farmer's
Speaker 1: market summer tomato that has never been refrigerated, never had
Speaker 1: to be shipped on a big truck, any of that stuff.
Speaker 1: It is a thing of beauty. And if you've never
Speaker 1: experienced a tomato that way, you don't know what you're
Speaker 1: missing yet. Yeah, absolutely, you just you're not going to
Speaker 1: get the same thing with a grocery store tomato generally,
Speaker 1: unless you know they are actually serve as selling like
Speaker 1: local air limb tomatoes. I'm a big fan of box
Speaker 1: meal kits. I'm a subscriber to one of them right now.
Speaker 1: But you're just not gonna You're not gonna get a
Speaker 1: wonderful tomato through the mail like that it's got it's
Speaker 1: gotta come from your own garden. It's got to come
Speaker 1: from a local um garden. It and when you get
Speaker 1: to dig into it, it is like nothing else. It's
Speaker 1: just miles above uh the sort of mundane canned tomato
Speaker 1: grocery store tomato experience. Yeah, and I think one reason is,
Speaker 1: uh just the sheer mechanics of like shipping products. Right
Speaker 1: if you ever had a really good ripe summer tomato,
Speaker 1: as soon as you handle it, you know, like this
Speaker 1: would not survive the like the rough process of getting
Speaker 1: from a farm to the grocery store to my house.
Speaker 1: It's a delicate baby bird. It's the thing that that
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's barely going to survive the trip
Speaker 1: from the vine to your kitchen counter. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: again speaking is a very amateur tomato grower here. But
Speaker 1: the ones we bring in from the backyard, like they
Speaker 1: we have to like knock the bugs off of them,
Speaker 1: they're already oozing a little bit. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: very delicate balance between the plate and the compost heap.
Speaker 1: You've got to get there just the right time. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, I'm also actually I'm a pretty
Speaker 1: big fan of canned tomatoes for cooked applications. If if
Speaker 1: it's a tomato, you know, if you're making tomato sauce
Speaker 1: or something like that, a decent can of of whole
Speaker 1: peeled tomatoes that you puree yourself or mash to whatever
Speaker 1: consistency you want, where it's just fine. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know that they're picked when they're ideal, and you know
Speaker 1: they go ahead and canum. It's much better than trying
Speaker 1: to make a say a tomato sauce from tomatoes that
Speaker 1: are fresh in the off season. Yeah. Yeah, It ultimately depends,
Speaker 1: like what is the role of the tomato in the dish?
Speaker 1: Is Is this a starring vehicle for a fresh tomato.
Speaker 1: If so, nothing but a really good fresh tomato is
Speaker 1: going to work. But if it's something where the tomato
Speaker 1: is more of a supporting player, then perhaps one of
Speaker 1: these other things will work. And then, of course all
Speaker 1: there's not just one tomato. Obviously, there's so many different types.
Speaker 1: For my own purposes, I find that when it's not
Speaker 1: tomato season, those little like grape tomatoes are pretty good
Speaker 1: if you have to get some of the store. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I'm a hundred percent in agreement, cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes
Speaker 1: are the much better option if you need fresh tomatoes
Speaker 1: in the off season. So listeners, as you can probably tell,
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about tomatoes not for one episode,
Speaker 1: but for two whole episodes. And if you're thinking, well,
Speaker 1: the tomato is just so mundane, it's so every day.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be a you know, two episodes of
Speaker 1: of backyard um like hoakery here that I can just
Speaker 1: skip on stuff to blow your mind. Nothing could be
Speaker 1: further from the truth, because there is so much weirdness
Speaker 1: in these episodes. There's quackery, there's myth making, they're tall tails,
Speaker 1: and there's all space colonizations, yes, space colonization. It's going
Speaker 1: to cover really like a broad area of stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind content, even though at the center of
Speaker 1: it is this fruit that has become just such a
Speaker 1: staple of most of our diets in one form or another.
Speaker 1: So maybe we should start off just by looking at
Speaker 1: the tomato plant as an organism, What what is this organism?
Speaker 1: And how did we end up with the modern cultivated tomato. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a great, great place to start, because this
Speaker 1: is another one of those stories where if you don't
Speaker 1: think about it too close, if you don't research it yourself,
Speaker 1: you just might think, oh, well, tomatoes have always been everywhere,
Speaker 1: they have always been a part of our diet because
Speaker 1: they're just so ubiquitous now. But this is not the case. Okay,
Speaker 1: So first of all, you've probably just heard to say
Speaker 1: the word fruit. This is one of those facts I
Speaker 1: think most people know at this point. You probably learned
Speaker 1: this before. But in biological terms, a tomato is a
Speaker 1: fruit rather than a vegetable. And part of this comes
Speaker 1: down to the different ways that we use the term
Speaker 1: fruits and vegetables in a sort of culinary or nutritional
Speaker 1: sense versus in a botanical sense. Um Like we in
Speaker 1: a culinary or nutritional sense, we intuitively sort things into
Speaker 1: categories of fruits and vegetables, I think largely based on
Speaker 1: sugar content and whether they're primarily used in sweet or
Speaker 1: savory preparations. So plants that are savory or vegetables plants
Speaker 1: that are sweet or fruits. However, even this is somewhat
Speaker 1: arbitrary as a cultural convention, because there are ways in
Speaker 1: which these these types of groupings can vary widely from
Speaker 1: culture to culture. One example is avocados. Are avocados a
Speaker 1: sweet food or a savory food? I think for me
Speaker 1: and for most of Americans, the answer overwhelmingly would be
Speaker 1: its savory food. They go in guacamole, you pair them
Speaker 1: with lime and salt, you put them on toast, you
Speaker 1: put them in a burrito. But for millions of people
Speaker 1: in like South America and Asia, avocados are primarily a
Speaker 1: sweet food, used more often in dessert dishes, which seems
Speaker 1: very strange to us. But I don't know. If you
Speaker 1: think of it as kind of basically just a buttery substance,
Speaker 1: it starts to click in place. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: I always grew up thinking of it certainly something you
Speaker 1: add a little salt and pepper two again some olive
Speaker 1: oil two, and you have a great dish. But we're
Speaker 1: big fans of going to local like bubble tea places,
Speaker 1: uh in Asian dessert places, and you will find like
Speaker 1: avocado smoothies as as a you know, a standard item
Speaker 1: you encounter on menus and I've tried it before and
Speaker 1: it's delicious, But yeah, you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily think
Speaker 1: about it from a Western perspective of being the dessert item, right.
Speaker 1: But either way, these culinary distinctions often just don't have
Speaker 1: a biological basis. In fact, other alinary vegetables things we
Speaker 1: think of as vegetables in a cooking sense, are biologically fruits. Cucumbers, chili, peppers, eggplants,
Speaker 1: all fruits. But to go even better, the tomato is
Speaker 1: not only fruit, it is technically a berry and one
Speaker 1: thing that I think you could probably even into it
Speaker 1: just looking at say, you know, if you're growing a
Speaker 1: variety of heirloom tomato in your backyard and you see
Speaker 1: this monstrous fruit hanging off of a vine that you
Speaker 1: have to prop up on a steak or a cage
Speaker 1: or otherwise, this gigantic fruit is just going to make
Speaker 1: it drooped down on the ground. Uh, And it's the
Speaker 1: you know, it looks like a thing that should not
Speaker 1: be in a way. Um, so you might be able
Speaker 1: to into it that tomatoes have not always been this way,
Speaker 1: like many of the modern fruits and vegetables we eat.
Speaker 1: It had to be adapted from a naturally occurring fruit
Speaker 1: or vegetable that did not necessarily grow as large in
Speaker 1: the edible part um. And it appears that modern cultivated tomatoes,
Speaker 1: which have the scientific name Solanum lycopersicum, are descended from
Speaker 1: a wild berry that grew in northwestern South America, maybe
Speaker 1: around the area of Peru or a little farther north.
Speaker 1: And the research tracing these biological origins has been summarized
Speaker 1: in a few sources. I looked at, for example, in
Speaker 1: the Oxford Companion to Food, which was edited by Alan Davidson.
Speaker 1: They looked at studies by, for example, Sophie co in
Speaker 1: N and other researchers over the years that found that
Speaker 1: the wild ancestor of the tomato was very likely. They
Speaker 1: identify a couple of species, one Lycopersicon seraciform, and then
Speaker 1: another one so Lantum pimpanellifolium, which is today known as
Speaker 1: the current tomato. Not current as in timely, but current
Speaker 1: as in like the fruit a current. And it's called
Speaker 1: this because in a way, these these wild tomatoes, the
Speaker 1: Slanum pimpanella folium, sort of resemble currents they're these tiny
Speaker 1: little berries, almost kind of current or blueberry sized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of the examples I was reading was that if
Speaker 1: you went back to pre Columbian Peru, you would encounter,
Speaker 1: if you knew where to look, you would find these
Speaker 1: wild growing, essentially yellow berries that were the predecessor, the
Speaker 1: likely predecessor to the modern tomato. Yes, now, exactly how
Speaker 1: it went from that wild berry to the cultivated varieties
Speaker 1: that people eat that that's still um, we know some things,
Speaker 1: but it's still a somewhat open question that there have
Speaker 1: been some genomic studies that I'll talk about in just
Speaker 1: a minute, but we know that such a thing as
Speaker 1: the cultivated tomato existed by the time the Spanish arrived
Speaker 1: in meso America. By that time, the az Tech people
Speaker 1: are the no waddle speaking people were eating tomatoes that
Speaker 1: they grew as crops, and they were eating them in dishes,
Speaker 1: often prepared in conjunction with chili peppers. But of course
Speaker 1: we we know that this wild ancestor of the tomato,
Speaker 1: this berry grew in northwest South America. It was, you know,
Speaker 1: this wild fine and so there's still a question of
Speaker 1: how exactly that wild fruit made its way up north
Speaker 1: to Meso America in order to be cultivated as a
Speaker 1: food crop by the Aztecs. Yeah, there's already even at
Speaker 1: this early stage in the history of the global tomato.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a botanical game of telephone, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I was trying to look up what is some
Speaker 1: of the most recent scientific work on this, and there
Speaker 1: was a new study about the domestication history of the
Speaker 1: tomato that was published just this year, published in the
Speaker 1: journal Molecular Biology and Evolution by Razafard at All. And
Speaker 1: so what they present is a little complicated. I'm going
Speaker 1: to try to do the simplest version I can. So
Speaker 1: the authors say that before their research, our best guess
Speaker 1: about the domestication history of the tomato went like this.
Speaker 1: So you had this wild berry in South America. It's
Speaker 1: growing up in the Andes, up in the northwest corner
Speaker 1: of South America. And this is Solanum pimpanella folium here again,
Speaker 1: this is the one we mentioned earlier. The fruits are
Speaker 1: going to be about the size of a blueberry. Then
Speaker 1: in this older understanding, this was transformed into the semi
Speaker 1: domesticated plant Solanum lycopersicum saraciform or SLC. But if you
Speaker 1: see SLC and tomato literature, don't confuse that with Salt
Speaker 1: Lake City. It means this species and this would have
Speaker 1: happened within South America. These fruits would have been about
Speaker 1: the size of a cherry, so kind of similar to
Speaker 1: cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes that you could buy at
Speaker 1: the store today. Obviously somewhat different, but similar somewhat in
Speaker 1: in look, in size. And then finally, this middle species,
Speaker 1: the s l C, was transformed into the larger, fully
Speaker 1: domesticated clandum Lycopersicum variant Lycopersicum, and this was the Aztec
Speaker 1: food crop that was developed into the tomatoes that the
Speaker 1: people eat all around the world today and uh strange
Speaker 1: fact lyco persicum. I think Robert you might have a
Speaker 1: note about this later, but it means literally wolf peach. Yes, um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that it's This is interesting because this was some sort
Speaker 1: of a fruit that was described by Galen who lived
Speaker 1: two dred c, which obviously as well before tomatoes actually
Speaker 1: came to uh To, uh To to Europe, so obviously
Speaker 1: Galen was not describing a tomato. But this just this
Speaker 1: description ends up getting wound up in the classification of
Speaker 1: tomatoes in the West later on. Yeah, but so anyway,
Speaker 1: the authors of this study from used population genomic methods
Speaker 1: to try to reconstruct a genomic map of the modern
Speaker 1: tomatoes domestication history, and they conclude quote A. Results suggests
Speaker 1: that the origin of SLC may predate domestication, and that
Speaker 1: many traits considered typical cole of cultivated tomatoes arose in
Speaker 1: South American SLC, but we're lost or diminished once these
Speaker 1: partially domesticated forms spread northward. These traits were then likely
Speaker 1: re selected in a convergent fashion in the common cultivated
Speaker 1: tomato prior to its expansion around the world. So a
Speaker 1: little complicated. Basically, they're saying that the semi domesticated breed
Speaker 1: of tomato that may have been used as a as
Speaker 1: not not a cultivated crop but a semi domesticated food
Speaker 1: by some people in South America, it had some traits
Speaker 1: that arose naturally, and then those traits were re selected
Speaker 1: and emphasized by growers in Mesoamerica before the tomato finally
Speaker 1: spread all over the world. Interesting, now we've already touched
Speaker 1: on the fact that the tomato isn't the only case
Speaker 1: of this there. There's a whole thing about what you
Speaker 1: call breeds of plants and how and how to know
Speaker 1: whether you're talking about the same fruit or plant. When
Speaker 1: you're using different names throughout history, it can become very confusing. Um.
Speaker 1: But just about the history of the word tomato itself.
Speaker 1: The English word tomato, of course comes via the Spanish tomate,
Speaker 1: which was adapted from the original no Wattle word tomadel.
Speaker 1: Now I've seen a lot of sources claimed that to
Speaker 1: model was simply the Noattle word for the fruit for
Speaker 1: the tomato, but the entry and the Oxford companion actually
Speaker 1: goes a little deeper. And this is kind of interesting
Speaker 1: again about linguistic confusion. So apparently in the now Wattle language,
Speaker 1: tom model simply meant plump fruit. So to indicate the
Speaker 1: ancestor of our tomato you had to add the prefix z.
Speaker 1: So the word was z to model that was the
Speaker 1: ancestor of the tomato we have today, and this distinguished
Speaker 1: it from the husked ancestor to modern tomatios, which the
Speaker 1: Aztecs called meal to model, and then the Spanish ended
Speaker 1: up using the word tomate for both tomatio in Spanish
Speaker 1: that just means little tomato, though they are not actually
Speaker 1: large and small versions of the same fruit. They're totally
Speaker 1: different species. Yeah, but that but they are related. These
Speaker 1: are all in the night shade family, and we'll get
Speaker 1: into to that, um into that in a bit. But
Speaker 1: the authors of the Oxford Companion point out this led
Speaker 1: to a bunch of confusion for Spanish chroniclers, who just
Speaker 1: didn't always seem to understand which fruit was being talked about. Uh.
Speaker 1: THEO and I have mentioned this before, but they also
Speaker 1: point out that in as Tech cuisine, tomatoes were consistently
Speaker 1: linked with chili peppers, and I gotta say it's a
Speaker 1: good combination. Tomatoes and chili peppers are are two fruits
Speaker 1: that go well together. Absolutely, But here, once we have
Speaker 1: contact between the hemispheres, this opens up the doors of
Speaker 1: of of spread of this plant all over the world,
Speaker 1: and eventually it does spread. Now I have to say
Speaker 1: that the way that the tomato spreads uh through and
Speaker 1: around the world is it both is it was it
Speaker 1: once alarming, like it's really it's really a success story.
Speaker 1: But it's also not one of these situations where you
Speaker 1: can say, oh, well, this individual brought the tomato to
Speaker 1: Europe and then it was an enormous success. And here
Speaker 1: we are like, it's not that simple and uh and
Speaker 1: and we we certainly encourage people are interested in this
Speaker 1: to seek out some of the books we're going to
Speaker 1: mention here in a bit because they'll get into a
Speaker 1: lot more detail about this. It is, um, I guess
Speaker 1: you would say it is. There's a lot of touch
Speaker 1: and go uh, false starts. Um. And as we'll discuss
Speaker 1: a little bit too, there's some myth making involved in
Speaker 1: some some legend regarding just how the tomato takes off
Speaker 1: and what is standing in its way. I would also
Speaker 1: say that the tomato has a somewhat complicated and murky Uh.
Speaker 1: If it were a text, we would call it the
Speaker 1: reception history. Yeah. Absolutely, So we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but when we come back, we are going to dive
Speaker 1: into some of the issues of its spread through Europe
Speaker 1: and then paradoxically, like back into North America. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. So. Uh. We may have talked in the past,
Speaker 1: you and I about doing a tomato episode, uh, doing
Speaker 1: something about the tomatoes. Tomatoes have definitely come up on
Speaker 1: the show before, but my wife this summer had had
Speaker 1: specifically mentioned she said, you guys should do Tomato episode.
Speaker 1: You should do it. You should, you should really dive
Speaker 1: in there. And I think something that helped encourage this
Speaker 1: is that we encountered a sign at a botanical garden
Speaker 1: that was describing tomatoes and it mentioned that in the
Speaker 1: past people thought they were poisonous. So I have to
Speaker 1: admit that that was like, that was a real key
Speaker 1: area of interest for me going into this episode, getting
Speaker 1: into you know, just just discussing whether people ever actually
Speaker 1: considered the tomato to be poisonous and what does that mean,
Speaker 1: because it just seems ridiculous on the face of it, right,
Speaker 1: but the tomato has conquered the planet. We know the
Speaker 1: tomato is not poisonous, and the idea of people being
Speaker 1: afraid to eat it because they think it is poisonous, Uh,
Speaker 1: it just seems completely looney. Well, in this money, because
Speaker 1: even once you investigate it, I would say that this
Speaker 1: irony remains, because the irony remains because we are going
Speaker 1: to encounter people who are saying the tomato is poisonous,
Speaker 1: but they're not saying it at a time when nobody
Speaker 1: was eating tomatoes because everybody thought they were poisonous. They'd
Speaker 1: be like, well, some people eat them but they're poisonous. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you didn't have like single voices with a global reach
Speaker 1: saying we do not eat tomatoes or no one should
Speaker 1: eat tomatoes, because you have a lot of um, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of division based on like who's talking about it,
Speaker 1: what country they're in, what you know, what levels of
Speaker 1: society they're at, etcetera. And then on top of additional
Speaker 1: legends that pop up. But but this basic idea that
Speaker 1: people specifically, you'll see like Europeans or Americans used to
Speaker 1: be afraid to eat tomatoes because they thought they were poisonous.
Speaker 1: You see this everywhere. You see this again at botanical gardens,
Speaker 1: you see this popping up in news stories about the
Speaker 1: tomato and it is often just and it is just
Speaker 1: a straight up fact. Uh. But again, when I started
Speaker 1: looking into it, I became increasingly less sure because on
Speaker 1: one hand, yeah, it sounds too good to be true,
Speaker 1: and then you do encounter these um these are these
Speaker 1: these wrinkles in the description that really um drive home
Speaker 1: that Okay, not everybody thought this at the same time.
Speaker 1: So again we're not going to cover the entire history
Speaker 1: of the tomatoes um influx into Europe. And then it's
Speaker 1: um it's acceptance by European societies. But the first known
Speaker 1: European reference to tomatoes comes in four from Italian herbalist
Speaker 1: Pito Andre Matthioli, and he wrote of the mala aria
Speaker 1: the golden apples we described as ripening from green to yellow.
Speaker 1: Now he classified the tomato with the man drake, which
Speaker 1: was of course part of this big nightshade family. And
Speaker 1: this is, of course this is accurate. I mean they
Speaker 1: are in this family. We consider the tomato to be
Speaker 1: a nightshade, along with things like the eggplant um But
Speaker 1: this is often held up is one aspect of the
Speaker 1: poisonous reputation that tomatoes gathered in European society, with botanists
Speaker 1: signifying that they were a part of this family that
Speaker 1: contained things um uh like deadly nightshade or like like
Speaker 1: the man drake root, which of course has all these
Speaker 1: connotations with various medicinal and sort of magical practices. But
Speaker 1: at the same time at the only discussed how tomatoes
Speaker 1: were cooked and eaten at the time much in the
Speaker 1: same way as eggplants, which were another imported food. Only
Speaker 1: this this eggplants came from Asia um and and they
Speaker 1: were again part of the night shade family, and this
Speaker 1: has to be This seems to be a major sticking
Speaker 1: point for a large portion of of the tomatoes European
Speaker 1: tradition UH, with it and the related egg plant not
Speaker 1: traveling all that well into New European cuisines, or not
Speaker 1: all of them anyway, because of their or association with
Speaker 1: man drakes and poisons as well as I would imagine
Speaker 1: just sort of a general hesitation to take up new
Speaker 1: plants into a into a pre existing culinary tradition. One
Speaker 1: one really interesting example of this um I was reading
Speaker 1: about UH regards the seventeenth century German garden. Uh I
Speaker 1: was reading when the tomato was purely ornamental considering New
Speaker 1: World foods in seventeenth century Berlin. And this was by
Speaker 1: Millie Taylor Pulaski, published in Transatlantic Trade and Global Cultural
Speaker 1: Transfer since fourteen nine two. This was published in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: so the author mentions that tomatoes were purely ornamental summer
Speaker 1: plants in most Berlin gardens in sixteen fifty six, and
Speaker 1: this was due in large part to a German naturalist
Speaker 1: by the name of Johann uh citismund El schotz Um
Speaker 1: who highlighted its connections, first of all, to the vile
Speaker 1: eggplant which UH, which was also present in the gardens
Speaker 1: of Berlin, but not consumed, just growns so you could
Speaker 1: look at it. But Taylor at Polinsky also points out
Speaker 1: that el Schultz didn't argue that either of these plants
Speaker 1: was poisonous, only that they were unhealthy U. And he
Speaker 1: also seems to mention with some disdain that Italians eat
Speaker 1: them and Spaniards did too at the time. So um,
Speaker 1: the idea is that there was likely um a large
Speaker 1: amount of anti Catholic sentiment here as well, Like this
Speaker 1: is this is a plant. Yes you can eat it,
Speaker 1: the Italians eat it, the Catholics eat it, but Protestant
Speaker 1: Germans should not eat it because it's bad for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That seems to go along with some of the things
Speaker 1: I was reading. And this is interesting to because we
Speaker 1: see a similar trend actually if you look at potatoes,
Speaker 1: which are also part of the large night shade family. Again,
Speaker 1: where a new food is destined just destined for widespread
Speaker 1: popularity and ultimately is going to have a life sustaining success. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, with the particularly it ends up being embraced
Speaker 1: by um lower levels of the socio economic um uh
Speaker 1: ladder first and those communities that take up the potato
Speaker 1: benefit from them like nutritionally uh and and dietarially um.
Speaker 1: And then of course ultimately it it just takes over.
Speaker 1: But initially something like the potato as well, is grown
Speaker 1: only for decoration before it is ultimately embraced by everybody
Speaker 1: for decoration. Potato for decoration. Yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I could I guess I could see it. I see
Speaker 1: it less with the two with with the potato, but
Speaker 1: certainly to tomato is a bright plant. It is pleasing
Speaker 1: to look at. But it's impossible for for me to
Speaker 1: really imagine like a garden, walking into a garden where
Speaker 1: you have ripe tomatoes and eggplants and you're just gonna
Speaker 1: stand back and say, oh, look at that. Isn't that
Speaker 1: Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that nice? No, you need to
Speaker 1: harvest that stuff and make a ratatui. Yeah. Now. One
Speaker 1: of the really wonderful text that we're both looking at
Speaker 1: for for this a pair of episodes, UH is a
Speaker 1: book by Andrew F. Smith titled The Tomato in America, which, again,
Speaker 1: if you if you're tantalized by our discussions in these episodes,
Speaker 1: and you want more about the tomato, this is the
Speaker 1: book for you. Highly recommended. But Smith points out that
Speaker 1: some Renaissance herbalist when they were considering the the tomato,
Speaker 1: they looked at these other sources, one of which is
Speaker 1: galen and the idea of the wolf peach. And that's
Speaker 1: again when we have the scientific name that we have
Speaker 1: for the tomato. But also there were descriptions of of
Speaker 1: of Glossium by Pedanius Dioscorides who lived forty through nineties,
Speaker 1: and this was a Syrian herb that was so named
Speaker 1: because it was recommended as a treatment for eye ailments. Um.
Speaker 1: So that was another sort of pre existing classification that
Speaker 1: helped inform how we thought about tomatoes, or certainly how
Speaker 1: naturalists and botanists thought about them at the time. But
Speaker 1: neither of these uh is the tomato, just to be clear,
Speaker 1: But they do tie into some of the they frequently
Speaker 1: mentioned associations that were made at the time with tomatoes.
Speaker 1: Now to get into some of the myth making a
Speaker 1: little bit, here's another frequently mentioned tail that I imagine
Speaker 1: a number of you have heard, and this is how
Speaker 1: it goes, um. This is the story. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: this is this correct. We'll get into that in a second.
Speaker 1: But the story goes that when the tomato originally found
Speaker 1: its way onto European plates, you had aristocrats who were like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try out this. This sounds great, and they
Speaker 1: started eating these tomatoes. But then they started becoming very sick,
Speaker 1: and they end up pronouncing the fruit to be poisonous.
Speaker 1: But it would turn out that the acid in the
Speaker 1: tomatoes was leaching lead out of the plates they were
Speaker 1: served on, which incidentally made poorer members of society um
Speaker 1: less susceptible to the poison because they would be eating
Speaker 1: off of the wooden plates or earthenware plates. Now, whether
Speaker 1: or not this claim is true, it is actually true,
Speaker 1: of course, that that acidic fruits and vegetables, when cooked
Speaker 1: in or eaten on certain types of pots or pans
Speaker 1: or plates, can actually react with the material. One example
Speaker 1: is if you cook overly acidic foods, including tomato based foods,
Speaker 1: and for example, aluminum cookware. Sometimes this isn't great, Like
Speaker 1: they can react with each other. The food can pick
Speaker 1: up a kind of nasty metallic taste from the aluminum.
Speaker 1: The acid can sort of damage the surface of the aluminum.
Speaker 1: So so there are reactions like that that can't happen, right,
Speaker 1: And we have discussed lead making its way into food
Speaker 1: and lead poisoning in at least a couple of episodes
Speaker 1: in the past. I know we did Cupids leaden Arrow,
Speaker 1: which discussed lead quite a bit, and then we also
Speaker 1: did one of one of our three or four Dangerous
Speaker 1: Foods episodes touched on lead poisoning. But anyway, this idea
Speaker 1: of tomatoes sucking the lead out of your your your
Speaker 1: plate where uh. This ended up being circulated in the
Speaker 1: United States as well, um, with commentators highlighting the lead issue,
Speaker 1: and they were also conser turns over the general effect
Speaker 1: of the acidity of the tomato on the stomach, with
Speaker 1: some saying oh, well, the you know, the the acidity
Speaker 1: and the tomatoes dangerous to the stomach, others saying no, no,
Speaker 1: it's really beneficial. Another thing I've read, Actually, I don't
Speaker 1: know if this overlaps with the lead issue or not,
Speaker 1: but the specific substance I saw mentioned was pewter plates.
Speaker 1: Was that like that they would discolor When you put
Speaker 1: tomatoes on a pewter plate, it would allegedly discolor the plate,
Speaker 1: and this led to concerns. Yeah, now, Andrew F. Smith
Speaker 1: does right that the acid content of tomatoes was a
Speaker 1: topic of concern in Europe and the United States for
Speaker 1: a while. The Paris Society for Horticulture published a paper
Speaker 1: warning about the possibility of leaching with metal plates uh,
Speaker 1: including copper, recommending that you should use wooden and earthenware
Speaker 1: plates instead. But but I looked into this a bit more,
Speaker 1: reading from a book titled Death by petticoat American History
Speaker 1: Myths Debunked by Mary Miley Theobald, and the author points
Speaker 1: out that in Brittish barber surgeon published a botanical book
Speaker 1: that claimed tomatoes were actually poisonous, while also noting that
Speaker 1: the French and Italians did eat them. So I guess
Speaker 1: it was like, these are dangerous to humans unless you're
Speaker 1: French or Italians. Somehow, I don't know. Apparently this uh
Speaker 1: that this was this was no expert um, this particular
Speaker 1: barber surgeon. I guess it would be like the modern
Speaker 1: equivalent of say a a like a YouTube based dietary expert.
Speaker 1: I'm not positive, but I think that's referring to somebody
Speaker 1: who's cited in another paper by Andrew F. Smith. Not
Speaker 1: that book we're looking at, but a paper I'm going
Speaker 1: to sit in a bit. I think that is John Girard,
Speaker 1: a barber surgeon and the superintendent of the gardens of
Speaker 1: the College of Physicians in Holborn. And Smith says of
Speaker 1: of of this barber surgeon guy, that in addition to
Speaker 1: repeating the claims of others that the tomatoes poisonous, he
Speaker 1: also made strange comments such as quote the temperature of
Speaker 1: the tomato was in the highest degree of coldness, which
Speaker 1: he said was left quote to every man's censure. What
Speaker 1: does that mean. I don't know. Well, I know about
Speaker 1: the censure. It just seems like, okay, yes, disdain in
Speaker 1: the tomato alright, Well, at any rate, Um theobald of
Speaker 1: contends that quote this book set the state for the
Speaker 1: negative view of tomatoes among the English that lasted more
Speaker 1: than a century. However, by the end of the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: tomatoes had overcome this bad press. Yeah. That seems in
Speaker 1: line with a lot of what I was reading as well,
Speaker 1: that it's not that everybody thought that tomatoes were poisonous,
Speaker 1: but that there were some prominent writers that had made
Speaker 1: or repeated these allegations that the tomato was in some
Speaker 1: way potentially poisonous or unhealthy, and that these misimpressions trickled
Speaker 1: down to some people in society but not everybody. So
Speaker 1: some people were reading tomatoes, other people were saying, no,
Speaker 1: that's dangerous, don't do that, And over time the non
Speaker 1: dangerous faction grew in numbers. Yeah, I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it's easy to look back at history and assume that
Speaker 1: there would be sort of weirdly to think there would
Speaker 1: be some sort of consensus at the time about whether
Speaker 1: you know wrong or correct about particular foods. But obviously
Speaker 1: we just look around the world today and we see
Speaker 1: how um are our understanding of the nutritional values of
Speaker 1: various foods shifts with our understanding, and also just sort
Speaker 1: of the popular idea of what we should be eating,
Speaker 1: what is good, what is tasty, what is stylish, and
Speaker 1: even what is healthy shifts as well. Yeah, you're exactly right,
Speaker 1: and and there is a grain of truth here, at
Speaker 1: least in the fact that that plants in the soul
Speaker 1: and a c family, including you know, say potatoes, for instance,
Speaker 1: to do sometimes in some parts of the plant have
Speaker 1: do accumulate toxins that can be dangerous. For example, if
Speaker 1: you consume the leaves or something, or even um, we've
Speaker 1: talked before about there there are ways that talk sins
Speaker 1: can accumulate in potatoes if they say, left out for
Speaker 1: a long time, if you have a really old potato,
Speaker 1: it can get a lot of soulanine in it, which
Speaker 1: can lead to potato poisoning. Yeah, it turns green on
Speaker 1: the sunlit countertop, that sort of thing. Um. Yes. Smith
Speaker 1: points out that well, first of all, as far as
Speaker 1: um acidity goes, it's gonna very quite a bit across
Speaker 1: the varieties of tomato. But then in terms of um
Speaker 1: potentially dangerous alkaloids, those are going to be mostly in
Speaker 1: the leaves and stem. That's where the highest concentrations are
Speaker 1: going to be in a tomato plant. And there have
Speaker 1: been cases where, say, a child consumed a key made
Speaker 1: from those leaves, and it has resulted in severe reactions.
Speaker 1: But as you can guess from the like billions of
Speaker 1: pounds or whatever of catchup and other tomato products that
Speaker 1: people eat around the world every day, the tomato itself
Speaker 1: is overwhelmingly safety. There's just yeah, there's nothing to this, right,
Speaker 1: and and certainly any of these case is we we're
Speaker 1: discussing a place or a people or a community that
Speaker 1: was afraid of the tomato, or did not eat the tomato,
Speaker 1: or only grew it ornamentally, there was an all likelihood
Speaker 1: um people or a place not too far away where
Speaker 1: it was just a part of the It had already
Speaker 1: become part of the culinary tradition. So yeah, you would
Speaker 1: have English people or Germans that were not eating the tomato.
Speaker 1: But meanwhile, in Italy and Spain and France and Portugal
Speaker 1: they were already all in. I mean, it was already
Speaker 1: a food crop when Europeans first encountered it. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Now there's a really interesting paper I mentioned a minute
Speaker 1: ago by also by Andrew F. Smith, from from the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties that was about the history of how perceptions
Speaker 1: of the tomato changed in the United States during the
Speaker 1: first half of the nineteenth century, and there are some
Speaker 1: some interesting reasons involved in that transition that the Smith
Speaker 1: gets into. I think we're probably gonna explore that paper
Speaker 1: in the second episode here, but it's got a lot
Speaker 1: of fun quackery in it, so so pulled on for
Speaker 1: that one. I'd say one of the stumbling blocks to
Speaker 1: understanding The idea of the tomato as being is being
Speaker 1: received as poisonous or beneficial is that sometimes the best
Speaker 1: seeming examples, the best stories about about this are actually
Speaker 1: just legends, so you know, are completely apocryphal, Uh, such
Speaker 1: as the this famous story that I imagined a lot
Speaker 1: of people have heard, uh, the apocryphal legend of Robert
Speaker 1: Gibbon Johnson. Uh. So they're multiple versions of this, and
Speaker 1: they concern a real life individual named Robert Gibbon Johnson
Speaker 1: who have seventeen seventy one through eighteen fifty, and he
Speaker 1: was a notable farmer and horticulturist in Salem, New Jersey.
Speaker 1: He was an actual tomato grower uh, and is sometimes
Speaker 1: credited with having introduced the crop into the area in
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty, and certainly they become a major crop around
Speaker 1: that time in southern New Jersey. But this is was
Speaker 1: discussing a second like this doesn't seem to be the
Speaker 1: case either. He didn't didn't actually introduce the crop. But
Speaker 1: in this particular story, um, the idea is that he
Speaker 1: said he was defending the tomato and he announced I
Speaker 1: will publicly eat a basket of tomatoes on the old
Speaker 1: Salem County courthouse steps uh, that this is the twenty
Speaker 1: in order to demonstrate that they are not poisonous. And
Speaker 1: then and then the town's folk burned him as a witch.
Speaker 1: Wrong Salem. But but you know, the idea is that
Speaker 1: people were like, oh, he's gonna eat a basket and
Speaker 1: tomatoes and die publicly. I've got to see that. So
Speaker 1: people gather to watch the spectacle. They come from far
Speaker 1: and wide, and then he eats the tomatoes and does
Speaker 1: not die. That's the story, and it makes for a
Speaker 1: great story. But everyone seems to agree that this is
Speaker 1: just not true as uh. And Andrew F. Smith actually
Speaker 1: gets into this in the first few pages of the book,
Speaker 1: um pointing out that there's some pretty good records from
Speaker 1: the time in Salem, and Johnson being a prominent citizen,
Speaker 1: was mentioned quite a bit for his their activities and exploits,
Speaker 1: like he was also in the military and so forth,
Speaker 1: like he was a major deal at the time. But
Speaker 1: there's nothing about him introducing the tomato. There's nothing about
Speaker 1: him um uh, you know, eating tomatoes and as a
Speaker 1: matter of public spectacle to to to prove that they're
Speaker 1: not poisonous. And it just seems like that would be
Speaker 1: written up if he had done that, Like the papers
Speaker 1: were not shy about writing about about this guy at
Speaker 1: the time. Anyway. Smith goes on to note that as
Speaker 1: far as the idea of him introducing the tomato, this
Speaker 1: is just one of some five hundred different myths about
Speaker 1: tomato introduction in America, and that they often end end
Speaker 1: up involving the great Man trope, in which someone such
Speaker 1: as Thomas Jefferson, He's another individual that sometimes is erroneously
Speaker 1: cited as being the introducer of tomatoes is responsible. But
Speaker 1: in reality we don't know who is responsible, you know,
Speaker 1: specifically for introducing the tomato. There is no actual American
Speaker 1: King Tomato to credit. I do love the idea, though,
Speaker 1: that if this story were true, I mean, so, imagine
Speaker 1: this guy sits out in front of the courthouse and
Speaker 1: eats a bushel basket of tomatoes. Like I don't think
Speaker 1: that would kill him because they're not poisonous, but surely
Speaker 1: that would give him just like horrible diarrhea. What you
Speaker 1: eat a basket of tomatoes with nothing else? Yeah? Maybe so,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Supposedly, this whole incident has even been
Speaker 1: um recreated in various past documentaries. But I didn't get
Speaker 1: a chance to look them up and see how they
Speaker 1: presented it if because there are different versions of it.
Speaker 1: So maybe in some versions it's just like one tomato, uh,
Speaker 1: and in others it's a whole bushel. I don't know.
Speaker 1: So I've got another story like this about the supposed
Speaker 1: reputation of tomatoes as poisonous, and this is the rumor
Speaker 1: about the George Washington assassination attempt. Okay, so one version
Speaker 1: of the story, as collected in the Snopes article on
Speaker 1: this rumor quote. I remember one of my junior high
Speaker 1: history teachers reading us a suicide note by George Washington's cook.
Speaker 1: The author of the note said that he could not
Speaker 1: forgive Washington's treason against the British and had therefore decided
Speaker 1: to poison him then kill himself. The poison he used
Speaker 1: on Washington was a tomato. That's great story, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's comedic, It generates laughter, and it ties into
Speaker 1: this this ridiculous idea that people once thought that the
Speaker 1: tomato was harmful and and exaggerated to the point where
Speaker 1: it could be used as a lethal weapon. Yeah. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: as great of a story as this is, this one
Speaker 1: is fiction in a literal sense. It comes from a story,
Speaker 1: a short story called the Murder of George Washington by
Speaker 1: Richard im Gordon, which was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery
Speaker 1: magazine in April nineteen fifty nine. I think the author
Speaker 1: is this guy, Richard Gordon, who was also a surgeon
Speaker 1: and an an enthusiologist, who who wrote historical fiction underpen names.
Speaker 1: But anyway, in the story, uh this, this cook wants
Speaker 1: to kill Washington because he's a British loyalist, and so
Speaker 1: he waits until Washington is quote afflicted with a cold
Speaker 1: in his head which has seriously impaired his sense of taste. Okay,
Speaker 1: so perfect opportunity, right, He's not going to be able
Speaker 1: to taste the poison that the cook adds to his stew,
Speaker 1: which comes in the form of quote, the scarlet flesh
Speaker 1: of a fruit of a variety of the deadly nightshade.
Speaker 1: And then, after serving what he assumes to be the
Speaker 1: deadly poison, the cook writes a ps to his suicide
Speaker 1: note quote, as a cook, I have a prejudice against
Speaker 1: dying by poison. I am too corpulent to hang. But
Speaker 1: by reason of my calling, I am expert with a
Speaker 1: carving knife. So it is alleged that he takes his
Speaker 1: own life somehow with the aid of a carving knife.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, I think the reader is just
Speaker 1: left to assume that this guy's scheme does not work
Speaker 1: because the poison does not work, because it is a tomato.
Speaker 1: That's great, but no basis in history whatsoever. It sounds
Speaker 1: like the author was merely having fun with some of
Speaker 1: these very these very topics that we've been discussing here.
Speaker 1: All right, on that note, we're going to take one
Speaker 1: more break, but when we come back, we will discuss
Speaker 1: the killer tomato worm. Thank alright, we're back now, Robert.
Speaker 1: Before we went to the break, did you say something
Speaker 1: about a killer tomato worm? Yes, killer tomato worms, which
Speaker 1: is another interesting area that combines like actual um actual
Speaker 1: in this case, entomological fact with a fair amount of
Speaker 1: myth making here. Uh and and just uh, you know, superstition.
Speaker 1: I guess. So it is a fact of life that
Speaker 1: if you're going to raise some crops, uh, you're going
Speaker 1: to have to deal with other organisms that also want
Speaker 1: to eat said crops. And uh, again, we've been growing
Speaker 1: some tomatoes in our own backyard here. So so we've
Speaker 1: gotten used to this. As again we're growing tomatoes. We
Speaker 1: also have some volunteer summertime pumpkins from our compost. We
Speaker 1: didn't know what they were gonna be. It turns out
Speaker 1: they're useless pumpkins, but they're still fun. Are pumpkins useless? Well,
Speaker 1: most of these are those little ornamental pumpkins, uh, you
Speaker 1: know the kind uh that you you buy around um
Speaker 1: Halloween and you set out for decoration and you put
Speaker 1: on the basket on the down dining room table. Um.
Speaker 1: That's what's been growing in our backyard. But can you
Speaker 1: can can you imagine a future culture that looks back
Speaker 1: on us with the same disdain that we had for
Speaker 1: people who would have grown tomatoes and eggplants only as decorations,
Speaker 1: and they think that about us about pumpkins. It's true,
Speaker 1: I may be completely off on this. I could be
Speaker 1: wasting these um like. It does remind me of a
Speaker 1: time when I was helping deliver for a c. S
Speaker 1: A here in in our area. And you know, so
Speaker 1: I would we would volunteer and we would would get
Speaker 1: like a free basket of vegetables in return for our service,
Speaker 1: but we would deliver baskets of fresh vegetables to various households,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of good stuff in there. There's
Speaker 1: stuff like sun chokes that I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: had before. Um. But then we would also have a
Speaker 1: lot of squash, and one of them I particularly remember.
Speaker 1: They were acorn squash, which can be quite delicious. And
Speaker 1: I delivered one week to this household, and then the
Speaker 1: next week when I came back, there were the acorn squash, uh,
Speaker 1: not served up inside in a dish, but on the
Speaker 1: porch as decorations. And I was thinking, oh my god,
Speaker 1: those are so delicious and you're just gonna use them
Speaker 1: as porch decorations. Did they carve a jackal interface into
Speaker 1: them at least? No, No, just they just set them
Speaker 1: out there. But it's possible I'm doing the same thing
Speaker 1: with my summertime pumpkins. UM. So I do I do
Speaker 1: not know, um, But at any rate, growing all this
Speaker 1: stuff in the backyard, um, other organisms are interested. Various
Speaker 1: bugs make a go at it. The squirrels, I think,
Speaker 1: get a little bit bored and we'll eat like part
Speaker 1: of something here and there. And we've also even had
Speaker 1: a rabbit shown up, show up which has been a
Speaker 1: lot of fun because you get anytime you get to
Speaker 1: watch a rabbit in your own yard. Uh, that's kind
Speaker 1: of magical, at least for me. Yeah, they'll they'll gnaw
Speaker 1: on your fruits, but they bring bunny magic with them
Speaker 1: in return. They're they're fun to watch, they're cute. Um.
Speaker 1: But but then there's there's a different pest we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about here and um, and it's it's quite interesting.
Speaker 1: According to Smith, there's no beating the large green tomato worm,
Speaker 1: an alarming pest that is three to four inches long
Speaker 1: or can grow the three to four inches long. And
Speaker 1: it has this weird horn sticking out of its back,
Speaker 1: kind of out of the final portion of its body.
Speaker 1: And uh, I've included a picture here for you to
Speaker 1: look at, Joe. It's it's really quite impressive, right. It
Speaker 1: is generally not spiky. It just has one giant buttthorn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that has kind of a crimson or scarlet color to it,
Speaker 1: as if it has already like stabbed a muppet or something. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it is, so it's pretty impressive. It's closely related to
Speaker 1: the tobacco worms, So if you've seen one or the other,
Speaker 1: you may have an idea where I'm talking about here.
Speaker 1: Smith points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson even bemoaned these
Speaker 1: quote young entomologies that we're eating up his tomato plants.
Speaker 1: So this particular, these particular worms, they are the larval
Speaker 1: stage of the five spotted hawk moth, and it is
Speaker 1: in fact a different species from the tobacco hornworm. But
Speaker 1: they're closely related. And the confusing thing is that both
Speaker 1: organisms feed on a variety of species that include both
Speaker 1: tomato and tobacco leaves. Oh interesting, but they got what
Speaker 1: different kind of specialties? Uh? Yeah? Or just one is
Speaker 1: in one is more associated with tomatoes and one is
Speaker 1: more associated with tobacco. But they'll, you know, either one
Speaker 1: will eat the leaves of both plants. Now, will will
Speaker 1: strip your nerve screamingly raw? Yes? Apparently so, or at
Speaker 1: least that seems to have been the panic around them
Speaker 1: back in the uh certainly the mid nineteenth century. Apparently
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty five New York Farmers Club report described
Speaker 1: them as quote positively shocking to weak nerves. Well, I
Speaker 1: think there are a lot of weak nerves back then.
Speaker 1: Smith has a bit more on this. You just have
Speaker 1: to read in in the book. But but he includes
Speaker 1: these quotations where people were talking about how like the
Speaker 1: worm just ruins tomatoes for them forever, Like they're just
Speaker 1: like they're just too gross. I'm not even going into
Speaker 1: my tomato garden ever again. Oh I see you like
Speaker 1: you see the worm once, it like turns you off
Speaker 1: of the entire fruit. Right. But on top of that,
Speaker 1: some even considered it to be poisonous as well, including
Speaker 1: such claims that the bite could cause instant death, or
Speaker 1: that the spittle, the mere spittle from one of these
Speaker 1: creatures could kill a small child dead. Um, so it's
Speaker 1: it's like, it's not only is is it like a
Speaker 1: foul creature to behold? Buddy? It befouls the entire tomato
Speaker 1: garden and makes it a dangerous place in which to venture.
Speaker 1: So is there any truth to this? Where's this coming from? Uh?
Speaker 1: The thing is apparently not. The idea ran rampant through
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century until you had an Illinois based
Speaker 1: intomologist by the name of Benjamin Walsh who pointed out
Speaker 1: and apparently this made the papers and all saying like, look,
Speaker 1: this is hard, this is harmless to humans. This is
Speaker 1: not going to kill you. This is. It's a past. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's maybe a little big, it's a little maybe alarming
Speaker 1: to look at, but it's not going to poison you. Uh. Though,
Speaker 1: as Smith points out, you still you had publications uh
Speaker 1: in um Illinois based papers pointing out Walsh's um uh
Speaker 1: facts here. But then you had other columns where people
Speaker 1: were saying, oh, there was a girl that was killed
Speaker 1: by one of these tomato worms. So it took a
Speaker 1: while for this idea to really go away. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: roommates cousin's friend died from tomato hornworm. Yeah, now I've
Speaker 1: got another poison tomato rabbit hole to run down here,
Speaker 1: Because I was trying to think, okay, well, what if
Speaker 1: you do want to poison somebody with a tomato allah
Speaker 1: the you know, the early European misunderstandings, or or the
Speaker 1: fictional account of George Washington's cook. I do have a
Speaker 1: possible candidate for you. It's not confirmed how lethal this
Speaker 1: tomato would be, but it's at least suspected with good reason,
Speaker 1: and that candidate is the tomaco now. Weirdly, whereas the
Speaker 1: George Washington story takes a historically factual misunderstanding as the
Speaker 1: inspiration for fiction. This story takes a modern fiction as
Speaker 1: the inspiration for a fact. So there's an episode of
Speaker 1: The Simpsons that aired in called Ei Ei Annoyed Grunt
Speaker 1: as an e I E I dough uh. And in
Speaker 1: this episode, Homer I guess he's trying his hand at arming,
Speaker 1: and he attempts to farm tomatoes and tobacco plants, but
Speaker 1: he fertilizes his crops with plutonium from the nuclear power plant,
Speaker 1: and this produces a hybrid plant that is basically a
Speaker 1: tomato stuffed with tobacco, which tastes bad but is highly addictive.
Speaker 1: I think Bart says it's so refreshingly addictive, and he
Speaker 1: sells it as tomacco and everybody gets addicted to it.
Speaker 1: And then I think there's some calamity where where all
Speaker 1: his crops are destroyed. Okay, I'd forgotten about this episode,
Speaker 1: but now that you summarize it, I do remember it.
Speaker 1: But apparently reality caught up because I was reading a
Speaker 1: report in Wired from November of two thousand three by
Speaker 1: Kristen Philip Cooski, and it was about a man named
Speaker 1: Rob Bauer of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Now Bauer I believe
Speaker 1: he worked in wastewater management, and he had some scientific training, uh,
Speaker 1: and he remembered reading about a similar procedure when he
Speaker 1: had been in college, when I think when he was
Speaker 1: in graduate school, and he decided to try to create
Speaker 1: such a plant in reality, which he did by grafting
Speaker 1: together a tomato plant and a tobacco plant. Apparently he
Speaker 1: initially experimented with with grafting in in one direction, which
Speaker 1: was putting a tobacco plant on a tomato root, but
Speaker 1: the graft didn't take and when he removed the wrapping
Speaker 1: that held them together, the plant kind of fell apart
Speaker 1: and died. But the inverst grafting procedure did work. He
Speaker 1: put a tomato plant on a tobacco root, and Bauer
Speaker 1: claims that this process was successful and the tomato plant
Speaker 1: with the tobacco roots actually bore fruit, though nobody ate
Speaker 1: the fruit because he suspected it was at least possible
Speaker 1: that one of these tomatoes could contain a lethal amount
Speaker 1: of nicotine. Oh wow, Well, on one hand, it's alarming,
Speaker 1: but on the other hand it's I guess it's not
Speaker 1: completely surprising because tobacco is a part of this large
Speaker 1: night shade fan point. Yeah, exactly, and that's probably why, yeah,
Speaker 1: why the grafting worked out. Uh. So, to be clear,
Speaker 1: I don't I couldn't find any evidence that it was
Speaker 1: ever confirmed that the tomato itself would have been poisonous
Speaker 1: with the lethal amount of nicotine. But it seems like
Speaker 1: a reasonable thing to worry about, at least good reason
Speaker 1: enough not to eat the tomato. Uh And Bower, speaking
Speaker 1: to Wire, had said, quote, I've got this one plant
Speaker 1: growing and it's blooming again. I accidentally left the tomacco
Speaker 1: on the kitchen table, and my wife yelled at me,
Speaker 1: get that thing out of the kitchen, you knuckle head,
Speaker 1: because it looks like a regular tomato. Yeah, don't leave
Speaker 1: your secret poison tomatoes just laying around. But but as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, Bauer was apparently not the first person
Speaker 1: to try this plant hybridization. He he mentioned that he
Speaker 1: had actually read about this when he was in college,
Speaker 1: I think, in an article that was published in Scientific
Speaker 1: American in nineteen fifty nine that described a similar procedure
Speaker 1: to what end. I'm not exactly sure. I don't know
Speaker 1: what what you really gain by creating a tomato that
Speaker 1: possibly has nicotine in it, I mean, and that's probably
Speaker 1: ultimately the reason you don't see a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: effort going to this, right, I mean, like, what is
Speaker 1: the payoff? What's the incentive? Perhaps there's some I just
Speaker 1: don't know. I couldn't find anything else about that. But hey,
Speaker 1: if you know of a good reason to create a
Speaker 1: tomato tobacco hybrid right in, let us know. All right,
Speaker 1: well we've reached the point we're gonna have to stop
Speaker 1: and uh and come back in another episode to continue
Speaker 1: our exploration of the tomato. But but real quick, Joe, Uh,
Speaker 1: fresh tomatoes are in your kitchen. What's what's one of
Speaker 1: the first dishes you think you'll you would try to make?
Speaker 1: Like what something is popular right now in your household
Speaker 1: with tomatoes? Oh? Answer to that is extremely easy. Um
Speaker 1: toast with a little bit of mayonnaise with tomato on top,
Speaker 1: salt and pepper, I mean, unbeatable, Like just tomato sandwich
Speaker 1: with mayonnaise is the most delicious thing if it's a
Speaker 1: good ripe summer tomato. Also just a good ripe summer
Speaker 1: tomatoes sliced with like olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe
Speaker 1: a bit of torn basil leaves. I mean, keep it simple,
Speaker 1: a good ripe summer tomato is it's like a steak.
Speaker 1: It's a dish unto itself. Yeah, that sounds great. I mean,
Speaker 1: it reminds me that one of the things we like
Speaker 1: to do here at our house is make a sort
Speaker 1: of b LT. We don't we don't eat bacon anymore,
Speaker 1: but we will will use um like store bought soysage
Speaker 1: like you get from like Morning Star or t J's
Speaker 1: put that on there instead of bacon, and with a
Speaker 1: really good tomato. It's fabulous. I've actually been wondering about
Speaker 1: trying to create a vegetarian version of a b LT
Speaker 1: and some of the ideas that came across for the
Speaker 1: bacon substitute, where like um uh sort of dried out
Speaker 1: charred strips of eggplant or smoked strips of eggplant, but
Speaker 1: then also just the idea of using like smoked tempe.
Speaker 1: That sounds good. It sounds good. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: We're gonna close out then, but obviously we want you
Speaker 1: to come back for the next episode on Tomatoes, and
Speaker 1: in the meantime you can certainly right in and give
Speaker 1: some feedback on the journey thus far, share some insight
Speaker 1: based on your own experience with tomato growing with tomato consumption.
Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from you. If you want to
Speaker 1: check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind?
Speaker 1: Do you know where to find us? Absolutely anywhere you
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Speaker 1: sure you rate, review and subscribe huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
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Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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