For about 200 years, Europeans looked at the tomato and saw a killer.
They grew it in gardens as a curiosity. They put it in paintings. But eat one? Not a chance. The tomato had a reputation as a poison, and that fear hung around for two full centuries before people finally got over it.
Here’s the strange part. The tomato was never actually poisonous. Not the part you eat, anyway. So how did a harmless fruit end up with a killer’s reputation? A few reasons piled up, and together they were pretty convincing.
It kept bad company
The tomato belongs to a plant family called the nightshades. And that family has some genuinely dangerous members.
Deadly nightshade, also called belladonna, really can kill you. So can a big dose of mandrake. Both were well known and well feared in old Europe.
Now put a tomato next to them. Early tomatoes, especially the small yellow ones, looked a lot like the fruit of the mandrake plant. To a nervous herbalist in the 1500s, a tomato looked like it was related to the deadly stuff, because it was. Guilt by family resemblance.
So the very first instinct people had was simple. If it runs with the poisonous crowd, don’t eat it.
Then there’s the name: wolf peach
This part is my favorite, because it’s completely unhinged.
The tomato’s old scientific name was Lycopersicum, which gets read as “wolf peach.” That name didn’t come from nowhere. It is often tied to one of the darkest panics in European history: witches and werewolves.
Back then, witch hunters were obsessed with a so-called flying ointment that witches supposedly rubbed on their skin. The recipes for it included nightshade plants like belladonna, mandrake, and henbane. And the ointment was said to do more than let a witch fly. Some believed it could turn a person into a werewolf.
Since the tomato sat in that same nightshade family, it caught the blame by association. Eating one felt like flirting with witchcraft. A “wolf peach” was not something a cautious person put on their dinner plate.
Here is the caveat that most retellings skip. The werewolf link is a popular story, not documented history. No scholarly source connects the wolf peach name to witch panic, and it looks like a later embellishment on a real etymology. What holds up is the name itself, and the nightshade suspicion sitting underneath it. Fear doesn’t need to be logical to spread.
One influential guy trashed it in writing
In 1597, an English botanist named John Gerard published a hugely popular plant book.
In it, he called the tomato “corrupt” and said it had a “rank and stinking savor.” Basically, he told all of England the tomato was gross and bad for you.
People listened. Gerard’s book was the plant reference of its day, and his thumbs-down shaped opinion in Britain and the American colonies for generations. When the most trusted expert says a food is foul, most folks don’t argue.
The dinner plates were actually killing people
Here’s the reason that gave the whole myth some real teeth.
By the 1700s, stories circulated of wealthy Europeans eating a tomato and then falling ill, sometimes seriously. That’s not made up. People really did get sick.
The popular explanation is that the fault wasn’t the tomato at all. It was the plates. Rich households ate off pewter dishes that were high in lead. Tomatoes are acidic, and that acid could pull lead right out of the plate and into the food. So the diner got lead poisoning and blamed the reddest thing on the table.
I’ll be honest with you, the way I was with our origin story. This lead-plate explanation is repeated everywhere, and it’s a great story, it is shakier than it sounds. Food historians have turned up no court record, physician diary, or coroner report tying a single poisoning to tomatoes, and chemists point out that a brief meal on a pewter plate does not pull a dangerous dose of lead. Treat it as a tidy story rather than settled history. The plainer explanation is the one above: people feared the tomato because they had filed it with the nightshades.
Wait, were they completely wrong?
Not entirely, and this is the nuance most tellings skip.
The tomato fruit is safe. Always was. But the rest of the plant is a different matter. Tomato leaves and stems contain a bitter compound called tomatine, which is a genuine nightshade-family chemical. Eat a big pile of the leaves and you can get an upset stomach.
So the old fear wasn’t pure superstition. The plant really does carry a mild toxin, just not in the part you slice onto a sandwich. People had the right suspicion about the wrong piece. If you’re curious how that fits the whole nightshade story, it connects to the nightshade family the tomato belongs to.
How the fear finally died
By the early 1800s, the tomato started winning people over, mostly through cooking.
Recipes and tomato cookbooks spread across America in the 1830s. Later, waves of Italian immigrants brought their tomato-heavy food and pizza culture, and that sealed the deal. Once people tasted a good tomato sauce, two centuries of dread didn’t stand a chance.
You’ve probably heard the dramatic version of this, where a man named Robert Gibbon Johnson supposedly ate a whole basket of tomatoes on the Salem, New Jersey courthouse steps in 1820 to prove they were safe. Fun story. There’s no real evidence it happened. It traces back to a book written in 1937, more than a hundred years later. File it under legend, not history.
The bottom line
Tomatoes were thought to be poisonous because everything about them looked suspicious. They belonged to a family with real killers in it, they carried a creepy “wolf peach” name tied to witch panic, a famous expert called them foul, and a lead poisoning story attached itself to them that people have repeated ever since.
Add it all up and the fear makes sense, even though the fruit itself was harmless the whole time. It just needed a couple hundred years and a good plate of pasta to clear its name. And if that old reputation still makes you wonder whether tomatoes are actually bad for you now, the answer is no for the vast majority of people.
Want more of this kind of thing? The tomato’s road from Mexico to Europe is its own wild ride, and I keep the other tomato mysteries people ask about over in Common Questions.