Tomato, poison apple for nobles
- Italy, 1541. Physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli mentioned for the first time in European literature the plant of Solanum lycopersicum and its fruit, the tomato.
He said that a new eggplant, red or gold in colour, arrived in Italy, which could be eaten by adding salt, pepper and oil. The Italians called pomo d’oro (now pomodoro) or “golden apple”, but in most European languages they were based on the name given by the Aztecs to this plant: in the Nahuatl language it was called tomatl and hence the word tomato.
Although Mattioli suggested that tomato was edible, for a long time most places in Europe were devoted exclusively to ornamentation because of its poisonous nature. British botanist John Gerard, for example, wrote in 1597 that it was toxic. And it is true that in Europe a number of people were poisoned with tomato, most of the members of the nobility, and some of them died. But then they didn't know why, or how the Aztecs didn't poison, and why the poison especially affected aristocrats.
For example, at the end of the 17th century, when the white pizzas of Naples began to incorporate the tomato into the white pizzas until then, consumers were not intoxicated because the tomato was placed on the flat bollo, that is, it was not consumed directly on the plate. The truth is that at that time the richest citizens used pelvis dishes and table utensils during meals. The pelvis is an alloy of metals like lead. Because of the acids in the tomato, the dishes and utensils released lead, which was the one that poisoned the diners, and not the tomato itself. Before the end of the 18th century, after clarifying the debate on toxicity, Encyclopaedia Britannica collected that tomato was a product “for daily consumption”.
However, a century later, when tomato consumption was booming, an American importer had another controversy on the table. In order to avoid high taxes on vegetables, the import documents indicated that tomato was fruit. In the end he had to pay taxes because the United States Supreme Court ruled that tomato was vegetable. But today the question still has no clear answer: in the colloquial language it is often considered a fruit; biologically it is a fruit and, in particular, it is a berries in botany; historically it is a product of orchard, vegetable, vegetable; and legally it is also vegetable or vegetable in most places, as decided by the American judges in the 19th century.
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