– 1820
Here's
a delightful story: In 1820 Jamaican-born U.S. Colonel Robert Gibbon
Johnson convinced a skeptical crowd in New Jersey that tomatoes are
not poisonous, after all, by eating an entire basket of them.
His
doctor warned him that he would foam and froth at the mouth and
double over with appendicitis. Many in the cheering crowd thought
that the colonel was a fool—that he was committing public
suicide—after all, everyone knows that tomatoes are poisonous, just
smell their leaves! The crowd grew and grew, as crowds often do, as
the colonel kept eating more and more tomatoes, and eventually 2,000
people had gathered around him as he stood there eating tomatoes on
the steps of the Salem Courthouse.
And
of course, Johnson lived! The people were amazed!!! Tomatoes were
proved to be edible, after all!
Here's
the thing about the story: it almost certainly did not happen.
Colonel
Johnson was a prominent citizen of Salem County, New Jersey, and
stuff was written about him during his life—but nobody wrote about
this story at the time. Some 68 years after the supposed event,
someone wrote that Johnson ate a tomato in 1820. (That might have
occurred, who knows? I ate a tomato two days ago. These things
happen.) Somehow all the details of the story, including a specific
date and location and even a quote or two, emerged from someone,
somewhere, and were added to the story, and it was even dramatized as
true on the national radio show “You Are There.” The story was
not just printed, but reprinted and quoted and referenced over and
over again—even in newspapers and scholarly journals. I'm sure that
people who passed on the story believed it was true.
But
historians are almost positive it didn't happen—because, if it did,
there would've been a full report (or two, or more) in the days just
after it happened. Colorful events don't go unmentioned for decades,
and then get reported as being simple and plain and then get reported
in more and more elaborate and colorful ways as the years pass—but
that' s exactly what happens with legends.
Wait!
Tomatoes? Poisonous?
Here's
one reason that such a legend is often believed: many people in many
places and times have believed that the fruit of a tomato plant,
although beautiful in its smooth yellow or red skin, is poisonous.
Here is the true history of tomatoes:
Tomatoes
were a New-World food first brought to Europe and the rest of the Old
World after Cortez conquered the Aztecs in Mexico in the early
Sixteenth Century (that is, the early 1500s). Apparently some
populations were early acceptors of the tomato as food; other groups
grew the plant for tomatoes' ornamental value and thought the fruit
to be poisonous. Names for the fruit included pomodoro
(Italian for “golden apple”), pomme d'amour (French for
“love apple”) and of course the English tomato, which came
from the Aztec word tomatl.
The British, and therefore the British colonists in North America,
were holdouts and didn't include tomatoes into their diets until the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1700s). We know that Thomas
Jefferson grew tomatoes, and his daughters left many recipes that
involved tomatoes, so his family saw them as food at least by 1782.
It
wasn't until after America's Civil War that tomatoes took off in
popularity in the U.S. (in the second half of the 1800s). Whether
most or just some Americans thought they were poisonous in 1820, by
the late 1890s, tomatoes were being enthusiastically used in soups,
salads, and sauces, without any cautions or reservations.
Also
on this date:
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