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[–] 73 points 5 months ago (6 children)

*europeans.

People in the americas had been eating them for a long ass time by the time the Columbian exchange happened

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Not just Europeans, from the article: "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"

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  • [–] 47 points 5 months ago

    According to the tomatoes Wikipedia article, tomatoes were definitely domesticated and eaten by indigenous folk in the americas by 500 BC.

    My point is that the people who domesticated the tomato never feared it. Europeans propagated the myth that it was harmful and people who’d been eating it for millennia never took that seriously.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    it was classified as a deadly nightshade

    It's worth mentioning that while this seems insane to us now, it probably made a ton of sense at the time. The key is that tomatoes are in the same botanical family, so the plants have a lot in common. For example, here's what black nightshade fruit looks like:

    You might see something that and think it resembles a dark tomato. Hundreds of years ago, people looked at a tomato and saw a red nightshade.

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  • [–] 35 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    That is because they ate out of pewter, a lead alloy, and the acidity of tomatoes leeched lead out into the food.

    This often lead to lead comas, and people were thought to be dead and then buried. They for some reason dug some up and found claw marks on the inside of their coffins, and started to attach a string connected to a bell on the surface.

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  • [–] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Tomatoes are nightshades and contain solanine. They weren't wrong.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but potatoes are the real killers. Much more solanine.

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  • [–] 23 points 5 months ago

    Well, the plants are.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago*

    if you eat unripe ones, they are technically poisonous. thats probably because most other nightshades are poisonous, the berries look other poisonous nightshade. potato berries, green potatoes,,etc.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    The lengths someone has needed to go to find out whether something is edible, not poisonous, etc...

    "Damn, Mike boiled these mushrooms once and died. What if I boil them once more? Hmm, tastes okay. And I didn't even die!"

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    It is toxic if you cooked in a copper pot because of its acidity, which a lot of people had.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago

    Copper might do it too, I read about pewter, which is a lead alloy. Copper poisoning is serious business too. Telltale signs are green rings around the eyes. It fucks with your reproductive organs amongst other things, in a non fucking sort of way if I recall.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    They are in the nightshade family, so makes sense with no other context

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  • [+] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    As someone with gout, I can say that eliminating carbs and red meat and going ketogenic did not relieve the gout. I'm on a prescription med, Allopurinol, to keep my uric acid down. Also, this issue started 10 years ago, when I was 50, so it wasn't a problem for most of my life, when I ate a normal amount of carbs and red meat. So, there's an age and probably genetic factor too, since most people eat carbs and red meat their entire lives and do not get gout. So far, no one knows why uric acid spikes in some people and not others.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    These are interesting comments. My mom has Rheumatoid arthritis bad and my dad used to have gout. He doesn't have gout anymore. We will all be cured one day too. Anyhoo, I started getting stiff joints when learning to weld as a young fellow. It wouldn't happen otherwise. As a grew older however in my early 40's my joints felt stiff every morning. I thought it was just age or maybe early arthritis. So as I took measures and stopped eating meat. I went full vegan. It helped quite a bit. Specially my teeth didn't feel like I had a piece of meat stuck in between every time I eat. It's good not eating meat. Another reason I stopped was because of heartburn. And here's the thing, it did help both heartburn and joint pain, that wasn't it. I started getting rashes at the time before I decided to go vegan and finally one day my wife was taking an allergy pill and I decided to try that. It was zirtek but I'm using a generic brand that doesn't cause cancer like zirtek does. Anyway, my occasional rashes went away, my joint pain was eliminated and I discovered that eating certain things like potatoes, chives, onions and garlic trigger my allergies. Additionally my heartburn and hemorrhoids are also connected to this trigger. I found that yoghurt that contains L.Reuteri helps a lot.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Well everyone who's eaten a tomato has either: A) already died or B) is going to die

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The tomato weren't poisinous, but the lead plate they used to serve them were. This is also the reason for the tomato scene in lotr. They are implying denethor is crazy.

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