We literally named them “golden fruits”
Central, eastern europe or Ireland didn’t even have potatoes (botanically related to tomato BTW) in the middleages! In some regions, it took substantial coercion to adopt it as a food staple, such as Friedrich II. of Prussia’s KARTOFFELBEFEHL. Didn’t help that potato is a pretty poisonous plant, even the part you’re supposed to eat can turn poisonous if stored improperly or if you just get unlucky.
In the Americas they had to freeze dry the early species of potatoes up in the mountains to make them edible.
It’s wild how much food wants us to die, but we just went “fuck you food, I’m going to make you be less deadly and more delicious” and we did so!
Cashews are a great example of this. Unless they have the shell removed and are cooked, they are poisonous. Also they look super weird on the tree. The fruit it’s attached to is actually edible.
Extra funny are the foods where humanity just went “ooh, I love poison!”. Chili, mustard, tobacco, coca, coffee and tea, various poisonous mushrooms …
I can’t even function without my midnight salsa now. Poison me to sleep
🍅👌
ayyyyyy
Okay, I’m not saying that science is wrong, but I’m just saying that tomatoes are vegetables. Search your feelings, young Padawan. You know this to be true.
Science doesn’t even know vegetables. That’s a culinary term.
But also, taxonomy is hard.
Science classifies plants based on how they grow and reproduce, not how they taste. Vegetables can be any kind of plant. Tomatoes are a fruit that is used as a vegetable in cooking.
Aren’t vegetables non-existent in science anyways? I thought it was strictly a culinary term.
They probably exist in some obscure branch of science. Culinary Anthropology perhaps?
Yes, science does not divide plants by what we eat.
Yup, purely culinary. The confusion comes from the fact that both science and the culinary arts refer to certain plants as “fruit”, but it covers a lot more plants in science than in cooking.
For me, a vegetable is a plant which can safely be eaten in its entirety or at least most of it.
Behold…a vegetable 🍏
This is a reference to Diogenes.
For me, a vegetable is any part of a plant (and aparently fungus) used for cooking. Tomatoes, apples, and bananas are all vegetables in the right context.
That said I need some definition against spices.
Could tomatoes change in those 200 years tho, like much of other produce? Like it was actually quite shit tier food in 16th century but then got edible after 200 years of selective breeding?
They may have been different but they had already been bred in the Americas by the Native Americans for many hundreds of years and were fully edible. The modern cherry tomatoes are the closest to the original pre-Columbian varieties. However the entire tomato plant is poisonous except the fruit. At the same time it’s related and highly looks like european native nightshade plants which are poisonous in every part of the plant. So scepticism was understandable. Same story for the potato, tomato’s close relative, where every single part of the potato plant, including the tomato like fruit, is poison, except the tuber.
I remember reading somewhere that pewter dinnerware was also partly to blame, as the acids in tomatoes were especially good at dissolving the lead in the alloy. But this only affected nobility as commoners tended to use wooden plates instead.
Yeah the new Galifinakis show “this is a garden show” explains it like this and makes no reference to toxicity of tomatoes themselves. And I would definitely trust a comedian for historical accuracy.
He was so hot in this show. “The future is agrarian”
Oh, thank you for wonderful explanation.
I didn’t think of its similarity to actual super poisonous stuff and did a follow-up read to find out that even their edible relative that is non-native to Americas - the eggplant, was also somehow quite obscure (in Europe) in those times. So yeah, makes sense in hindsight that stuff similar to Nightshade, wasn’t really garnering any trust of Europeans of the times.
Same story for the potato, tomato’s close relative, where every single part of the potato plant, including the tomato like fruit, is poison, except the tuber.
The tuber can be poisonous, too! It contains solanine, the level variies based on variety, how it’s stored and whether it’s peeled.
Raw potatoes are generally poisonous. But luckily, the really poisonous stuff (after exposure to sun) is green-blue, visible.
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I suspect that people just thought it was inedible.
