SC - Poisonous Tomatoes?

[Chris Stanifer]

- --- david friedman <ddfr at best.com> wrote:
> At 1:37 PM -0800 11/26/00, Chris Stanifer wrote:
>
> >More likely, it's due to the fact that the tomato
> is
> >closely related to BellaDonna, or Deadly
> Nightshade,
> >which has been known to be a deadly poison since
> >antiquity.  Just a wild guess, though...
> 
> A wild guess that seems to have become an
> established fact through repetition.
> 
> Eggplant, potato, and tobacco are all related to
> nightshade, and 
> nobody seems to have thought they were poisonous. It
> looks, from what 
> I have been able to track down, as though the
> Italian writer who 
> originally linked tomato to nightshade (he actually
> said 
> "mandrake"--I don't know if that term included
> nightshade at the 
> time) also linked it to eggplant, knew people ate
> it, but thought it 
> was unhealthy. More details are in another post I
> have already sent.
>

Okay, I'm confused.  Are we trying to determine
whether people in the MA thought tomatoes were
poisonous, or whether they are REALLY poisonous?  Or,
are we looking for extant proof that folks in the MA
thought they were poisonous?  If I'm not mistaken, Dr.
Friedman is looking for physical proof (i.e. written
documentation) that tomatoes were generally thought to
be poisonous during the middle ages.  I can't supply
that, myself.  However, with all this discussion, I
have become very interested in learning the truth.  I
had always been led to believe that tomatoes were
originally thought to be poisonous due to their
relation to the Nightshade family.  If that is
incorrect, or at best a "wild assumption", then i
should like to know.

Balthazar of Blackmoor

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