SC - Poisonous Tomatoes?

[Jenne Heise]

> In support of that conjecture, note that at least one bogus story 
> about beliefs in poisonous tomatoes (the courthouse steps story) 
> places it in the early 19th century.

If this story was accurate, it would be a statement about one community in
North America in the 1820's. If it was not accurate, it means that there
was a legend about that incident that was propagated after 1820.
Whether or not the legend was accurate, it says nothing about tomatoes in
any part of Europe in the middles ages and what they may or may not have
believed about tomatoes.

> Note also that many versions of 
> the story put it in terms of the linnaean classification, which 
> postdates the introduction of the tomato by quite a while. 

Unless you can prove that pre-Linnaean classifiers did not classify
tomatoes in the same family as nightshade, I'm not sure how this is
relevant. We do know that people in period recognized that belladonna and
tomato were related (if you grow heirloom tomatoes and struggle with
nightshade, it's easy to see why)

>Further 
> note that Matteoli identified a connection to the eggplant, which is 
> also related to Nightshade, and which had been eaten for a good many 
> centuries by that time.

In waht cultures was eggplant eaten?

> I never suggested that it was. But the quote (the relevant part of 
> which I provided in an earlier post, as it happens) implies that 
> whoever wrote it knew that tomatoes were not poisonous.

However, that says nothing about what other people believed about the
tomato. Therin lies the problem. We can prove that not everyone thought
the tomato was poisonous. We can prove that the tomato was eaten, by
certain people in certain places even before 1600.
What we can't prove is _why_ the tomato wasn't eaten in other places..
 
> >My suspicion is that the belief that tomatoes were poisonous may well have
> >been a superstition common in Northern europe, but not reflected in
> >scholarly treatises. 
> Certainly possible. Do you have any evidence for that suspicion?

The strongest evidence for this is that tomatoes were apparently not
widely cultivated in Northern Europe and America, and the widespread
belief that certain people thought they were poisonous, thus accounting
for the lack of enthusiasm. That people might hesitate to eat the fruit of
an ornamental so conspiciously similar to the deadly nightshade, feeling
that it was probably poisonous, is certainly reasonable. However, the idea
that such a suspicion never existed, but was a hoax perpetrated by modern
writers, is a bit more complicated.

- -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker