The Dangerous History of Tomatoes

my great grandmother hadn’t tried tomatoes until she was an adult, she immediately demanded her husband grow some which he kept up for the next 30 years :)

12:46 Agreed. Many store-bought tomatoes taste like nothing while tomatoes from "grandma's garden" almost taste like a whole different plant.

I'm loving the variety lately. Sometimes we get cryptids, sometimes we get traditional history, sometimes we get food. It's all great.

My father, born in the 1920's, ate a tomato as a young boy of about three. He wound up being extremely allergic to them, and his airway closed up, causing him to almost suffocate before they managed to get him to a hospital. According to my grandmother, the doctor told her that such an allergic reaction to tomatoes was quite rare, but that sufferers often died before they could get help, due to the swelling caused around the windpipe. She says he told her, "That's why they're called love apples--because of the idea that star-crossed lovers could commit suicide by eating them. People used to think they were poisonous because of early cases in which people died from this type of allergic reaction." So, another possible reason folks thought they were poisonous.

"The unpleasant smell of the plant..." That's something I'll never understand, I grow tomatoes in my greenhouse and I absolutely love the smell of them.

Wait, some people don't like the smell of tomato vines? I've always found the smell strangely comforting. Reminds me of warm summers, milling about in my Grandmother's garden.

I’ve been growing a line of San Marzano, Costoluto, and Zapotec tomatoes from seeds I bought like 15 years ago. They beat the crap out of store-bought ones and grow like weeds in California.

I actually have a story about tomatoes that survived in my family. The grandfather of my great grandfather brought home tomatoes from the market for the first time which my great^6 grandmother wouldn’t have known how to cook with back then, so she did the usual English thing of making it into a pie like they were apples or something. Safe to say it probably didn’t taste that good but it’s still pretty cool that, that story survived so long.

I won't eat a commercially grown tomato. My dad grew them when I was a kid and they tasted good. Store bought tastes like nothing. So now I'm an old woman and I grow a few plants every year. I like the yellow varieties, a little less acid.

Wild tiny tomatoes grow naturally in open areas, so I guess people started domestication with those growing in corn fields, I remembered my grandparents picked them from the milpas during dry season when corn in the milpas was already harvested

It's really hard to imagine Mediterranean cuisine without tomatoes yet it's relatively modern

Fun fact: Potatoes belong to the same family of plants and if they ever get fruit from their flowers (usually from cold weather) you should never eat them as they are extremely toxic. The fruits on Potato plants look exactly like green tomatoes, so maybe that's where the rumour of tomatoes being poisonous came from? Someone may have gotten the plants mixed up and ate them not realising what they were.

I love this series. People often forget just how different the world as a whole was to our ancestors. This is such a good reminder

Here in Austria they are called "Paradeiser" which from what I know comes from the word "Paradeisapfel/Paradiesapfel" which mean "Apple from Paradise"

My great grandmother who was born around 1865, thought they were poisonous. My great grandfather would go next door to their Italian neighbor and eat all kinds of tomatoes and foods with tomatoes and she always was worried he would die...and of course he never did.

I was raised an Air Force brat and had travelled widely as a child. My mother took me back to her home in rural Mississippi 65 years ago when her brother died, and I encountered Southern cooking for the first time. But one of my favorite foods was missing -- tomatoes. I asked for some and my rural relatives were horrified, telling me they were poisonous and called them "love apples." I said that I ate them all the time and they were delicious. Now, of course, tomatoes are widely accepted. Yum.

I'm a cook and love your videos, i think it is very important to know the history of the food you eat and cook with in order to truly appreciate them

Tomatillos are an underrated vegetable. They grow okay in Sweden. They keep for months, picked the last before an October frost, I am still eating my harvest in December. They are so nice on sandwiches.

growing tomatoes has always been a family tradition. We can't stand store bought ones so we always grew hundreds of plants so we could can, make juice, and make salsa for all our neighbors. My favorite kind of tomato is a Cherokee purple. They are so juicy, sweet, and make perfect sandwich sized slices! They are heirloom tomatoes that allegedly came from seeds given to a family by the Cherokee generations prior that were eventually shared with a man who sent them to someone to cultivate them in modern times. Tomatoes are awesome!

As a preserver of Heirloom tomatoes and peppers this was very informative. I currently have over 80 types of heirloom peppers and tomatoes each and am constantly on the lookout for plants handed down through families and other historic plants for their stories, unique flavor, colors, shapes and growing attributes.