Tomatoes Were Feared as Poison for 200 Years Because of Aristocrats' Plates

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When Spanish conquistadors brought tomatoes back from the Americas in the early 16th century, the fruit quickly earned a reputation in Europe as the "poison apple." For more than 200 years, wealthy Europeans refused to eat them, while the poor — who ate off wooden boards — consumed tomatoes without issue and survived. The mystery of why only the rich seemed to die after eating tomatoes was never solved at the time. The explanation, pieced together by historians centuries later, lies in their tableware: aristocrats dined from pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Tomatoes are highly acidic, and that acid leached lead from the plates directly into the food. The poor, eating from wood, had no such problem. The suspicion of tomatoes was reinforced by the fact that the plant belongs to the Solanaceae family, which includes genuine poisons like deadly nightshade and mandrake. The pope's own physician in 1545 listed those plants as key ingredients of witches' flying ointment, and tomatoes looked nearly identical to them. The English and French remained in the anti-tomato camp long after the Spanish and Italians had embraced them; Britain's colonies in North America inherited the fear, which persisted well into the 1820s.