The History of the Tomato: The Fruit Europe Was Sure Would Kill You

In 1820, a crowd gathered outside the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, to watch a man try to kill himself in public. At least, that's what many of them expected. Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson stood on the steps holding a basket of tomatoes — plump, red, and to most of the onlookers, absolutely lethal. For nearly two centuries, Europeans and Americans alike had known the tomato as the "poison apple," a fruit blamed for fevers, madness, and death among anyone wealthy enough to eat it regularly. As legend has it, Johnson raised one to his mouth, bit down in front of the crowd, and kept talking. He didn't die. Some versions of the story say a few people fainted anyway, just from the shock of watching him do it. Whether that afternoon happened exactly as it's remembered, it captures something true: the tomato spent most of its history being misunderstood. To find out why, you have to go back much further than 1820 — back past the poison scare, past the ocean crossing, all the way to a wild, pea-sized berry growing along the coast of South America. That's where the story really starts. Long before it was cultivated by anyone, Solanum pimpinellifolium grew wild along the coasts of what's now Peru and Ecuador — tiny fruits, nothing like the slicers and beefsteaks in a garden today, gathered rather than grown. It took a journey north, into Mexico, for the tomato to become something closer to what we'd recognize. There, indigenous peoples — likely the Aztecs — began deliberately cultivating and selecting the plant, breeding it over generations into larger, sweeter fruit. They gave it a name, tomatl, that would eventually become "tomato" in English. By the time Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early 1500s, the tomato was already a fixture of Mesoamerican cooking, often served alongside chili peppers — the same pairing that shows up in salsa today. The conquistadors carried tomato seeds back across the Atlantic, and that's where the trouble started. The fruit spread quickly among European aristocracy — and so did a mysterious sickness that seemed to follow it. What no one understood at the time was that wealthy Europeans were eating off pewter plates high in lead content, and the tomato's natural acidity was pulling that lead directly out of the plate and into the meal. People got sick. Some died. And the tomato — sitting right there on the plate — took the blame, not the metal underneath it. It didn't help the tomato's case that it belongs to the nightshade family, alongside plants that really are toxic, or that its leaves and stems carry mild irritants of their own. The circumstantial evidence was damning enough that it took Europe nearly two hundred years to trust what was on the plate, rather than the plate itself. Italy broke from the pack first — by the late 1600s, tomatoes were turning up in Neapolitan cookbooks, quietly laying the foundation for the tomato-soaked cuisine Italy is known for today. Tomatoes eventually made their way back across the Atlantic to North America, but old suspicions die hard, and the poison apple reputation followed them. Which brings us back to Colonel Johnson, standing on the Salem courthouse steps, biting into the fruit everyone thought would kill him — and by doing so, nudging American gardens a little closer to the ones we know now. By the close of the 19th century, tomatoes had shed their sinister reputation for good and become a staple of American gardens and kitchens. From that small, bitter Andean berry, growers and breeders have since produced thousands of varieties — deep purple heirlooms, sweet golden cherry tomatoes, giant beefsteaks built for sandwiches, paste tomatoes made for sauce. It's botanically a fruit but legally a vegetable in the U.S., thanks to an 1893 Supreme Court tariff ruling — a fun fact that still starts arguments at dinner tables. Every tomato plant you tuck into your garden this season is carrying that whole story forward: five thousand years of selection, a case of mistaken identity that took two centuries to clear up, and one man's very public bite out of a fruit nobody trusted. Whether you're growing a modern hybrid bred for disease resistance or an heirloom variety that traces back generations, you're part of the same story that started with a wild little fruit in the Andes. If you're ready to grow a piece of that history yourself, pop over to our plant database on the app to find a tomato variety suited to your growing zone and space — and check back here as we keep digging into the stories behind the plants we grow. Tomato Care Instructions Sunlight: 6–8 hours of full sun daily. Soil: Well-draining, slightly acidic (pH 6.2–6.8), enriched with compost or aged manure. Planting depth: Bury two-thirds of the stem, removing lower leaves first — roots will form along the buried stem. Watering: 1–2 inches per week, deep and consistent, at the base (not overhead). Inconsistent watering causes blossom end rot and cracked fruit. Support: Install cages, stakes, or trellises at planting time to avoid root damage later. Feeding: Balanced fertilizer at planting; switch to low-nitrogen, higher phosphorus/potassium once flowering begins. Pruning: Pinch suckers on indeterminate varieties to direct energy to fruit. Determinate varieties need little pruning. Mulching: 2–3 inch layer to retain moisture, suppress weeds, and prevent soil-borne disease splashback. Common issues: • Blossom end rot → inconsistent watering • Yellowing lower leaves → often normal aging; watch for early blight if spreading • Cracked fruit → sudden heavy watering after a dry spell Happy growing, Adams Eden — Come and Grow