Nowadays, tomatoes are associated with nice, delicious things like summer, pastas, and the country of Italy. But back during the early 1600s, when they first arrived in Europe from the Americas, they had a very different reputation.

For nearly two centuries, most people in the Old World stayed clear of this New World food. Not because they didn’t like its taste, but because they thought it was poisonous.

Why Tomatoes Were Associated With Witchcraft

Long before it ended up on dinner tables around the world, the tomato was cultivated and eaten by the Aztecs, called tomatl in the Nahuatl language. In Europe, one of their earliest descriptions comes from an Italian doctor and naturalist called Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Mattioli correctly classified as a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family—a group of plants known to grow in dark places, which also includes potatoes and eggplants—but incorrectly classified it as a mandrake, a genus of the nightshade family that’s known to be highly toxic.

Mandrakes appear in the Harry Potter franchise, where they are imagined as sentient, screaming little trees. Although their real-world counterparts are—it goes without saying—very different, their placement in these stories is not without cause. In medieval times, mandrakes were strongly associated with witchcraft, and thought to be a main ingredient in love potions and other nefarious magical concoctions.  

The tomato’s early reputation was further tarnished by English botanist John Gerard’s 1597 text Herbal, a Renaissance encyclopedia of plants and plant-based medicines. In this text, Gerard wrote that the “whole plant” was of “rank and stinking savor.”

Another text, Maison Rustique, or The Country Farm, an English translation of from Latin published in 1600, warned that “the plant is more pleasant to the sight than either to the taste or smell, because the fruit being eaten provoketh loathing and vomiting.”

It’s been said that, during the early 18th century, lower class Europeans believed that tomatoes killed the adventurous aristocrats who ate them. The idea behind this rumor is that the acidity of the tomatoes would have “leached” the lead in the metal plates that rich people at from, causing lead poisoning. Today this theory has been largely discredited, though, as tomatoes do not contain enough acid to make this happen.  

Though Gerard and others correctly identified that only its leaves were toxic, while the fruit itself was perfectly edible, most Europeans opted to stay clear of the tomato altogether.  For more than two centuries, they were grown only with a small number of plant enthusiasts, who cultivated them for their exotic appearance rather than their taste or nutritional content.

It was not until the 19th century, when bakers in the city of Naples started putting tomatoes on their pizza, that the plant’s popularity began to take off. Within decades, tomatoes were grown and consumed across Europe, finding their way into various regional dishes and diets.

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