People in South America were eating tomatoes at least 2,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. But in Europe, where the tomato arrived in the 1500s, it took nearly 300 years before most people considered it safe to eat. The story of how tomatoes went from a feared “poison apple” to one of the world’s most popular foods is one of the stranger chapters in food history.
Tomatoes in the Ancient Americas
Wild tomatoes originated in western South America, in the Andes region of modern-day Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. These early fruits were small, about the size of a cherry tomato or even a blueberry. Indigenous peoples in the region gathered and ate wild tomatoes long before any formal cultivation began, though pinning down an exact date is difficult. The earliest archaeological and genetic evidence suggests people were interacting with tomato plants thousands of years before European contact.
The Aztecs in central Mexico were almost certainly the first to domesticate the tomato on a large scale. By the time Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early 1500s, tomatoes were a well-established part of Aztec cuisine. They were combined with chili peppers and ground into sauces that bear a clear resemblance to modern salsa. The Nahuatl word “tomatl” is the origin of the English word “tomato.” For the peoples of Mesoamerica, there was nothing exotic or suspicious about the fruit. It was simply food.
Arrival in Europe
Spanish explorers brought tomato seeds back to Europe in the early to mid-1500s, with the first written European references appearing around 1544 in an Italian herbal by Pietro Andrea Mattioli. He described the fruit as a “golden apple” (pomo d’oro), which is still reflected in the modern Italian word for tomato, pomodoro. Early tomatoes reaching Europe were likely yellow varieties, which explains the name.
Italians and Spaniards were the first Europeans to actually cook with tomatoes. Southern Italian recipes incorporating tomatoes began appearing by the late 1600s, and by the 1700s, tomato-based sauces were becoming a recognizable part of Italian cooking. Spain, with its direct colonial ties to the Americas, also adopted the fruit relatively early. In both countries, the warmer climate helped tomatoes grow easily, which encouraged experimentation in the kitchen.
Why Northern Europe Feared Tomatoes
While southern Europeans gradually embraced tomatoes, much of northern Europe treated them with deep suspicion for roughly 200 years. There were several reasons for this, and the most important one was botanical.
Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, which includes deadly nightshade (belladonna), a well-known poisonous plant. European herbalists recognized the family resemblance immediately. The leaves and stems of tomato plants do contain small amounts of toxic compounds, and the visual similarity to dangerous relatives was enough to keep many people away from the fruit itself. In England and parts of northern Europe, tomatoes were grown as ornamental curiosities rather than food well into the 1700s.
A second, more practical factor reinforced the fear. Wealthy Europeans ate from pewter plates, which contained high levels of lead. The acid in tomatoes would leach lead from the plate, and people who ate tomatoes from pewter could develop lead poisoning. The resulting sickness and sometimes death were blamed on the tomato, not the dinnerware. This earned the fruit the nickname “poison apple” in some circles. Poorer people, who ate from wooden plates, didn’t face this problem, but they weren’t the ones writing the books.
Tomatoes Catch On in America
The tomato’s path into mainstream American eating was surprisingly late. Despite being native to the Americas, tomatoes were not a significant part of colonial American cooking for most of the 1700s. British colonists brought their home country’s skepticism with them, and tomatoes were grown mainly as decorative plants in gardens.
That began to change around the late 1700s and early 1800s. Thomas Jefferson grew tomatoes at Monticello in the 1780s and served them at dinner, though he was considered adventurous for doing so. Recipes calling for tomatoes started appearing in American cookbooks by the 1820s and 1830s. A popular (though likely embellished) legend claims that Robert Gibbon Johnson publicly ate a tomato on the steps of a courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, in 1820 to prove it wasn’t poisonous, though historians have found little evidence this event actually happened.
What really drove tomato adoption in the United States was the canning industry. By the mid-1800s, canned tomatoes became one of the first commercially canned foods in America. Canning made tomatoes available year-round, affordable, and convenient. By the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, canned tomatoes were a staple ration for soldiers. After the war, returning troops brought their taste for tomatoes home. By the late 1800s, any lingering fear had essentially vanished, and tomatoes were firmly established in American kitchens.
From Feared Fruit to Global Staple
The 20th century turned the tomato into one of the most consumed foods on earth. Today, global tomato production exceeds 180 million metric tons per year. China produces roughly a third of the world’s supply, followed by India, Turkey, and the United States. The fruit is central to cuisines on every inhabited continent: Italian pasta sauces, Indian curries, Mexican salsas, Middle Eastern stews, and American ketchup all depend on it.
Ketchup itself traces an interesting path. Early American ketchup recipes from the 1800s were often tomato-based but also included ingredients like anchovies or mushrooms. The sweet, vinegary tomato version that dominates today was popularized by companies like Heinz in the late 1800s. It became arguably the most widely used condiment in the United States by the early 1900s.
The total timeline is striking. Indigenous peoples in the Americas ate tomatoes for millennia without concern. Europeans spent roughly three centuries working through their fear of the fruit. And within just a few decades of widespread acceptance in the 1800s, the tomato became so embedded in global cooking that it’s hard to imagine Italian, Mexican, or Indian food without it. Almost every cuisine that now features tomatoes prominently had no access to them before the 1500s.