Wacky Facts by Agent K #15: Did You Know Tomatoes Are The Only Fruits To Be Put On Trial As "Outlaws"?

Can you imagine pizza or spaghetti without tomato sauce? Fries without ketchup? Greek salad without tomatoes? What a horrible world this would be, huh? 

That could be the case, if our red little "friends" were found to be guilty back on June 28 of 1820 in Salem, New Jersey, when they were accused for being "poisonous outlaws." 

The Menu of the Day 

Almost 200 years ago, some folks suggested that tomatoes were poisonous "outlaws" that murdered their poor, innocent fans who loved to eat them. Funnily, some other folks would even claim that tomatoes were pure evil and that's why they are red just like the devil. 

One of the fruit’s earliest cultivators named John Gerard, was the person who started the rumor that tomatoes were poisonous and could be deadly, because they contained low levels of the toxic chemical tomatine. He wasn't entirely lying though. Indeed, tomatoes contain very low levels of  tomatine – a glycoalkaloid found in the stems and leaves of tomato plants. 

However, Mr. Gerard forget to mention a very IMPORTANT information: the levels of this glycoalkaloid in tomatoes is so ridiculously low that the fruit could never be dangerous. In spite of that, Gerard’s theories became so wildly popular that there was a true "tomato-hunt" in England and its North American colonies. 

The Aftermath

Happily for all of us who love and freely consume tomatoes today, a New Jersey farmer going by the cool name Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, decided to take action and solve the issue for good.  During the harvest of 1820,  he publicly consumed a big, juicy tomato on the courthouse steps in Salem. The judges waited for him to die instantly, but after a couple of hours Mr. Johnson was still alive and healthy staring at them like a true champion.

The judges decided to triumphantly declare the tomato's innocence by stating, "Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson ingested a tomato without incident." Soon after this incident, people in all over the Western world began consuming tomatoes fearlessly, while tomato became (and still is) the first and only fruit in recorded history to ever be put on trial as a criminal. 

References:

The Salem….Tomato Trial?

Belief that the tomato is poisonous was disproven

Tomatoes are Evil 

A Tomato Was Put on Trial in New Jersey in 1820

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