At A Point In Time The Tomato Were The Devil's Fruit

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For a time people thought eating tomatoes aided a witch to turn into a werewolf because of a recording by Andres Laguna in 1545 that believed flying ointment for witches were created using hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake - which the last three look similar to other tomato variants. (Yeah by the way they believed witches used flying ointment, either by smearing it on their broom or on themselves.)

The superstition continued partly from a priest named John Gerard's views about Tomatoes being poisonous caught on and for hundreds of years tomatoes and were considered not to be consumable in England and even North American colonies when it was introduced.

And in the 1850's, Dio Lewis, a Harvard-trained doctor, blamed tomatoes for everything from bleeding gums to hemorrhoids—because, he argued, tomatoes' medicinal powers were so strong it was easy to overdose. There were even anti-tomato propaganda, like a fabricated story about George Washington's chef trying to poison him with tomatoes.

Even more recently, when NASA distributed tomato seeds that had been to orbit, the L.A. Times freaked out about the imaginary potential for poisonous mutations, and the panic went international. When NASA did the same with basil, nobody cared.

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