11/16/2025
Food & History — Tomatos were a “Peasants Food” 🍅🍽️
Tomatoes are packed with nutrients that support overall health. They’re rich in vitamin C, potassium, and folate, and they contain powerful antioxidants like lycopene, which is known for supporting heart health, reducing inflammation, and potentially lowering the risk of certain cancers. Their high water content helps with hydration, while their natural fiber supports healthy digestion. Whether eaten raw or cooked, tomatoes offer a nutritious boost to nearly any meal.
But… at one point in history, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous and played a role in furthering the divide between the wealthy and the poor.
Before ceramic and glass dinnerware were widely available, pewter plates were a common choice, especially among the wealthy. When people ate tomatoes off these pewter dishes, many of them fell ill. Lacking scientific understanding, they blamed the tomatoes and assumed the fruit itself was poisonous.
In reality, the acidity of the tomatoes reacted with the pewter, causing lead to leach into the food. The resulting sickness wasn’t from “toxic tomatoes” at all…. it was classic lead poisoning.
Interestingly, this problem affected mainly the upper classes. Wealthier households used pewter dinnerware, while the poor typically ate from wood plates, which didn’t react with acidic foods. Yet the wealthy refused to believe their plates were the issue. Instead, they spread the idea that the poor could tolerate tomatoes only because they were “used to eating anything,” viewing them almost like human garbage disposals.
Since tomatoes were widely eaten among the lower classes (who stayed perfectly healthy) the fruit became labeled as “food for peasants,” reinforcing class divides and keeping tomatoes off elite tables for decades.
The fear surrounding tomatoes finally began to fade in the late 1700s to early 1800s, when improved understanding of chemistry and changes in dinnerware exposed the real culprit as lead, not the fruit itself. As glass and ceramic plates became more common, people noticed that tomatoes caused no illness when eaten off safer materials. Physicians and botanists also began publicly challenging the superstition, pointing out that tomatoes were widely consumed in other countries without harm. By the early 19th century, chefs and gardeners helped popularize tomatoes in recipes and seed catalogs, and the lingering myth of “poisonous tomatoes” was officially laid to rest.
