Hello and welcome to another episode, a no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Aniches Inski, James Harkin and Andy Murray.

But once again, we have gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from

the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

I'm sitting with you, Chazinski.

Yeah, my fact is that for 200 years after tomatoes made it to England, they were grown almost

entirely for ornamental reasons because they didn't want to eat them.

Because they were just waiting for them to be ripe.

It's not ready.

It's still red.

Wait for it to be green.

I think the first tomatoes that were brought over were yellow and that's why they're

called Pomodore in Italian, I think, yellow apples or something.

Anyway, yeah, people thought they were poisonous.

And this was for, well, there are a number of explanations for why people thought that.

I think the most likely one is that they were botanically identified as belonging to the

nightshade family and people knew that other members of the nightshade family, deadly nightshade,

were poisonous.

So they were botanically advanced enough to work out what family tomatoes belonged to,

but not botanically advanced enough to say these things are obviously harmless so you

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