Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.

Recently we were trying to brainstorm some ideas for the show that were food related in

some way.

We talk about food fairly often but this was for like a specific project.

And I briefly thought about doing a history of the tomato because there's just so much

stuff there that really fascinates me.

Like, for example, tomatoes are such a key part of so much Italian cuisine but they

are not even native to the same continent as Italy.

There's that whole thing where people in parts of the world used to think tomatoes are

poisonous and they are in the nightshade family, which does include some really toxic plants

and people can have allergies and intolerances and things like that.

But also tomatoes are just acidic enough to leech the lead out of dishes and utensils.

So in the era when people were eating off of lead a lot, they really might have been

helping to poison people.

We've also done histories of specific foods before some of those episodes are ones that

I researched and wrote.

So I know that can be done.

But as I looked at this, it just increasingly seemed maybe not workable for tomatoes.

You could do any one of those nodules of the tomato story and its own story.

It would be its own thing.

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