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Unhealthy, Smelly, and Strange: Why Italians Avoided Tomatoes for Centuries ‹ Literary Hub

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Just when did tomatoes arrive in Europe? We can pinpoint many events of the Spanish Conquest down to the hour, but historians haven’t been able to determine even the decade that tomatoes made landfall, because the Castilian tax collectors at the Port of Seville who collected the quinto real—the royal fifth—logged every last coin, necklace, and silver plate that came off the galleons, but couldn’t have been less interested in plants, never mind seeds. (Future historians of this century will have it easier, being able to study, for example, the May 2018 attempted smuggling of a single slice of tomato into the United States, thanks to the air-port sandwich that has resulted in my being flagged by US Home-land Security as an “agricultural violator,” I suppose for life. And it was a lousy tomato, besides.) When the tomato started to circulate throughout Italy, Giulia [Marinelli, a guide at the Museo del Pompodoro, the world’s only museum dedicated to the tomato] says, it was so foreign that

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