They are not ours, but we love them like they are

An excerpt from my in progress Southern Italian Materia Medica

a grappoli d’inverno heirloom from Apulia, Italia grown in my garden in CT.

Despite their ancient beginnings as a wild plant specifically from the Mountains of Peru, Ecuador, and Northern Chile, tomatoes are now used by cultures throughout the world. They are inextricably linked with Southern Italian food, yet they are not even remotely native to Europe, nor did they really enter the cultures food til the late 1700s/ early 1800s (that we have record of at least). It’s said tomatl, or xitomatl, as they were originally called in Nahuatl, were introduced to Europe in the late 1500s by that scum bag colonist Cortes. Initially, due to a confluence of factors, Northern Europeans and namely the wealthy English, dismissed tomatoes as poisonous. Partly due to their early association with the nightshade family, but largely because of their ignorance on how to properly steward and work with them. A handful of aristocrats were even thought to have died from eating them, but it turns out their preference for eating on fancy pewter plates which had a super high lead content were the true culprit in these instances. Pietro Mattioli, an Italian botanist & doctor, helped incorrectly categorize them as a type of mandrake, which added to their poisonous character attribute by association. This also contributed to them being considered an aphrodisiac, as they went on to be called ‘love apples’ a derivative of their Italian name, ‘pomodoro,’ from ‘pom d’or,’ or apple of gold.

Though they arrived before the 1600s, they didn’t really start to show up in Southern Italian food until the mid to late 1700s. Of course a big reason for this is due to the extreme regionality of Italy for most of its history, and also in the reality that only the wealthy had the means & access to experiment with foods that weren’t native to their land and so plants like tomatoes didnt become available to the larger peasant population of Italy til much later than their rulers. Because these rulers were incorrectly convinced that tomatoes were poisonous, they chose to grow them strictly ornamentally rather than as food and of course did not introduce them to the masses.

And now is the point in the story, where if you’ve grown tomatoes to any degree, you can start to imagine how they found their way to the peasants who were adept enough at cooking and communing with plants to learn how go properly steward and work with them and how they quickly became an absolute staple of southern Italian food to this day.

The tomatoes spread their seeds, most likely from the ‘trash middens’, where the workers of the self ordained elite would have dumped each years plants at the end of the season. Where little by little the common people would find these attractive vines growing ravenously and bearing small yellow & red fruits that attracted a myriad of animals and quickly realized that these rumors of them being poisonous couldn’t be true. Though Southern Italian cuisine includes meat today, back in these days the common peoples diets were largely vegetarian. Tomatoes very quickly became the backbone of many of their dishes, particularly in Naples where peasants began putting stewed tomatoes on top of their homemade flatbreads … and here we have the origins of the Neapolitan pizza we all know and love.

Knowing the origins of all things, is everything. Tomatoes ended up in Europe as a result of the project of colonization and therefore as a result of greed, hate, and violence. And the people who stole them as well as the elite who initially received them, had no idea what to do with them, and ultimately are not responsible for their popularity or current relationship with Italian food. Tomatoes themselves made their way into the hands of those who adored and revered them, who didn’t hesitate to bring them into their gardens and bodies. Who went deep into learning the myriad of ways that they improved their food and therefore their lives, and who to this day steward countless heirloom varieties of. They are not ours, but we love them like they are.

This excerpt is from an in progress materia medica on ancestral southern Italian plants ~ both those native to my homeland and those introduced. The work dives into their origins, story, and paths, and our relationships with them and the resulting folklore, food rituals, and magic we practice with them to this day. The full work will be available on the site soon ❤️