From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 17:56:49 MDT
>>For hundreds of years, europeans commonly thought that
>>tomatoes were poisonous for no other reason than that they were reddish
>>orange and berry-like.
Not quite.
The main reason naturalists (not just common folk, but serious followers of Linnaeus) thought they were poisonous is that they're in the Nightshade family.
And tomato parts *other* than the fruit *are* toxic.
Not nearly as bad a gaffe as the old medical texts whose anatomy drawings were based on orangutang dissections...
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