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Comment by Kosirich | Hacker News Reader

My dads grandma would still refer to tomato as "food for pigs".

My great uncle used to tell me stories about how he wasn't allowed to eat tomatoes growing up in Massachusetts during the Great Depression. Only Italian immigrants ate them and everyone else thought they were crazy and were slowly poisoning themselves. It's amazing to think how this New World vegetable (fruit?) was (eventually) introduced into American cuisine via Italy.

A new thought: you'd think people back then would just see that it was safe because Italians were eating it and not dying. But then again we seem to still live in an age where facts about what things are safe to take are still under siege.

Counterpoint: people back then saw people chain-smoke cigarettes all day long with no apparent ill effect.

Not really true. The harm from tobacco has been known for centuries. Epidemiology didn’t mature enough as a science to provide good evidence for harm until the 1950s.

> In 1602 an anonymous English author published an essay titled Worke of Chimney Sweepers (sic) which stated that illnesses often seen in chimney sweepers were caused by soot and that tobacco may have similar effects. This was one of the earliest known instances of smoking being linked to ill health.

> In 1795 Sammuel Thomas von Soemmering of Maine (Germany) reported that he was becoming more aware of cancers of the lip in pipe smokers

> In 1798 the US physician Benjamin Rush wrote on the medical dangers of tobacco

You’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical that these 3 obscure sources that you needed a search engine to find were common knowledge among regular Joes in Massachusetts during the Great Depression

The dangers of tobacco were known centuries before the Great Depression. This is well known and has been covered extensively by historical works on the subject.

Closer to home, within the twentieth century, Max MacLevy’s book "Tobacco Habit Easily Conquered” (1916) was well known, as was Louis L. Krauss’ "Tobacco Mysteries Exposed and Habit Conquered” (1917).

Krauss lists the available evidence as to the known dangers of tobacco for almost 100 pages. This was in 1917. We also know that the public was exposed to much of the information in Krauss’ book. I haven’t even brought up the Germans.

Any cursory review of the the history and harm of tobacco shows this is true. Your counterargument is just wrong, and given its latest iteration, has now devolved into no true Scotsman.

Kava is the national drink of Fiji. It's been consumed across the Pacific Islands for 3000 years. It's currently banned in Europe, and the US FDA refuses to give it GRAS (Generally Recognised as Safe) despite it being an ancient food of a US state).

It's not blanket-banned in Europe (or the EU). It's generally not permitted in pharmaceutical products, some countries restrict its commercial sale.

AFAIK the only exception is Poland.

> It's generally not permitted in pharmaceutical products, some countries restrict its commercial sale

It's never been acceptable as food. Only as a mislabelled pharmaceutical product. That ended in 2002 after some nonsense in Germany.

Hm, seems like you're right, all sources are foreign and selling is indeed more widely restricted than I thought.

My grandfather considered all green vegetables cow feed.

Your grandfather only ate grains and things that eat grains.

Yes, meat, but not so much grains as potatoes.

I'll never forget when I was 6 or so and visiting my grandparents.

My grandma had decided to do something wild and new and had made one of those newfangled frozen pizzas for dinner, kids loved those she'd read.

So we sat down, each getting a slice, and then she serves my grandfather a small plate with three cooked potatoes on it...

I ask what's the potatoes are for.

"It's not dinner if there's no potatoes".

And with that, he ate pizza with potatoes.

> "It's not dinner if there's no potatoes".

This is mostly anecdotal, but I've had something similar happen in Nicaragua. Most of my acquaintances and friends don't consider pizza a "meal". It is considered by most only a side dish, because it doesn't come served with rice

In my youth my parents always served pizza with baked potatoes and coleslaw. I think there was definitely this general idea that pizza wasn't a meal in and of itself.

It's a common attitude in various countries in Asia if you haven't eaten rice you haven't had a meal. Also common, if there's no soup something is missing.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. My grandfather was the same way. He slowly changed ways after retirement.

just to point out, this wasn't a dig at veggies. My dads grandma still used tomatoes and ate them, but probably the "food for pigs" was still a "strong meme" at the end of 19th century in central Istria. The part of Istria, todays Croatia, I'm taking about was then owned by Austrian dukes and not Italy like coastline, which might explain later adoption of "New World" based cousine.

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