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Comment by Agoreddah | Hacker News Reader

In 18th century in Astria-Hungary, there were several conspiracies about the potatoes as a weapon of rich to poison and kill the poor. Funny fact, our ancestors were fighting againts potatoes 300years ago and now we celebrate this ingredient in national dishes as a cultural heritage.

Btw similar revolts could be found in many government/kingdom actions f.e. to fight cholera or plagues of that time. Peasants didn't understand the actions and expected bad things to come instead.

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> Peasants didn't understand the actions and expected bad things to come instead.

lets not make it sound like peasants were stupid vs the enlightened elite. most governments in History were utterly bad at managing anything, no matter whether the high borns were in power or not.

> most governments in History were utterly bad at managing anything

s/were/are

The article seems to gloss over that tomatoe plants look very similar to the closely related poisonous nightshade plants.

See pics [1] and [2], could you definitively differentiate between these two plants in the wild? Now consider if you removed the hundreds of years of selective breeding of tomatoes that has led to them looking the way we imagine them. Think of something like an heirloom tomato that can be a variety of shapes and colors, and without modern agricultural advancements, the fruits are smaller too. I bet that some of those tomatoes looked pretty damn similar to its poisonous cousin. On top of that, at BEST you have access to an old drawing someone made of a tomato plant, and probably a different variety than the one you're looking at. I'm speculating a fair bit here, but at least superficially it doesn't seem that crazy that your average seventeenth century European person wouldn't want to risk their lives on correctly identifying a tomato vs. a nearly identical, toxic garden weed.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_nigrum#/media/File%3...

[2] https://c8.alamy.com/comp/K6WXHY/tomato-plant-growth-sequenc...

Also, maybe it's just me, but tomato plants smell bad. Personally, I can barely stand to be around even one plant, let alone a small garden of them. Smell is one of the most evocotive senses. A bad smell is almost always a sign of danger.

I don't have the same problem with the smell, but maybe if enough people thought it smelled bad everybody else would think to avoid it.

That allmost sounds like a evolutionary survival strategy.

I absolutely love the smell of tomato plants. My grandfather used to grow them in large green houses. Now when I smell a tomato plant it reminds me of walking into those hot hunting greenhouses and being surrounded by ripe tomatoes everywhere

I like it too, I tend to get vine tomatoes because they smell of the plants a little bit :)

Don’t cannabis plants stink? People have been cultivating them forever.

But it's the fruit which is poisonous; which looks nothing like a tomato? (Except perhaps while both are small and unripe.)

New world crops were a major change and had serious economic implications for northern Europe. Given how peasents were treated at the time I can understand anxiety.

I remember one noble solved this in a clever way. He made it illegal for peasants to grow potatoes, and grew them in the his royal garden. Then peasants would smuggle them out in the night and grow them back home, thinking if it was forbidden it must be good.

https://satwcomic.com/can-t-touch-that

That's attributed to Friedrich II, king of Prussia, however might just be legend:

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoffelbefehl

This legend or similar exist throughout European countries. I am not sure how based in reality they are, but there must be fragments of truth, or common approaches that were later exaggerated.

Potatoes and Tomatoes are very similar plants. You can graft them together and have a living plant that grows tomatoes on top and potatoes in the roots.

Potatoes also produce fruits that are similar to cherry tomatoes. They taste like gross tomatoes and are indeed poisonous in relatively small quantities.

> Potatoes and Tomatoes are very similar plants. You can graft them together and have a living plant that grows tomatoes on top and potatoes in the roots.

It's true that they're similar plants, but that's not a requirement of grafting.

It kind of is, though.

Grafting specimens of the same species is fairly easy - grafting onto a different species but staying in the same genus is a little less reliable but the basis of most grafted orchard trees.

Grafting to a different genus, but within the same family, is much more challenging. Not impossible, of course, but less likely to succeed, so less commonly done.

You can do something similar with hops and marijuana…so I’ve heard

There is a story, which may be apocryphal, that in the late 16th century Sir Walter Raleigh brought potatoes into the gardens and court of Queen Elizabeth.

Once they'd grown and were harvested, the cooks having no familiarity with the plant, promptly discarded the tubers, and instead used the stalks & leaves in various dishes.

As a result, at a banquet featuring this wonderful new plant, everyone was violently ill, resulting in the potato being banned from the court.

I wonder how long on average something becomes heritage. 100 years ? is it n generation ? after 5 generation, your grandmother's grandmother was born there so you're 99% from her culture (all your siblings are, you and their memories are)

Most recipes have only standardized in the last 100 years or so. We didn't have exact temperature controls on ovens or stoves until the 1930s, which is a fairly easy way to tell, and even cooking units vary across time, place, and even household. (How big is a teacup? Depends on your glassware.)

Raw potatoes might be mildly toxic from my personal experience ... or maybe I'm allergic.

Why did you bite a raw potato? Did you wash and peel it first, at least?

The plants that potato evolved from were toxic and people would soak them in a mix of clay and water to remove the toxicity. Eventually less poisonous varieties were created. Potatoes still produce toxins as a defence mechanism when exposed to light or late blight.

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