Tomatoes were called “love apples” because they were believed to be aphrodisiacs.

Bucket of tomatoes

Today, tomatoes are so common and ubiquitous that some of us have no qualms sacrificing the juicy produce by chucking them at subpar performers. Yet prior to the early 16th century, tomatoes existed exclusively in their native South America. This all changed when Spanish colonizers began taking tomatoes home to Europe; the seeds of the tomato plant grew quite well there, and it was soon being cultivated throughout the continent. This unfamiliar, exotic fruit from the New World fascinated Europeans, not least of all in France, where tomatoes were referred to as “pomme d’amour,” or “love apples,” because they were believed to be an aphrodisiac.

The exact reason the French developed this belief in the tomato’s libidinous power is not known, but there’s at least one explanation often offered by historians. One of the earliest Europeans to write about tomatoes, Italian naturalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, classified the tomato as a member of the nightshade family, and referred to it as a “mandrake” (another nightshade plant). Mandrakes were widely considered an aphrodisiac in 16th-century Europe — in fact, they appear in the Bible as the key ingredient in a love potion, and their name in Hebrew translates to “love apples.” It’s possible the French assumed that the novel “mandrake” the Spanish brought from the New World shared the same erotic potency as its biblical counterpart.

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Europeans once thought tomatoes were poisonous.

The belief that tomatoes were aphrodisiacs wasn’t the only misconception that 16th-century Europeans had about the strange new fruit. For more than two centuries after tomatoes were introduced from South America, many Europeans believed they were poisonous, and they acquired the sinister nickname “poison apples.” This false belief in the tomato’s toxicity might have had something to do with one of its infamous relatives, the highly toxic belladonna plant. Another possibility is that Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous because some aristocrats actually did occasionally fall ill or even die after eating them. This sickness wasn’t caused by the tomatoes, though — at least, not directly. Rather, many wealthy people would eat off of pewter plates, which contained high quantities of lead. The acid in the tomatoes would cause the lead to leach out of the pewter and into people’s food, causing lead poisoning. Until the real reason for these mysterious illnesses was discovered, many people believed — quite unfairly — that a toxin contained in the tomato itself was to blame.