[ekianjo]

> 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.

[notjulianjaynes]

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...

[moron4hire]

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.

[diroussel]

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

[GekkePrutser]

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

[rackjack]

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.

[hutzlibu]

That allmost sounds like a evolutionary survival strategy.

[wil421]

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

[OJFord]

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

[7952]

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.

[ARandomerDude]

> most governments in History were utterly bad at managing anything

s/were/are