No other vegetable has been as maligned as the tomato (and it is a vegetable, by order of the United States Supreme Court). We call tomatoes killers. We call them rotten. We call them ugly. We call them sad. To find the reason why, you have to go back to the 1500s, when the humble fruit first reached European shores (and it is
a fruit, by scientific consensus). Through no fault of its own, the
tomato stepped into the middle of a continent-wide witchcraft panic, and
a scientific community in tumult.
Between 1300 and 1650, thousands of
Europeans (mostly women) were executed for practicing witchcraft, in a
church-and-government-sanctioned mass hysteria academics call the "witch
craze." Women were burned, drowned, hanged, and crushed after trials in
both secular and religious courts; and lynched by vigilante mobs. By
the most conservative estimate, Dr. Ronald Hutton's count of execution
records, between 35,184 and 63,850 witches were killed through official
channels—at least 17,000 in Germany alone. Sociologist Nachman
Ben-Yehuda estimates the combined death toll could have been as high as 500,000. It was a massive, concerted, prolonged crusade.
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