Wolf Fruit

Pathetically Failed Scholarship

Maned wolf, Chrysocyon brachyurus, eating a wolf-apple, Solanum lycocarpum.

When I was once taking one of those college entrance exams administered by my high school, I remember that one of the essays contained a random supposed fact that I found quite dubious, and whose dubiousness and lack of explanation annoyed me so much I remembered it many years later: Europeans not only refused to eat tomatoes when they first encountered them since they resembled deadly nightshades (this is straightforward and believable) but called them “wolf peach” for their “poisonous qualities.” Wolves aren’t poisonous and this is the only example I have ever heard of where something is called “wolf” to denote it supposedly is, which in linguistics is known as a hapax legomenon, and tomatoes visually resemble cherries, apples, and eggplants much more than peaches if I had to pick something else to compare them to. (Apparently the Chinese sensibly called tomatoes “foreign eggplant” when they first encountered them which is much more straightforward than “wolf peach.”)

Either this had to not actually have been a very common designation for them, only a few aristocrats no one cared about except English literature scholars who like obscure facts called tomatoes “wolf peach,” or there’s more reasoning behind this that isn’t being explained either out of deliberate obscurantism or because English literature scholars don’t actually know and just think everyone in the past had a completely different brain that did inexplicable magic things. None of these options makes English literature scholars look good, but the last and worst, that English literature scholars just thought everyone in the past had weird whims and it was so quaint and enchanting so we don’t have to explain, is the actual answer. This points to a deep flaw in modern scholarship, since it really shouldn’t be that hard of a question to answer even if it isn’t that important of a question in itself.

Many years later, I was looking at plant seeds and I got a pack of seeds labeled as Chinese lantern plant that looked like it had some sort of weird fruit inside of a transparent case of petals. I wanted to know what it was taxonomically so I ended up on a plant taxonomy page that said Alkekengi officinarum, which was a type of ground cherry in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Then I looked at an entire page of Solanaceae and learned about ground cherries and also learned which other plants were in the nightshade family besides the ones I already knew, which were nightshades, potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers. I learned tomatillos were also in the nightshade family, I learned that you can eat ground cherries including the ones I bought seeds of but that Chinese lantern plant probably wouldn’t make ones that were very good and you’d probably ruin the ornamental value, and I saw plants I never heard of. However, the one that stuck out to me was one called Solanum lycocarpum, with the common name fruit-for-wolves and a picture of a wolf-looking creature that’s described as being important to its life cycle. I assumed this was the real reason tomatoes were called “wolf peach,” because someone confused tomatoes with this plant, which seems easy to do since most Europeans using secondhand sources would probably just hear that there are wild tomatoes which some wolves in South America eat and say tomatoes are the wolf fruit, and maybe use peach to translate something along the way.

Solanum lycocarpum fruit.

Today I tried to look up that fruit again and the maned wolf, and expectedly, I had to go to a page for Solanum and search through species to find it, because “fruit for wolves” kept turning up randos on the Internet being all “did you know tomatoes used to be called wolf peach because Europeans thought they were poisonous?” as if this were annoying people’s absolute favorite piece of dubiously-valid trivia. The Solanum lycocarpum Wikipedia page itself has the header, “Not to be confused with Solanum lycopersicum, wolfberry, or Wolf River (apple),” Solanum lycopersicum being the tomato plant which bears a similar binomial nomenclature, and also one that directly references the “wolf peach” idea again, but doesn’t claim why it was called that at all, or whether it was just highly-educated people using that name to show off, or whether everyone used it because it made sense to lowly peasants too. So I started reading the page about tomatoes to see if it had any more specific information and if it could confirm whether the “wolf peach” was actually called that because someone confused it with the fruit-for-wolves plant, especially since species are not well-defined in current biology anyway.

Etymology

The word tomato comes from the Spanish tomate, which in turn comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl [ˈtomat͡ɬ] pronunciation^ⓘ.^[2] The specific name lycopersicum, meaning 'wolf peach', originated with Galen, who used it to denote a plant that has never been identified. Luigi Anguillara speculated in the 16th century that Galen's lycopersicum might be the tomato, and despite the impossibility of this identification, lycopersicum entered scientific use as a name for the fruit.^[3]

Now this history at least starts to make sense, although it’s missing why Luigi Anguillara speculated it might be the tomato. Did Galen describe a similar plant to a tomato, or did Luigi Anguillara hear of the fruit-for-wolves plant and think it was the same as a tomato, since it appears to be almost the same and species aren’t well-defined even today anyway? If Galen described a similar plant to a tomato, why is that? Did such a plant that looks like a tomato and was associated with wolves exist in Europe in prehistory, maybe in Galen’s time or before Galen’s time? Or did Galen a priori predict the characteristics of a fruit which wolves would eat and it just happened to line up with the fruit-for-wolves plant, and Europeans were more familiar with the closely-related tomato? If there was a plant in Europe or maybe Africa or West Asia that was basically the same as the fruit-for-wolves plant via convergent evolution, but it went extinct, this is an important piece of natural history which should be reconstructed. If Galen predicted a South American plant a priori, this is also an interesting example of convergent evolution in a different way, because it shows you don’t even have to empirically observe an organism to predict it will exist since there are certain ecological niches that things will converge into.

Yet all the English majors who just want some interesting piece of trivia and don’t like science very much are just spreading the idea that tomatoes were called wolf peach, of course automatically and by everyone, because people thought they were poisonous, and it’s obvious a poisonous fruit would be called wolf peach, because wolves are poisonous and peaches are what archetypal fruits look like. The second-century physician Galen is never mentioned, the fact there’s a similar fruit to a tomato from South America that the locals literally call the wolf fruit or wolf apple because the maned wolf eats it as 50% of its diet and spreads its seeds that might’ve been conflated with tomatoes is never mentioned. It’s just supposed to be obvious that everyone and anyone would look at a tomato, think it’s a new kind of deadly nightshade, and that the obvious name for it should be the poetic and obtuse-seeming expression wolf peach. Additionally, some people are recorded as calling tomatoes wolf apple and wolf fruit, in addition to unrelated names like love-apple, though the latter seems straightforward because it’s bright red and people like to associate bright red things with passion, lust, and arousal, and fruits, especially forbidden fruits, also get associated with the same things in general like the Garden of Eden story and Gilgamesh, unlike the wolf descriptor which was not at all since wolves are not poisonous and I have never ever heard the word wolf used to denote poison in any other context, unlike with bright red things, fruits, and love.

In the comments to this article, which remains my most popular one to this day, I said I didn’t hate humanities-type subjects, I just thought it was better for STEM majors to learn them so people would broaden their horizons and be creative but also useful (so basically STEAM,) and

Stephanie Molchan

said the real problem was people being forced to specialize too much when choosing what to study. I agreed and I think this is a case study with a non-controversial example of that. People like to bandy around the “wolf peach” trivia despite the fact it’s still not well-explained, and seemingly largely because it’s not well-explained and they like the feeling of marveling at how supposedly different people in the past were. However, that mentality breaks down really quickly once you learn it was a reference to some unidentified plant mentioned by Galen which someone decided reminded them of a tomato, but that raises the problem of the fact no one knows why it reminded that person of a tomato.

Furthermore, it has implications for how taxonomy is done in general and/or natural history, because it appears that either it’s referencing a plant which no longer exists which needs to be documented, or predicting a plant which Galen never saw completely a priori, or at the bare minimum, is showing there was some kind of recording error somewhere which was important because it confused enough people to name an extremely common domestic plant if there was an error. This really shouldn’t be hard to settle, it’s not some controversial religious or political dispute, but whatever facts are out there are not easy to find at all because humanities people are wasting their time and science people are to a lesser degree also wasting their time, just on string theory and freezing dead billionaires instead of memorizing and sharing dubious trivia.