I wonder if there was not an earlier or lost variety of Tomato plant that may have been deadly or at least bad for the gut. Recall that the plague is still active in very rural areas in the US where ground squirrels and wolves etc., seem to keep it circulating due to ground squirrels dying from it and wolves eating them.
Could wolves have been circulating or carrying something into the sites of these fruits? Sometimes, the limited language use of ancient civilizations required a lot of context to know the actual meanings.
Maybe, but Europeans mostly just seemed to think it was bad because it looked like deadly nightshade. It seems way too European-centric to think of tomatoes as poisonous when Mesoamericans were wolfing them down (pun intended) without much of a thought.
I really like this post. You have made a giant point and illustrated it with a microcosmic example. I’ll be thinking about this for quite a while.Thank you.
I wonder if there was not an earlier or lost variety of Tomato plant that may have been deadly or at least bad for the gut. Recall that the plague is still active in very rural areas in the US where ground squirrels and wolves etc., seem to keep it circulating due to ground squirrels dying from it and wolves eating them.
Could wolves have been circulating or carrying something into the sites of these fruits? Sometimes, the limited language use of ancient civilizations required a lot of context to know the actual meanings.
Maybe, but Europeans mostly just seemed to think it was bad because it looked like deadly nightshade. It seems way too European-centric to think of tomatoes as poisonous when Mesoamericans were wolfing them down (pun intended) without much of a thought.
I really like this post. You have made a giant point and illustrated it with a microcosmic example. I’ll be thinking about this for quite a while.Thank you.