Wolf Peach

Photo by The Curated Feast

🍅 Tomayto, tomahto... oh let's call the whole thing wolf peach. 🍅

The tomato's luscious fruits are more than a little bit dangerous if you peel back into their history. This edible relative of deadly nightshade was actually linked with witchcraft and was feared for the first 200 years after it arrived in Europe.

The deadly nightshade plant itself lives up to its family name and is truly poisonous. 💀 It has been used as a hallucinogenic drug because of the tropane alkaloids that it contains. 💊⚗ The mandrake root has the same alkaloids.

These hallucinogenic properties include seeing visions and feeling like you are flying. 🎉🎏 This created a link between the tomato and witchcraft, because German folklore claimed that witches used the various plants with tropane alkaloids to summon werewolves, and it may logically follow that the tomato shared this same property with its deadlier cousin.

The practice of summoning werewolves was known as lycanthropy, and before the modern taxonomy system, the tomato was unabashedly classified as Lycopersicon esculentum, or, "edible wolf peach"—a firm nod to the witchy pursuits of its cousin, the deadly nightshade. 🔮

Hand modeling by Kyle of @briskventure 🙌🏼 .