I’ve extensively searched google and other search engines, but I haven’t come up with an answer.
I’m trying to find the origin of the tradition of throwing rotten tomatoes at bad performers. Can anyone help?
One reference to it would be in Huckleberry Finn, where the audience was bringing the stuff in to bombard the Duke and Dauphin he was travelling with at the time, the mid-1800’s.
I was taught in high school (in other words, what follows may be completely false) that this had to do with the belief that tomatoes are poisonous. That is, you’d actually try to peg the guy in the mouth in hopes of poisoning him. Supposedly this was already being done in Shakespeare’s time. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
I’ve eaten ripe tomatoes, semi-ripe tomatoes, and even tried fried green tomatoes based on a recipe I got on these boards. Are you thinking of some mutant strain most haven’t heard of?
Note that tomatoes are native to the America’s, and when they first arrived in Europe, they were viewed with suspicion, because the leaves resemble that of the poisonous nightshade plant. The same thing is true of the potato, as both plants are related to nightshade.
I think the idea that people once believed that tomatoes were deadly poisonous has been disproven. People in northern Europe long believed that tomatoes were unhealthy, but not that eating one would kill you. This belief was never very common in America. The famous story that someone named Robert Johnson ate a basket of tomatoes on the courthouse steps in Salem, New Jersey, in 1820 to “prove” that they weren’t poisonous is a 20th century invention. Nobody in 1820 in New Jersey believed that eating tomatoes would kill you. I haven’t read it, but Andrew Smith, editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America wrote an article about the Johnson story: “The Making of the Legend of Robert Gibbon Johnson and the Tomato,” New Jersey History 108 (Fall/Winter 1990): 59-74.
I always thought it was interesting that people would just happen to have rotten tomatoes that they brought with them to a performance. :dubious:
This reminds me of the infamous vaudeville act the Cherry Sisters. They were so notoriously bad that audiences always arrived well armed with produce for flinging.
The apparently inaccurate explanation I was given mentioned that tomatoes were sold at the theater specifically for the purpose of throwing.
Both potato and tomato plants produce the toxin solanine. The mature leaves of either plant will make you sick, as can some varieties of potato when green or sprouted.
Solanine related threads:
Killer French Fries!!!
Are Habanero leaves edible ?
Onions and Potatos…
Don’t tomatoes react with pewter?
I stuffed a couple of tomatoes into the back of my friends 'puter, it’s still working, perhaps I should try more tomatoes?
I guess if actors were made of pewter…
The acid in tomatoes will leach lead from pewter. It’ll also etch aluminum.
Everyone who ate a tomato when they were imported into Britain is now dead. Scary.
Yes, but as an explanation of why some people thought tomatoes were poisonous (or even just unhealthy), it doesn’t hold water. See Snopes on Life in the 1500s
What about canned tomatoes and lead solder?
Of course, that could quite possibly be lethal if thrown with enough power and accuracy…