Talk:Tomato

Tomatoes in Africa

The section about tomatoes in the middle east has an image of tomatoes described as grown in Ghana (West Africa), which is not even close to the middle east There is aso no content about tomatoes in Africa Traci Deecee (talk) 09:22, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Well spotted. I've removed the off-topic image. The history by region is constructed from the available sources to make the main points for the article, which it seems to do. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:12, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Apocryphal stories

@Chiswick Chap: The whole business of tomatoes being considered poisonous has been debunked by Andrew F. Smith. The Cornè and R.G. Johnson narratives are part of this. That said, I wonder if we should mention the fakelore in this article, since many people will expect to see documentation of it on Wikipedia. It's covered in Robert Gibbon Johnson#Tomato story, but how will someone coming to this article find that? My experience is that preemptive mentions of legends -- clearly documenting that they are in fact apocryphal -- perform a valuable service in dissuading new editors from "correcting" the article; I call that "defensive editing" (cf. ), something like a defensive publication in patent law. --Macrakis (talk) 15:58, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for discussing. The article's history section mentions the assumption the fruit would be poisonous. It would be quite in order to have a subsidiary article on Myths of tomato's toxicity or some such title, in which case we could link it here with a brief summary. I think you are probably correct to remove the other myths from the United States section, though it might be that some such material would go into the brief summary, probably as part of the History section. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:27, 24 June 2026 (UTC)