38. An Ill-Timed Introduction
It was not the tomato’s fault that it was first imported to Europe around 1540, at a historically weird moment during the height of witch hysteria. From the fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, thousands of Europeans – the overwhelming majority of them women – were killed as witches. Women accused of witchcraft were lynched by mobs, or hanged, crushed, drowned, or burned by courts, both secular and religious. Conservative estimates, culled from official records, put the number of executed victims in the tens of thousands. Other estimates go as high as half a million.
Tomatoes arrived in Europe just when authorities were trying to figure out the ingredients of witches’ flying ointment – the goop they smeared on brooms to make them fly, or on themselves to fly without a broom. That same goop could also transform whoever it was smeared on into a werewolf. In 1545, the pope’s physician, Andres Laguna, described the key ingredients as henbane, nightshade, and mandrake – close botanical relatives of tomatoes.
