It may sound silly to you now, but back in the 1700s, tomatoes were feared. Europeans actually nicknamed the fruit “poison apples.”
The nickname came about because aristocrats would become ill and die after eating them. But really, the entire reason they became ill at all was due to the fact they would eat off of pewter plates. These are known to be high in lead content. Since tomatoes are so acidic, the fruit would leach the lead from the plate.
The tomato got a bad rap back in the 1500s as well thanks to mistakenly being classified as toxic. It wasn’t until the 1880s when pizza became a widely loved food that they were regularly eaten again. The stigma around eating them actually helped make them more popular. Failing lead to success!