Post by tom π on Aug 6, 2019 19:27:53 GMT -5
The 1830s Tomato Worm Panic
www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-was-feared-in-europe-for-more-than-200-years-863735/
The fears have not entirely vanished. I once saw a woman take off her dress because a hornworm had gotten on it.
By the 1830s when the love apple was cultivated in New York, a new concern emerged. The Green Tomato Worm, measuring three to four inches in length with a horn sticking out of its back, began taking over tomato patches across the state. According to The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs and Cultivator Almanac (1867) edited by J.J. Thomas, it was believed that a mere brush with such a worm could result in death. The description is chilling:
The tomato in all of our gardens is infested with a very large thick-bodied green worm, with oblique white sterols along its sides, and a curved thorn-like horn at the end of its back.
According to Smithβs research, even Ralph Waldo Emerson feared the presence of the tomato-loving worms: They were βan object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it.β
Around the same time period, a man by the name of Dr. Fuller in New York was quoted in The Syracuse Standard, saying he had found a five-inch tomato worm in his garden. He captured the worm in a bottle and said it was βpoisonous as a rattlesnakeβ when it would throw spittle at its prey. According to Fullerβs account, once the skin came into contact with the spittle, it swelled immediately. A few hours later, the victim would seize up and die. It was a βnew enemy to human existence,β he said. Luckily, an entomologist by the name of Benjamin Walsh argued that the dreaded tomato worm wouldnβt hurt a flea. Thomas continues:
Now that we have become familiarized with it these fears have all vanished, and we have become quite indifferent towards this creature, knowing it to be merely an ugly-looking worm which eats some of the leaves of the tomatoβ¦
The tomato in all of our gardens is infested with a very large thick-bodied green worm, with oblique white sterols along its sides, and a curved thorn-like horn at the end of its back.
According to Smithβs research, even Ralph Waldo Emerson feared the presence of the tomato-loving worms: They were βan object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it.β
Around the same time period, a man by the name of Dr. Fuller in New York was quoted in The Syracuse Standard, saying he had found a five-inch tomato worm in his garden. He captured the worm in a bottle and said it was βpoisonous as a rattlesnakeβ when it would throw spittle at its prey. According to Fullerβs account, once the skin came into contact with the spittle, it swelled immediately. A few hours later, the victim would seize up and die. It was a βnew enemy to human existence,β he said. Luckily, an entomologist by the name of Benjamin Walsh argued that the dreaded tomato worm wouldnβt hurt a flea. Thomas continues:
Now that we have become familiarized with it these fears have all vanished, and we have become quite indifferent towards this creature, knowing it to be merely an ugly-looking worm which eats some of the leaves of the tomatoβ¦
www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-was-feared-in-europe-for-more-than-200-years-863735/
The fears have not entirely vanished. I once saw a woman take off her dress because a hornworm had gotten on it.