Shedding Light on the Nightshade Family

Plenty, apparently….

Before the 14th Century and Columbus’s collision with our continent, peppers were unknown outside the Americas. The potato wasn’t known to Europeans or Asians or Africans either, nor were tomatoes. All of these familiar crops belong to Solanacea, an economically important plant family whose members also include tomatillos, eggplants, tobacco, and petunias. Also, and most significantly, none of these plants are mentioned in the Bible even once. The Medieval Mindset that gripped Europe in the late 1400s had a finer appreciation for the moral force of botany than consumers necessarily do today; if eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and petunias aren’t mentioned in the Bible, the believers reasoned, then maybe these crops hadn’t sprung from the Garden of Eden but, in contrast, were poisonous weeds and fiery fruits of Satan. Today, if you squint, you can almost see how this religious perspective makes sense……

Belladonna, the “Beautiful Woman,” or “Atropa belladonna to the scientist, is a cousin in the Solanacea family to the eggplants, peppers, tomatoes etc. Unlike its more commercial cousins, Atropa belladonna, also known as “Deadly Nightshade,”  is native to Europe, Africa, and Asia. The nightshade’s little, black berries look like “Goth Cherry tomatoes.” The lavender flowers of poisonous nightshade look like potato flowers. And significantly, the powerful alkaloids that the nightshade berries contain can provoke delirium and hallucinations when ingested in moderation. If you consume Belladonna “immoderately” then you die. Not everybody in old world Europe hung on to the Pope’s every word with fascination; there were witches, for example, whose spiritual path took them far from the catechism of the Patriarchy, and some of them chose to trip on Belladonna. This association gave all nightshade family lookalikes a sinister, diabolic reputation.

The “Indies,” where Columbus was trying to reach when he bumped into the Americas, was just across the biggest ocean on earth from the “New World.” Once the European explorers rounded Cape Horn the way was clear to reach Asia, and soon the Spaniards and Portuguese were hauling cargoes of gold and silver from their American outposts to ports in Asia like Manila and Macau. Without a religious reason to oppose the introductions from the Americas the Asians readily accepted the American “peppers” and tomatoes. Eventually, the Europeans overcame their suspicions and came to accept the nightshades. What would they do without them now?