On various forums around the web, I’ve been watching as @Joseph_Lofthouse and other collaborators grow out various crosses between domestic tomatoes and various wild species. In fact, I’ve participated to a small degree; I grew out some crosses that Joseph sent me.
One thing, though, that I’ve always wondered about and never found a solid reference for is the potential toxicity of the various wild species involved. Solanum habrochaites and S. peruvianum seem to be pretty safe, as far as I can tell; some sources say S. pennellii is toxic.
If there are toxins involved, can we be sure that all of them taste bad enough to be noticeable?
This is important to me because I garden for my family who have food sensitivities; in some cases, one brand of a particular food is fine for them while a seemingly identical one is not. And I like sharing tomato fruit and plants with friends and neighbors, but don’t want to be at the center of a local news story when somebody gets a poison tomato!
So any solid references to the particular toxins that may or may not be involved would be very helpful.
BTW, the question of food sensitivities is maybe something to consider when landracing.
That is a good question! I don’t have an answer other than I have a slight fear of trying tomatoes crossed with the hard green when ripe species. The off flavors continue for some time. I wonder how they deal with these concerns at the university tomato breeding programs?
I’m afraid I can’t answer your question either, but I will say I seem to have very strong nightshade sensitivities, which is why I don’t grow nightshades unless someone in my family specifically asks for them. (Which, right now, means tomatoes for my husband and potatoes for my daughter.) I can’t eat them myself. Or rather, I can, but I feel very bleh afterwards. My body clearly doesn’t like them. This is why I’m hoping I can get oca to grow here.
I realize this isn’t what you asked, but this puts me in mind of a second question that probably ties in with the original one:
Are there any crops that tastes similar to tomatoes that aren’t nightshades? That may be really helpful for people with nightshade sensitivities to know.
Aside from chemically testing a given berry, which I assume there are resources for somewhere, there’s the Universal Edibility Test. I have no idea if it would work for a potentially low-key poisonous tomato, but maybe? The test’s limitations are listed in the linked page.
I just found out about Brix refractometers (measures sugar content of juices, i.e., is the sweetness of my peppers increasing?); maybe there’s a version for poison compounds?
@H.B Yes, those of us with severe sensitivities have eliminated nightshades. I guess I didn’t frame that part of my question correctly; it is more that my experience with sensitivities leads me to wonder about situations where we have things that look like tomatoes, but aren’t quite the same at a chemical level. Or for that matter, beans or cucumbers or whatever.
@UnicornEmily I’m not sure; nothing really seems to taste like a tomato as far as I know. This raises a different question; could the allergins in nightshades be bred out? How would low-tech breeders do that?
@Logan_zzz333 I’m guessing all of these crosses would pass the edibility test—after all, I assume those who are working with them have been sampling them? I’m more interested in lower-level effects that might show up with larger amounts or longer times.
I’ve always assumed that the thing in tomatoes that makes me feel bleh is a toxin in the plant, not an allergen. I could be wrong about that.
As for breeding it out . . . good question! My best idea is that someone with nightshade sensitivity could sample a bunch of tomatoes, the same amount each day and a different variety every day, and record how they feel an hour later. Then they could start crossing varieties that they react the least to, test those out, and keep on going that way until they’ve bred a tomato that their body reacts all right to.
I think it would have to be a very specific kind of person who could do a project like that – someone who loves tomatoes, wants to eat loads of them despite having nightshade sensitivity, and is willing to stubbornly put in a lot of work and a lot of feeling not-so-great over the course of many years. That’s the kind of person who would consider the cost to be little more than “doing what I want to do anyway,” and would consider the reward to be tremendous.
Of course, it’s also possible there are specific nuances in the flavor that correlate with higher toxin levels, and if such a person did such a project, they might figure those out quickly and be able to eliminate a lot of varieties from consideration by just trying a taste and spitting it out.
I am not such a person, since I don’t really like tomatoes all that much. I think they’re fine. I like spaghetti sauce and ketchup, for instance. But I don’t really miss them when I avoid them entirely.
I wonder if it’s like potatoes and high glycoalkiloids (sp?). And the simplest explanation is that the tomatoes that were the most edible… least toxic… least work to make not toxic… they were kept and grown over time until they got to the domestic tomatoes that were sent to Europe and got us to where we are now.