Daniel's favorite pizza topping was once called the wolf's peach.

And in some parts of Europe, people were suspicious of it for generations.

When tomatoes arrived from the Americas in the 1500s, European botanists immediately noticed something troubling. The tomato belonged to the nightshade family -- the same family as mandrake and deadly nightshade, plants already associated with poisons and witchcraft. And the name they gave it -- lycopersicon, wolf's peach -- was stranger still. That name was actually much older than the tomato itself, borrowed from ancient texts by Renaissance botanists trying to match this unfamiliar fruit to plants described in old books.

There is also a famous story about pewter plates and lead poisoning. It is a wonderful story. The episode explains why chemists have questioned it -- and why the fear pr ...