“Like the tomato, its botanical cousin, the potato was greeted with fear and skepticism when it was first brought to Europe from the Americas near the end of the sixteenth century. Most people wanted nothing to do with it. The green leaves and stems of the potato plant smelled nasty, and nasty in much the same way as several well-known poisons. This is because the potato is a member of the Solanaceae family, which includes not only tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplants, and ornamental petunias, but also potentially dangerous species like deadly nightshade, jimsonweed, henbane, mandrake, and tobacco. Potatoes grow underground, a region always associated with dubious transactions, and farmers feared the plant would poison their soil. Leprosy, scrofula, and syphilis were only some of the diseases wrongly attributed to potato eating.”