Ketchup Was Once Sold as Medicine

Before it became a beloved condiment, the tomato faced a significant image problem in many parts of the Western world. For centuries, Europeans and early Americans regarded tomatoes with suspicion, often believing them to be poisonous due to their botanical relation to the deadly nightshade plant. They were frequently grown for ornamental purposes rather than consumption. This perception began to shift in the 1830s, paving the way for a surprising chapter in the tomato's history.

In 1834, an Ohio physician named Dr. John Cook Bennett championed the tomato as a powerful medicinal agent, promoting it as a "medical panacea". He claimed that tomato-based preparations, including a form of ketchup, could cure a wide array of ailments such as indigestion, jaundice, and diarrhea. Bennett even took his claims a step further by marketing concentrated tomato extract in convenient pill form. This belief stemmed from the prevailing idea of "vegetable medicine" and the understanding that tomatoes contained beneficial compounds, like acids and the antioxidant lycopene, which were thought to possess healing properties.

The idea of tomato as medicine quickly gained traction, creating a booming industry for "tomato pills". However, this health fad was short-lived. Many unscrupulous manufacturers flooded the market with inferior, and sometimes entirely fraudulent, products. These copycat pills often contained little to no actual tomato and some were even laced with laxatives, making outlandish claims such as the ability to heal broken bones. By the 1850s, scientific scrutiny and the widespread failure of these products to deliver on their exaggerated promises led to the debunking of medicinal ketchup as "quack medicine," and it rapidly faded from the apothecary's shelf to begin its transformation into the culinary staple we recognize today.