Grandma’s Green Ketchup Is Toxic! – Halloween Special

WARNING! This is a Halloween article whose slightly horrific humor may offend some readers!

I hope you’re having a great October! Here’s the next installment in our Halloween special series, coming just in time after (during?) your fall canning.

Happy reading! (If you missed the first article on oxalic acid, it’s right here!)

It’s me again, my little trembling gardeners, the clown Dreadbak Gardnoir, back with another TERRIFYING revelation about what you consider to be good garden vegetables. But beware, today I’ve chosen a particularly INSIDIOUS one! Shall we start with a firm handshake?

Come on, we know each other well now, don’t we? Well… You’re probably right: never trust a clown wearing green socks. And mine are… The same color as our toxin of the day!

You all know tomatoes: no need for a picture to imagine these beautiful red, fleshy fruits that you grow with so much love in your gardens, right? You eat them in salads, you make delicious sauces with them, and at the end of the season… oh là là! You carefully collect all those little GREEN fruits that didn’t have time to ripen to make delicious green jams and ketchups. Just like Grandma used to make…

In fact, she was quite the poisoner, Grandma! Krrrh-hihi-HIK!

Yes, I have news for you: Grandma’s green ketchup is full of toxins!

The Evil Sisters: Solanine and Tomatine

You are probably already familiar with solanine, a poison found in the green parts (leaves, stems, buds) of plants in the Solanaceae family. It is a poison that causes hallucinations, convulsions, and death in excruciating pain… Fortunately, grandma doesn’t make spicy ketchup with tomato leaves (at least, the most loving ones don’t Krrrh-hihi-HIK!).

Fortunately, your green tomatoes don’t contain too much solanine… BUT they are full of another equally dangerous toxin: TOMATINE! That’s the poison we’re going to talk about today, and no, it’s not a joke, it’s really called tomatine… and it’s far from being a character in a children’s nursery rhyme!

How Tomato Sauce Attacks You From Within

When you bite into a green tomato, this sneaky molecule infiltrates your body and then… OH MY! It’s carnage! Tomatine attacks your cell membranes like a dart hitting the bullseye with every throw. It practically pierces your cell membranes, emptying them of their contents! Poof! The cell is empty and dead!

(Let’s hope it wasn’t too big a cell!)

In concrete terms, my friends, we’re talking about violent nausea, uncontrollable vomiting, bloody diarrhea, blurred vision, excruciating headaches, and in severe cases, hallucinations and coma. Krrrh-hihi-HIK!

But that’s not all! This treacherous tomatine also attacks certain enzymes in the nervous system (acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase, if you want to know everything… that’s worth a few points in Scrabble). Without these enzymes, paralysis is just around the corner! One more symptom to add to the list, my dear tomato lovers!

But I’ve saved the worst for last… Unlike oxalic acid, which is destroyed by cooking, tomatine does NOT disappear when heated: it starts to deteriorate SLIGHTLY at 175°C (347°F), that’s all! Even frying at high temperatures cannot destroy it completely, and since canning is done in boiling water, forget about it!

So, are you afraid of Mammy’s ketchup now?

To let you savor these terrifying revelations… Nothing better than some archery! Watch closely as this flaming arrow hits the only green tomato in this harvest basket.

Every shot, like the tomato fight, hits the mark Krrrh-hihi-HIK! Applaud, dear audience, applaud this tomato sacrificed for the show!

A Dose of Tomatine, a Dose of Nostalgia…

How dangerous is green ketchup, you ask? Green tomatoes contain between 7 and 40 milligrams of tomatine per 100 grams… and you make LITERS of it! Each jar is a little toxic bomb that you lovingly store in your pantry, a bomb ready to be offered to your loved ones as a hostess gift. Krrrh-hihi-HIK!

It reminds me of clowns’ favorite ketchup. Do you remember purple ketchup? Around the year 2000, that troubled and colorful time when a clown could go unnoticed in a troupe of teenage girls, the Heinz company marketed purple ketchup. Fortunately, it was just coloring added to normal red ketchup—nothing like the real poison in your green tomatoes!

Have you ever considered bringing back this disturbing trend by adding food coloring to your homemade green ketchup? I’m just throwing the idea out there.

The Quantity to Consider

I have to admit something funny… I am a clown, after all, and I love good jokes Krrrh-hihi-HIK!

So here’s my little final revelation…

Everything I’ve told you about tomatine is perfectly true. The toxic mechanisms, the resistance to cooking… All of it is scientifically accurate! And if some people are PANICKING and warning against tomatine, you should know that in fact…

…you would have to eat between 90 and 500 WHOLE GREEN TOMATOES in a single meal to suffer serious symptoms, including death, with the amount depending on the stage of ripeness of the tomato: very green = much higher concentration of tomatine.

Oh, but wait! There are currently no documented cases of tomatine poisoning in medical literature! Only estimates based on mouse poisoning. It must also be said that this toxin causes damage when injected directly into the bloodstream, but what about when it is eaten? Only 2 or 3% of tomatine is absorbed by the body and the rest… well, it ends up with all the other normal waste from our bodies. TADA!!

The Clown’s Epilogue

See how fun it is, my little gardeners? You’re light years away from danger! So, alarmist friends on social media: you’re right to say that there are toxins, dangerous toxins, in green tomatoes… But honestly… who here eats 100 green tomatoes in one go? Krrrh-hihi-HIK!

In fact, in the United States, green tomato festivals are organized , fried or not! Thousands of people gorge themselves on them every year, and guess what? No one has ever died at an annual fried green tomato festival! And even though they are fried at high temperatures, these tomatoes retain much of their tomatine, and everyone is doing just fine!

Too bad, we missed it this year!

See you next week, my little woolies, for more hot revelations that will pique your curiosity and set your little eyes ablaze with eagerness to read Dreadbak Gardnoir!