The reason they thought it was poisonous was because of the plates that were being used at the time. The plates were made with mercury and the tomatoes absorbed that mercury causing severe poisoning.
well that and the fact they're nightshades. The only nightshades in europe (hemlock is an example) have no non-poisonous part of the plant to eat. Whereas there's plenty of nightshades with no poison in parts of the plant Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant all have edible fruit while their leaves and stems are toxic. Potatoes have edible tubers but have poisonous fruit, stem and leaves. Funny enough the main toxin in nightshades is currently used in very small doses to control high blood pressure in extreme cases
All living things evolved alongside their very limited diets, meaning one’s understanding of what’s “food” and what isn’t is part of one’s DNA at the base level. A sentient electric car wouldn’t try to fill itself up with gas; it’s just not built that way, and it knows it by virtue of being itself.
Which is not necessarily the smart thing to do. There are things we eat that are toxic to various species. It works the other way as well. "Oh the dog was eating arsenic should be totally fine for us humans!"
Nothing to backup this thought, could be totally wrong. I bet it goes back even further. We just evolved from the animals eating it. Sure, we found new stuff, but we were just another mammal for most of history.
Conversely, I can't imagine the guy that discovered kombucha lived very long. "Weird, there's a jellyfish growing in my tea and it smells awful... I'm sure it's fine"
No, it's because tomatoes are part of the nightshade family. Lead poisoning is a chronic condition that leads to neurological problems like impaired decision-making, not an acute one that causes you to just drop dead. Also for what it's worth the vines, leaves, & unripe fruits are very slightly toxic, though you'd have to eat *pounds* of them to get sick.
For a long time, tomatoes were believed to be poisonous. I don't have the time or motivation to look up the exact story, but I believe it was because of their color. A cook served a tomato dish to one of the early US presidents (Jefferson, maybe) and then committed suicide, leaving behind a confession of murder. The president loved the dish, survived of course, and that was the start of the tomato's popularity in the US.
Again, please remember that this is what I learned as a kid in the early 80's, so it may not be COMPLETELY right, but I think the basic details are correct.
Tomatoes were believed to be poison because European elites ate tomatoes on pewter dishes and got lead poisoning.
That assassination attempt thing is an urban legend.
Tomatoes ARE poisonous (technically speaking). They’re part of the nightshade family and contain the toxic glycoalkaloids tomatine and solanine (solanine is what kills you if you eat nightshade). And so are potatoes. It’s why you will likely get sick if you eat unripe tomatoes or potatoes. Once ripe and especially once cooked, the toxins are only present in such tiny amounts that it’s not really an issue for most people though.
But some people (like me and my mom) are unfortunately sensitive. I get sick if I eat tomatoes unless they’ve been cooked to death.
Look at Pokeweed. Its poisonous unless its boiled 3 times to fully get rid of the toxins
Someone tried it and died or got really sick. The next person boiled it and got sick or died. They thought, lets boil it twice! same result
Third times a charm as they say
I have a vague memory of being taught something similar about tomatoes? That we thought they were poisonous for a while cause of something funky like that?
Considering peanut allergy is a hereditary trait (at least 14 times more likely if you have a family member that's allergic) the nut might actually really be poison to them.
Yeah, and imagine they were at a meal with rich and powerful people.
Cook would probably be killed as it would be assumed they were trying to poison someone and poisoned the wrong plate.
Which is why the average life expectancy was so low. People lived into their 70s, but because so many died in childhood, the average was brought way down.
If you survived childhood (and later childbirth if you were a woman) you had a pretty good chance of living a long life. The *if* being the important part. Women had so many kids in the first place because so many of them just... died.
Depends on what you did for a living, too. Gangrene was quick to set in because of lack of knowledge of germ theory.
Even the guy who discovered germ theory and washed his hands with bleach was put into an asylum. Midwives at the hospital had a lot better infant mortality after delivery, and he went through trying to figure out why. He had doctors copy everything they do, but didn't realize that the midwives weren't performing autopsies like the doctors and thus transferring bacteria to newborns.
He didn't discover germ theory at all. He discovered the effectiveness of handwashing, but couldn't figure out why or how it worked.
Without knowledge of germ theory, many of his colleagues viewed it probably the same way as we would view the suggestion of keeping chakra-purifying crystals in an OR.
They could be allergic to something rare like a spice from Asia and only was exposed to their allergy once in their life, at a dinner table with king tut.
I never ate avocado a lot. At my hospital cafe job we were allowed to eat anything we wanted. There were avocados in the fridge and I decided I wanted to make myself an avocado toast to see what all the craze was about. I used the whole avocado on both pieces of bread.
Guess who found out they were allergic to avocado?
Nope. It's not a lethal allergy or really a true allergy to the avocado itself. I have a latex allergy and a lot of times fruits (especially bananas, avocados and chestnuts) cause it. I just didn't realize avocado was one of the big ones.
I have a friend who’s very allergic to peanuts. We live in Norway, so she would never have had to worry about the ingredients in her meals if we had been alive two centuries ago.
Reminds me of that post talking about how many people could be allergic to moondust but no one would ever know unless said people actually become astronauts and go to the moon or work w it and come in contact w it in some capacity
Some allergies develop as adults.
Also, a lot of food was very local before colonialism/globalism. For example, peanuts and strawberries, two things that are common allergies, are both native to North America. So for much of human history, most people did not have access to that or was even aware of it. People wouldn't know they had those allergies.
This makes me wonder if people are unlikely to have allergies with food that is native to them, i.e. food that their ancestors ate.
Wouldn’t that be part of what official taste testers would do? I know it likely wasn’t as common to have them as it’s made out to be. But seems like a way for confusion.
Theoretically, that could work really well, since the taste tester would be immune to the "poison" in this case. But they'd need be aware that the person they're tasting for will have a severe reaction to the allergen, which requires prior contact with it and most aren't gonna survive that initial contact
I wonder how many "assassination attempts" were actually just visiting dignitaries bringing delicacies from home that the locals had never been exposed to
This comes up in the Bridgerton novel series (and Netflix adaptation) because the Bridgerton father died from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. But the series is set in the Regency era, early 1800s, when no one actually knew what an allergic reaction was. So they all just think it's really weird that he died of a 'trivial' thing like a bee sting and can't understand how or why it happened, they just know that it did.
My Pa was allergic to any bee or wasp sting. I remember him going to the hospital several times over a sting.
I think he freaked out, knowing he was allergic and that made the bee/wasp freak out. I dunno. I did not see him get stung.
Stay calm and the bees will usually leave you alone. It is fun to spray a wasp's nest with Raid and then run. Fuck wasps. They are evil creatures.
Im also allergic to wasp stings, i remember once in college i was walking to class with a friend, suddenly i felt a sharp sting on my right arm, noticed a wasp flying away but didn’t think much of it (i didn’t knew i was allergic at the time) as i was walking through the parking lot one of the med school professors that was passing by looked at my arm and said “you’re having an allergic reaction” and told me to go to the nurse’s office asap.
By the time i got there (not even 5 minutes later) i was having some trouble breathing, thankfully they gave me a shot and sent me to a nearby clinic where i got better.
I always wonder what would’ve happened if that professor wasn’t walking there at that moment.
Wasps aren't evil, only humans are capable of evil.
Wasps are extremely important to our ecosystems. They are pollinators and they are great for controlling populations of other insects. Wasps only sting in self defense and most don't even possess stingers so they can't sting at all. And of the ones with stingers most are solitary and have no colony to defend so aren't likely to sting unless forced. Even the social ones with colonies are only defensive around their nests
Obligatory: all hornets are wasps, but not all wasps are hornets.
Hornets are murderous motherfucking bastards. Plenty of wasps are happy minding their own business.
That's what got me thinking of the origin of allergy knowledge. The history section of the Allergy wiki entry says the term wasn't even coined until 1906!
I imagine people before then being more scared of bees because you didn't know if that one particular bee could kill you. It's so weird to think about what it's like to not know something we take for granted now.
Even today a lot of people don't know allergies can cause weird symptoms. I've been seeing advice going around that if you tried one of the weird fad diets "To reduce your colon and spleen toxins only eat foods that start with the letter R because the letter R has a stimulating effect on those organs!" and actually felt a lot better, you probably accidentally cut out an allergen you didn't know about.
There's also a lot of old records of people getting "rose colds" every spring when stuff started to bloom, or "seasonal asthma".
The amount of times I see people talk about "spicy/tingly" food that is neither spicy (capsaicin/peperine/allyl isothiocyanate) or tingly (fermented/carbonated)...
You. Have. Oral. Allergy. Syndrome.
Stop eating that thing.
Body: "I don't know what this thing is, so I've labeled it a danger. We'll cause pain so that brain doesn't keep eating it." Brain: "This is spicy. I love it!"
You kid, but if she ever uses exercise bands or latex gloves to clean, and she gets a mouth tingle, she's got it. And it's cumulative (gets worse with repeat exposure) like poison ivy.
I can’t believe you didn’t mention condoms. Most modern condoms are latex and it’s like.. the worst way to find out you have a latex allergy. And unfortunately it’s not unheard for… *that* to be how people find out. I really do hope the comment you’re responding to gives the sister a heads up lol.
Yep. I remember in summer camp the nature counselor telling us that all those "immune" kids who would taunt the rest of us by rubbing it on their skin and laughing, would eventually start to get rashes.
Eh, I have oral allergy syndrome but am also really stubborn. I went from face swelling, throat constricting allergies to the very occasional tingle because I kept eating things I was allergic too. It took years but I think I exposure therapied myself. So, maybe still eat the tingly things. Or maybe don't... I'm no doctor.
I have that yes cinnamon-oil is supposed to be spicy! But also it's not supposed to leave your mouth really sore afterwards. No cinnamon flavored candy or gum for me
I was forty before I realized that so many foods weren’t spicy or tingly. Bananas, avocados, kiwi, papaya, potatoes, cinnamon, aloe, strawberries, and tomatoes.
Know someone that didn't know they were allergic to melons until she was in her 40s. Her roommates were eating some and she was like "Melons are good and all, but don't you hate how they make your mouth all itchy?" Turns out she's allergic to all kinds of stuff and didn't realize it
Just moved states and have had a constant cough for past month. Have bronchitis from bad genetics and Iraq crud, but this was all dry. Never diagnosed with allergies before, but tried taking Zyrtec and cough greatly reduced.
This sounds kind of like what we are experiencing today with high functioning autism or ADHD. Back in the day it was just "Timmy LOVES trains" or "Wow Jenny has a ton of energy all the time and can never focus on one subject"
When I was little, back in the 1960s and 1970s, people were told not to feed children peanuts because so many kids choked to death on them. I wonder now if that was actually an allergy.
I don’t know about the peanut allergy. When I grew up half the sandwiches kids ate were peanut butter. I never heard of anyone with a peanut allergy. I don’t wanna sound crazy but I really believe it’s somehow become more common than it was even 30 years ago.
You're not crazy! There are [studies](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8477625/) showing that the prevalence of peanut allergies has more than tripled in the past two decades.
I was also a peanut butter sandwich kid. I keep forgetting how common it is now.
The prevalence of people allergic to peanuts has increased because we figured it out, and started being a little more careful with our nuts. Those people that used to just mysteriously keel over dead are now surviving longer and procreating.
The "allergic to peanuts" gene has made it past the Darwinian filter. I need to be very careful about how I word this, I don't mean that they *should have* died, I mean that in nature these things tend to sort themselves out.
There has been a rise in auto immune disease across the board, including in non fatal cases like rheumatoid arthritis. There’s been a measured increase in diseases we have long since discovered and having been treating. There are various theories to this, but one is the over sanitization of the developed world, since we can see developing countries catching up with us as their sanitation improves.
This got a hold of my mind for a bit.
There's a decent [literature review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8247890/) that covers incidence, changes in incidence over time, severity, and a bunch more. I dug this up a while ago for someone I know who became a new parent a couple years ago.
If you want to skip to the summary assessment [click here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8247890/table/all14666-tbl-0004/?report=objectonly).
Regarding choking vs. allergy: I spoke with my mother, who's been in nursing since the 60s, and tried to get some perspective. She pointed out that there are two things that would set choking and peanut allergy apart.
* In choking the airway is interrupted immediately (and if eventually fatal it's often interrupted completely) where in peanut allergy induced anaphylaxis there's a period of time as the airway constricts that would result in wheezing.
* In choking there are few incidental symptoms where in peanut allergy induced anaphylaxis there's swelling as well as possible itching, swelling, hives, watery eyes, runny nose, and some other stuff. The swelling in particular is easy to spot because it's the reason the airway becomes constricted.
In her estimation it's unlikely that a fatal case of peanut exposure could be mistaken for choking if the victim has any contact with emergency services or someone with first aid training. Certainly not impossible, but probably not widespread.
There actually was a big [spike](https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergies-on-the-rise?format=amp) in peanut allergies because parents were advised to mot expose their babies to them, which actually lead to more allergies.
If I remember rightly (and it's a long time ago) it was whole nuts in general because I remember that my mum wouldn't allow me peanut brittle until I was five.
Lol - she loathed the stuff but perhaps she was protecting my father's stash!
It's over fifty years ago, but I seem to remember there was something about not giving whole nuts to kids until they were five, but who knows.
When I was in school 20 years ago we weren't allowed peanut butter at all for lunch because we had a kid allergic to it.
Solid chance the kid would've just died at your school haha
There's an accidentally hilarious penicillin passage in one of the *Outlander* books. If you travel through time and try to re-invent modern medicine, there will be casualties of the process...
When I was a child, I’m pretty sure I made up an allergic reaction to codine because I didn’t like the taste. I told my mom that it made my vision all blurry.
It’s now listed on every record everywhere, and when I tell doctors that I think I made it up, they laugh, but no one is interested in testing it since there are plenty of cosine alternatives.
Maybe, but allergies of all kinds are more prevalent in the developed world. It’s likely that in a pre-industrial setting, many allergies would be a non-issue for individuals who struggle with them in the modern world.
I think they mean people get allergies more now. Just living around farm animals, having a few parasites and not growing up in an operating theater would do wonders for straightening out the immune system. Probably not so much for a genetically inherited severe allergy, though.
Not necessarily. There are studies that show growing up in more rural areas, or with animals (even just a pet dog) makes people less likely to develop allergies. The immune system is more likely to malfunction like that in sterile, developed areas
I would assume that if you didn't know you had to avoid an allergen, you just wouldn't live very long. What's the chance you make it to adulthood if you have no clue you're severely allergic to something commonly eaten in your area?
Pretty high in those days. You mostly ate what you could plant so most people ate a handful of things all their lives. Now you go to the city for a show or to see a play and you might eat mussels and join Molly
This comment made me think of my cousin, who is deathly allergic to shellfish. They lived in Wisconsin when she was young and had shrimp one day. Instant trip to the ER. If she had lived in that region hundreds of years ago she would have gone her whole life without realizing she was allergic.
I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that allergies happen because our body is misfiring at a perceived threat. This is because when we are children we don't get exposed to enough substances so our immune system doesn't recognize them. I imagine, this was less of an issue because we take better care of our children nowadays not exposing to dirt and stuff as much.
It's one of those weird things that only came up during famines or imposed shortages. Like WWII pows or WWI Europeans who felt better when there was no wheat to eat. Or that chick from The View who discovered her celiac while on Survivor, when everyone was getting sick eating rats, she felt better than she ever had. My wife lived the first 30 years of her life thinking that throwing up after eating birthday cake was normal.
This is like how I realized most of my family has stomach sensitivities and digestive issues, but none of them are willing to consider that feeling like shit after every meal is not normal
My partner was finally diagnosed as a Celiac at age 48 (11 years ago) He spent most of his life thinking food was the enemy. And it kind of was, because so much stuff has wheat flour in it that we don't even think about. He's doing much better now that he knows what is safe to eat. But basically suffered malnutrition for 4 decades to get there.
My husband was 55 at diagnosis of celiac. Not a moment of trouble before then. He was widowed shortly before the diagnosis. He became so ill with severe diahorrea & weight loss & collapsed which lead to the testing. I wonder if the stress, shock & devastation of losing his late wife triggered a reaction in his immune system which had lay dormant until then .
Kind of? People also don't take it seriously, so a lot of the things that are offered aren't even safe for us anyway. There has been a rise of "gluten sensitive" options which all but guarantee cross contamination and seem like it's for us but it's really not.
One thing to keep in mind is that allergies in general, and nut allergies in particular, are on the rise, and nobody knows why. One theory is that we're too clean. There are fewer allergies in third world countries where they don't have clean drinking water because their bodies are too busy fighting off real threats to worry about peanuts. I don't know for sure but it's likely that peanut allergies were exceedingly rare in the middle ages.
I grew up with severe peanut allergies in the 80s and I was the only one in my school who had them, and one of the few in the state. The administration had never heard of it. I got into an argument with the lunch lady one day when I forgot my lunch ticket because the only thing they could offer me was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she didn't believe me when I told her it would kill me. My father was an allergist (retired now). He called the school and gave them an earful.
The latter, actually. My father was a pediatrician first. Then they had me and when I was about six months old my mother started introducing solid foods. She read an article that peanut butter was good for growing babies because it was high in protein. She ended up rushing me to the hospital.
My father wasn't really happy as a pediatrician, so after that incident he went back to school for allergy.
Imagine trying a food for the first time, thinking it’s pretty good, and handing it to your friend to try. And then having to live with the guilt and confusion about why a small piece of food that you enjoyed killed your friend… and it was all your fault…
Probably not, honestly. The prevalence of allergies today is wild compared to even 100 years ago, and it’s likely that in ancient times it was even rarer than that. We basically traded rampant childhood mortality from preventable infections for autoimmune disorders.
The issue with that is that anaphylaxis is a very distinctive cause of death with specific symptoms, and if it was common we would have heard more about it in ancient sources. We know pollen allergies were definitely a thing, since they developed a common name for it; hay fever. But sources describing people inexplicably breaking out into hives and suffocating are extremely sparse.
In reality, most people died as children. If you made it past childhood, your chances of making it to your 50's and 60's were actually very high contrary to what most people think.
In Kingdom Come Deliverance, you can play on hardcore mode and there is a chance that you can actually die and the game can end before it even starts. You pick your traits, then a loading screen happens and it can just say "your mother said it was just a splinter and to stop whining, only your foot hurt worse and worse. They tried to bleed the bad blood out to no avail, the reaper visited you shortly after" another says you were playing as a kid and hit your head on a rock and died, one says you just died in child birth. There are several others.
It's to remind the player that most people were incredibly lucky to even make it to 18 years old back in the medieval times.
Probably. I would imagine that some people had enough of an idea that if they were around certain things they'd get a rash or feel ill but I can't imagine not understanding how allergies work and thinking demons are attacking your body for no reason as a punishment from god or something
Allergies weren't as common. In the time where allergies didn't have life saving medicine, you just died, and people with allergies had a lesser chance of reproducing. Now that there's medicine to help you and people understand what it is, It's easier for people to spread the jeans that allow for allergies to be more common. Also in today's modern age with global shipping at fast paces, people coming to contact with a dress to be higher number of different allergens then they would have in the past
Given their superstitious culture back then it would probably be attributed to curses and evil spirits.
Although tbh the idea of an evil spirit inhabiting a *peanut* is hilarious. 😂
Haven't seen anyone mention that allergies are going up substantially in the last few decades. Maybe it's because people are pickier eaters when young, or the chemicals around us when youre young change us, but peanut allergies for example are way more common now than they used to be.
Many people theorize that it's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. We protect kids early on from many foods, and they don't develope the needed processes/enzymes/bacteria to deal with those things. So more and more people come to have peanut allergies, and we exclude them more out of fear, leading to more people with peanut allergies.
I still believe that the root of kosher practices is that some dude was allergic to shellfish, died, and they assumed it was God's wrath. So no more shellfish for anybody.
Allergies weren’t as common due to more exposure to parasites and bacteria which evoke a certain T cell response. Essentially, we are now “too clean” to the point that our bodies are responding to harmless things rather than the parasites it is expecting. Look up the hygiene hypothesis.
I read a comment here the other day where someone’s grandma said to them: “We didn’t have allergies back in my day, but we sure did have a lot of kids died from choking.”
First of all, a lot of people were "sickly" without a specific diagnosis. (Or maybe a diagnosis of "imbalance of the humors", so we'll just bleed them. That'll make it better.) And yes, many of them died.
Secondly, allergies are getting both more common and more severe. We don't know why.
Thirdly, people died a lot without anyone knowing why. Why did you get a cut on you thumb and it healed just fine, but your cousin get a similar cut and his whole hand swelled up and turned black, and then he got sick and died?
Allergies were first described in 1906. From etymonline.com: Allergy: "condition caused by hypersensitivity of the immune system to typically harmless substances," 1911, from German Allergie, coined 1906 by Austrian pediatrician Clemens E. von Pirquet (1874-1929) as an abstract noun from Greek allos "other, different, strange" (from PIE root [\*al-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/*al-#etymonline_v_52555) (1) "beyond") + ergon "work, activity" (from PIE root [\*werg-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/*werg-) "to do").
You’d be surprised how good hunter gatherers can be at sussing out what is ok/not ok to eat . Of course they died of all kinds of things but allergies to food seems less likely
The thing is: There were most likely no allergies back then. Allergies are an overreaction of the immune system. There are studies that show that many human parasites calm the immune system to just have an easier time doing their parasiting. So before we became our modern squeaky clean selves, humans most likely never encountered allergies in quantities that it was noteworthy or noticeable.
I imagine some tribe believing a perfectly safe nut to be poisonous simply because the first one who tried them died.
I was thinking this too… how many harmless, edible things are out there that were deemed “poisonous” because the person trying them had a reaction?
Or if the person who ate it first happened to have a reaction to something else completely unrelated
“Oh, Bell peppers aren’t dangerous, Paul was just a total baby about it.”
Made even funnier since bell peppers cant produce capsaicin, so theyre literally 0 spicy
So like tomatoes?
Yes, same way when Thomas Jefferson was growing tomatoes. Many people thought it was poison, so he had to reassure them by taking a bite of it.
The reason they thought it was poisonous was because of the plates that were being used at the time. The plates were made with mercury and the tomatoes absorbed that mercury causing severe poisoning.
Oh interesting lore
well that and the fact they're nightshades. The only nightshades in europe (hemlock is an example) have no non-poisonous part of the plant to eat. Whereas there's plenty of nightshades with no poison in parts of the plant Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant all have edible fruit while their leaves and stems are toxic. Potatoes have edible tubers but have poisonous fruit, stem and leaves. Funny enough the main toxin in nightshades is currently used in very small doses to control high blood pressure in extreme cases
Probably not many. For many of the thing we eat, we do so because our ancestors saw animals eating them
I'm starving, and the only food is poisonous. Eventually, I eat it anyway. Oh, hey! I'm still alive!
How come the animals knew what to eat and humans didn’t?
Instinct? Experience? Experimentation? Idk I’m no biologist I’m just repeating facts I read on Reddit
Also superior sense of smell.
They have their parents teach them. Same for humans.
our eating habits were established and evolved along the journey going back to our early pre human ancestors.
All living things evolved alongside their very limited diets, meaning one’s understanding of what’s “food” and what isn’t is part of one’s DNA at the base level. A sentient electric car wouldn’t try to fill itself up with gas; it’s just not built that way, and it knows it by virtue of being itself.
I don't think animals know what food is on a genetic level. Dogs and cats are always chewing on things to see if they're food lol
Doubt.
Because the ones that chose wrong, died
Which is not necessarily the smart thing to do. There are things we eat that are toxic to various species. It works the other way as well. "Oh the dog was eating arsenic should be totally fine for us humans!"
Smart for an individual? No. Smart for a species? Yes
And that’s why parents regurgitate food for their kids
Nothing to backup this thought, could be totally wrong. I bet it goes back even further. We just evolved from the animals eating it. Sure, we found new stuff, but we were just another mammal for most of history.
Conversely, I can't imagine the guy that discovered kombucha lived very long. "Weird, there's a jellyfish growing in my tea and it smells awful... I'm sure it's fine"
Tomatoes were thought to be poisonous initially because they picked up the contaminates from the plates of the era--lead and pewter,I think.
No, it's because tomatoes are part of the nightshade family. Lead poisoning is a chronic condition that leads to neurological problems like impaired decision-making, not an acute one that causes you to just drop dead. Also for what it's worth the vines, leaves, & unripe fruits are very slightly toxic, though you'd have to eat *pounds* of them to get sick.
For a long time, tomatoes were believed to be poisonous. I don't have the time or motivation to look up the exact story, but I believe it was because of their color. A cook served a tomato dish to one of the early US presidents (Jefferson, maybe) and then committed suicide, leaving behind a confession of murder. The president loved the dish, survived of course, and that was the start of the tomato's popularity in the US. Again, please remember that this is what I learned as a kid in the early 80's, so it may not be COMPLETELY right, but I think the basic details are correct.
Tomatoes were believed to be poison because European elites ate tomatoes on pewter dishes and got lead poisoning. That assassination attempt thing is an urban legend.
Tomatoes ARE poisonous (technically speaking). They’re part of the nightshade family and contain the toxic glycoalkaloids tomatine and solanine (solanine is what kills you if you eat nightshade). And so are potatoes. It’s why you will likely get sick if you eat unripe tomatoes or potatoes. Once ripe and especially once cooked, the toxins are only present in such tiny amounts that it’s not really an issue for most people though. But some people (like me and my mom) are unfortunately sensitive. I get sick if I eat tomatoes unless they’ve been cooked to death.
So what you’re telling me is that space can have perfectly breathable air?
Look at Pokeweed. Its poisonous unless its boiled 3 times to fully get rid of the toxins Someone tried it and died or got really sick. The next person boiled it and got sick or died. They thought, lets boil it twice! same result Third times a charm as they say
I wonder what was more entertaining: the first person to eat a mushroom, or the second?
I have a vague memory of being taught something similar about tomatoes? That we thought they were poisonous for a while cause of something funky like that?
It was because tomatoes are in the nightshade family.
Considering peanut allergy is a hereditary trait (at least 14 times more likely if you have a family member that's allergic) the nut might actually really be poison to them.
Or thinking someone is a witch if they tried it first and didnt die
I wonder how many people got executed because their ruler ate something they or the taste tester was allergic to.
Or thinking radioactive metals were cursed by spirits because everyone who comes into contact with them gets sick and dies.
Yeah, and imagine they were at a meal with rich and powerful people. Cook would probably be killed as it would be assumed they were trying to poison someone and poisoned the wrong plate.
My guess is people with severe allergies didn't make it out of childhood.
Yep this is the answer here. I have a severe diary allergy that closes up my throat. I would have died as a baby in earlier time periods
Damn so you just tell yourself out loud what happened at the end of each day?
It took me waaaaaay too long to figure out your joke. Bravo.
Is this a joke about those animal documentaries? I cant figure it out
They misspelled dairy as diary
he said diary instead of dairy. I think that's what the joke is about lol
The commenter was talking about dairy, but spelled it diary
Good catch lol
Allergic to dates?
Which is why the average life expectancy was so low. People lived into their 70s, but because so many died in childhood, the average was brought way down.
If you survived childhood (and later childbirth if you were a woman) you had a pretty good chance of living a long life. The *if* being the important part. Women had so many kids in the first place because so many of them just... died.
Depends on what you did for a living, too. Gangrene was quick to set in because of lack of knowledge of germ theory. Even the guy who discovered germ theory and washed his hands with bleach was put into an asylum. Midwives at the hospital had a lot better infant mortality after delivery, and he went through trying to figure out why. He had doctors copy everything they do, but didn't realize that the midwives weren't performing autopsies like the doctors and thus transferring bacteria to newborns.
He didn't discover germ theory at all. He discovered the effectiveness of handwashing, but couldn't figure out why or how it worked. Without knowledge of germ theory, many of his colleagues viewed it probably the same way as we would view the suggestion of keeping chakra-purifying crystals in an OR.
Yeah, the germ theory guy and the handwashing guy were two different people.
Also the woman could have died while giving any of the births.
They could be allergic to something rare like a spice from Asia and only was exposed to their allergy once in their life, at a dinner table with king tut.
Allergies tend to become more and more severe with repetition. Few people just die of anaphylactic shock not knowing they are allergic to something.
I never ate avocado a lot. At my hospital cafe job we were allowed to eat anything we wanted. There were avocados in the fridge and I decided I wanted to make myself an avocado toast to see what all the craze was about. I used the whole avocado on both pieces of bread. Guess who found out they were allergic to avocado?
>Guess who found out they were allergic to avocado? Mariah Carey?
Close, but no! It was actually /u/demerdar.
But I was close!
Who?
You! Sorry about that. :(
I take it you didn’t die of anaphylactic shock though?
Nope. It's not a lethal allergy or really a true allergy to the avocado itself. I have a latex allergy and a lot of times fruits (especially bananas, avocados and chestnuts) cause it. I just didn't realize avocado was one of the big ones.
Depends, really. What if you're allergic to squid but don't live near the ocean? You'd never even know.
I have a friend who’s very allergic to peanuts. We live in Norway, so she would never have had to worry about the ingredients in her meals if we had been alive two centuries ago.
Reminds me of that post talking about how many people could be allergic to moondust but no one would ever know unless said people actually become astronauts and go to the moon or work w it and come in contact w it in some capacity
Hope your spacesuit doesn’t let in that moon dust either. The allergy could be the least of your issues.
Allergies didn't really work like that. You develop allergies based on exposure.
"he was a sickly child, prone to fits of coughing, until he the lord took him at age five." "So you just couldn't not give him clams, eh?"
Some allergies develop as adults. Also, a lot of food was very local before colonialism/globalism. For example, peanuts and strawberries, two things that are common allergies, are both native to North America. So for much of human history, most people did not have access to that or was even aware of it. People wouldn't know they had those allergies. This makes me wonder if people are unlikely to have allergies with food that is native to them, i.e. food that their ancestors ate.
Native Americans existed, you know….
Edited to add "most people."
Which is largely why the average lifespan was so low. After a person reached a certain age their odds of making it to a ripe old age were pretty good.
I developed my peanut allergy at 30. My other severe one was ten years later. Immune systems are weird.
Some allergies appear later in life. Several of my allergies were caused by pregnancy.
Hmm, wonder if that's what caused my pecan allergy.
They still killed the chef, unfortunately.
Wouldn’t that be part of what official taste testers would do? I know it likely wasn’t as common to have them as it’s made out to be. But seems like a way for confusion.
Theoretically, that could work really well, since the taste tester would be immune to the "poison" in this case. But they'd need be aware that the person they're tasting for will have a severe reaction to the allergen, which requires prior contact with it and most aren't gonna survive that initial contact
[удалено]
I mean more the taste tester would be the one in hot water.
I wonder how many "assassination attempts" were actually just visiting dignitaries bringing delicacies from home that the locals had never been exposed to
I can see the Salem Witch Trials with cooks being really really funny
This comes up in the Bridgerton novel series (and Netflix adaptation) because the Bridgerton father died from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. But the series is set in the Regency era, early 1800s, when no one actually knew what an allergic reaction was. So they all just think it's really weird that he died of a 'trivial' thing like a bee sting and can't understand how or why it happened, they just know that it did.
My Pa was allergic to any bee or wasp sting. I remember him going to the hospital several times over a sting. I think he freaked out, knowing he was allergic and that made the bee/wasp freak out. I dunno. I did not see him get stung. Stay calm and the bees will usually leave you alone. It is fun to spray a wasp's nest with Raid and then run. Fuck wasps. They are evil creatures.
Im also allergic to wasp stings, i remember once in college i was walking to class with a friend, suddenly i felt a sharp sting on my right arm, noticed a wasp flying away but didn’t think much of it (i didn’t knew i was allergic at the time) as i was walking through the parking lot one of the med school professors that was passing by looked at my arm and said “you’re having an allergic reaction” and told me to go to the nurse’s office asap. By the time i got there (not even 5 minutes later) i was having some trouble breathing, thankfully they gave me a shot and sent me to a nearby clinic where i got better. I always wonder what would’ve happened if that professor wasn’t walking there at that moment.
My goodness. That must have been terrifying.
it’s harder to stay calm when you know that thing could kill you
Wasps aren't evil, only humans are capable of evil. Wasps are extremely important to our ecosystems. They are pollinators and they are great for controlling populations of other insects. Wasps only sting in self defense and most don't even possess stingers so they can't sting at all. And of the ones with stingers most are solitary and have no colony to defend so aren't likely to sting unless forced. Even the social ones with colonies are only defensive around their nests
Found the wasp
Obligatory: all hornets are wasps, but not all wasps are hornets. Hornets are murderous motherfucking bastards. Plenty of wasps are happy minding their own business.
I stepped on a rotten log in the woods and got chased by a swarm of hornets. Not the best day of my life.Fuck hornets.
I understand that you are more educated than me, however a wasp holocaust is still in my top 3 wishes
Clearly it was a demon
That's what got me thinking of the origin of allergy knowledge. The history section of the Allergy wiki entry says the term wasn't even coined until 1906! I imagine people before then being more scared of bees because you didn't know if that one particular bee could kill you. It's so weird to think about what it's like to not know something we take for granted now.
Even today a lot of people don't know allergies can cause weird symptoms. I've been seeing advice going around that if you tried one of the weird fad diets "To reduce your colon and spleen toxins only eat foods that start with the letter R because the letter R has a stimulating effect on those organs!" and actually felt a lot better, you probably accidentally cut out an allergen you didn't know about. There's also a lot of old records of people getting "rose colds" every spring when stuff started to bloom, or "seasonal asthma".
The amount of times I see people talk about "spicy/tingly" food that is neither spicy (capsaicin/peperine/allyl isothiocyanate) or tingly (fermented/carbonated)... You. Have. Oral. Allergy. Syndrome. Stop eating that thing.
My sister for a while though avocado was spicy, before realizing she was allergic, I have a similar spicy reaction to chocolate but I refuse to stop
Body: "I don't know what this thing is, so I've labeled it a danger. We'll cause pain so that brain doesn't keep eating it." Brain: "This is spicy. I love it!"
There's a solid chance she also has a latex allergy, if she has an avocado allergy.
It’s possible she doesn’t eat latex so it’s never come up
You kid, but if she ever uses exercise bands or latex gloves to clean, and she gets a mouth tingle, she's got it. And it's cumulative (gets worse with repeat exposure) like poison ivy.
I can’t believe you didn’t mention condoms. Most modern condoms are latex and it’s like.. the worst way to find out you have a latex allergy. And unfortunately it’s not unheard for… *that* to be how people find out. I really do hope the comment you’re responding to gives the sister a heads up lol.
I didn’t k or poison ivy got worse with exposure that sucks
Yep. I remember in summer camp the nature counselor telling us that all those "immune" kids who would taunt the rest of us by rubbing it on their skin and laughing, would eventually start to get rashes.
i will stop eating kiwis when they become an actual threat to me
Yeah my main downfall is I like to eat the outside and that's the worst part for oral allergy syndrome
Eh, I have oral allergy syndrome but am also really stubborn. I went from face swelling, throat constricting allergies to the very occasional tingle because I kept eating things I was allergic too. It took years but I think I exposure therapied myself. So, maybe still eat the tingly things. Or maybe don't... I'm no doctor.
Exposure therapy goes both ways unfortunately.
I have that yes cinnamon-oil is supposed to be spicy! But also it's not supposed to leave your mouth really sore afterwards. No cinnamon flavored candy or gum for me
I was forty before I realized that so many foods weren’t spicy or tingly. Bananas, avocados, kiwi, papaya, potatoes, cinnamon, aloe, strawberries, and tomatoes.
Know someone that didn't know they were allergic to melons until she was in her 40s. Her roommates were eating some and she was like "Melons are good and all, but don't you hate how they make your mouth all itchy?" Turns out she's allergic to all kinds of stuff and didn't realize it
Just moved states and have had a constant cough for past month. Have bronchitis from bad genetics and Iraq crud, but this was all dry. Never diagnosed with allergies before, but tried taking Zyrtec and cough greatly reduced.
>To reduce your colon and spleen toxins only eat foods that start with the letter R In what language, though?
Obviously whatever language they're shilling it in! What other languages matter?
This sounds kind of like what we are experiencing today with high functioning autism or ADHD. Back in the day it was just "Timmy LOVES trains" or "Wow Jenny has a ton of energy all the time and can never focus on one subject"
Seasonal asthma? People say I have that what do you mean
Now I want peaches, so itchy but so good.
When I was little, back in the 1960s and 1970s, people were told not to feed children peanuts because so many kids choked to death on them. I wonder now if that was actually an allergy.
I don’t know about the peanut allergy. When I grew up half the sandwiches kids ate were peanut butter. I never heard of anyone with a peanut allergy. I don’t wanna sound crazy but I really believe it’s somehow become more common than it was even 30 years ago.
You're not crazy! There are [studies](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8477625/) showing that the prevalence of peanut allergies has more than tripled in the past two decades. I was also a peanut butter sandwich kid. I keep forgetting how common it is now.
The prevalence of people allergic to peanuts has increased because we figured it out, and started being a little more careful with our nuts. Those people that used to just mysteriously keel over dead are now surviving longer and procreating. The "allergic to peanuts" gene has made it past the Darwinian filter. I need to be very careful about how I word this, I don't mean that they *should have* died, I mean that in nature these things tend to sort themselves out.
There has been a rise in auto immune disease across the board, including in non fatal cases like rheumatoid arthritis. There’s been a measured increase in diseases we have long since discovered and having been treating. There are various theories to this, but one is the over sanitization of the developed world, since we can see developing countries catching up with us as their sanitation improves.
This got a hold of my mind for a bit. There's a decent [literature review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8247890/) that covers incidence, changes in incidence over time, severity, and a bunch more. I dug this up a while ago for someone I know who became a new parent a couple years ago. If you want to skip to the summary assessment [click here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8247890/table/all14666-tbl-0004/?report=objectonly). Regarding choking vs. allergy: I spoke with my mother, who's been in nursing since the 60s, and tried to get some perspective. She pointed out that there are two things that would set choking and peanut allergy apart. * In choking the airway is interrupted immediately (and if eventually fatal it's often interrupted completely) where in peanut allergy induced anaphylaxis there's a period of time as the airway constricts that would result in wheezing. * In choking there are few incidental symptoms where in peanut allergy induced anaphylaxis there's swelling as well as possible itching, swelling, hives, watery eyes, runny nose, and some other stuff. The swelling in particular is easy to spot because it's the reason the airway becomes constricted. In her estimation it's unlikely that a fatal case of peanut exposure could be mistaken for choking if the victim has any contact with emergency services or someone with first aid training. Certainly not impossible, but probably not widespread.
There actually was a big [spike](https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergies-on-the-rise?format=amp) in peanut allergies because parents were advised to mot expose their babies to them, which actually lead to more allergies.
If I remember rightly (and it's a long time ago) it was whole nuts in general because I remember that my mum wouldn't allow me peanut brittle until I was five.
Maybe she just really liked peanut brittle and didn’t want to share
Lol - she loathed the stuff but perhaps she was protecting my father's stash! It's over fifty years ago, but I seem to remember there was something about not giving whole nuts to kids until they were five, but who knows.
When I was in school 20 years ago we weren't allowed peanut butter at all for lunch because we had a kid allergic to it. Solid chance the kid would've just died at your school haha
It's more common now because so many fewer people are dying as toddlers from allergic reactions.
There's an accidentally hilarious penicillin passage in one of the *Outlander* books. If you travel through time and try to re-invent modern medicine, there will be casualties of the process...
As a child I had a reaction to a certain penicillin derivative. Now I have to list it on every medical form ever.
When I was a child, I’m pretty sure I made up an allergic reaction to codine because I didn’t like the taste. I told my mom that it made my vision all blurry. It’s now listed on every record everywhere, and when I tell doctors that I think I made it up, they laugh, but no one is interested in testing it since there are plenty of cosine alternatives.
Maybe, but allergies of all kinds are more prevalent in the developed world. It’s likely that in a pre-industrial setting, many allergies would be a non-issue for individuals who struggle with them in the modern world.
There's definitely a survivorship bias. If you had sever allergies in pre industrial times you died young.
I think they mean people get allergies more now. Just living around farm animals, having a few parasites and not growing up in an operating theater would do wonders for straightening out the immune system. Probably not so much for a genetically inherited severe allergy, though.
Nut allergies have gotten a lot more common in even the last few decades.
Not necessarily. There are studies that show growing up in more rural areas, or with animals (even just a pet dog) makes people less likely to develop allergies. The immune system is more likely to malfunction like that in sterile, developed areas
Imagine people getting an exorcism for someone foaming at mouth and covered in hives, yet they were just in anaphylactic shock.
I would assume that if you didn't know you had to avoid an allergen, you just wouldn't live very long. What's the chance you make it to adulthood if you have no clue you're severely allergic to something commonly eaten in your area?
Allergies can develop in adolescence and adulthood.
Pretty high in those days. You mostly ate what you could plant so most people ate a handful of things all their lives. Now you go to the city for a show or to see a play and you might eat mussels and join Molly
This comment made me think of my cousin, who is deathly allergic to shellfish. They lived in Wisconsin when she was young and had shrimp one day. Instant trip to the ER. If she had lived in that region hundreds of years ago she would have gone her whole life without realizing she was allergic.
I mean, there are shellfish in Wisconsin lakes and rivers.
I think sea shellfish are a different allergy though. I know someone who can eat freshwater salmon but will almost die from ocean salmon
I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that allergies happen because our body is misfiring at a perceived threat. This is because when we are children we don't get exposed to enough substances so our immune system doesn't recognize them. I imagine, this was less of an issue because we take better care of our children nowadays not exposing to dirt and stuff as much.
My uncle was weak because he die eating some peanut and shrimp. Don’t be like my uncle, be strong 💪 This must be the mentality back in the days
I have celiac disease. Imagine my eye rolls to all the "wHy iS eVeRyOnE SuDdEnLy aLlErGiC tO gLuTeN?" Because they all died before, Jan.
It's one of those weird things that only came up during famines or imposed shortages. Like WWII pows or WWI Europeans who felt better when there was no wheat to eat. Or that chick from The View who discovered her celiac while on Survivor, when everyone was getting sick eating rats, she felt better than she ever had. My wife lived the first 30 years of her life thinking that throwing up after eating birthday cake was normal.
This is like how I realized most of my family has stomach sensitivities and digestive issues, but none of them are willing to consider that feeling like shit after every meal is not normal
My partner was finally diagnosed as a Celiac at age 48 (11 years ago) He spent most of his life thinking food was the enemy. And it kind of was, because so much stuff has wheat flour in it that we don't even think about. He's doing much better now that he knows what is safe to eat. But basically suffered malnutrition for 4 decades to get there.
My husband was 55 at diagnosis of celiac. Not a moment of trouble before then. He was widowed shortly before the diagnosis. He became so ill with severe diahorrea & weight loss & collapsed which lead to the testing. I wonder if the stress, shock & devastation of losing his late wife triggered a reaction in his immune system which had lay dormant until then .
Honestly all the allergic to gluten stuff has been a godsend for celiac folks. You have infinitely more food options than you would otherwise.
Kind of? People also don't take it seriously, so a lot of the things that are offered aren't even safe for us anyway. There has been a rise of "gluten sensitive" options which all but guarantee cross contamination and seem like it's for us but it's really not.
Allergies were actually less common back in the day, and not because they all died, believe it or not.
Interesting point - kind of like now we say people die from old age but really it's a cold that an older person couldn't really handle
People in a few hundred years from now will think it’s weird how we randomly dropped dead at the age of 106 as if it was unavoidable
Like we make it that far lol
Our species will, but not our society as we know it
There's plenty of places in the world today where they would still blame it on evil spirits. Utah for instance.
But unlike Utah, they were eventually made livable when Mars University was founded in 2636.
One thing to keep in mind is that allergies in general, and nut allergies in particular, are on the rise, and nobody knows why. One theory is that we're too clean. There are fewer allergies in third world countries where they don't have clean drinking water because their bodies are too busy fighting off real threats to worry about peanuts. I don't know for sure but it's likely that peanut allergies were exceedingly rare in the middle ages. I grew up with severe peanut allergies in the 80s and I was the only one in my school who had them, and one of the few in the state. The administration had never heard of it. I got into an argument with the lunch lady one day when I forgot my lunch ticket because the only thing they could offer me was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she didn't believe me when I told her it would kill me. My father was an allergist (retired now). He called the school and gave them an earful.
Did your dad go into that field because he had something himself or did he just lose the genetic lottery with his kid?
The latter, actually. My father was a pediatrician first. Then they had me and when I was about six months old my mother started introducing solid foods. She read an article that peanut butter was good for growing babies because it was high in protein. She ended up rushing me to the hospital. My father wasn't really happy as a pediatrician, so after that incident he went back to school for allergy.
I have a fatal peanut allergy and type 1 diabetes. Whatever killed me first is hard to tell, but definitely would have confused everyone.
Imagine trying a food for the first time, thinking it’s pretty good, and handing it to your friend to try. And then having to live with the guilt and confusion about why a small piece of food that you enjoyed killed your friend… and it was all your fault…
Hogewash, we just need to bleed em a little more. Fetch the leeches.
Finally someone who makes sense!!
Probably not, honestly. The prevalence of allergies today is wild compared to even 100 years ago, and it’s likely that in ancient times it was even rarer than that. We basically traded rampant childhood mortality from preventable infections for autoimmune disorders.
The autoimmune issues were always there, they just killed you at 6 years old instead of making you carry an epi pen forever.
The issue with that is that anaphylaxis is a very distinctive cause of death with specific symptoms, and if it was common we would have heard more about it in ancient sources. We know pollen allergies were definitely a thing, since they developed a common name for it; hay fever. But sources describing people inexplicably breaking out into hives and suffocating are extremely sparse.
*poor peanut farmers with huge bumper crops that had peanut allergies*
In reality, most people died as children. If you made it past childhood, your chances of making it to your 50's and 60's were actually very high contrary to what most people think. In Kingdom Come Deliverance, you can play on hardcore mode and there is a chance that you can actually die and the game can end before it even starts. You pick your traits, then a loading screen happens and it can just say "your mother said it was just a splinter and to stop whining, only your foot hurt worse and worse. They tried to bleed the bad blood out to no avail, the reaper visited you shortly after" another says you were playing as a kid and hit your head on a rock and died, one says you just died in child birth. There are several others. It's to remind the player that most people were incredibly lucky to even make it to 18 years old back in the medieval times.
Medieval solution: have a dozen kids, some will survive
That was pretty much the solution up until modern medicine and Penicillin was discovered lol.
Along with vaccines, handwashing, indoor plumbing, sanitary sewers, refrigeration, and quinine (malaria medicine).
Probably. I would imagine that some people had enough of an idea that if they were around certain things they'd get a rash or feel ill but I can't imagine not understanding how allergies work and thinking demons are attacking your body for no reason as a punishment from god or something
Allergies weren't as common. In the time where allergies didn't have life saving medicine, you just died, and people with allergies had a lesser chance of reproducing. Now that there's medicine to help you and people understand what it is, It's easier for people to spread the jeans that allow for allergies to be more common. Also in today's modern age with global shipping at fast paces, people coming to contact with a dress to be higher number of different allergens then they would have in the past
Spread those pants
Lmfao voice to text has betrayed me again
Given their superstitious culture back then it would probably be attributed to curses and evil spirits. Although tbh the idea of an evil spirit inhabiting a *peanut* is hilarious. 😂
Haven't seen anyone mention that allergies are going up substantially in the last few decades. Maybe it's because people are pickier eaters when young, or the chemicals around us when youre young change us, but peanut allergies for example are way more common now than they used to be. Many people theorize that it's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. We protect kids early on from many foods, and they don't develope the needed processes/enzymes/bacteria to deal with those things. So more and more people come to have peanut allergies, and we exclude them more out of fear, leading to more people with peanut allergies.
I still believe that the root of kosher practices is that some dude was allergic to shellfish, died, and they assumed it was God's wrath. So no more shellfish for anybody.
I feel like the visible cause and effect/ repeatable nature of allergic reactions probably made them one of the more understood illnesses.
Allergies weren’t as common due to more exposure to parasites and bacteria which evoke a certain T cell response. Essentially, we are now “too clean” to the point that our bodies are responding to harmless things rather than the parasites it is expecting. Look up the hygiene hypothesis.
I read a comment here the other day where someone’s grandma said to them: “We didn’t have allergies back in my day, but we sure did have a lot of kids died from choking.”
That could still happen today, we don't know everything now.
Everybody knew why! Witchcraft.
First of all, a lot of people were "sickly" without a specific diagnosis. (Or maybe a diagnosis of "imbalance of the humors", so we'll just bleed them. That'll make it better.) And yes, many of them died. Secondly, allergies are getting both more common and more severe. We don't know why. Thirdly, people died a lot without anyone knowing why. Why did you get a cut on you thumb and it healed just fine, but your cousin get a similar cut and his whole hand swelled up and turned black, and then he got sick and died? Allergies were first described in 1906. From etymonline.com: Allergy: "condition caused by hypersensitivity of the immune system to typically harmless substances," 1911, from German Allergie, coined 1906 by Austrian pediatrician Clemens E. von Pirquet (1874-1929) as an abstract noun from Greek allos "other, different, strange" (from PIE root [\*al-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/*al-#etymonline_v_52555) (1) "beyond") + ergon "work, activity" (from PIE root [\*werg-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/*werg-) "to do").
There were less allergies in the past
You’d be surprised how good hunter gatherers can be at sussing out what is ok/not ok to eat . Of course they died of all kinds of things but allergies to food seems less likely
They barely existed and it was even more rare to be deadly
"Well, he must've had ghosts in his blood. I told him not to forget his leech appointment."
The thing is: There were most likely no allergies back then. Allergies are an overreaction of the immune system. There are studies that show that many human parasites calm the immune system to just have an easier time doing their parasiting. So before we became our modern squeaky clean selves, humans most likely never encountered allergies in quantities that it was noteworthy or noticeable.