We came around in the end of course, but the tomato bandwagon was almost full before we jumped onto it. Native peoples in South and Central America, where the plant originated, didn’t have any misapprehensions regarding thesafety of eating tomatoes. In fact, some sources claim that they regarded tomato seeds as an aphrodisiac. The French name,pomme d’amore, or “apple of love,” suggests that they agreed, though some experts suspect that the name was a misunderstanding of the Spanish “pome dei Moro,” or “apple of the Moors.”