Colonel Johnson Eats the Love Apple

September 26, 1820 and the Selenium Micro-Perticaln alias the Wolf Peach alias the Love Apple alias the Jerusalem Apple alias the Tomato alias the Tomato still has not been eaten anywhere in the United States the sinister reputation of this poisonous rich round red Pulpist mass known to botanists and housewives of the flower and an ornamental shrub but shunned feared and despised as nettable food

He's still intact. For Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, the wealthiest man in Salem County, and the first citizen of this southern New Jersey town, has not shown up as he has promised to eat a tomato right here on the step of Salem Court House, before a highly excited but extremely skeptical crowd.

The tomato or tomato or love apple or Jerusalem apple, as you prefer, has never been eaten in this country, and the crowd is certainly in a The September 26th, 1820, Salem, New Jersey. You are...

Early American, a citizen of New Jersey, has promised to eat a tomato, regarded by science, tradition, and custom as poisonous. CBS takes you back 129 years to an amusing but significant moment in the unceasing struggle against ignorance and superstition.

All things are, as they were then, except for one thing. When CBS is there, you are there. You are there, produced and directed by Robert Louis Cheyenne, is based on authentic historical fact and quotation.

And now, Salem, New Jersey, the courthouse square. To keep a tomato here on the single white marble step of the Salem Corder. Yesterday, when word of Colonel Johnson's intention reached CBS News in New York, we hurried down here to Salem to cover the event for the tomato As botanists and herbalists will tell you,