We were arguing about whether mustard or mayo is the superior sandwich condiment this week, and somewhere in that conversation we fell down a rabbit hole about ketchup. Turns out the stuff on your fries used to be sold as actual medicine. With a prescription pad and everything.
In 1834, an Ohio physician named John Cook Bennett decided tomatoes were a miracle food. He published recipes claiming tomatoes could treat indigestion, diarrhea, jaundice, and rheumatism. So far, so quirky — lots of 19th-century doctors had odd opinions about produce. But Bennett went a step further. He partnered with a guy named Archibald Miles, who compressed tomato extract into little pills and started selling them as "Dr. Miles' Compound Extract of Tomato."
They sold like crazy. Newspaper ads ran across the country. Imitators piled in almost immediately, which is when things got ugly. Competing brands started showing up with pills that contained no tomato at all. Some were just laxatives dressed up in red packaging. A few were, charitably, sawdust.
By the late 1830s, the tomato pill market collapsed under the weight of its own fraud. Customers figured out the knockoffs were useless, and the backlash took the legitimate tomato pills down with them. Bennett's reputation never recovered, and he eventually pivoted to other ventures (including, briefly, the early Mormon church, which is a whole separate rabbit hole we are not going down today).
But the tomato itself stayed popular. The medicinal pitch had done its job of convincing Americans that tomatoes were safe to eat — a real concern at the time, since people genuinely thought they might be poisonous because of the nightshade-family connection. Once tomatoes were rehabilitated, ketchup the condiment was free to take over the country. Heinz launched their version in 1876, and the rest is sandwich history.
Mostly that the line between food and medicine used to be a lot blurrier than it is now. People drank Coca-Cola for headaches. Graham crackers were invented to suppress lust. 7-Up originally contained lithium. Half the stuff in your pantry started life with a much weirder marketing pitch than the one on the label today.
Next time you squeeze a packet of ketchup onto a fry, you can mentally thank a discredited Ohio doctor and a brief, scammy pill craze for putting tomatoes on the American table. We promise this is the most interesting thing you'll learn about condiments this week.
If you've got a weird-origin story we should chase down for a future Friday post, send it our way. We collect these like other people collect stamps.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
