Robert Gibbon Johnson, also known as Colonel Johnson, was an American gentleman farmer, historian, horticulturalist, judge, soldier, and statesman who lived in Salem, New Jersey. He is especially renowned for the probably-apocryphal story that he publicly ate a basket of tomatoes at the Old Salem County Courthouse in 1820 to demonstrate that they were not poisonous like many other nightshades, as was supposedly-commonly thought at the time. He was a keen antiquarian and wrote a history of Salem – An Historical Account of the First Settlement of Salem, in West Jersey – published by Orrin Rogers in 1839.

The tomato is the edible berry of the plant Solanum lycopersicum, commonly known as the tomato plant. The species originated in western South America, Mexico, and Central America. The Nahuatl word tomatl gave rise to the Spanish word tomate, from which the English word tomato derives. Its domestication and use as a cultivated food may have originated with the indigenous peoples of Mexico. The Aztecs used tomatoes in their cooking at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and after the Spanish encountered the tomato for the first time after their contact with the Aztecs, they brought the plant to Europe, in a widespread transfer of plants known as the Columbian exchange. From there, the tomato was introduced to other parts of the European-colonized world during the 16th century.