Not sure, but my Chickens won't even eat them so I would say no.

No, the green parts of solanaceous crops are poisonous (but unlikely to do more than make you sick)

Peter - I believe Pepper leaves are the exception to your comment. I've had them in filipino cuisine. My chickens would rather eat pepper leaves than the peppers themselves.

http://www.gardenbetty.com/2013/08/tomato-leaves-the-toxic-myth/

The link is an interesting read but I still wouldn't eat them.

Rodney

I think the key here may be "in abundance". Tomato leaves are not poisonous, though they contain alkaloids (e.g. tomatine) that, in large quantities, can make you sick. In fact, several chefs use tomato leaves to "spice up" their dishes. But they probably just don't taste that good on their own. I believe that the offending alkaloids are also present in green (immature) tomatoes, so eating lots of tomato leaves isn't necessarily a lot worse than eating lots of raw green tomatoes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/dining/29curi.html?_r=0

Tomatoes are in the (very large) nightshade family, but do NOT have the poisonous properties of some others in that family. FWIW, note that tomatine has been identified as a cancer inhibitor. Also FWIW, potato (which are also nightshades) foliage contains additional alkaloids that are not as benign. Probably best not to eat those leaves.

Interesting, and nice post Dan. IME, if I eat more than a pound of tomatoes a day I get achy joints and do not feel all that well. That is ripe tomatoes. But, really, even though we have bred them for centuries, all plants are toxic to some extent. Good to know that the leaves have low toxicity.

Following what Bertolli did, in the article linked by Dan, I have also wondered why deer do not eat things that I grow outside the fence. I eat garlic shoots in early spring (with great enthusiasm, as it is the first veggie after winter), I eat bekana raw, I steam mustard leaves, and I use turnip and daikon leaves for stock and soup. But the deer will not touch them. I have some sort of explanation for the brassicas (they contain iodine blockers, and I eat seaweed and seafood but the deer don't), but no explanation why garlic shoots are good for me and bad for them.

That's an important point. Alkaloids are common in plants, and we eat them every day. There are psychoactive varieties of alkaloids, which include caffeine and nicotine. You can certainly OD on those. As to why animals don't eat certain things, it may just be that they don't taste good to them. The sense of taste is kind of mysterious from an evolutionary perspective, because you'd think that the things that taste best would be the most nutritious. But at least for humans, that's not always the case.

I have had deer eat garlic. They will eat just about anything in the winter here when there is nothing else to eat. They've stripped my xmas hollies. They eat hostas all the time, which certainly must make them ill.

Poison or not, the consensus is that they are "not healthy" to eat and certainly so in abundance. Plus nutritional benefit from them is minimal.

So if one had no other food source I suppose the side effects could be tolerated in survival mode. But to 'elect' to eat them by choice? I'm not that desperate. Compost them and add them back to the soil next year. The soil will benefit from them far more that your digestive tract.

Dave

The consensus is also that parsley will be deadly in pound quantities. There is a continuum, and normally healthy foods like beans are really hard on certain people, red beans cooked in a crockpot can make people very ill. I myself have a really hard time with wheat and dairy.

And it is essential that people understand that the officially sanctioned food categories are at best a rough approximation, with plenty of toxic food falling in and edible foods falling out. Officially sanctioned "foods" include margarine, corn syrup, chemically leavened bread made with modern wheat, non-fermented soy products, sugar, aspartame and seed oils. Tomato leaves are not bad in comparison. i also disagree about nutritional benefits. Leafy greens have always been the main vitamin and mineral contributors from the garden.

Actually, in many parts of the world, tomato by-products such as foliage and stems are used routinely as feed for dairy cows, goats, and sheep. So it must have some nutritional value and is not considered unhealthy for them to eat. In fact, there is some evidence that goats get more sick if they eat ripe tomatoes than if they eat the foliage! I think the main nutritional value is simply the fiber content. But such tomato by-products are pretty bitter, and it seems that for such feed they are mixed with more palatable ingredients.

Go to http://www.feedipedia.org/node/694 and click on "nutritional value". NDF and ADF are different kinds of fiber. You can use that website to look up many different kinds of feed. It appears that tomato by-products have nutritional value to ruminants, but plain old grass is better.

But if you like the taste of the stuff (I don't), there is no reason why you couldn't make yourself a side salad of it. As noted, they are used as flavoring.