Tomacco is/was real!

Real tomacco

'College-level plant science courses routinely teach plant grafting techniques using Tobacco and Tomato plants, which are considered easy plants to graft due to the similar biology.

In 2003, inspired by The Simpsons, Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon successfully grafted a tomato plant onto the roots of a tobacco plant, which was possible because both plants come from the same family, Solanaceae or nightshade, and furthermore both plants are dicotyledons (It is not possible to graft monocotyledons, because the xylem and the phloem are distributed in bundles throughout the stem, and therefore it is impossible to align the vascular tissues of the two plants).

The plant produced fruit that looked like a normal tomato, but Baur suspected that it contained a lethal amount of nicotine and thus would be inedible. Testing later proved that the leaves of the plant contained some nicotine. The world's first tomacco fruit, destroyed in the testing process, contained no nicotine. The second tomacco fruit was given to a Simpsons writer. The third was sold on eBay and the fourth was eaten by a Xerox engineer who suffered no apparent ill effects from the fruit. The Tomacco plant bore fruit until it died due to weather-related causes at the ripe age of 18 months, having spent the previous winter indoors.

The process of making tomacco was first revealed in a 1959 Scientific American article, which stated that nicotine could be found in the tomato plant after grafting. Due to the academic and industrial importance of this breakthrough process, this article was reprinted in a 1968 Scientific American compilation, Bio-Organic Chemistry, on page 170.'