Man spent 40 years perfecting a lettuce cigarette
In 1959, a colleague challenged New Jersey pharmacist Puzant Torigian to make a nicotine-free cigarette. He became obsessed. Over the following years, he tested over 200 plants — kale, grape leaves, cabbage, spinach, carrot tops, peanut plants, rhubarb, sunflower, even tomato leaves — before settling on the winner: lettuce. When properly cured, it burned like tobacco but contained no nicotine and produced lower tar, reports Atlas Obscura.
By 1965, Torigian was producing 90,000 packs of “Bravo Smokes” a month at a factory in Hereford, Texas. The lettuce — both romaine and iceberg — was cured with natural enzymes, pressed into sheets, shredded, and rolled just like regular cigarettes. But Torigian wasn’t trying to give people a safer way to smoke forever. He’d become convinced that inhaling any burning plant was dangerous. Bravo was designed as a cessation tool: you’d smoke lettuce instead of tobacco until you didn’t need either.
The name came from his wife Joanne. When he told her about the project, she exclaimed “Bravo, bravo!” in her Italian way, and he said, “That’s what I’ll call it.” They’d both been smokers. She quit cold turkey after he sent her to see a chronic smoker’s lung at a hospital. He needed more help — and Bravo worked for him.
The company folded in 1972 due to a falling out among investors, not lack of demand. Torigian relaunched it in the late 1990s, still chasing the dream. He died in late 2021 at 99, having spent more than four decades trying to help people quit smoking by smoking vegetables.