I once read a blog post by a plant breeder who was crossing domestic and wild tomatoes to develop tomato varieties that could produce a crop in climates where our current varieties don't grow.
Most of the poisonous compounds in tomatoes have a bitter flavor, so he got pretty good mileage out of tasting a tiny amount of a fruit and not continuing if it had a bad taste. But one time he ate a very tasty little tomato he'd bred, and then several hours later started feeling really sick. For some reason he wrote "sorry" and the identifying info of the poison fruited plant on himself and went to bed instead of seeking medical help. (He may have been living off grid in a remote place or something like that, I don't remember.) Luckily he wasn't too badly poisoned and lived to tell about it.
For anyone interested in plant breeding, modern domestic tomatoes don't have the genes for poison fruit anymore, so you can crossbreed them with each other safely.
I recall Guns Germs & Steel mentioning that not being poisonous in almonds is a recessive genetic characteristic, then speculating that some almonds being non poisonous might have been discovered by accident when a naughty child ate almonds and then didn't die.
Wild carrot still looks like a member of the dropwort family (inc. hemlock) side fact: The reason almost every carrot 🥕 on the planet is orange is because it was bred that way by the Dutch to celebrate their monarch. Before this there were blue & purple carrots too.
Yeah there's a reason we cultivate food. I tried some blue spuds once, it was weird (not the taste) Apparently blue is a very disconcerting food colour for the human psyche.
A bean you can't eat Which you rot to ferment the stone and remove the pulp Which you can't eat Which you have to roast Which you can't eat Which you you have to add to boiling water Which tastes vile (mmmm coffeeeee) and has zero food value...
@Kincaid @David Honess AIUI, that one came from an observation of the effects on goats that ate the plant by a monk who wanted to replicate the effect in humans.
@Becky is not a bear In terms of hemlock, apparently there’s no intoxication: just a horrible death as you lose the ability to breathe, but remain fully aware (it’s a neurotoxin).
Solanine, it seems can cause hallucinations, but only once you are deep into “oh shit, I’m going to die” territory, and apparently you have to get there via nausea, diarrhoea, muscle cramps, and a whole lot of other fun stuff.
The latter is one of my main IBS triggers, so I eat potatoes very sparingly.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •See also: potatoes - early varieties would likely cause death by solanine poisoning, as well as tasting vile.
Almonds - originally full of cyanide and apparently tasted of bleach.
Rhubarb - stalk lovely, leaf gives excruciating death by oxalic acid poisoning.
How desperate and hungry were our ancestors to turn lethal poisons into food crops?
And it would have saved a lot of bother if they’d never bothered with the gluten grains. Rice deserved better.
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legumancer Davy
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I once read a blog post by a plant breeder who was crossing domestic and wild tomatoes to develop tomato varieties that could produce a crop in climates where our current varieties don't grow.
Most of the poisonous compounds in tomatoes have a bitter flavor, so he got pretty good mileage out of tasting a tiny amount of a fruit and not continuing if it had a bad taste. But one time he ate a very tasty little tomato he'd bred, and then several hours later started feeling really sick. For some reason he wrote "sorry" and the identifying info of the poison fruited plant on himself and went to bed instead of seeking medical help. (He may have been living off grid in a remote place or something like that, I don't remember.) Luckily he wasn't too badly poisoned and lived to tell about it.
For anyone interested in plant breeding, modern domestic tomatoes don't have the genes for poison fruit anymore, so you can crossbreed them with each other safely.
IanMoore3000
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Privatised Sentient Water
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Privatised Sentient Water
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Privatised Sentient Water
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Dan Foster
in reply to Privatised Sentient Water • • •@sentient_water
We have purple, white, and orange carrots growing in our garden right now.
Carrot ginger soup made with just purple carrots is awesome. They have a different flavor than the orange ones.
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Rev. GothAlice
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Rev. GothAlice • •@Rev. GothAlice @Plant A Tree & Punch A Nazi @Dan Foster I am firmly of the opinion that the orange ones took off because the purple ones were annoying as fuck to work with.
"Hi! Everything you own is purple now. Kaythxbye"
Dan Foster
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Hey, to each their own 😀
Kat A Klysm :bisexual_flag:
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Kincaid
in reply to David Honess • • •@davespice coffee...
A bean you can't eat
Which you rot to ferment the stone and remove the pulp
Which you can't eat
Which you have to roast
Which you can't eat
Which you you have to add to boiling water
Which tastes vile (mmmm coffeeeee) and has zero food value...
Sarah Brown
in reply to Kincaid • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Becky is not a bear In terms of hemlock, apparently there’s no intoxication: just a horrible death as you lose the ability to breathe, but remain fully aware (it’s a neurotoxin).
Solanine, it seems can cause hallucinations, but only once you are deep into “oh shit, I’m going to die” territory, and apparently you have to get there via nausea, diarrhoea, muscle cramps, and a whole lot of other fun stuff.
The latter is one of my main IBS triggers, so I eat potatoes very sparingly.