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.

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.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Sarah Brown

@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.