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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Some survival teachers will recommand this:

1 - do not do it if you can avoid it

2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing:

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue.

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue.

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue.

* masticate a tiny amount. Same.

* swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount.

If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.

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And remember, kids, this is for plants only. Had someone show up touting this in one of my mushroom foraging groups once, where following this advice for every mushroom you see would probably get you killed within ten foraging trips in most areas.

Mushroom foraging isn't nearly as hard to learn as the general public believes, but you don't do it like this.

The process I was taught for mushrooms that you can identify as an edible species was:

Day 1: Eat a small (1/4 tsp) amount and observe for any reaction

Day 2: Repeat

Day 3: Don't eat any. Observe for any reaction.

Day 4: Eat

The explanation was that individuals can have widely varied reactions to species others find edible. Obviously don't do this for something unknown.

That's a bit overly cautious for identified edibles outside of a couple that can cause extreme reactions (raw shiitake, for example), but it's much better to be overly cautious with mushrooms than to be overly bold.

Eh, its not a bad test. Chicken of the woods is edible and quite delicious. But, some people(including me) will have severe gastrointestinal distress after eating. Mushrooms produce a plethora of compounds that people may react to. Much better to try in small doses the first time.

Indeed; though I restrict doing this to mushrooms I'm familiar with. Neurotoxins abound, and that test won't reveal them.

That test almost certainly wouldn't trigger your CotW GI issues -- I also have issues with CotW unless it is cooked to death, but 1/4t wouldn't do anything, so with that test you'd still be surprised by the GI issues the first time you ate a bunch.

I've bumped into some homesteaders and permaculturists who love the word 'medicinal'. They don't seem to get that 'medicinal' means "the disease is worse than the cure", not "make salads out of this and enjoy!".

If it were just edible it would be labeled edible in the literature. If you consume it in a way or quantity that isn't recommended, well, there's a reason you don't see this stuff in the grocery store.

The reason is next to no company/investor wants to fund double blind clinical research on a natural product to come up with an FDA/medically sound treatment regimen due to there being no monopoly privileges conferred for doing so, therefore rendering it unprofitable from a capitalist free market point of view.

Big difference. It's not that all medicinal plants can be worse than the condition off the bat, it's that no one can make money by figuring out a dosage and putting it through the proper channels to allow manufacture and utilization for that purpose.

Herbalists have been doing their best to maintain a corpus of knowledge around these procedures for centuries. It isn't their fault that our boner for letting the market arbitrate ever aspect of our lives keeps useful research from being done.

I think you misread that. They didn't say that medicinal plants were worse than the condition - rather the opposite. The point they were making was "better than being ill" is not the same as "you will always feel better so eat it at any meal".

I lean heavily capitalist but I enjoy keeping notes of things like this that must so obviously be done collectively. Thanks

All mushrooms are edible, some only once.

Also you can kill cancer cells with a gun

If all that passes, it can still destroy your liver.

The critical word here is survival - it's better than dying from starvation.

Which is also why a lot of training will tell you to straight up avoid mushrooms. There's very little caloric value, and there are much safer ways to get nutrients.

Yeah but starvation probably isn’t a big concern for your average American lost in the woods. You can live weeks or months on your existing stores of food. Waters your top priority in a survival situation. IMO don’t eat anything you’re not 100% sure you can eat unless you’re in really dire straits.

Cicuta maculata, Spotted Water Hemlock in North America, fools all of these. The root smells good and tastes like a turnip. Nobody knows the smallest fatal dose. People who get help breathing may survive.

Chickling peas taste fine, but gradually and permanently paralyze your legs. They affect birds the same way.

> Chickling peas taste fine, but gradually and permanently paralyze your legs.

According to Wikipedia, this is only if you eat them for a long period. Otherwise the first sentence in its article makes no sense:

> Lathyrus sativus, also known as grass pea, blue sweet pea, chickling pea, chickling vetch, Indian pea, white pea and white vetch, is a legume (family Fabaceae) commonly grown for human consumption and livestock feed in Asia and East Africa.

Unless there is some way known to render them safe, as for the other toxic plants noted here: "L. sativus needs soaking and thorough cooking to reduce toxins", "Breeding programs are underway to produce lines of L. sativus that produce less ODAP", and "Some authors have argued that this toxicity is overstated, and L. sativus is harmless as part of a normal diet."

People carry on about cyanide in peach pits, but as a youngster I ate them like almonds and never suffered for it.

> masticate

I haven't heard this word since my SAT-prep classes. It means "chew". In case there are English-2nd language people here.

I guess it is related to greek mastic gum? Really interesting to learn.

It's probably the French-descended version, like thinking and pensive, or belly and stomach

History and Etymology for masticate Late Latin masticatus, past participle of masticare, from Greek mastichan to gnash the teeth; akin to Greek masasthai to chew — more at MANDIBLE

For speakers of Romanic languages, the definition of this word will be more obvious than the definition of the word "chew".

> I haven't heard this word since my SAT-prep classes. It means "chew". In case there are English-2nd language people here.

There's an interesting -- understandable but very wrong -- viewpoint that the right way to form sentences that a second-language speaker can understand is to talk in the way you might talk to a toddler.

Reality is pretty much the opposite. A toddler has perfect grasp of their language's grammar and is likely to know common words, less likely to know uncommon words. For best results, you'd communicate with a toddler using complex sentences and "easy" vocabulary.

A foreign learner has a much shakier grasp of the grammar and may have a pretty spotty vocabulary. But they're also likely to have a dictionary. And uncommon words are much easier to understand, given a dictionary, than common words are. The fact that they're uncommon means they don't have the wide variety of meanings and usages[1] that common words do. For best results, you'd communicate with a foreigner using simple sentences and "difficult" vocabulary.

[1] For reference, here are the ABC dictionary glosses for the very common Mandarin word 做:

1. make; produce

2. cook; prepare (food)

3. do; act; engage in

4. be; become

5. write; compose

6. celebrate

7. be used as

8. form/contract a relationship

9. pretend; feign

10. (slang) make love

11. play tricks to punish somebody

Using "chew" rather than "masticate" is not talking to someone like they are a toddler though. It's the usual way you would explain the action to someone else.

> Using "chew" rather than "masticate" is not talking to someone like they are a toddler though.

> It's the usual way you would explain the action to someone else.

How exactly are you contrasting these? Which words do you think toddlers are likely to know?

I think the suggestions is that toddlers know the word "chew" but not the word "masticate". Is this hard to believe?

My point was that I and most others would use the word "chew" when talking to adults in general conversation, it's not a childish word.

I was agreeing with you

If I say I'm talking to someone like they're a toddler the point of that is I'm speaking differently than I would to an adult. Using the word "chew" would not be something I'd avoid if talking to an adult.

For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.

Does that make sense?

But correcting the original "masticate" to "chew" is an adjustment you make based on the mentality I described. As multiple comments have pointed out, "masticate" is not generally more difficult for a second-language speaker to understand than "chew" is, and in some common cases (Spanish, French...) it's considerably easier. The correction was targeted at native speakers, on the theory that they had limited vocabulary, but justified as if it was targeted at foreigners. If the intention was really to benefit foreigners, that impulse was misplaced, for exactly the reasons I detailed.

> For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.

The example we have here is more along these lines:

A: Salutations!

A: Oh, I'm sorry -- I meant, "how are you?"

This is an example of speaking to someone like they are a child. You come out with a natural (for you)[1] word choice, and then pre-emptively decide your interlocutor can't handle it, so you adjust to something you believe is simpler. You are speaking differently than you would normally.

[1] http://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2009/1/2...

> And uncommon words are much easier to understand, given a dictionary, than common words are. The fact that they're uncommon means they don't have the wide variety of meanings and usages.

A somewhat related phenomenon is that many fancy words in European languages have Latin or Greek roots, so foreign language speakers can correlate with a similar word in their own language, or, for those of us who wasted some of our youth on this, may even be familiar with the word in the original language.

And I was planning to learn Mandarim... =/

It was just an example of a phenomenon that occurs in all languages. Here are the ABC English-Chinese glosses for the verb "play":

1. 玩儿；做游戏

2. 扮演；表演

3. 演奏

4. 开玩笑；玩弄

5. 上映；上演

6. 放音

7. 闪动；飘动

8. 发生影响

9. 赌博

In Spanish (my mother tongue), the word is "masticar", if you're curious.

For me as a Portuguese mother tongue guy... masticate is easier to understand than chew! =P

"Mastigar" => To chew in pt-br

A question: I believe that poison ivy takes a long time to become symptomatic. It can take a week for symptoms to show. If someone were to follow this progression then I believe they would die due to having ingested it before seeing symptoms. Would following this kill you with poison ivy? Or would it give noticeable symptoms to make you stop before ingesting it?

No idea. Many plants will still kill you even with this protocol. Hence point number 1.

From the primitivetechnology guy I heard the same. He also gives another tip, similar to part of ritual from the article:

A lot of toxic plants can be washed with clean flowing water for a few days. Chop them up and put them with a net in a clean natural stream if available for three days or so. Test the end result for the same way you would do with other unknown edibles (armpit, lips, etc).

One could probably try all the mentioned ritual techniques.

The Greeks and Romans used to eat lupine seeds (it's a legume, they look a bit like edamame, but very, very, very high in alkaloids).

The simplest solution was throw them in a bag with a string and soak them in a stream for a week or two. The labor intensive solution involves boiling and rinsing them three or more times.

Legumes are good protein, but come on. Lupines do self-sow though, and you can probably get more than a cup per plant, so I expect you could be looking at an entire field of lupines and thinking it would feed your extended family for a week.

Portuguese still eat them a lot, but they are marinated in a saline solution, which I assume solves this problem. It's quite tasty too.

Brazilians also eat them a lot! (probably it came with the colonisation! =P)

A suggestion -- you can buy survival guides to edible plants, specific to regions. If you're unsure, the boy scouts or wilderness orgs will have recommendations.

If you're going backpacking, tossing one of them in your pack seems like you can shortcut a bunch of the above.

Yes, but remember it's still easy to pull an "into the wild" ending.

One day I was with David Manise, a survivalist teacher. He pulled out a root, and made us tasted it. Young wild carrots. Pretty funny how small it is compared to our domesticated version, we really did a number on the specie by breeding them.

Then 10 meters away, he harvested another one. Looked the same. Only it was young hemlock. It's what Seneca used for killing himself.

The lesson here, is that eating wild plants is always risky, no matter what protocol or book you use.

I still love the idea, romantically, of going in the wood and finding my food with the help of some kind of Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook.

Most modern food does not pass.

Where do you live? lol

Been rubbing a lot of Big Macs on your armpits?

To be fair, it would definitely cause a reaction. Especially if you're still inside the McDonald's.

Or if you work there.

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