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Comment by MichaelRo | Hacker News Reader

I don't eat stuff that I don't totally, 100% know and trust. Wild shit, never.

There's this fascination of people towards eating exotic stuff (defined as "non domesticated plants"), like wild garlic (Allium Ursinum), I see people selling leaves at the market. A slight mistake and they're buying Lily Of The Valley which looks very similar but will kill you.

Or wild mushroom people. I'm not touching wild mushrooms with a barge pole, couldn't give a s*it what experts say and how great they taste. I'd rather eat bread and water and stay alive than risk kidney failure and agonizing death.

I guess people are curious on experiencing interesting tastes but as they say "curiosity killed the cat".

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In fairness, there’s a method to eating exotic plants that isn’t just “ram it down the hatch”. You smell, look, and feel for anything that seems off-putting. You touch it to your tongue and wait 30 minutes to see if anything happens. You make sure you’re within range of EMS with people around. You eat a very small bite to begin with.

But yeah, unironically please don’t eat exotic plants I don’t want anyone to die for a silly reason.

We have this method nowadays not so available to our recent ancestors, "look it up". Do that one first.

There's a theory[0] that the bloke from "Into the Wild" died from seeds that weren't in his fieldbook because they had never been known to be poisonous at the time. Again, though, I agree - pack your own food into the campsite.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Swainsonine_i...

If it's not in your fieldbook, don't eat it.

This is the only way. It is a tautology, but a plant is only safe to eat if you know it is safe to eat and can identify it correctly.

It misses the step of crushing it and applying it to a patch of sensitive skin and waiting days waiting for rash or boils to show up, which comes before putting it in the mouth.

That said, these sort of strategies are for actual explorers living off the land, not people that have all human knowledge beamed to their phone.

Isn't this method failing with the most toxic of mushrooms? "Death caps (Amanita phalloides) have been reported to taste pleasant.This, coupled with the delay in the appearance of symptoms—during which time internal organs are being severely, sometimes irreparably, damaged—makes them particularly dangerous."

So funk that, unless some life or death situation like facing starvation, there's a zillion things to eat and taste without the need to try what I don't know for sure.

The South American tapir eats toxic plants all day long

But only one leaf off of each, and then eats kaolin clay.

The tapir is wise as was Mithridates, as told by Housman:

  There was a king reigned in the East:
  There, when kings will sit to feast,
  They get their fill before they think
  With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
  He gathered all the springs to birth
  From the many-venomed earth;
  First a little, thence to more,
  He sampled all her killing store;
  And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
  Sate the king when healths went round.
  They put arsenic in his meat
  And stared aghast to watch him eat;
  They poured strychnine in his cup
  And shook to see him drink it up:
  They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
  Them it was their poison hurt.

  I tell the tale that I heard told.
  Mithridates, he died old.

But don't neglect the kaolin.

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