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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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