The real key though is stinging nettles just simply grow like crazy in your backyard (at least in Ireland) so it's a two birds with the one stone kind of deal, you're gardening as well as cooking. There is also the 'badass' feeling of eating something that previously was dangerous. The heat will denature any stingers in the soup.
We never ate the nettles, just had 1000 remedies for stings, but we did eat a lot of blackberry jam, cobblers and pies.
Can't control the size of other people's dogs.
These days, tyre microplastics and diesel particulates are still a concern, but there's little hard science around the hazards of eating them in small quantities - there's microplastic in basically everything, to some degree, so you're not making it appreciably worse - and agricultural farm machinery is a worse diesel PM offender by far than a street's worth of modern cars.
One would hope that more expensive chocolate would have a value chain to show that it’s been dried in a proper manner.
Nothing beats random sampling though.
I remember dreading them when we'd go through the ravines with friends to our hideouts. :D
We also eat nettle soup with a boiled egg-half. I would not call it bland, it is just a dish that does not scream with its loudest voice in your face.
My dear mother told me this story when I was just a boy. I was enchanted by the idea of this magical stone, too young to consider the clever trick the tramp was playing on the woman.
The sense of cooking being a magical endeavor has stayed with me ever since.