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The dose makes the poison delicious.
Jun. 21st, 2020 05:29 pmI went camping for my birthday.
Well, today is my birthday, and we left camp about 2pm, but Thursday when we left was JJ's birthday, so we basically camped as a joint celebration in between. We usually do something in the days between for both of us.
It was lovely. My mother in law took the goober, so it was an actual vacation, and not just my "job" in a new place with extra stress worrying about her falling in the stream, wandering off into the woods, etc.
I did mostly fuck all. :D Sat around camp reading, drank wine, helped JJ cook amazing food (his camp kitchen is the thing of legend at this point, and he's still adding to it, working towards a grand design) and took long rambles to relax. Oh, and I ate the flora, though not the fauna, whenever I possibly could. :3
I like foraging. I've liked foraging ever since I was a little kid, when I did it with blithe disregard for any knowledge of WTF I was eating, but it turns out that this is at least somewhat more fine than you might think. I won't say it was the best idea in the world, but while "poisonous" pants are common, deadly ones are rare. And well, see above.
Humans are strange creatures, for we often like poison, at least in small amounts.
When I was eleven I spent a year living in Texas with my aunt, for Reasons, and her huge back yard was dotted with clumps of something I thought of as "sour clover." The yard had regular clover too, but I wasn't interested in that. That tasted of not much in particular, while the sour clover was, well sour. Very sour. I'd eat a few stems every chance I got, and I still do today! I deliberately planted some in my own back yard, just so I'd have it to hand.
Some time later I learned that this plant was actually called sorrel, or oxalis, and that the sour taste came from oxalic acid, a poison that the plant creates to discourage animals that might want to eat it.
Didn't work too well, did it?
But actually it did, because the dose makes the poison. I can have a few stems to no ill effect, and so could any ruminant, but if I attempted to eat it as a staple, it would definitely cause me some ill effects, even setting aside the fact that I can't really digest most of it.
Plants with toxins strong enough to harm a human in small quantities are quite rare. They exist, so I'm not necessarily saying go out and chow down on every plant you see when you have no idea what it is, but I am saying that I felt zero trepidation about tasting a leaf to double-check that I'd found shepherd's purse while out camping this weekend. And yep, tastes like spinach, so it was either that or miner's lettuce, which I get mixed up every damn time, but they taste the same anyway, so not being able to remember which name goes with which very similar plant doesn't matter.
I taste things all the time while out in nature. I particularly taste flowers. I taste berries on occasion. When something looks interesting, I taste leaves too. I never eat more than a mere taste of plants that are strangers, and I do make a point of knowing what's outright dangerous (few enough plants that you can know all the ones likely to turn up in the whole of north America, and the list of ones that *worry* me is shorter and composed mostly of Jimson Weed, but it's also pretty hard to mistake that for anything else.) I also just...I don't know. Of course poisoning is serious business, but small quantities are so often harmless, and also so often easy to detect. I used to eat sweet peas, for example, which are definitely poisonous. I liked them because they both tasted like peas and tasted bitter. But the bitterness meant I only ate a pod here or a pod there. Because they were super bitter. Because they were poisonous, and poisons are often bitter!
It just doesn't stop us, does it? Coffee is bitter, and technically poisonous, and we like it. There's a literal list of "poisonous food plants" on wikipedia. How nuts is that? Sure, sometimes it's some other part of the plant, or it comes out in cooking, or it's only a problem if you use it as your sole staple. But on the other hand the poisons are the entire reason for most spices. Look up nutmeg and myristicin some time!
Much as I am a forager and as bold as I am about self-poisoning, though, I do have limits.
Which is why when I found some little mushrooms I was 99% sure were edible button mushrooms, the 1% doubt about remembering how to identify them correctly lead me to sigh and leave them there, un-tasted. I will fuck around with maybe eating some random leafy forest green that's not actually shepherd's purse, but I will not fuck around with maybe eating deathcaps or psylocibin, both of which grow around here (and many different mushrooms can look like small button mushrooms when just sprouting.) I don't need a a trip to the ER and I don't need a bad trip either.
The dose makes the poison, and the LD of deadly mushrooms is muuuuuuuuuuuch smaller than that of nearly all poisonous plants. Meanwhile "that is definitely not jimson weed" is much easier to be sure of than "that is definitely not shrooms." :3 (Both are hallucinogens, though anybody who does jimson weed recreationally is off their rocker, the other effects are really flipping dire.)
I harvested a big heap of shepherd's purse, by the way, ate the flowers plain, then sauteed the leaves and stems with butter, dusted with fresh ground pepper (hey, more poisons! Though black pepper isn't especially toxic to humans, not even in large doses) and it was really fucking delicious.
Well, today is my birthday, and we left camp about 2pm, but Thursday when we left was JJ's birthday, so we basically camped as a joint celebration in between. We usually do something in the days between for both of us.
It was lovely. My mother in law took the goober, so it was an actual vacation, and not just my "job" in a new place with extra stress worrying about her falling in the stream, wandering off into the woods, etc.
I did mostly fuck all. :D Sat around camp reading, drank wine, helped JJ cook amazing food (his camp kitchen is the thing of legend at this point, and he's still adding to it, working towards a grand design) and took long rambles to relax. Oh, and I ate the flora, though not the fauna, whenever I possibly could. :3
I like foraging. I've liked foraging ever since I was a little kid, when I did it with blithe disregard for any knowledge of WTF I was eating, but it turns out that this is at least somewhat more fine than you might think. I won't say it was the best idea in the world, but while "poisonous" pants are common, deadly ones are rare. And well, see above.
Humans are strange creatures, for we often like poison, at least in small amounts.
When I was eleven I spent a year living in Texas with my aunt, for Reasons, and her huge back yard was dotted with clumps of something I thought of as "sour clover." The yard had regular clover too, but I wasn't interested in that. That tasted of not much in particular, while the sour clover was, well sour. Very sour. I'd eat a few stems every chance I got, and I still do today! I deliberately planted some in my own back yard, just so I'd have it to hand.
Some time later I learned that this plant was actually called sorrel, or oxalis, and that the sour taste came from oxalic acid, a poison that the plant creates to discourage animals that might want to eat it.
Didn't work too well, did it?
But actually it did, because the dose makes the poison. I can have a few stems to no ill effect, and so could any ruminant, but if I attempted to eat it as a staple, it would definitely cause me some ill effects, even setting aside the fact that I can't really digest most of it.
Plants with toxins strong enough to harm a human in small quantities are quite rare. They exist, so I'm not necessarily saying go out and chow down on every plant you see when you have no idea what it is, but I am saying that I felt zero trepidation about tasting a leaf to double-check that I'd found shepherd's purse while out camping this weekend. And yep, tastes like spinach, so it was either that or miner's lettuce, which I get mixed up every damn time, but they taste the same anyway, so not being able to remember which name goes with which very similar plant doesn't matter.
I taste things all the time while out in nature. I particularly taste flowers. I taste berries on occasion. When something looks interesting, I taste leaves too. I never eat more than a mere taste of plants that are strangers, and I do make a point of knowing what's outright dangerous (few enough plants that you can know all the ones likely to turn up in the whole of north America, and the list of ones that *worry* me is shorter and composed mostly of Jimson Weed, but it's also pretty hard to mistake that for anything else.) I also just...I don't know. Of course poisoning is serious business, but small quantities are so often harmless, and also so often easy to detect. I used to eat sweet peas, for example, which are definitely poisonous. I liked them because they both tasted like peas and tasted bitter. But the bitterness meant I only ate a pod here or a pod there. Because they were super bitter. Because they were poisonous, and poisons are often bitter!
It just doesn't stop us, does it? Coffee is bitter, and technically poisonous, and we like it. There's a literal list of "poisonous food plants" on wikipedia. How nuts is that? Sure, sometimes it's some other part of the plant, or it comes out in cooking, or it's only a problem if you use it as your sole staple. But on the other hand the poisons are the entire reason for most spices. Look up nutmeg and myristicin some time!
Much as I am a forager and as bold as I am about self-poisoning, though, I do have limits.
Which is why when I found some little mushrooms I was 99% sure were edible button mushrooms, the 1% doubt about remembering how to identify them correctly lead me to sigh and leave them there, un-tasted. I will fuck around with maybe eating some random leafy forest green that's not actually shepherd's purse, but I will not fuck around with maybe eating deathcaps or psylocibin, both of which grow around here (and many different mushrooms can look like small button mushrooms when just sprouting.) I don't need a a trip to the ER and I don't need a bad trip either.
The dose makes the poison, and the LD of deadly mushrooms is muuuuuuuuuuuch smaller than that of nearly all poisonous plants. Meanwhile "that is definitely not jimson weed" is much easier to be sure of than "that is definitely not shrooms." :3 (Both are hallucinogens, though anybody who does jimson weed recreationally is off their rocker, the other effects are really flipping dire.)
I harvested a big heap of shepherd's purse, by the way, ate the flowers plain, then sauteed the leaves and stems with butter, dusted with fresh ground pepper (hey, more poisons! Though black pepper isn't especially toxic to humans, not even in large doses) and it was really fucking delicious.