Somewhere in the Cooking Issues archive there's a Dave Arnold rant about how dangerous foraging apiaceae (I remember him referring to them as umbillifers, or maybe less accurately as umbillaceae, which I found memorable because it describes the shape of the plant vividly) is --- because there's delicious stuff there but also some of the more widespread umbillifers can straight up kill you.
> There are many reports of the spotted water hemlock’s use as a suicide tool among the Iroquois nation; the most commonly cited occasion is upon the discovery of marital infidelity. There are plenty of other ways to take your own life; the spotted water hemlock is specifically chosen because it causes the most horrible, painful death possible.
why would they go for the most painful death possible?
People didn't always do certain things (like committing suicide) the easy way, they often did them in the most dramatic way possible. This was generally true up until around the Industrial Revolution.
In the news quite recently a woman doused herself with gasoline and lit it in protest over wholesale Gaza slaughter. She does not seem to have slowed the process.
As Thích Nhất Hạnh said, it should not be seen as a suicide but as a way to draw the world's attention to the situation in Vietnam. The distinction is crucial. Cannot remember where I read it.
They could be forced into taking it. Or they may choose the painful death to erase the shame of the infidelity, similar to how seppuku was sometimes done.
Though the effects of both poisons couldn't differ more.. gentle death one might choose in certain circumstances vs death you wouldn't even wish your worst enemy.
Recommend reading the article, not only because of this detail and that your "seems" would have become certainty before posting, it has even more nice points ;)
> There are toxic plants that may kill you but will be nice about it. “Poison hemlock is much better,” says “Wildman” Steve Brill, a New York based foraging expert and tour guide with an encyclopedic knowledge of the edible and not-so-edible plants of the Northeast. “You just stop breathing and your heart stops.” Socrates, when choosing death over a life in exile as an old man, chose poisoning by poison hemlock. It was a gentle death.
> Poison hemlock is related to spotted water hemlock, but, um, only taxonomically, not in the way its poisons affect mammals. Here is Brill’s explanation of what happens when you eat spotted water hemlock:
> Every single muscle starts firing and contracting, so you have convulsions, you chew your tongue into ribbons, you vomit but then you can’t open your mouth because the jaw muscles are contracting 10 or 20 times as hard as they normally do, and you die a horrible death
There’s also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_(plant) from the same family (carrots). If you touch it and go in the sun you get crazy sunburns. It is an invasive species common in eastern europe (ukraine, russia) where it grows out of control and apparently has been detected in 16 states here
The article mentions that spotted water hemlock is not particularly common, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for poison hemlock. It is a omnipresent weed around here (Pacific Northwest). And it remains poisonous for years after it dies, which makes disposal a problem. This also is a huge issue if it gets into a hay-field. I have heard that some people have tried to burn it, with very poor results.
Also, in this terrible plant family is Cow-Parsnip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_maximum. If touched, it causes your skin to be excessively sensitive to the sun. It is basically reverse-sunscreen.
Semi-serious question: can I keep a poison hemlock as pet, just in case I need it in the future? I.e., are there laws around growing the plant, just like it'd be for marijuana?
Also, are there more details on Socrates' intake of the said plant--any particular recipe or precautions?
Socrates used regular poison hemlock. He would have recommended not using spotted water hemlock for anything but on his political enemies, who had a point.
Interesting that it doesn't use the normal advertisements of danger (bright red colour, bad taste, etc.). Instead the thing looks harmless, tastes nice, and kills mammals at a small dose. I suppose it works to protect from anything that herds since killing one is sufficient to keep the herd away.
Their ancestors were smart enough to stay out of that particular thicket, afterward.
Typically they have dug up and eaten the tasty-smelling tuber. The most daring cow chowed it while the others goggled, and remembered the smell forever after.
I was on one of those investigative rabbitholes and stopped in at various rodent traps. One of the antiques was this contraption with eight holes, in a line, in which rats could stick their heads and be swiftly killed via your basic spring-loaded spinal injury.
Anyway, you could have seven dead or dying rats, heads in, and another rat would clamber over the victims, both the twitching and the finally-still, just to stick its head in the only open hole. The presence of kin corpses and dying nestmates was an insufficient deterrent.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Funny - I was just picking a ton of these out of my yard last summer. They smelled like carrots, which I found interesting. I researched them at that time and realized they were indeed known as a "wild carrot"
That is probably a different plant also known as Queen Anne's Lace, which is an edible wild carrot that is invasive and everywhere in the midwest and harmless. It is unfortunate that the two look similar. Queen Anne's Lace thrives in dry conditions whereas spotted water hemlock as the name implies grows in damp conditions.
The ONLY sure fire way to know you have QAL is by the presence of a central flower, usually black or purple, sometimes red. QAL also bunches up more than hemlock (which has gaps in between the flower clusters), but regardless, you should never eat it unless you know for sure. QAL is like a very fibrous carrot
There are quite a few plants which can kill you but it's probably better that they're not widely known. I knew a guy who worked as an ER doc and he talked about how in Sri Lanka there was a widely known and common plant which could kill you, and people overdosed on it regularly (suicide attempts).
It disrupts the nervous system, so in that sense it is similar. There is a fundamental difference in action though, pesticides (like most nerve agents) are based on a structure called an organophosphate (general structure O=P(OR)3 ). Most pesticides and nerve agents act on something called acetylcholine (ACh) or the enzyme that breaks it down, called acetylcholineesteraste (AChE). There are other classes though, such as sodium channel blockers, and in the case of water hemlock it's a bit strange.
No one is 100% sure just what the mechanism is, but it appears to have something to do with GABA. In particular cicutoxin (the active molecule) seems to hyper-excite the receptors involving GABA, which leads to seizures and death. It's interesting in that sense, it's much more violent than most nerve agents, for which the seizures and so on are just side-effects, not the lethal mechanism.
> In particular cicutoxin (the active molecule) seems to hyper-excite the receptors involving GABA
Other way round. Cicutoxin is an ANTagonist to GABA receptors, pretty much the opposite of classical sleeping pills (benzodiazepines and z-drugs). As such, taking it is probably extremely similar to delirium tremens, the potentially deadly manifestation of alcohol, benzo or z-drug withdrawal after severe addiction. A horrid way to go.
Hyper excitation of GABA receptors would lead to coma and potentially death via cardiac arrest or pulmonary aspiration -if it happens, death by benzo overdose must be a truly gentle death, but rather unreliable even with extreme dosages I would assume.
Homeopathic snake oils are diluted so many times they pretty much guarantee there are no traces of original substance left (they believe the more times it is diluted, the more potent healing powers it gets). I think default is 30 times dilution, each time with ratio 1:100, so you're left with 1e-60 of original, so if you'd put all atoms from milky way (1e68) and start homeopathic them, you'd be left with number of atoms that make ie. a virus (influenza has roughly 1e8 atoms).
I had no knowledge of snake oil terms, so I was confused by the "30C is just water". So after reading your comment, I had to go look it up and came across this [0] with description of the terms. For anyone else ignorant of snake oils ;-)
Surely, you're not implying that someone making a snake oil would be doing so in a non-sterile environment without any kind good manufacturing practices being used. These things seem so trust worthy. I mean, even the government feels they need no regulations because they do it so well themselves.
> Homeopathic medicines are prepared by potentization where the dynamic curative power of the medication is aroused, so homeopathic medicines produce negligible side effects.
Celery is one of the main vegetables in mirepoix (an essential part of French and French-influenced cooking), soffritto (an essential part of Italian cooking used for most sauces), and is also used in many soups, stocks, and stews. I think you like it a lot more than you realize; you're just only thinking of eating it whole, raw.
Even raw it can be lovely, very finely diced into something like egg or chicken salad. It adds a bit of savory crunch, a lightness and some of that aromatic zip.
Finely diced pickle can do the same thing though, for people who really hate celery.
Perhaps there is a generic situation at play? Cilantro to me tastes like soap, and celery to me tastes like grass mixed with paint thinner. I can't tolerate it in any form.
But I love to cook and adore every other vegetable. Just celery and cilantro are abhorrent to my palate.
Hey fellow cilantro-sufferer, I also have that reaction to it. I love so much of the food it's in though, and cooks often struggle to understand that it isn't pickiness, it's vile to me. I... also find large amounts of raw celery to be unpleasant, although I like it well chopped into a rich mayo-based salad. Still you can barely taste in in there.
Well, carrot, celery, and cilantro (coriander) all share a common ancestor and it's not too fanciful to suppose that they might contain the same compounds that trigger people who have the aldehyde-detecting gene (ORA62) that is responsible for the dislike of cilantro.
There was a study written up here where the authors sequenced the cilantro genome and compared it to other plants, if you want to go down this rabbit hole.
This is pretty common, I can taste even very small amounts as a soapy flavor. I think it’s genetic, a chef I met once said they take a test for it in school so they know for sure but if you have it there’s really no doubt. Fwiw celery tastes good to me so they are probably unrelated phenomena.
I'll eat it in specific contexts: chinichurri and salsa verde, which have sufficient garlic to mask the taste. But I do feel a bit wistful that I can't truly enjoy it.
I’m not aware of a bison grass vodka from Russia. I quite like the Polish bison grass vodka (Żubrówka). Though perhaps that’s your point.. the Russian variant having notes of paint thinner?
The bison grass mostly adds coumarin as a flavor component, which is the same component that gives Tonka beans their main flavor (also the popular Waldmeister in Germany). Personally a fan of that Vodka, never found it tastes anything like grass. But maybe we talk about a different one, I only know the polish one from Zubrowka.
For me it's cruciferous veg. Broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, etc. Even smelling them makes me nauseous.
There's this traditional Norwegian dish called fårikål. Literally means "mutton in cabbage". Cooked in a casserole for hours. It's the freaking national dish too. This shit is so fragrant, if someone at the table next to me orders it my appetite is basically gone.
Right, it's an "aromatic," and many dishes wouldn't taste right without it. Or, if you only ever eat dishes that don't call for it, I feel sorry for you.
To me, all dishes with celery taste worse. I can't stand the flavor or smell of it. When I'm cooking, I always omit it. I'm not a picky eater otherwise.
I've heard there's a gene that makes cilantro taste like soap to people who have it. Being that celery and cilantro are related, I wonder if there's something similar going on? Celery certainly doesn't taste anything remotely like lighter fluid or turpentine to me. Maybe even the same gene?
Is there some genetic condition that makes you hate the taste of pretty much all that plant family? I like a very slight anise flavour in cookies, and carrots are pretty versatile, but all of the others are on my "everybody but me loves them but you can ruin any dish with them" list.
Super tasters is genetic condition for heightened and different taste. Super tasters commonly have problem with coriander/cilantro having soapy taste. But could see more of the family being problem for some people. I wonder if carrots are fine because those eat the root and not the leaves.
There must be. I posted a similar comment. I can't stand the taste of celery (tastes like grass and paint$ or cilantro (tastes like soap), and carrots also have a hint of soapy taste to my palate. Otherwise, I love all vegetables and cook often.
Its quite salty for a vegetable. Also try buying some from a chinese or farmers market and you'll find more strongly flavored celery than the generic grocery store stuff that is crunchy water
I eat it raw daily. I would say it's a developed taste but i liked it the moment I had it. My sibling on the other hand would not even eat a meal if celery was cooked with it.
I used to think like this. It’s mainly because my only encounters with celery were teachers who thought celery and peanut butter was a good “snack” for kids. Gross.
But in cooking, it’s great. The purpose of celery is to break up the rush of flavor that sauce brings. For example in a stir fry, meat and rice tend to take on the flavor of the sauce (or even become enhanced by it). Celery does not. Sauce doesn’t stick to it. Celery adds dynamics to a dish by adding a pause to the flavor. And in the context of a mouth full of meat and sauce and rice and peppers, celery gives it all meaning by being none of that.
> People enzymatically convert corn sugar to match what comes out of sugar cane. Straight-up corn sugar is harmless, "high-fructose" is deadly.
Corn sugar is the monosaccharide glucose (more specifically its a specific stereoisomer of glucose called dextrose or D-glucose).[1] Cane sugar is sucrose, which is a disaccharide of composed of glucose and fructose.[2]
There is no way to enzymatically convert a monosaccharide to a disaccharide, you would need to be joining the glucose together with a fructose, which, as we are not fruit don't just have naturally occurring in our body.
When you eat sucrose, the enzyme sucrase-isomaltase located in the small intestine catalyzes its hydrolysis into fructose and glucose.[3,4] High-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of glucose and fructose which is exactly what you get when your body enzymatically breaks down sucrose.[5]
So corn sugar is glucose. Sugar can is sucrose. And high-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of "pre-digested" sucrose. I think that high-fructose corn syrup is probably bad in that its in everything and cheap, but I can't see how its any worse than regular sugar. And corn sugar is not the same as regular sugar, it lacks fructose entirely.
Yet, millions of tons of corn sugar is, in fact, made via industrial enzymatic process into "high-fructose corn sugar", mainly because it is sweeter when cold than straight glucose, and doesn't absorb water from air as readily. Cane sugar in beverages has typically already separated into glucose and fructose, no sucrase needed.
Fructose is a problem because it is processed as a toxin, in the liver. Fructose was invented by flowering plants in the early Cretaceous because, erg for erg, it tasted sweeter to insects. Our evolutionary ancestors never had need to evolve means to process much of it. The liver makes it into fat, wraps it in cholesterol, and ships it off to the fat cells to store, emitting lots of uric acid as waste. Too much uric acid causes lots of problems.
If production of cholesterol is inadequate, worse things happen.
Fructose is a minor problem if consumed along with enough fiber, because enough fiber delays absorption long enough for your intestinal bacteria to get a crack at it first. (They can eat fructose all day long.) But modern industrial "food" processing is all about eliminating fiber, and delivering the straight-up stuff. The only actual fruit without enough fiber is, oddly, grapes.
> Our evolutionary ancestors never had need to evolve means to process much of it.
That's not true because about half of the carbs in fruits and vegetables is fructose. (Cherries have the lowest ratio I know about at about 30%; apples and pears have the highest at around 70%; most fruits and vegetable are almost exactly half fructose and half glucose.)
Also, if you eat a spaghetti meal or a lot of potatoes (which rapidly become glucose and get absorbed) your body will convert a decent amount of the glucose into fructose according to researcher Robert Lustig MD.
(I don't disagree with your overall point that most affluent people consume too much fructose. In the ancestral environment however calories were scarce enough that people should have and did eat almost all the fructose they could find.)
Worth keeping in mind that Lustig is a crank who says a lot of things that are beyond what is supported by the science and most likely untrue. I don't know if that particular statement is true or not, but I am less likely to believe it with Lustig's name attached than without it.
Prehistorically, fructose without intermixed fiber was found mainly in honeycombs, i.e. rarely. Beverages are the way most people get the most concentrated blasts of fructose nowadays. With enough fiber, intestinal bacteria get first crack at it. (Keep your intestinal bacteria well-fed; hungry bacteria will eat you instead.)
Your body has processes to produce fructose, which is then processed by the liver to fat for storage, when preparing for lean times seems indicated.
It is hard to research, but it seems like mangoes have the highest proportion of fructose. Honey has more fructose than glucose, and agave syrup is mostly fructose.
Again, worth pointing out that none of this fructose stuff is really operable, because there isn't a mainstream "low-fructose" sugar that anyone uses as a sweetener†. As you acknowledged across the thread: HFCS is (if not chemically identical) bioavailably the same thing as cane sugar.
† Other sugars get used for functional reasons other than sweetening, of course.
You can buy straight glucose, sold as "corn sugar", from brewery suppliers. In the US they would like to sell you a 50-pound bag for $100, but a 10-pound bag for $20 should last you a long time. It all comes, ultimately, from Tate and Lyle. It may also be labeled "dextrose"; same stuff. They will let you pay as much as you like. (Some claim to offer "organic", but there is really no way to tell and, by the evidence, they are probably just re-bagging it with a new label, and lying. Enforcement is nonexistent.)
There are other sugars, maltose, maltodextrin, [not lactose] with varying numbers of glucose molecules stitched end on end, collectively amyloses. With enough, it becomes starch.
There is also left-handed enantiomeric glucose, zero calories, expensive, and racemic glucose, 50% calories. The latter is made from raw chemicals. Guessing they make the former by feeding the latter to bugs and selling what is left over, although there are crystallization tricks.
I bake with corn sugar, and it works fine. I have found that hot chocolate made with it is unsatisfying without a half-teaspoon of table sugar added. Or a marshmallow.
The health benefits of table sugar over HFCS are a myth. High-fructose corn syrup is higher in fructose relative to normal corn syrup, not to sugar. The HFCS used in processed foods has the same percentage of fructose as table sugar; your body does not see a meaningful difference between the two. The whole HFCS thing is Mercola science.
Sugar is certainly not good for you. The problem with HFCS is that it makes it cheap easy for the food industry to create hyperpalatable foods jacked with sugar. But choosing foods with "cane sugar" does nothing to improve health outcomes.
"Table sugar" and HFCS are, chemically, the same thing.
HFCS has the commercial benefit of being substantially cheaper than cane sugar, in part via massive subsidy by the US federal government, and in part because maize is so fantastically productive of starch cheap to convert to glucose and thence via chemical-engineered wizardry to fructose.
HFCS originated as a clever way to consume the massive influx of surplus maize produced by the Nixon adminstration's agricultural subsidies for mono-crop maize production instituted under Earl Butz, still in place. The public health catastrophe we still suffer is just an unfortunate side effect of the disproportionately representated rural voting bloc that keeps the subsidies in place.
Tobacco and sugar cane don't belong in the same list. It's like dismissing the Boeing door-flying-off incident by saying "Don't pay it any mind, motorcycles are far more dangerous overall"
And then they die, in droves, but neatly out of sight. "Nothing to see here, just millions dying from lung and throat cancer, and from complications from fatty-liver disease." (Vs. barely a couple hundred lately via Boeing, conveniently overseas. Between flying 737-Max and tobacco, I would recommend the former.)
No. Fat, in particular, has been blamed for the illnesses caused in fact by sugar and by hydrogenated oils (called "trans fat" on US food labels). Most people still believe that saturated fat is the cause of those illnesses, and still prefer "low-fat" food laced, instead, with sugar.
Technically, trans fats were supposed to be banned in US food, but major corporations get from the FDA a "temporary exception", year after year, to put it in anyway, with no requirement to reveal it as "trans fat" on the label. It has been well-known as a major cause of heart disease since the '70s, but took until late in the last decade to get (technically) banned.
Tobacco very rarely kills due to acute toxicity though. I mean, technically nicotine is a very potent and lethal toxin, but it's also so quickly absorbed and so nauseating that you have to go out of your way to extract the nicotine and take it through means that don't allow purging it from your body to even have a chance at reaching those toxicity levels.
In other words, hemlock and tobacco are toxic in very different ways and it's a bit strange to say one is more toxic than the other at all. Accidental tobacco poisoning is hardly a thing at all.
On the subject of smell, there are some people that can distinguish wild carrot from poison hemlock by smell alone.
In a controlled educational setting a sample of both was pass around a crowd of about 25 people at different times, and the instructor asked if anybody detected a strong smell in either sample.
I found the smell of poison hemlock terrible, a kind of chemical souring sensation in the back of the nose, as did one or two others in the group.
The instructor highlighted that the ratio of people sensitive was typically the same in every group, then moved on to another topic.
This might be true for water hemlock as well, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.
I still identify wild carrot visually, but always do a sniff test as a final check.
I agree that giant hogweed is worse, maybe not as deadly but capable of blinding just from touching it's roots and rubbing your eyes. I was unfortunately enough to encounter hogweed while prospecting for gold, I was digging into the bank of a stream with a hand shovel . I ended up burn like blisters arthritis like pain for over two years. Nasty nasty stuff!
There’s no first principles reason tobacco is a legal product. If it was invented today, as a product which kills or disables a large percentage of its users, it would be banned.
Only the combustion of the plant is the problem though - not the addictive parts of it: artificially created nicotine enjoys an open market globally. Tobacco is in a sense demonized due to the direct idea that it’s combusted — nicotine pouches are legal everywhere in the EU but the ones with tobacco are banned sans Sweden.
Nicotine pouches were first sold in year 2008 according to Wikipedia.
Tobacco is anyway in decline after it was demonstrated to kill people not directly using it. There have been efforts at limiting alcohol, some catastrophic. Practically nothing has been done yet about concentrated sugar.
