On foraging wild berries
There’s a berry bush near my house that appears to be covered in blueberries. I am nearly positive they’re blueberries and want to eat them but I also don’t want to poison myself if they aren’t blueberries. Can I eat them?
It’s hard to answer this without having a baseline understanding of how stupid you are. Are you over the age of 12? Have you ever seen a real blueberry growing on a plant before?
To rephrase your question in food safety terms — you are worried that these berries might contain toxins and that consuming these toxins might cause you injury.
Putting aside your dubious plant-identification skills, this is a perfectly valid question. In fact it’s pretty much the only question that matters. (“Can I eat that?”)
Consider a koala who only eats eucalyptus leaves. It doesn’t need to know very much about food; it only needs to identify eucalyptus leaves and when those leaves are ripe to eat. Although eucalyptus leaves are highly toxic, the koala has adapted to this food source — its gut is fine-tuned to disarm toxins and extract requisite nutrients.
Now back to you. You are an omnivore and this means you can eat just about anything. The downside is that you must accrue a huge amount of Food Knowledge so that you don’t accidentally poison yourself by eating the wrong thing or by eating the right thing at the wrong time.
The simple truth is that you will occasionally eat something poisonous. Whoops. Fortunately, the human body has adapted to your specific brand of stupidity in a few ways:
We can taste most plant toxins. If your mystery berry is toxic then it will taste shitty. Specifically, it will taste bitter and it might make your mouth tingle. This is your cue to spit it out.
Your digestive enzymes have evolved to fight a wide range of toxins. Unlike the koala bear, whose gut is tuned only to fight eucalyptus toxins, the human digestive system has to account for our wider feeding patterns and your apparent propensity for eating random berries. The good news is that your body will naturally protect you when you eat all types of toxic foods. The bad news is that it can only tolerate a small amount of each specific toxin at a time.
So: eat one berry. Aim for a ripe one. You will immediately know whether it is a blueberry (or a blueberry-adjacent berry) or not. If it tastes shitty, spit it out and avoid that plant.
If it tastes fine but you’re still not 100% sure, then wait a day and see if you feel any unpleasantness. If not, repeat the experiment the next day and try eating a tiny bit more. Worst case scenario is that you get a tummy ache. Best case scenario: free blueberries for life!
Me eating an experimental blackberry cultivar.
Last thing — don’t fuck with mushrooms. They all look exactly the same and one bite of the wrong one will kill you.
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