On Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:33:56 -0500, phorbin wrote:

In article ,
says...

Fortunately I had boiled the hell out of it before I ate it, boiling
removes the toxins although you are supposed to boil it twice and I
only boiled it once. I didn't have any symptoms but that's the last
time I eat any unfamiliar plant. My gardener had told me that he eats
this all the time but he is from Jamaica. I suspect that they have a
different plant that looks like pokeweed.

He probably identified it as a relative of a Jamaican variety of
pokeweed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaloo

I did a bit more poking around and it's range through several varieties
runs from Canada right through South America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokeweed

I always knew that this is the way people died from mushrooms, they learn
to identify safe varieties on one continent and then they go mushroom
picking on a different continent and they mistake a deadly variety for a
similar appearing but unrelated variety from their home country. There
was a case recently here in Massachusetts where some Russians poisoned
themselves when they ate some Death Angel mushrooms that they found in
their backyard. My father told me a similar story when I was a child
about a little boy who had stolen mushrooms from a neighbors garden, that
night the family had wild mushrooms that they had picked in the forest
but as punishment for his crime the little boy wasn't allowed to eat any.
The mushrooms were poisonous and every member of the family died except
the little boy. For the last 50 years I've wondered why my father told me
that story since the moral of the tale is that crime pays. I assume the
reason he told me the story was because it was something that he had just
read in the newspaper and not because he was conveying a twisted morality
to me. My take on the story was to confine mushroom picking to the
produce aisle of the supermarket. I never realized that the lesson
extended to green plants also, I didn't realize that there were any
deadly leafy plants growing in North America, now I know better.