In article , gentlegreen
writes

"Kay" wrote in message
...
In article , Martin Brown |||newspam
writes

You should see the laboratory MSDS for table salt, sugar or even pure
water.

There was a tagline doing the rounds about the dangers of Di-hydrogen
oxide 'causes several fatalities each year, gaseous form causes severe
skin lesions, implicated in every case of polluted streams and rivers'
... that sort of thing ;-)

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

:-)

Brilliant! :-)
--
Kay
"Do not insult the crocodile until you have crossed the river"

The message
from (Nick Maclaren) contains these words:
In article ,
Jaques d'Alltrades wrote:

As with black nightshade, there are conflicting reports of its
edibility. In the case of black nightshade, there are reliable
claims that at least some strains, grown under at least some
conditions, are poisonous when ripe.

You've said this before, and I've yet to see any evidence of it, and Kew
confirms without any caveat that they are edible and widely eaten.

Which does not negate my point. I found it when looking up the
edibility of Physalis species in several books and papers that
described the edibility of the Solanaceae generally.

I've been noshing them since I discovered (some time in the '60s) that
they were not poisonous, and from then have eaten them from the north of
Scotland to Dartmoor without ever having suffered any ill-effects.

A piffling geographic range, and an even smaller varietal one. It
is a global species.

They are intermixed and spread worldwide quite rapidly by some migrating
birds.

IME such variation of toxicity in a species is restricted to fungi.

No way. You can start with yams, almonds and French beans. In all
cases, the forms that we eat have been selected and bred for low
toxin levels. Toxicity is as variable as any other characteristic;
some plants will be fairly constant; others will be highly variable.

Maybe, but selective breeding is cheating - you can selectively breed
wolves into all sorts of silly shapes and sizes.

--
Rusty
horrid dot squeak snailything zetnet point co full-stop uk
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/

"Jaques d'Alltrades" wrote in message
k...
The message
from "Des Higgins" contains these words:

Holey Saint Imelda!!!!
I am glad I never bloody well ate that then.
During one daft undergraduate phase, I tried smoking Carroway seeds
(disgusting),

Deliberately 'planted' urban legend, I believe.

dried banana skins

This was definitely put about to embarrass the 'authorities', and hoping
they'd be silly enough to ban bananas. (Hence the pop song 'They call it
Mellow Yellow'.

Wow; live and learn (that was a Donovan song??).
All of this is quaint and delightfully silly (me sitting in my bedroom
trying to smoke carroway seeds 30 years ago) except for the Datura bit.
That sounds like a nasty experience and makes me feel lucky/idiotic for
blindly trying things like that. One problem with health warnings on plants
like Datura coming from government sources used to be that governments used
to be just as bad at spreading lies about drugs as the long haired idiot
from next door. Now that I have kids, I would like information to be as
clear and factual as possible and without the hype that says that cannabis
will make you vote Lib Dem and listen to Bulgarian Jazz naked. When people
lie about drugs, the real dangers get blurred.



and eating nutmeg.

Nutmeg contains strychnine. But the word 'nutmeg' is used for a code for
cannabis resin.

--
Rusty
horrid dot squeak snailything zetnet point co full-stop uk
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/