No gluten here
Beware “wellness.” It’s always bullshit and sometimes it’s worse than that.
From 2018 but “wellness” promoters who tell us to poison ourselves haven’t gone away yet.
Yes, whilst this “pudding” is free from gluten and the milk we’ve drunk for centuries, any health benefits would be heavily offset by the terrible diarrhea you would likely get from lycorine, found in the deadly Narcissus flowers sat prettily atop the glass. You might briefly feel good because you’ve avoided sticky toffee pudding, but before long the convulsions could set in.
“Remember, as a general rule: If you are not 100 percent sure something is edible, just don’t eat it,” Botanist James Wong explained.
“If it’s a staple eaten for centuries, which you don’t have a diagnosed medical intolerance or allergy to, it’s probably safe.”
At higher quantities, lycorine can be lethal if ingested. The plant’s toxicity has been known for centuries, and has been used in various suicide attempts over the years.
Ok. How about scrambled jade eggs? Are they safe?
Advice I give my students all the time. And not just botany – mycology, too. Eating fungus you collect in the wild is not a good idea unless you know what you are doing. Too many things look like other things.
In this particular case, I’m not going to blame this on someone not knowing how to put together a healthy smoothie. I’m going to blame it on someone not knowing how to put together a credible photograph. It’s not a preoccupation with health, but with art, which lead whoever took that picture to look around for some super-cool way to set it off.
“Oh, look — the bush is in bloom! Now let me decorate my tasty treat with these aesthetically pleasing little star shapes, juuuuust so. I got blueberries, I got nuts, I got an uncomfortably small spoon — and I got flowers! Damn, I’m good. Click.”
I have some pretty foxgloves growing in my garden. I shall finely chop the leaves as a garnish for my new Digitalis Diet.
Maybe it identifies as a healthy food option? You guys are so narrow minded.
“Ok. How about scrambled jade eggs? Are they safe?”
Suppose I should have known better than reading one of your posts while drinking coffee. Coffee exiting through my nostrils – you suck…;)
Ugh, gluten-free. One of my pet peeves. Pardon my rant–I know you know this, but I have to get it out. About 1% of the world’s population have celiac disease. Fewer have wheat allergies. Some percentage of the rest (perhaps up to 6%) may have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, though that’s controversial. For that small percentage, gluten-free food is necessary.
For the rest of us, gluten isn’t only harmless–avoiding it can lead to a less healthy diet.
I don’t suppose it’s the same in the USA, but in France every qualified pharmacist is required to know how to recognize dangerous fungi, so people who collect them in the wild trot along to their local pharmacy to find out which are safe to eat. If pharmacists are found to have given wrong advice they’re in big trouble.
@6 Me too, all the GF options for the miniscule segment of the population. Marketing fads suck, every time I see gluten free it makes me think of George Carlin. :P
Slightly OT but James Wong is one of the unsung heroes of the internet! He recently wrote a short article on the politics of gardening and, by Jove, does he get attacked for it! But he is invariably calm and polite (and funny!) in a way that I could never sustain! Plus he put me on the trail of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jarrariums/ !
And Athel, have you ever tried this in France? I only ask because the only time I went to a pharmacist with fungi, I was met with a rather blank stare and a “OK, let me fetch my mushroom chart, I suppose…” that were not really that reassuring!
Athel, I am unaware of any such requirement for pharmacists in the USA, and I was once in a pre-Pharmacy program, until I got corrupted by Ecology and switched my focus (okay, not corrupted in my view, but my son found out his mother would make a lot less as an Ecologist than as a Pharmacist, and wasn’t so sure I made the right decision).
I went to a pharmacy for such an identification, but alas, the pharmacy was too small, they didn’t have mushroom.
(I’ll crawl back under my rock. I’m lichen it here, anyway.)
Ha!
Sackbut,
If the pharmacy was too small, it may be because you were eating the wrong side of the mushroom.
Sackbut, you’re a fungi to be around.
Is that before or after they’ve been used “as directed”?
Maroon @ 13
Good one!!
That is entirely the consumer’s choice.
I have to confess that an occasional lack of tact has led to one-or-two disgruntled people who had accepted invitations to dinner at our house then gone on to dictate what must be served or done to accommodate their dietary needs. One insisted that his food simply must be prepared, cooked and served using chopping boards, utensils, pans and crockery that had never been used with seafood because of his recently discovered ‘allergy’ – which, as his then wife had previously told my wife, was actually a nasty bout of liquid ass caused by him eating fresh-water mussels that he’d taken from a river without giving a moment’s thought to the sewage plant a half-mile upstream. Anyway, pretending that I was somewhat taken aback by his demand with its tacit criticism of the cleanliness of my kitchen, I asked him to either supply the necessary equipment himself or pony up for me to buy it all. He told me that I was just being rude and inconsiderate and he wouldn’t be coming for dinner after all, which saved me the job of telling him to stick his demands where the sun don’t shine. I’ve no time for anybody who is prepared to put people through so much inconvenience rather than admit they made a stupid mistake,
Another insisted on a gluten-free meal because of a self-diagnosed intolerance. I asked the symptoms: uncomfortable bloating after meals. I asked if he’d considered trying smaller portions. That did not go down too well, either, but fuck that noise. I’ll happily accommodate the requirements of those with genuine food allergies but those who self-diagnose and expect special treatment can either not come or bring their own food. Their loss because, all modesty aside I’m a bloody good cook.
Acolyte @#18:
Mussels can be a bit of a problem. My wife, her mid-70s mother and I were once staying in the house of her cousin in a small town in Brittanny, who happened to also be the local Catholic priest. He lived alone in his manse/ priory or whatever, and his cooking was pretty rough and ready.
One evening he served us some mussels he had cooked up (some days before, as it later turned out.) My mother in law ate them slowly at first, then realised she was dragging the chain and delaying the serving of the next course. So she wolfed them down, saying as she did so “I don’t want to be any trouble.!”
Trouble found her. She got one down the wrong way, and was soon bent over the priest’s dunny, chundering the whole lot up, while the priest set off to find the local doctor, just in case. I was standing directly behind the dear lady when she did about the rudest thing one person can do to another, and farted straight into my face. Still face down into the dunny bowl, she apologised profusely for that terrible faux pas while my wife searched around in the kitchen trying to find a glass that was half-way clean enough for her to drink out of.
It was all sorted out in the end, with the doctor arriving to check her out. But I am told that a crook mussel can kill you, so it is a wonder that I am still alive to tell the tale, and have never eaten one since.
That qualifies me as a bit of an Ancient Mariner, I suppose.
Omar@#18 – quite a story.
I love seafood and once did have a plate of mussels in an Italian restaurant. After the meal we went to visit a friend, who had been lent a flat with a very posh bathroom, which I duly decorated with vomit for the rest of the afternoon.
It hasn’t stopped me eating mussels though.
I do have a great-niece who has a serious celiac allergy and has to have a set of her own utensils. It makes her miserable, poor kid, as it messes up her social life. I imagine she will be a “bring my own food” type, at least I hope she will, rather than be demanding.
I have a peanut allergy, and when I was little I had to avoid all legumes (perhaps out of an excess of caution on my doctor’s part). Back then, peanut allergies weren’t as widespread, and people often told me “I’ve never heard of that!” or “You just don’t like them.” I learned from an early age to be extra cautious about any food I was offered–if you can’t guarantee that those cookies are peanut free, thanks but no thanks.
Today the labeling on food is a lot better, and people are much more aware of peanut allergies, so it’s easier to avoid them. I’m grateful that airlines have for the most part stopped serving them (true story: I had a bad reaction when we went to the circus when I was 4, just from all the peanut dust in the air).
But thankfully “peanut free” hasn’t caught on as a health fad (“Doritos are part of a healthy, peanut-free diet!”). If you’re not allergic, peanuts are one of the healthiest, most nutritious food around. And I’m told they’re delicious (though from the few times I’ve accidentally tried them, I’m not buying that).
KB, #20.
Not at all, I happily accommodate those with genuine needs. It’s the self-diagnosed that I can’t be doing with.
It’s odd how these things seem to become trendy in certain circles. First it was food allergies and intolerances. All of a sudden every other person couldn’t eat this, or was careful about that, even though they’d never had problems before. It reached the stage where supermarkets devoted a couple or more entire aisles to ‘free-from’ foods, yet now those sections – at least in the supermarkets I go to – have shrunk back to maybe a half-row, one side of an aisle. The trend seems to have passed.
The same happened with autism/Aspergers/ADHD. All of a sudden people were self-diagnosing as being on one or another ‘spectrum’: some collected labels like medals (one current FTB blogger claimed ‘SIWOTI syndrome* as one of their genuine disorders.
Now it’s transgender. There are a lot of attention seekers out there jumping on each bandwagon that comes along, and they shouldn’t because it detracts from those who really do have the conditions.
*Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, an XKCD cartoon punchline.
I know I’m late to this thread, but…
As someone who has cœliac disease, I am very, very grateful to the GF faddists. Their sheer numbers, and the fact that they weren’t being forced to eat gluten-free food but could take their dollars elsewhere, meant that a lot of food manufacturers got in on GF food production, competing for the newly-expanded market, and started producing stuff that was not merely actually edible for once, but tastes really good. Pre-fad, GF bread came from only one manufacturer, in the form of vacuum-packed bricks which had to be sprinkled with water and baked in the oven in order to make them even chewable; the stuff tasted rather worse than cardboard, which is apparently what they made the biscuits out of. Jam tarts were concrete discs filled with artificially-coloured superglue. Seriously, I bought a box of six a couple of years ago, out of nostalgia when I recognised the brand, but expecting that they had caught up. They hadn’t. I simply couldn’t bite into the one I took from the box. Even my super-strong son-in-law couldn’t break it, and he tried smashing it against the table. I bet it had been baked in 1984, and was nearly fossilised. And that was the choice, apart from sawdust ‘cake’ which was about as appetising as the sweepings from a rabbit’s hutch.
My husband has just reminded me – all that competition has not only forced the quality, quantity, and sheer variety of GF foods to rise precipitously; it has also brought the price way down, to somewhere in the region of twice the price of standard foods instead of ten times the price. I will be ever grateful to the NHS for handing out GF foods on prescription. I couldn’t afford to pay a fiver for a GF loaf at a time when real bread was about 40p a loaf, provided four times as many slices, and remained edible for days. GF loaves were tiny, which was good because they only came within binocular range of edible for about four hours after ‘refreshing’. Tiny, and very heavy. They were so dense, they could have been used for modelling neutron stars.