[procrastinate]somewhere else i replied to someone about how it would be beneficial if everyone put their heads together to compile a list of fruits that you should eat before you die. then i said, whatever you do, don't mix up this list with the list of fruits that you eat and then die. this came to mind when i saw
this post on instragram by scott zona...
These are fruits from one of the most toxic plants in the Caribbean: manchineel (Hippomane mancinella; #Euphorbiaceae). The fruits are sweet! There is a vivid 1st-hand account of eating a bit of the fruit and living to tell the tale: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25225353
What disperses it?
#dispersal #botany #fruit #poison
if you're a nerd like me, then you might want to graph this...
x-axis: delicious
y-axis: deadly
where would manchineel go on this graph? (7,
? out of all the fruits in the world, which would be closest to (10,10)?
if there was a list of the most delicious and deadly fruits, i don't know if it would be more helpful than harmful. seems like it could be helpful for someone like "all the fruit" who fearlessly tries all sorts of noid jungle fruits. but then i imagine that some villain type of person might use the list for villainy.
personally, at botanical gardens i often google to see if a fruit is edible or not. one time i saw several trees covered in fruits that kinda looked like purple jamuns. i picked one of the fruits, opened it and smelled it. didn't smell bad. then i looked it up whether it was edible and nope. in fact, it said to avoid contact with the fruit! hah. wish that i could remember the name of the fruit.
i'm pretty sure that all cactus and ficus are edible. but one time i tried what i thought was a ripe fruit of rhodocactus grandifolius. the seeds looked fully formed so i figured this meant that the fruit was ready to eat. i took a small nibble and it tasted sour and bitter, so i didn't eat any more. shortly after i really regretted my decision to taste the fruit as my throat became very uncomfortable for around an hour. i found out the hard way that every rule has exceptions? maybe the fruit wasn't actually ripe.
most fruits don't want to be eaten before they are fully ripe. persimmons come to mind. but perhaps the best example is monstera deliciosa. if you eat it before its fully ripe it's like eating fiberglass. it's easy to tell when it's fully ripe though because the outter shell sloughs off. the trick is that the fruit sequentially ripens. when i put a fallen fruit in a brown paper bag that i crumpled closed for a couple days most of the fruit was ripe enough to eat at once.
perhaps ackee is a better example of a fruit that doesn't want to be eaten before it's ripe.
in most cases, when a fruit is delicious, there's competition to eat it before anyone else. usually you're competing with the usual suspects like birds, possums, rats and squirrels. it's a race to the bottom, of sorts. or tragedy of the commons. with this in mind, maybe unripe persimmons aren't astringent enough. and for all we know thanks to the selection pressure of countless squirrels, perhaps persimmons are evolving unripe fruits that are more and more astringent. clearly there's quite a bit of variation in the amount of astringency in unripe persimmons. [/procrastinate]
Topic: the most delicious and deadly fruit? (Read 3704 times)