Yes, your food is trying to kill you

[akaihyo]

As Professor Ottoline Leyser of York University says: ‘People think that the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simply not the case. In fact, it is the opposite that is true: the closer a plant is to its natural state, the more likely it is that it will poison you. Naturally, plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years developing agriculture and breeding out harmful traits from crops. “Natural agriculture” is a contradiction in terms.’

Comments

[xuande.livejournal.com]

It is an irony pleasant to contemplate that the mechanism chili peppers evolved to defend themselves from being eaten by mammals is precisely why we like to eat them so much—but in a further twist, they're far more successful and widespread thanks to the fact that we grow them for food than they would be otherwise.