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by DaveZale 9 days ago
so interesting.

I worked for a very small company getting funding by the Medici Fund a while back. First I ever heard of the name.

So much intrigue in the past. Guys like Montaigne were said to have "food tasters" to sample the goods before they ate themselves.

As a career trace analytical chemist, I can tell you for sure, that weird poisonings are so much less likely to occur now, because of the probability of detection. That's a little comforting. The same goes for the food supply. Mechanisms are in place to rapidly detect deliberately placed poisons.

1 comments

> Mechanisms are in place to rapidly detect deliberately placed poisons.

Sure, but as soon as you add wild-collected fungi [1] or greens [1] to the food mix... it gets easy enough to slip in the bad doppelgangers into a meal.

That's also why I never deal with collecting any food in the wild, I don't trust myself (and certainly I don't trust any of the vibecoded AI apps!) to reliably tell the difference between "this is edible", "this probably will give you a few days of diarrhea" and "even touch that thing and you'll die a horrible painful death".

[1] https://niedersachsen.nabu.de/tiere-und-pflanzen/pilze/23048...

[2] https://www.wwf.de/aktiv-werden/tipps-fuer-den-alltag/famili...