Instincto and Natural Poisons

The death cap mushroom, for instance, provides a range of useful substances, like other mushrooms. It contains a single toxic substance, phalloidin, which the human body is unable to break down and eliminate, and which comes between neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors, so that paralysis sets in as far as the respiratory centers and the heart. A trivial application of progenetics: the death-cap omelette must be struck from recipe books.

These same recipe books can nonetheless recommend preparations whose harm is less apparent. Simple French fries, for example, supply fats the body is unable to break down, producing atheromatous plaques in the circulatory system, culminating in strokes or heart attacks, responsible for a significant share of mortality. Another trivial application of progenetics: frying oils contain substances unsuited to the body’s capacity for breakdown and elimination — or, put the other way around, the body is not genetically adapted to this type of substance.

What is the difference between French fries and the death cap? This toxic mushroom has always existed, whereas French fries are a human invention. It is therefore worth asking, for every recipe, whether it isn’t adding new toxins, born of culinary preparation, to the range of natural toxins.

Second major difference: French fries are attractive to smell and taste, whereas the death cap is not. This points back to the origin of our genetic makeup: if some of our primate ancestors, still lacking any knowledge of chemistry, had found the death cap attractive, the poisonings would have harmed their lineage, and one would expect their competitors, repelled by this mushroom, to have statistically outcompeted them. One can therefore expect that our genetic makeup organized itself, over millennia, so as to avoid olfactory and gustatory attraction to toxic plants. Most natural poisons are in fact very bitter; some are simply unappealing.

What, then, is the difference between the raw death cap and the death cap in an omelette? The first, raw, remains a natural poison: it has a bitter, unpleasant taste, which constitutes a protection, even if that protection is not proportional to the real danger it poses to us. Our ancestors may never have shared its biotope, so the instinctive recognition of this mushroom cannot be taken for granted; the signal exists, but it should not be trusted absolutely. The second, in an omelette, is an entirely different problem: cooking and preparation mask this protective bitterness and make it attractive, exactly like French fries — except that, unlike French fries, the toxic substance predates any human intervention. It is therefore the culinary preparation, not the nature of the poison, that turns an already-present but signaled risk into a trap made tasty, and therefore undetectable.