Poisonous Food - a cool trivia item

Thanks to other people's comments on cassava, I was reminded that I always confuse cassava and taro. The thing the two of them have in common is that they are poisonous if not treated before eating. But it turns out that some varieties of cassava (referred to as "sweet cassava") have little enough cyanide that they can be eaten raw - at least for a while.

The chronic low level cyanide poisoning results in goiters.

So there is the explanation for this Dogon dance mask, seen in Tereli, which Adama explained has to do with "a disease that no longer exists." (I had assumed that there was now some new source of iodine.)




By the way, eating poisonous foods is not actually uncommon throughout the world. Salt fish with akee is pretty much the national dish of Jamaica. And I have been known to eat (and enjoy) fiddlehead ferns.