Prudence

[redbird]

I was going to have plum yogurt this morning, having picked up some 10% milkfat yogurt and three very nice-looking plums yesterday.

I put the yogurt in the bowl (at 10% it doesn't pour any more than sour cream does), then cut the plum in half. I accidentally opened the pit as well. I removed the half pit from one side of the plum, washed the result, and started cutting the plum pieces into the yogurt, Nice and juicy.

Then I took another look at the other half-plum and half plum-stone. And the very pretty little clear crystals on the plum stone.

Plums hybridize with apricots and produce interesting fruit.

I don't know what cyanide looks like.

I wasn't sure how thoroughly I'd rinsed the first half of the fruit, or the knife I'd cut it with.

I had yogurt with black currant jam for breakfast this morning. The plum would probably have been tastier, but while the risk of poisoning myself was slight, the consequences were too serious to chance in order to have a tastier bowl of yogurt. (I know at least one person on my friends list has eaten fugu, and enjoyed it; not me.)

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Almonds also have cyanide in them. I found this out in the early seventies when I read a mystery novel (Mom didn't moderate my reading all that much) and asked Mom why the detective knew the dead guy had been killed with cyanide with the only clue being air that smelled of almonds in the closed room where his body was found.

It takes a fair bit of almond, or plum or apricot pit or other related (apple, peach) pit to add up to cumulative poisoning.

I know. I tried to get my sister to eat apricot pits when we were little. :/

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Did you throw it away yet? I'm curious. I *think* I could tell the difference between cyanide and sugar by inspection and smell. If some is left, could you put it in a plastic bag and refrigerate it?

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna speculate that it almost certainly wasn't cyanide. I've eaten apricots with that slight crystalline-looking stuff leaking out of a split pit many, many times. And this article (http://homecooking.about.com/od/fruit/a/apricot_3.htm) says that there isn't enough in a single pit to harm you anyway. Several other sources agreed.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

I can add my agreement. As a child, I ate an apricot pit at least once (and probably more). I didn't know about cyanide, but I did know about bitter almond flavour, used in amaretti, which I really liked.

Not only I'm still alive, I don't remember being sick. IIRC, I stopped when my father (lab chemist) told me it wasn't the wisest idea in the world. OTOH, I also don't remember him panicking.

I've seen that stuff many times

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

It's harmless. It's a sort of lining for the fruit's pit. I've even touched my tongue to it, and it doesn't have the bitter, tingly taste that you get from a peach pit. (Yes, I HAVE eaten a peach pit, thanks, and no, they don't have enough cyanide to be dangerous. You have to eat quite a few of them to be made ill. The fatal dose of apple pits, for instance, is about a cup.)

Er, apple seeds

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

not pits, of course.