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. :/