>>1235587Seems like that is indeed what he did with the mushrooms. As for the seeds. The amount you'd need to eat to impact your health also happens to be the about same amount that you'd need to eat of just about any other wild food to impact your health. While alkaloids, toxins, etc are a bad thing for you to be eating, other compounds in normal wild greens also have a negative affect when you go overboard eating them, including their seeds. I mean, people have died from eating too much kale for instance.
While that bag of seeds looks like a lot, it is only about 4 meals once you've taken the assloads of time to clean them to get to the seeds. I don't know how he was prepping them, for all I know he was eating them raw right out of the bag with husks and all. Which would be terrible palate-wise.
Another thing, people really need to stop mentioning potatoes when referring to Hedysarum sp. It is nothing like potatoes and nothing in it is like potatoes. Hell eating real potato fruit/seeds (Solanum sp)can outright kill you simply from the super high solanine content. The content of oxalyldiaminopropionic acid is way too low and the content of L-canavanine is also too low, but you should still cook them. Cooking them renders this entire thing a moot discussion. I mean red kidney beans are deadly poisonous for the same type of reason (phytohaemagglutinin), but you always cook them so there's no problem.
A bit of Trivia: Alfalfa has more Canavanine than Hedysarum sp. seeds. Alfalfa has 1.5% Canavanine while Hedysarum alpinum only has 1.2% Canavanine. The only people who really have trouble with alfalfa are people who do juicing. Even vegan sprout eaters don't have trouble with alfalfa. Alfalfa isn't considered a toxic plant.
The main problem with the McCandless story is the people desperately want his death to be a tragedy, instead of the absurd stupidity it was.
