Comment by bastawhiz
10 hours ago
> Alex rightly points out that apple seeds do contain cyanide. Turns out, it’s not a huge risk for normal apple consumption.
You don't have to eat them. There's no benefit to eating them. They don't taste good. They provide a negligible amount of nutrition, if any, and harm you very mildly. The stem of an apple is edible, but for what? A gram of extra fiber after you manage to gnaw through it?
You can eat banana peels, but you probably wouldn't want to. It's a terrible texture and flavor. They decompose well, so there's no meaningful environmental benefit. Yes, they have nutrients. You can eat a second piece of fruit instead.
And this is not universally good advice. The seeds, leaves, and stem of the pawpaw is filled with toxins—enough that folks have died from it.
I don't think the author is trying to make a point, but rather to show that we do things because we were told them. But it's important to also realize that the cultural reasons are sometimes backed up with hard-earned lessons or to save us from having to learn for ourselves that watermelon rind isn't pleasant to eat without preparing it in other ways.
Doing things as we were told to is sometimes called "following tradition". Traditional knowledge can be based in superstition or valid information that's out of date, but it can also be based on things that remain relevant.
e.g. Bitter cassava is a staple crop in parts of South America and Africa. Unlike apple seeds, it contains substantial quantities of cyanide. It's a great crop because you can plant it and forget it. No need for fences. Animals won't eat it. A chemist would be hard-pressed to come up with a more effective method for removing cyanide from it than some of the traditional methods of cooking it. However, problems arise when people cook and consume it in non-traditional ways.
Traditional knowledge can be both constraining and protective. It's like a fence whose purpose you don't know. Tearing it down is a gamble. You might win. You might lose. It's probably not a bad idea to try to figure out why a tradition is there before you mess around.
There are a lot of examples of this in the book The Secret of Our Success (which argues that human cultures have a lot of culturally-evolved knowledge which individuals would be very unlikely to develop in a single generation, and which often provides benefits for reasons that aren't consciously understood by the actual members of the culture, while occasionally including some noise or bad advice).
Many of those are traditions or ritual behaviors that decrease the chance of poisoning, sometimes subtle chronic poisoning rather than obvious acute poisoning.
> It's probably not a bad idea to try to figure out why a tradition is there before you mess around.
Interestingly, I think the rest of your comment supports exactly the opposite message. Traditional food preparation is the way it is for excellent reasons, that's true.
And what's also true is that you have absolutely no hope of determining what those reasons are. You can mess around and see if you get problems. But if you don't do that, you'll never have any idea what's behind the traditions. Investigating the question before messing around would be a gigantic waste of time and effort.
Chesterton's Fence
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
As a person who always eats the whole apple, stem and all (have done so for years), I'll object to your "apple seeds do not taste good" statement - tastes differ, to me they are delicious, certainly on par with other "normally edible" seeds like sunflower seeds! Of course I wouldn't eat them in any great quantity because of the poison issue.
Bloody 'eck. This sounds like a chat around the back of the bike sheds off of the '70's onwards.
Yes, apple pips do have a tiny amount of cyanide in them (but why)
This is a from a reasonable source and relates to cherries: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-40738573
I think we can assume that apples and cherries are OK to eat. Apple pips are fine and why on earth would you want to crunch through a cherry stone.
>I think we can assume that apples and cherries are OK to eat. Apple pips are fine and why on earth would you want to crunch through a cherry stone.
Black cherries (prunus serotina) I ate a whole bunch of during late summer. Much smaller than the Prunus avium (sweet cherry) which ripens around early June here. Allegedly the fruit does contain the cyanide producing compounds but without the enzymes. The catch is if you chew the pits (or eat the leaves/stems) it is poisonous. Poisons a lot of horses and other livestock: https://horsedvm.com/poisonous/black-cherry-trees
The logical next step is to eat the tree.
And then an airplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanide_poisoning#Chronic_expo...
How many apple seeds do you need to eat to get to that point?
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By "they don't taste good" I wasn't trying to imply that they taste bad, though maybe they do to some folks. At least to me they don't taste like anything (they lack a good flavor). For me and probably many folks, the flavor isn't something that attracts me to eating the seeds.
I also eat the whole apple and like to crunch the seeds.
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Most of the insecticide sprays are on the skin. You can eat the seeds, maybe don't bite them as they taste nasty. Eating the core is not the most pleasant part, and the top and bottom might be be most difficult to rinse the sprays from.
Banana peels are delicious if cooked correctly. You can make a surprisingly tasty "facon" with them.
I'm sure you could prepare almost anything to taste great. You can do whatever you think you'd enjoy. My point isn't to discourage you from doing it. If you want to eat apple stems or orange peels or horse chestnuts, knock yourself out. My point is that it's probably not smart to do so unless you know what you're doing and have a good reason to.
And extremely high in potassium (more than the flesh) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=potassium+banana+peels&ia=web
i wanted to try that, but aren't they like super full of poisons to kill bugs?
Please tell us more! What do you mean by correctly?
I too am intrigued, so I found the following:
https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com/banana-peel-bacon/
Sounds simple enough - is there anyone who has done this? Bacon is a hard one to replicate!
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You can make curry with them (either just the peels, or whole unripe bananas).
It definitely provokes some thinking of what we even mean with "edible". The author seems to use "you can eat it and it won't kill you or make you sick" as the definition.
That's alright, but then grass and pebbles are also edible.
I mean even monkeys just dispose of the banana skin
I mean it reminds me of this article where a university professor asked his students if you can put a toaster in the dishwasher. Everyone replied no, obviously not. But as the professor replied - why not? Your average toaster works perfectly fine after going through a dishwasher, once properly dried. The answers ranged from "you're not supposed to" to "it's electric"(sic).
Just because we think you shouldn't do something doesn't mean you really can't is the takeaway I guess. We don't normally eat apple cores but you could and you'd be perfectly fine.
> once properly dried
That “properly” is doing most of the heavy lifting there. The reason i would be weary of running the dishwasher with a toaster inside because i would worry that liquids trapped around thin electric conductors will corrode them. In othet words toasters were not designed to be easy to “properly” dry them out. And that damage might not be appearant right away or after a single wash.
In fact i wouldn’t trust the professor’s claim that the “toaster is perfectly fine” unless the professor conducted a lot of experiments. And even then i would only trust it with the toaster models he tested the claim with.
There even was a HN thread about this anecdote. I remember though that someone there made the counter argument that, yes, the toaster will be fine, but the dishwasher will be full of icky chemicals that you don't want to have on your dishes...
If you eat the apple diagonally down instead of around, the cores are totally edible. Less waste!
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