Don’t be bitter: how to avoid toxic plants

Three ways to keep safe when our much-loved crops revert to their wild old ways

One of the most fascinating things for me as a greedy botanist is quite how different our most commonly cultivated crops are to their wild ancestors. Today’s sweet, seedless bananas are the result of an accidental sterile hybrid of two wild species that are so packed full of ball bearing-like seeds they are essentially inedible. The fat, juicy sweetcorn cobs we know from supermarkets started life as tiny sprigs of rock-hard seeds of a Mexican grass called teosinte. A totally different species. But perhaps the most extreme examples are crops like potatoes and squashes, whose wild relatives are packed so full of bitter toxins that it took thousands of years of selective breeding by farmers to make them edible.

Ornamental squash cultivars are full of toxic compounds

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