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Anonymous Tue Sep 20 17:53:21 2022 No.21018127 [Reply] [Original]

>He wrote his diary on blank pages in the back of an exhaustively researched field guide to the region’s edible plants, “Tanaina Plantlore / Dena’ina K’et’una: An Ethnobotany of the Dena’ina Indians of Southcentral Alaska,” by Priscilla Russell Kari. In the book, Kari explicitly warns that because wild sweet pea closely resembles wild potato, and “is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food.” And then she explains precisely how to distinguish the two plants from one another.

>It seemed more plausible that McCandless had indeed eaten the roots and seeds of the purportedly nontoxic wild potato rather than the wild sweet pea.

>Our results confirmed the presence of L-canavanine (an antimetabolite with demonstrated toxicity in mammals) as a significant component of H. alpinum seeds…. In the case of Christopher McCandless, there is evidence that H. alpinum seeds constituted a significant portion of his meager diet during a period before his death. Based on this and what is known about the toxic effects of L-canavanine, we make the logical conclusion that under these conditions, it is highly likely that the ingestion of relatively large amounts of this antimetabolite was a contributing factor to his death.

>The death of Chris McCandless should serve as a caveat to other foragers: Even when some parts of a plant are known to be edible, other parts of the same species may contain dangerous concentrations of toxic compounds. Additionally, there may be seasonal, as well as ecotypic, variations in the concentrations of L-canavanine between various communities of H. alpinum. Further studies are needed to determine the range of L-canavanine concentrations among different populations of the plant. Given the known toxic properties of L-canavanine and its established presence in H. alpinum seeds, it seems prudent to use caution before ingesting these seeds, especially as a significant part of the diet.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chris-mccandless-died-update

Now that we know he died not due to his own incompetence but ironically because society and scientists were not competent and dilligent enough to research potato seeds correctly, and he managed to survive 140 days prior to this, why do people still hate him? Is it just NPCs?

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