We tend to think that most common foods are harmless, at least in the short term. So it’s always a surprise to discover that everyday foods can actually do some startlingly bad things. I’m not counting allergic reactions, since that has to do with the person consuming the food, rather than the food itself. Here are a few “dangerous” foods - can anyone think of more?
[ul]
[li]Grapes and chocolate can make dogs very sick, or even kill them[/li][li]Grapefruit juice will keep medications from being effective[/li][li]Black licorice in quantity can cause heart arrhythmia[/li][/ul]
Aren’t some seeds poisonous if consumed in quantity - thinking of almonds and cyanide maybe?
7 foods that are poisonous.
Only two are very common. Red Kidney beans and Lima beans require boiling for ten minutes. I wonder if these canned beans have already been boiled ten minutes to make them safe?
Nutmeg is a dangerous hallucinogenic:
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Nutmeg is also extremely toxic when injected intravenously.
I better stop sprinkling it on my egg custard then. 
Egg custard is just about the only time I use nutmeg. You sprinkle it on top just before baking the pie.
Even for its food aspect, i.e. when one unit is drunk during a meal, alcohol is much deadlier proportionate to the dose than most other substances we take. The dose you’d take is 1/20th or more of a dose that can kill you, and the dose you take for maximal psychoactive effect is more than 1/4 of the deadly dose. If alcohol were a new drug or food, it would only be approved for extreme uses (such as for methanol poisoning or alternative painkiller when others won’t work.)
“Common” depends on where you live–my grandmother and all her siblings ate poke whenever it was available. To make the leaves safe to eat you have to boil it, drain and replace the water, and boil it again 3 or 4 times. I never tried the stuff myself (didn’t like the smell of it cooking) but there was more than one time in my childhood when I was made to get out of the car and pick it from where it grew on the sides of roads. [URL=“Phytolacca americana - Wikipedia”]
Not actually dangerous because of the huge amounts you would need to eat, but all potassium-rich foods have at least a trace amount of the unstable isotope potassium-40, including bananas, potatoes, kidney beans, and most nuts, particularly Brazil nuts. Granted, you’d have to literally eat a ton of any of them to receive a harmful dose, not to mention you’d die of potassium poisoning (or something else, like selenium) long before the radiation ever became an issue.
Eyup. Definitely. Um…I asked a friend.
Considering the millions that die each year from canned beans, I doubt it.
Poke tastes rather like spinach/bok choy/chard - it’s tends more towards the sweeter rather than bitter greens like turnip/collard/mustard.
But it’s a lot of work to make it edible. Much easier to simply eat spinach, chard, or bok choy.
I’ve never tried any of those, either (except possibly spinach.) I guess I’m not a “leafy greens” person.
But it has the benefit of being free (looking out the window from where I’m sitting, I see poke plants about 25 feet away from me in a field, free for the taking if they weren’t dying down for the season.)
But grapefruit juice also greatly enhances effectiveness of most antidepressants and also other mood affecting medications, drugs and hallucinogenics 
Tomatoes and potatoes are famously both in the nightshade family. The parts we eat are safe, but the leaves of both are poisonous. A shame, too: Tomato leaves smell wonderful, and would probably make a fine herb if they weren’t poisonous.
That seems like a lot of work just to eat a plant.
Rhubarb is also toxic but it’s mostly in the leaves.
Flour can be explosive and sugar burns very easily.
I’m sure it stared off as a [URL=“Famine food - Wikipedia”]famine food](Rhubarb - Wikipedia). I mentioned my grandmother and her siblings–they were the 9 children of a cotton sharecropper in the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression and the arrival of the boll weevil. You eat what you can get then, and then later it is a nostalgic childhood food. Some of those relatives liked scrapple, something no sane person should voluntarily eat.
There are other, more common foods (such as cashews) that take a similar amount of work to make safe, you just don’t notice because someone else is doing all the work. I sometimes think about how desperate people had to be (and how many tries they had to make) to try to find ways to make something that is poisonous prepared one way could be made safe prepared another. (Okay, eat this raw and you die screaming. What about if you boil it first?)
Sadly, spinach is not poisonous. If it were, perhaps my spouse would stop cooking it in the morning to have with her scrambled eggs. I usually have to turn on the exhaust fan and open the door, as the smell makes me retch.
What do you mean? Scrapple is delicious!
Can I have your Eggs Florentine, then? 