Surveying the whole scope of human history vis-à-vis food, a couple of themes emerge. One is that humans like their food to taste good. Another is that they like it to not kill them. These two qualities often cohere in the same foodstuff—apples, for instance, taste great, and are not to my knowledge toxic—but inevitably the tastes-good/won’t-kill-you ratio’s sometimes less than ideal. For some foods, this is a selling point—fugu, say, the poisonous fish you need a certificate to properly prepare.

For others, lethality’s just an unfortunate byproduct—as with the alloy in early tin cans, which sometimes gave people lead poisoning.

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