Minutus

Phytolacca a.k.a pokeweed, said to have been a potherb during (U.S)
colonial times, nowadays taught in survival courses as last resort food --young
shoots only--boiling supposedly takes out the poisonous alkaloid ( I learned
two changes of water, minimum). The berries also give me pause. Phyto grows a
couple of hundred feet from my house (north eastern U.S) in an area we use as a
leaf dump, and in thirty years here I've never seen birds eat the berries.
When, in late fall, we push over the phyto, the berries are very much intact
although we have jillions of birds. Hence I would attach a big caution to eating
the raw berries ad libitum in crude doses.
George Ugolini
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