Food

We are apt to treat food as though it was simply nutrition, but foods are chemicals and contain chemicals, so are drinks. 

They can contain additives that have no known equivalent in nature, so they are in some senses like a pharmaceutical in their actions. Some foods contain drugs ‘accidentally’, we will see in one example that honey has contained some quite potent hallucinogens. Food can also contain a whole range of chemicals that in high enough quantities are deliriants – they cause delirium and thus all sorts of strange experiences from hallucinations to visions, from visions to out of body.  Green potatoes and green tomatoes for example are like deadly nightshade – they belong to the same family.  And we mustn’t forget near death – yes food has caused near death experiences.

This section is not about food poisoning from bacteria.  It is about food poisoning from the chemicals that are in food and drink and there are a splendidly large number of observations – some truly bizarre and some rather frighteningly mundane in their source that show that eating and drinking can be a hazardous business.