Poison, please
From excess or deprivation, from addiction or freedom, from chemical or natural — we will all die poisoned by something.
Poison is everywhere, and humans cannot live without poisoning themselves. Or, to put it differently: poison is life. Nature itself is a vast playground for apprentice poisoners. Morel mushrooms must be cooked for over twenty minutes, or they’ll send diners straight to the ICU. Apple seeds are full of amygdalin, a dangerous mix of cyanide and glucose. You can even die from drinking too much water. It all comes down to dosage, balance, mastery.
“What is not poison? All things are poison, and nothing is without poison. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison,” wrote Paracelsus, the father of toxicology. We could hang this motto above our kitchens, in our restaurants, or even print it on food packaging — a more honest warning than any “gluten-free” or “vegan-friendly” label.
Orthorexia
Intensive farming, ultra-processed foods, carcinogenic pesticides, harmful preservatives… Faced with environmental and health scandals in the food industry, some people choose the obsession with “clean” eating, cutting out everything — gluten, lactose, sugar, fat — and in doing so, deprive themselves of the greatest earthly joy: taste.
Miracle diets promise purer bodies, longer lives, more “aligned” existences. These doctrines, as absurd as they are dangerous, pop up every season in the media. They don’t save us; they create problems, while distracting us from the real poison: soil quality, fair pay for farmers, respect for the seasons, and above all, our ways of consuming.
Sugar, for example, sneaks in everywhere, sly as a snake. Some scientists even claim it’s more addictive than cocaine. “Those who deny this addiction are, at best, incompetent, at worst, funded by the sugar industry,” says Serge Ahmed, research director at CNRS. In one experiment, 94 out of 100 rats preferred a sugary drink over increasing doses of cocaine. Sugar activates the brain’s reward system: each bite triggers a rush of dopamine, urging us to dive back in, again and again.
Love
But thankfully, the most powerful poison will always be love. It makes the sharpest minds foolish, and the strongest stomachs suddenly fragile. In Old French, “poison” once referred to the effects of love.
“And who would have thought (...) that one could so quickly overcome such a charming poison?” wrote Racine. This was a “poison” gladly taken.
The apple embodies this double game better than any fruit: the forbidden fruit of Adam and Eve, symbol of carnal sin, Dionysus’s gift to Aphrodite, the trap laid for Snow White. Even its cyanide-laced seeds invite us to taste danger. The red skin, official color of passion, already hints at the bite.
Everyone knows oysters are aphrodisiacs, that we call it a “honeymoon” because honey was believed to boost newlyweds’ energy, or that ginger heats up the yang. “All of this is nothing compared to the terrible marvel / Of your biting saliva, / That plunges my soul into oblivion without remorse, / And, carrying vertigo, / Rolls it fainting to the shores of death!” wrote Baudelaire in The Poison.
Bad food
Poison, according to the dictionary, is also “very bad food.” Sadly, that still rings true, and perhaps this is where we should look for an antidote. “There’s only a difference of intention between a poisoner and a bad cook,” quipped Pierre Desproges.
Today’s bad cooking? Ultra-processed dishes, lifeless ingredients, freezing and refreezing, residue of who-knows-what and preservatives, regional dishes in cans, fish that circle the globe three times, culinary nationalism, stunted chickens... Cancer, obesity (which kills nearly 3 million people a year), bad moods, pimples, stomachaches, depleted groundwater, stunted chickens: bad cooking poisons everything, in the worst ways.
So, what’s the cure for bad cooking? What alexiteric? What alexipharmic? In short, what counter-poison? On one side, there is wild food, common goods freely offered by nature. On the other, there are foods that have flavor, born from the work of humans in harmony with nature, without compromise, without marketing, without shrink-wrap.
We all have to die from something. We might as well use the time we have on Earth to choose our poison wisely.