Yew for food??!!

[Greenpete]

On the thread about pine needle tea someone said that you can eat Yew berries but spit out the seeds! Is this true? I thought Yew was one of those plants that you just didn't eat unless you were either suicidal or really, really stupid.

I eat 'em and have for years, they are in my opinion the best tasting wild berry in the UK!
And yes spit out the pip!
Pete

 

[rich59]

Taking a look at http://www.spaink.net/suicide/suicide_poison_natural.html suggests that ingesting material from the tree 0.1% of your body weight could be harmful. A quick calculation shows that:-

70kg person that means 70g could seriously harm or kill you. The average seed would be in the milligram range. A paracetamol weighs 500 milligram so taking in 140 pieces of yew the size of a paracetamol would be seriously dangerous. Harm seems normally to come to animals who injest whole branches of yew.

Having said that, the site quoted says its sources of information could be wrong.

 

[John S]

http://www.botanical-online.com/alcaloidestejoangles.htm

John S

 

[Wayne]

I have met people that have eaten yew berries. My view is that life is not so boring that i need to enliven it by risking a painful death. Once you have made a mistake and ingested the toxin there is no going back, liver failure and death.

When i worked in a hospital i can remember talking to a young man who had taken a paracetamol overdose. He had been revived and was very remorseful. Shame we all knew he was going to die.

Please be very careful if you are going to eat the berries.

 

[Wildlife Ranger]

I eat yew berries, and have done for years. It is easy to spit out the seeds, so minimal risk of poisoning. Because of the sickly sweet taste of the berries you'd never want more than a handful anyway.
As for avoiding poisonous stuff, that's sensible, but the reason why the British eat so few natural things such as wild mushrooms is because of an uneducated fear of the unknown. True, some of them can kill you, and it's not a pleasant way to die, but many of them are easy to identify and are quite tasty, so why miss out? A little bit of care and knowledge is required, but armed with them it's quite safe.
As for blaming the yew tree for people being poisoned by eating a fungus growing near/on the tree, is there any more information on this? Was it a normally edible species that was eaten? Or did they not know what they were doing? Seems a bit doubtful to me, especially as I don't recall ever seeing a fungus on a yew tree!!

 

[Jumbalaya]

As some of the posts here mention, parts of yew berries are edible... namely the aril, or outer skin and the inner sort of gloopy gunk... which is slightly sweet. The inner seed is most definitively toxic. Although there are several old-time references to folks consuming yew berries my personal suggestion is that you try no more than a few as an experiment [one presumes that the main yew toxins, which I forget offhand, are in the berries but in much smaller quantities]. This also assumes that you check your personal 'tolerance' to the berries before you start consuming. The red skin of the berries will provide you with a very vibrant red dye if you wanted to colour some food red.

 

[pierre girard]

As for avoiding poisonous stuff, that's sensible, but the reason why the British eat so few natural things such as wild mushrooms is because of an uneducated fear of the unknown. True, some of them can kill you, and it's not a pleasant way to die, but many of them are easy to identify and are quite tasty, so why miss out? A little bit of care and knowledge is required, but armed with them it's quite safe.

Reminds me of a family trip we took to the east coast (USA) a few years ago. The best campground we stayed at on the entire trip was on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. I'd imagine many of the people who camped there were from east coast cities.

We got in after dark, and in the morning, we noticed the entire place was full of blueberries and currents. The kids and I went out and, rather sureptitiously, picked a gallon of each in no time at all. Some kids at another campsite saw us picking and went out and picked a few. Their father saw them and yelled at them to throw the berries away as "they might be poisonous." This campground was full of people, yet none of them dared to pick blueberries.

PG

 

[Lucy Cassidy]

Well, that's a sad reflection on how "out of touch" modern people are with their surroundings.

(and on how parents seem to want to spend the least amount of time possible with their offspring)

I grew up in the country, and we were taught from an early age by our Nana which things were edible and which ones were not. Yew was definitely on the "not" list!

Lucy

 

[The Joker]

My parents bought me up that all of the Yew was poisonous, as I turned into an adult and read a few books which said that the berries are edible but nothing else, I bought this up with my parents and they said they just wanted me to stay away from eating any part of the Yew incase I ate another part of the tree.
Better to be safe than sorry my dad said.

But I have eaten the berries on more than one occasion and Im still here

 

[Ralph]

Please be very careful if you are going to eat the berries.

Dont worry, I won't be!!Even if i did i'd cut out the seed first.

 

[jason01]

Reminds me of a family trip we took to the east coast (USA) a few years ago. The best campground we stayed at on the entire trip was on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. I'd imagine many of the people who camped there were from east coast cities.

We got in after dark, and in the morning, we noticed the entire place was full of blueberries and currents. The kids and I went out and, rather sureptitiously, picked a gallon of each in no time at all. Some kids at another campsite saw us picking and went out and picked a few. Their father saw them and yelled at them to throw the berries away as "they might be poisonous." This campground was full of people, yet none of them dared to pick blueberries.

PG

I live in the suburbs of a big city, our small local park has a huge old Black Mulberry in a very prominent position. It produces masses of delicious fruit every year, we often combine it with blackberries and apple to make lovely jam but I cant say I've seen anybody else picking the fruit. Some people look at us suspiciously when we're picking and occassionally somebody will ask what it is!