this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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How fortunate then that the same species resistant to their defense actually goes on to cultivate it
Oh, we’re not resistant, we’re just crazy enough to like the pain. Birds are resistant and don’t feel it at all, they can eat chilis like fruits.
It's just relative. Most mammals don't pay rent, taxes, or have to deal with the TSA. Once you do those things, spicy plant chemicals become a frivolous game.
I eat peppers just to feel something
Well, given that it's supposed to be toxic rather than just painful, I'd say we're resistant in that it takes a high dose to kill us.
i wouldn't really count body mass as resistence, by that measure every single mammal bar perhaps the field mouse is resistant to basically every toxin.
You'd have to eat a lot of pure cap to kill you. Oral LD50 in mice is 47.2 mg/kg (source). For an 80 kg person, that's 3780 mg of pure cap. 1000mg of pure cap dropped into a pot of chili would be inedibly hot even to the most hardcore spicy food fan.
There's a book called The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, which is about this. Looking from the plants eye view of things, they have manipulated us into growing them in a huge variety of environments. The book focuses on tulips, cannabis, apples, and potatoes, iirc. Fascinating book.
Two quick examples from the book:
Pot gets us high, now we grow it in closets, warehouses, yards, basements, attics, etc.
Apples don't reproduce true from seed, so Johnny Appleseed brought readily available cider to the Americas. (You need a cutting of an apple tree to grow that type of apple.)