nemo wrote:

:-)

I think you're a mite defensive. Have you been slapped down hard elsewhere?

There was a spinach freak in my third-grade class. (In the 40s, spinach
was believed to be good for you (Popeye and all that) and a good source
of iron. That the iron was chelated by the oxalic acid, hence not
available for nutrition, escaped most people's attention. The kid's
mother encouraged his spinach kick, and pretending to be Popeye went
with his jock self image.

Most of us brought our lunch in lunch pails or paper bags. He brought
his in cans. (How can anybody eat canned spinach?) One day, he brought
three cans, and it turned out that he had had spinach for breakfast.
(Eat your vegetables, sonny!) We ate lunch in the gym, and he was
running around afterward when he doubled over in pain. The staff
diagnosed appendicitis and called for an ambulance that turned out to be
the Police Emergency Squad. I ran up to the stretcher bearers as they
carried out my writhing classmate and urged them to have the doctors
check for oxalic acid poisoning.

I thought they had brushed me off, but an hour and a half later, cops
took me to the station house and wanted to know why and how I had
poisoned him. (They reasoned that I must have administered the poison.
How else could I know about it?) They didn't believe that anyone could
poison himself with three cans of spinach (counting breakfast, it was
four) or any other amount. Finally (where did I get the chutzpah?), I
said check with the doctors or ask my parents to send a lawyer, and they
checked. The doctors confirmed the spinach link, and the cops brought me
home. (By that time, school was over.)

As for potatoes green under the skin, it's worse than acute discomfort.
There's good evidence that they induce stomach cancer.

Jerry