I've bumped into some homesteaders and permaculturists who love the word 'medicinal'. They don't seem to get that 'medicinal' means "the disease is worse than the cure", not "make salads out of this and enjoy!".

If it were just edible it would be labeled edible in the literature. If you consume it in a way or quantity that isn't recommended, well, there's a reason you don't see this stuff in the grocery store.

The reason is next to no company/investor wants to fund double blind clinical research on a natural product to come up with an FDA/medically sound treatment regimen due to there being no monopoly privileges conferred for doing so, therefore rendering it unprofitable from a capitalist free market point of view.

Big difference. It's not that all medicinal plants can be worse than the condition off the bat, it's that no one can make money by figuring out a dosage and putting it through the proper channels to allow manufacture and utilization for that purpose.

Herbalists have been doing their best to maintain a corpus of knowledge around these procedures for centuries. It isn't their fault that our boner for letting the market arbitrate ever aspect of our lives keeps useful research from being done.

I think you misread that. They didn't say that medicinal plants were worse than the condition - rather the opposite. The point they were making was "better than being ill" is not the same as "you will always feel better so eat it at any meal".

I lean heavily capitalist but I enjoy keeping notes of things like this that must so obviously be done collectively. Thanks

The process I was taught for mushrooms that you can identify as an edible species was:

Day 1: Eat a small (1/4 tsp) amount and observe for any reaction

Day 2: Repeat

Day 3: Don't eat any. Observe for any reaction.

Day 4: Eat

The explanation was that individuals can have widely varied reactions to species others find edible. Obviously don't do this for something unknown.

That's a bit overly cautious for identified edibles outside of a couple that can cause extreme reactions (raw shiitake, for example), but it's much better to be overly cautious with mushrooms than to be overly bold.

Eh, its not a bad test. Chicken of the woods is edible and quite delicious. But, some people(including me) will have severe gastrointestinal distress after eating. Mushrooms produce a plethora of compounds that people may react to. Much better to try in small doses the first time.

That test almost certainly wouldn't trigger your CotW GI issues -- I also have issues with CotW unless it is cooked to death, but 1/4t wouldn't do anything, so with that test you'd still be surprised by the GI issues the first time you ate a bunch.

Indeed; though I restrict doing this to mushrooms I'm familiar with. Neurotoxins abound, and that test won't reveal them.

All mushrooms are edible, some only once.

Also you can kill cancer cells with a gun