Pasta dish poisoned by herb mistake – an Italian family is recovering in hospital after eating pasta mistakenly garnished with Devil’s Trumpet, Datura metel.
The family grandmother had been growing the plant in her herb collection after seeing it growing wild near the market and mistaking it for a type of bitter green broccoli. After she used leaves from the plant to garnish the family’s pasta dish one night, they quickly fell violently ill with vomiting and then paralysis. Fortunately another family member found them collapsed on the floor. The grandmother, husband, daughter and young grandson are all recovering in hospital after being placed in a medically induced coma and doctors believe that the paralysis will pass.
Food foraging is all very well but you really do have to know what you’re doing.