"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.
Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.
We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.
I've seen it pointed out a few times that the various toxins mentioned above did technically have the desired effect, given humans started cultivating the plants and thus protected them from predators/insects, and spreading their seeds far and wide. I just like the idea of evolution/DNA in the examples above being like a benevolent Monkey Paw for the plants.
Another thing is - those poisons? They have exactly the effect they should have, except we are microdosing on them. A beetle chewing on a mint can easily consume 10% of its bodyweight in Leaf. At that concentration, menthol is toxic. We dose less than 1% of our bodyweight in menthol leaf, so all we get from it is the initial tingling cool recognition. Same with capsaicin. It makes us cry and salivate and puke, it repulses everything from any possible orifice if present in sufficient amounds. But we usually don't eat as much outside of some insane competitions — which usually end up with people spitting and crying and having snot all over their face and fighting the urge to puke, then paying for all of that several hours later while on toilet. The coffeine can kill us. The essential oil from cloves can dissolve our tissues. Brasilian nuts have so much selenium that eating a handful of them every day for just few days will give us metal poisoning, melt our liver, and kills us. Nicotine can seriously fuck up our nerve system. And so on amd so forth.
We can tolerate these things, sure. But that tolerance is heavily based on the fact that we use these ingredients in incredibly small doses overal, mixed with other ingredients that dillute the overal concentration, or bind to the chemical in question and allow for its slow release over a longer time as it gets digested. Just enough for our bodies to be able to keep up with getting rid of those.
