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Another neat inborn allergy is to a chemical found in the skins of apples, pears and peaches. It's also found in birch bark.

You eat any of those fruits/bark without first cooking it the insides of your mouth could swell up and choke you to death ~ or you could just have welts.

Yup, have that one too but not so severe; I notice some minor swelling with these. Sometimes raw carrots also.

But tell me, why would I be eating birch bark??

Back during the last major glaciation you'd be up there hunting big game at the foot of the glaciers. Birch trees grow like little bushes or shrubs under those conditions.

They are exceedingly high in cyanide.

They also are high in this naturally occuring substitute for ipicac, so if you are starving to death and eat some of those little bushes anyway, you'll toss your cookies and clear your airways long before you die.

Somebody's going to come in and tell us that "birch trees are low in cyanide" and I'm going to have to remind him that at the most Northern limits little bitty fully grown 6 inch high birch trees are HIGH in cyanide.

One friend with this allergy reports she can tell if roasted almonds are roasted enough, and if they aren't she gets welts from them too. Apples make her face swell up.