How did common hogweed from a food plant become "Stalin's revenge"?

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:42

According to history, the basis of Ukrainian borscht several centuries ago was not beets and vegetables, but a valuable nutritious plant - common hogweed. A few decades ago, it turned into a poisonous and dangerous weed for human he alth. Previously, flammable strong moonshine was brewed from its roots, and rich borscht, reminiscent of chicken broth, was made from leaves and stems. In the Siberian lands, it was called either angelica or a bear's paw. The common hogweed grew on wastelands and served as food for cattle, and in the spring, peasants gathered its greens to feed themselves.

This plant is pretty. Its umbrella flowers are large, and the stems reach a height of two meters. Nowadays, common hogweed grows in garbage dumps and abandoned uncultivated plots of land, captures territories in meadows and displaces fodder grasses from the lowlands. Many do not even realize that it can exhibit aggressive toxic properties, as a result of which the skin is affected, because this was not the case before. The children played in its thickets. The children wore pumpkin-like leaves on their heads to protect themselves from the sun. Today, out of ten people,touching this plant, eight are hospitalized with severe burns.

After the Second World War, information reached Stalin that the farmers of North America were feeding their livestock with this weed grass for our places. By his order, the common hogweed was classified as a fodder crop and began to be grown everywhere. Khrushchev, and even Brezhnev, actively supported Stalin's idea. But the ordinary weed did not suit the new government. The development of breeders began to advance. Sosnovsky's variety was considered the most successful. It was a huge plant, grown first in the Caucasus, and then offered to all other agricultural zones in the USSR. The fact that this variety had an unpleasant surprise - poisonous properties, no one dared to report to the top.

Therefore, in the mid-seventies, telling their Polish friends about the successes in agriculture, our government sincerely invited them to use this experience and endowed them with seeds of hogweed, bred by the brilliant Sosnowski. As a result, it turned out that this plant is unsuitable for food. Milk after it became bitter and poisonous. The Poles decided that this was a provocation. They called the plant "Stalin's revenge" and burned the plantations to get rid of the grass. And in our country, according to the order coming from above, they continued to grow this poisonous hogweed for many more years. The photo attached to this article perfectly conveys its visual appeal.

But as a result of natural pollination, poisonousproperties were transferred to weeds. So, a case was recently recorded: a mother and daughter decided to pull out a weed growing along the fence at their dacha, among which was the common hogweed (the photo shows what size it can reach). The mother chopped it with a sap, and the daughter carried the grass into the ravine. Two days later they were hospitalized with severe skin burns. It took a long treatment, the same as with thermal skin lesions. Moreover, the doctors immediately said that the traces of these burns would disappear only after two or three years. Contact with hogweed is especially dangerous on sunny hot days.