bottle palm is bottle palm fruit edible?

[treelover]

is bottle palm fruit edible?

[DTS1]

im pretty sure it is (correct me if im wrong pls)

[spike]

hyophorbe means pig food, I don't know anything else but I wouldn't eat anything with that name 

Edit: Palmpedia claims it's mildly poisonous so I wouldn't try it

Edited May 13, 2022 by spike

[Tyrone]

I have my theory about why Hyophorbe got the name which means pig food. Apart from the fact they actually would have fed them to pigs, back in the 1600s to 1800s in Mauritius and Reunion which are very remote outposts, everythings value would have been  connected to how it helped you to survive. Food would have been your biggest concern. The islands did have food shortages, and the population eventually ate almost all the palms out of existence. ( Also the Dodo and the land turtles that used to be there.) There are officially no wild populations of Acanthophoenix rubra in existence, although I did see some volunteers returning from cultivated specimens in rainforest in Reunion. The same is true of Dictyosperma which is extinct in the wild in Reunion, and almost extinct in Mauritius. Hyophorbe palm hearts however we’re not really palatable. Hyophorbe indica which is only from Reunion is critically endangered by loss of habitat, was known as the Poison palm. It probably wasn’t poisonous but it did taste bitter. So you can imagine being a hungry slave in the 1700s working a sugar cane field trying to find a palm to eat in the forest, looking for a good palm to eat (Acanthophoenix) and on finding only Hyophorbe calling them “pig food” because they were just unfit for a human meal and not what you were looking for. They had no value. I wonder how many Hyophorbe americaulis were just cleared and fed to pigs. 
 

However this doesn’t answer whether bottle palm seeds are edible. I personally would be very cautious.