Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

For Child of Lir, peaches being poisonous in the world of tWoT is one of the things I did to make the world different. Though peach pits do contain small amounts of cyanide, which was once manufactured through processing peach pits. Several other fruits with pits, such as apricots, also have trace amounts of cyanide in the pits. And almonds may be the first genetically engineered plant since humans bred the deadly, to humans, cyanide levels out them to make them edible for people.

Peach PITS are poisonous here and now. They're full of—strychnine? Arsenic? I've forgotten which, but they really are bad. The flesh is not. You could look it up. But after one encounter with peach pits, a person would decide the whole thing was poison. This is on a par with the eighteenth century belief that tomatoes were poisonous—some people have an allergic reaction to them.

And in some locations, six-toed cats are common.

Harriet? (laughter)

Harriet McDougal

I've never counted them! (laughter) I will tell you this, though, that peach pits do....someone wrote and said, "When did peaches become poisonous?" And I said, "You know, they're not." One of Robert Jordan's great themes was the unreliability of information, that we all think we know things that sometimes are absolutely cuckoo, and that's one of them. We do...if a child manages to eat a peach pit, chewing on it to get at the kernel inside, then you have to call poison control. That's true now, so that's why. I guess. (laughter) I don't know how many references there are.