Dear Dave,

I made a judgement based on a quick reading of his and other research.
Perhaps I should have said these are foods deserving special
consideration.  Ames doesn't single out broccoli or mushrooms for deletion
from the diet.  He discusses broccoli at length to illustrate the
similarity between the some plant toxins and synthetic pesticides:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/mutagen/ames.PNASIII.html

Elsewhere, I believe, he and others point out that broccoli and related
vegetables, among others, have potent anti-carcinogenic properties. One of
the points of his research is that, as we get apoplectic over synthetic
pesticides, we should consider the toxicity of natural foods.  The PNAS
paper above has a big paragraph on broccoli.  Read it and draw your own
conclusions.  (I'm not an expert--and Ames' own writing is readily
accessible.)

Yesterday, I ate a few broccoli florettes.  And kale is in the (broccoli's)
brassica family.  It seems that these might be foods to include but not eat
too much.  (In that same paragraph, Ames mentions a 100 g/day.)  ((Once or
twice I binged on kale.  Ames seems to often cite broccoli and cabbage in
the same breath.  As I think about it, taking that omission of kale as a
implicit marker from the dangers of the brassica family probably isn't wise
of me.))  (((The Tuft's USDA research ranks kale high by ORAC.)))

Dr Lois Swirsky Gold, Ames' colleague, has made an interesting table that
ranks various natural foods in order of their carcinogencity:

http://potency.berkeley.edu/herp.html

I may have singled mushrooms out because someone mentioned something about
it to me years ago.  Based on the table, mushrooms (hydrazine) have a high
HERP index, though the TD50 measure for that is particularly low.  The HERP
index is a normalization based on exposure.  TD50 is a weight potency
measure.

Ming