What's "toxic" with this picture?

This image was created by the ethnographer. It is a photo of fern scrolls in the hands of a local farmer. What I find interesting about this photo is it doesn't strike you as toxic at all. The scale of focus is pretty tight. All we can see are a person's midriff and the delicate scrolls they are holding gently in their rough and textured hands. There is almost nothing to give away the location of the photo or its recent history of disaster. I think this plays into the authors point that there is no way to tell whether or not these scrolls are "toxic" by the look of them.