>>12422865Pathogens are usually very specialized, which is why eating shit like cows is safe in the first place, their bugs just don't catch to us. When the species jump does happen is when shit usually hits the fan with the deadly diseases because native bacteria is usually pretty good at keeping the body alive. Stuff like bird or swine flu is so dangerous precisely because the source doesn't realize it's inside a human and is fucking shit up in a weird way. Considering only few pathogens have made the jump from conceptually similar mammals to us after hundreds of years of living together in cramped cities it's unlikely a totally alien virus could do it either, bit like how plant viruses or bacteria very rarely jump to humans. So pathologically aliens would be safe to eat. You could further enhance this by cooking since that will destroy basically all rabble rousers.
Structurally it would depend if the alien is carbon based or not. Provided they operate roughly with the same framework of elements then you probably should be able to eat them at least the same way you can eat basically anything on this planet be it meat, insects, plants or even leather. The few things you can shove in your mouth but not extract anything even with a thorough cooking and chewing just pass few days later. Similar logic would surely apply to the aliens where at least some part would probably be fully edible and the rest you could at least down if you chopped em up to fine enough pieces.
That really leaves chemistry which is the big nono. There could be trace elements like cyanide or lead which just straight up kills us. There could be biological poisons that are harmless to them but disastrous to us, there could be neuro chemicals that just shut our brains down. Lot of earth things despite nominally being edible produce poisons or venoms that they enjoy and we die from.
