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I'm looking for this short story - Astronauts make an emergency landing on a spiky/needle-like surface planet which turns out to be a storage facility for alien stuff. Astronaut almost starves to death, he can't figure which of the alien stuff is edible or poisonous. Some items he opens turns out to be alien weapons. That's all I remember.
It was in a SF anthology with another short story - How's the Night Life on Cissalda by Harlan Ellison
That's "Untouched by Human Hands" aka "One Man's Poison", a short story by Robert Sheckley, also the answer to the old questions Two men in an alien warehouse and Short story - "One man's meat is another man's poison"; available at Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Any of these covers look familiar?
Astronauts make an emergency landing on a spiky/needle-like surface planet
The planet was like a round gray-brown porcupine. The spines of a million needle-sharp mountains glittered in the red dwarf's feeble light. And as they spiraled lower, circling the planet, the pointed mountains seemed to stretch out to meet them.
which turns out to be a storage facility for alien stuff.
From the air, the building had merely seemed big. On the ground, it was enormous. Hellman and Casker walked up to it slowly. Hellman had his burner ready, but there was no sign of life.
"This planet must be abandoned," Hellman said almost in a whisper.
[. . . .]
The tremendous wedge-shaped room was evidently a warehouse of sorts. Goods were piled to the ceiling, scattered over the floor, stacked haphazardly against the walls. There were boxes and containers of all sizes and shapes, some big enough to hold an elephant, others the size of thimbles.
Near the door was a dusty pile of books. Immediately, Hellman bent down to examine them.
"Must be food somewhere in here," Casker said, his face lighting up for the first time in a week. He started to open the nearest box.
Astronaut almost starves to death, he can't figure which of the alien stuff is edible or poisonous.
At the end of two hours, they were no closer. They had translated dozens of titles and sniffed so many substances that their olfactory senses had given up in disgust.
"Let's talk this over," Hellman said, sitting on a box marked: VORMITISHGOOD AS IT SOUNDS!
"Sure," Casker said, sprawling out on the floor. "Talk."
"If we could deduce what kind of creatures inhabited this planet, we'd know what kind of food they ate, and whether it's likely to be edible for us."
"All we do know is that they wrote a lot of lousy advertising copy."
Hellman ignored that. "What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?"
"Stupid ones!" Casker said.
That was no help. But Hellman found that he couldn't draw any inferences from the mountains. It didn't tell him if the late Helgans ate silicates or proteins or iodine-base foods or anything.
"Now look," Hellman said, "we'll have to work this out by pure logic—Are you listening to me?"
"Sure," Casker said.
"Okay. There's an old proverb that covers our situation perfectly: 'One man's meat is another man's poison.'"
"Yeah," Casker said. He was positive his stomach had shrunk to approximately the size of a marble.
"We can assume, first, that their meat is our meat."
Casker wrenched himself away from a vision of five juicy roast beefs dancing tantalizingly before him. "What if their meat is our poison? What then?"
"Then," Hellman said, "we will assume that their poison is our meat."
"And what happens if their meat and their poison are our poison?"
"We starve."
Some items he opens turns out to be alien weapons.
Some of the alien things are dangerous to the astronauts, who don't know what they are for or how to use them. I'm not sure any of them are actually weapons.
It was in a SF anthology with another short story - How's the Night Life on Cissalda by Harlan Ellison
Are you sure about that? "Untouched by Human Hands" doesn't seem to be in any of the anthologies listed here.
