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Poisonous Food Urban Legends / Folkore

No and no.

Basically.

Duck should be pink or it dries up and is horrible and spinach makes a delicious salad vegetable.

Nigella, however, is marketed as a pouting prostitute, classic bank-manager's wank-fantasy material, safe posh totty for the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, middle-of-the-road man. In my opinion. Also NB 'marketed as', not 'is' :)
 
Leaferne said:
No, he's named for former Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, who was apparently hard of hearing.
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Ooh. Damn my ignorance of Canadian political history! Thank you for putting me straight on that one. Just the sort of thing I'd have ended up spouting out as gospel truth if leftuncorrected.
 
Lillith said:
Yeah, but she looks fantastic :D
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And she's a real woman, with curves, rather than a pipecleaner with knots in it.
I always thought the oxalic acid in spinach was safer eaten raw, but I may have been misinformed.
 
My best friend took a class called "Drugs in Society" and was taught nutmeg is hallucinogenic when inhaled. With peanuts or any other food that might be allergenic a minor reaction in an older child or adult really isn't anything. But a reation in a baby can be fatal as they don't have fully developed immune systems. ANything that you eat while breastfeeding can be absorbed into the breastmilk. I couldn't eat any dairy the first three months I was breastfeeding as it made my daughter colicky.
 
hehe nutmeg is a drug. a group of work colleagues were in the UAE and were bored and had heard of the nutmeg is a drug thing. so off they went to the local souk and bought a lot of nutmeg. so they all had large doses of the powdered spice in their drinks. they all got in to a drugged state, a sort of weird kind of stoned. but one guy decided to have a lot more nutmeg :eek: he then decided to go snorkelling in the pool and stayed under the water at the bottom of the pool swimming round and around for much to long than he should. his friends worried about the length of time he was in there jumped in and dragged him out. he was of course fine but in a very weird state. they settled him on a sunbed and he just stayed there till evening. he was in a sort of waking coma if that makes sense. he stayed that way for about two days wrapped up in bed before getting back to normal albeit very hung over. so the tale is kids, just say NO to nutmeg :laughing:
 
Ah, spinach and nutmeg, on the same thread where they belong! Seriously, a dash of nutmeg absolutely *makes* a spinach dish. That, and not cooking the heck out of it.

For the record, oxalic acid is not a poison in the usual sense. It's a calcium blocker. If you eat spinach every day, the calcium in your diet will not bond properly with the calciumin your bones. This was discovered in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, when a devoted father secretly, and illegally, grew spinach in his greenhouse in order for his sickly son to have fresh greens every day; yet the boy was weak and his bones fragile. The clinician treating him wormed all the details of the boy's diet from the father and did some experiments, uncovering the problem and revealing one of the core paradoxes of diet - even healthy foods aren't healthy if you overdo them. (I got this story from a book called *The Camel's Nose.* Sorry, don't remember the author - but he was married to the clinician in question at the time.)

I eat spinach in one dish or other two or three times a week (it being one of about three green vegetables my husband will eat) and my bones are fine.
 
I grew up believing that rhubarb and strawberries made a deadly poison when mixed together. I never questioned it until the day of the 'net dawned and I started finding recipes for strawberries and rhubarb everywhere (about 35,000 when last googled) so I figured it must have been a UL. Has anyone else heard this one? Has anyone ever eaten them together and lived to tell the tale? It's still too ingrained in me to put it to the test!
 
*raises hand (or flipper)*

I can attest that I have eaten strawberries and rhubarb together; they are tasty and not noticeably fatal. :cool:
 
fleeble said:
hehe nutmeg is a drug. :
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In Kenya, an UL said that a version of nutmeg, called Kukumanga IIRC, is said to have Viagra type powers. Our one attempt to test this, by getting a friend to eat lots and then running away, proved fruitless (or nutless, even). Upon further investigation, we were told that a) it was the wrong sort b) it had to be prepared in a special way c) it only worked when a woman was present d) the moon had to be full and you had to have hyenas in your front garden (ok I made that one up).

At least it was/is more eco-friendly than riono horn!
 
Someone told me recently that black pepper was bad for one's heart. How does that come about? :confused:
 
lizard23 said:
Nigella, however, is marketed as a pouting prostitute, classic bank-manager's wank-fantasy material, safe posh totty for the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, middle-of-the-road man. In my opinion. Also NB 'marketed as', not 'is' :)
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Works for me.

I don't know that I'd ever try any of her recipes, it could kill me. (Likewise the Two Fat Ladies.)
 
Another celebrity Nutmeg fiend was the Bebop JazzGod Charlie Parker.
In the biog 'Bird' by Ross Russell (Parker's ex-manager),he tells how the teenage 'Yardbird' went on a 'Nutmeg High'.The after effect being that he could eat nothing but soup for days afterwards.
Of course Parker graduated to much more dangerous pharmacopia later in his short life.
 
Re: oysters?

lopaka said:
I've heard the old saw about not eating oysters in a month with an 'r' in it attributed to the days when refrigeration wasn't reliable so during May, June, July and August eating something as perishable as shellfish was very risky.

Might there be another reason?
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I thought it was to do with oysters changing sex? They change sex during their life cycle which obviously causes them to become thin and less tasty (well, wouldn't you?)
 
i don't know anything about peanut allergies as such, but when i was 5 a classmate of mine suffered a collapsed lung from inhaling a peanut.

i've heard that nutmeg is quite dangerous as a drug - apart from the nausea that accomanies the (apparently pretty mediocre) high, the overdose level is not very far above the level required to produce an effect.
 
Seeing as this thread has also incorperated poisonous plant info as well as food, I'll post this here.

I read a book a while ago, all about the various uses of different types of wood. (stop yawning at the back!). Anyway, the book warned that the whole of the Yew tree was poisonous (apart from the fleshy part of the berries), even the sap. So you had to take care when working with Yew.
It even said that the dust from woodworking with the tree was harmful if inhaled!

And that started me thinking...
If all of the tree is poisonous, what about those clouds of yellow pollen that are released when I knock the branches of a 'flowering' specimen?! Am I breathing in poisonous pollen?! :eek:
 
We've got a friend staying at the moment who has just told a story about a student who apparently died from arsenic poisoning a few years ago having eaten pesto for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a period of several months.

Apparently pine nuts, along with other types of nuts, contain small amounts of arsenic and so frequent meals made from this food can be dangerous.

Is there any truth in this story? I can't find any reference to it having carried out several Google searches. Nothing on Snopes.
 
I do not know whether pine nuts contain arsenic. I do know that not all pesto contains pine nuts - walnuts and pecans are both alternatives.

Since your google fu turned up nothing, I suspect that even if there are trace amounts of arsenic in pine nuts it's of no more concern than the cyanide in apple seeds. Don't feed them to your small pets, and all should be well.

A possibility that occurred to me is that pine nuts, like acorns and other nuts, need to be treated before consumption. So a quick google found this on an educational site about the traditional lifeways of the Washoe Indians:

The preparation of pine nuts for eating is a complicated one. First the cones are roasted until they open. Then the shells of the nuts are cracked by rolling a round stone over them. Once the shells are removed, the nuts are roasted by placing them with hot coals on a winnowing basket, a large, Slightly curved tray, and tossing them up and down so they will not burn. Once the t''ah-gum are roasted, they are ground into flour, which is then used to make pine nut soup. Like pine nuts, acorns are cracked open with a large round stone and separated from their shells. Then the nuts are ground into meal. The meal contains tannic acid, which cannot be eaten. In order to remove the acid, the meal has to be leached by pouring cold and then warmer water over it. Afterwards, it is cooked and made either into acorn mush (like a soup) or into acorn biscuits, by dropping a spoonful into cold water. These products would provide food for the Washoe throughout the long winter.
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Note that the issue of the tannic acid in acorns is addressed but no cautions are made toward the pine nuts; so the nuts of these particulare pines should be non-toxic. Hunter-gatherers keep track of the toxic properties of foods as well as we keep track of highway laws and safe electrical practices - they may be shrugged off by individual idiots, but the instructors always highlight them.
 
Talking of poisonous food :-
We all know that red kidney beans need to be properly cooked,as thay are poisonous in their raw state.

Did you also know that the ordinary green runner bean, that lots of people grow in their back garden, is equally poisonous unless cooked?

My daughter made herself desperately ill by eating just a handful of the actual beans, raw, last year. They were nice fat beans from runner beans that she'd discarded as being too big /tough to cook.

Be warned!
 
*Nervous Laughter*

Yith eats sizeable quantities of pesto and is mystified by such tales as they've never hurt his ignorant body yet.
 
I can only think about those tales where assassins consumed small amounts of Arsenic every day in order to offer two poisoned drinks to their victims so that even if the victim was suspicious and changed the drinks around, they would still get poisoned. From that I can only conclude that small amounts of arsenic over a period of time does nothing much but makes you immune against large amounts.

As for the runner beans, I think earlier generations do know about them being poisonous raw. Even though we lived in town, my parents grew up on farms and I received all their wisdom.
All this is lost nowadays, people don't learn the basics about food any more, beans are just vegetable they can buy packed in the supermarket. Shame.
 
Thanks for the replies. As a pesto-lover I'm also heartened that there doesn't appear to be any truth in the story.

The weird thing is that my friend is insistent that the story was in a respectable paper (possibly the Times) around 8 years ago and that he showed me the article at the time. I have no memory of this at all but he seems convinced... some sort of false memory syndrome I guess...
 
My dad has a story that a flat-mate of his (a long time ago) ate nothing but Chinese takeaway, and at some point had to be rushed to hospital with 'monosodium glutamate poisoning', whatever that is. Looking on the internet inclines me to be a bit skeptical, but it could happen, right?
 
It sounds more likely that your friend has moved from a universe in which pine nuts contain arsenic and he showed you an article to this one. Presumably the you in that universe is currently reminding him about the article, about which he has no knowledge, about now. These unmotivated universe shifts are so annoying because they are so unnoticeable. You never go to the one where you never put on that extra ten pounds or the cat never got run over.

Eating arsenic (says the mystery reader) in small amounts over time builds up your resistance to arsenic, makes the hair glossy, and changes the complexion, If you go cold turkey off eating arsenic, the withdrawal affects the heart. So if you eat a lot of pesto, but aren't regular about it, and you don't exhibit any physiological changes, there must not be arsenic in pesto.

I've never understood how monosodium glutamate was supposed to be worse or better than ordinary table salt. It probably has less sodium content, or why would it be called "monosodium?" If you're on a low-sodium diet you should watch out of it; otherwise, it probably isn't any worse than the icky substances in mass-produced milk, the traces of pesticide and fertilizer remaining on washed vegetables, or the toxins in the air you breathe.
 
MSG

I react really badly to MSG. Certain foods (Chinese with sticky sauces, Pringles and some sorts of supermarket 'ready meals') make me go really buzzy and wired. I wake up in the night with racing heart, and experience weird semi-waking dreams. As a rule I try to avoid MSG. I can imagine it could land you in hospital if you ignored a bad reaction to it.
 
The pine nut / arsenic rumor may have started with the many reports of bitter / metallic aftertaste after eating certain Chinese-supplied pine nuts. I've found documentation dating as far back as 2001:

http://journals.lww.com/euro-emergencym ... e=fulltext

The combination of bitter aftertaste and metallic taste may have been presumed to be evidence of poison somewhere along the line of this story's proliferation ...
 
An allergy is a different thing, of course. Peanuts, milk, and wheat are all poisonous if you're allergic. If the person in the story had MSG allergy, he could well have been in danger, and the teller have misunderstood the reason. For that matter, the mysteriously vanishing article in the Times might have been referring to pine nut allergy; or maybe a batch of pine nuts grown someplace polluted with arsenic got into the marketplace at one time.
 
I'm sure my health nut sister would have told me if there was arsenic in pesto as I eat it in my pasta almost every week. Might have slipped her mind, though...

Although too much of anything will poison you, so maybe the story is essentially true but something was lost in translation from page to memory?
 
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