Poisonous Food Urban Legends / Folkore

[Spookdaddy]

And potatoes are a nightshade. Mind you, there are an awful lot of nightshades - peppers, tobacco, aubergine etc - so maybe it's nothing to get too worried about, unless you're unusually sensitive to alkaloids.

Bitter almonds contain high levels of prussic acid, from which cyanide can be refined.

And everyone knows that brussels sprouts have the unique quality of being poisonous to everyone in close proximity while leaving the ingester completely unharmed. As any fule kno, Hassan-i-Sabbah, leader of the Hashishin, employed this method to assassinate the ninth Fatimid Caliph in 1087, although it wouldn't of course have been at a christmas dinner, and he did use tincture of prunes as an accelerant.

Cookery is a lethal art - at least it is when I'm in the kitchen!!

 

[PeniG]

Don't use any green-tinted potatoes and you'll be fine.

Actually, when I was short of potatoes and had a high number of green-tinted ones, I've chosen the least-green ones, cooked them a good long time, and not had any difficulties. The degree of risk in any food is a combination of factors including preparation method and personal sensitivity. A lot more people are poisoned every year by bacteria from poor meat handling (chopping vegetables on the meat board, not heating food all the way through, etc. - bacteria die at 165 degrees, and the stuffing in a large turkey, for example, is unlikely to ever reach that temperature) or from vitamin imbalance than they are from trace elements normally considered poisons present in the food.

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Re: 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.

Yeah me and the wife react to MSG and call it the "MSG cough" whenever we eat fast food, KFC, MacDonalds and Bk, we get a tickly cough for a few minutes afterwards.

Also I lived on pesto and pasta solidly for a year, when young and skint and apart from needing regular exercise to keep the belly roughly in order had no ill effects.

Also I eaten raw runner beans, not in large quantities, but never felt particularly ill.

 

[kirmildew]

Pesto is naught but meconium from the devil's own spawn. Yeccccch. :cross eye

 

[DeeDeeTee]

I think this falls into a generalised urban myth which can be written:
" An unnamed male student at X, died/almost died from a diet of exclusiving eating Y."

In my years at Heriot-Watt, late 80s, the story doing the rounds was of a student at Aberdeen university who tried to survive on a diet of only porridge and was hospitalised with malnutrion. I may have been in the system long enough to hear another about someone dying on a rice-only diet.

Of course since the wonders of BBC3 and 'Freaky eaters' we can see that it is easily possible to survive for decades on diets that you wouldn't feed animals. Spaghetti hoops on toast every day? Or the man who could only eat cheese and crisps.

 

[Quake42]

Of course since the wonders of BBC3 and 'Freaky eaters' we can see that it is easily possible to survive for decades on diets that you wouldn't feed animals. Spaghetti hoops on toast every day? Or the man who could only eat cheese and crisps.

There's a lot of exaggeration in these stories though. I remember one about a boy who would only eat jam sandwiches. However, on further investigation, he also drank orange juice, ate apples and would eat some form of protein (possibly chicken - can't recall). So his diet wasn't brilliant, and was certainly quite boring, but was perfectly possible to survive on. I suspect most of these "freaky eaters" are similar.

Historically (and indeed in many parts of the world today) most people had little variety in their diets, in most cases without suffering terrible health problems.

 

[Spookdaddy]

...In my years at Heriot-Watt, late 80s, the story doing the rounds was of a student at Aberdeen university who tried to survive on a diet of only porridge and was hospitalised with malnutrion. I may have been in the system long enough to hear another about someone dying on a rice-only diet...

I was also at University in the late 80's and heard almost the exact same story - but in my version the Aberdonian porridge-eater got scurvy.

I put it down as an urban myth generated by the welfare officer (who was ironically called Ms De'Ath - I swear I've not made that up) but then in my second year we ended up with a friend of a friend staying with us after he had been thrown out of his own accommodation. (I say 'staying with us' - effectively he was actually squatting, until, that is, I got heroically drunk on vodka one bonfire night and threatened him with an ice cream scoop.)

This guy did not know how to make a cup of tea and had never so much as heated up a tin of beans, either in pan or microwave, in his life. I swear if he hadn't had the ability to whine us into culinary submission he would have ended up eating toilet roll and cobwebs. Anyway, one month with him was enough to persuade me that the scurvy story might not be as far-fetched as it at first appeared.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

I did spend a week, back in the mid Eighties living on nothing but tea, no sugar, or milk. I ended up quite ill.

 

[Dr_Baltar]

...In my years at Heriot-Watt, late 80s, the story doing the rounds was of a student at Aberdeen university who tried to survive on a diet of only porridge and was hospitalised with malnutrion. I may have been in the system long enough to hear another about someone dying on a rice-only diet...

I was also at University in the late 80's and heard almost the exact same story - but in my version the Aberdonian porridge-eater got scurvy.

Same here, but I'm sure in my version they filled an empty drawer with the porridge and ate it cold and sliced. Oh, and they got rickets. I love embellishment.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

...

Same here, but I'm sure in my version they filled an empty drawer with the porridge and ate it cold and sliced. Oh, and they got rickets. I love embellishment.

My grandfather used to visit someone who did actually do that,in a drawer in the kitchen dresser. A miserly farmer. That was in the wilds of South West Scotland many many years ago and is probably true. A drawerful lasted about a week.

 

[GNC]

Same here, but I'm sure in my version they filled an empty drawer with the porridge and ate it cold and sliced. Oh, and they got rickets. I love embellishment.

I heard that story applied to Highland crofters, except that they were all as strong as carthorses as a result.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

Kale, porridge, turnips and herring, those were the staples up North, for a long time.

 

[PeniG]

Historically (and indeed in many parts of the world today) most people had little variety in their diets, in most cases without suffering terrible health problems.

Well, that depends on your definition of "terrible health problems." In rural America, well into the 20th century, if you didn't can vegetables at harvest, you got vitamin deficiency disorders during the winter. You just did. Every year. Everybody took it for granted as part of the cost of being too poor to buy Mason jars (the pressure cooker was also a big expense); that's after 1858, when the Mason jar was invented. Before then, you had to be so rich you had a hothouse. Like malaria, and hookworm, and losing a tooth for a child, they were terrible health disorders but they were also part of normal life, so it's easy for us to look back now and think they weren't suffering.

 

[Timble2]

...In my years at Heriot-Watt, late 80s, the story doing the rounds was of a student at Aberdeen university who tried to survive on a diet of only porridge and was hospitalised with malnutrion. I may have been in the system long enough to hear another about someone dying on a rice-only diet...

I was also at University in the late 80's and heard almost the exact same story - but in my version the Aberdonian porridge-eater got scurvy.

Same here, but I'm sure in my version they filled an empty drawer with the porridge and ate it cold and sliced. Oh, and they got rickets. I love embellishment.

I heard that version too, about a Scottish student who'd been studying in Manchester (where I was) a few years earlier, this was the mid 70s.

 

[DeeDeeTee]

Pietro_Mercurios Posted:

I did spend a week, back in the mid Eighties living on nothing but tea, no sugar, or milk. I ended up quite ill

Eek. I'm impressed - I couldn't handle one full cup of tea without milk.

My only 'heroic' student starvation diet was to survive a full month on £3 worth of food. All I could say then was that thank god for Tesco economy bake beans (3 pence a can at the time) and economy plum tomatos (9 pence) and pasta.

I of course ate like a horse as soon as I got some money the month afterwards.

 

[SHAYBARSABE]

Well, that depends on your definition of "terrible health problems." In rural America, well into the 20th century, if you didn't can vegetables at harvest, you got vitamin deficiency disorders during the winter.

In the last Great Depression, according to the books, when the WPA started recuiting the population for work projects, the WPA was surprised to discover that a good percentage of those recruited couldn't perform any physical labor due to various nasty ailments resulting from vitamin deficiencies. First order of that day was getting the proposed workers proper food and medical care; the labor had to wait.

 

[PeniG]

Yup; and when you read accounts of travelers in one area dissing on how lazy, shiftless, or ugly the people they travel among are, it's well to make allowances for local circumstances. Sometimes descriptions of "lazy" behavior, when studied closely, reveal probable epidemics of parasites or diet deficiencies. Modern welfare programs that don't take into account the adaptation of local populations to local conditions (such as lactose intolerance, or a "thrifty gene" that stores fat more efficiently) can even create new health problems among the people they're intended to help.

 

[SHAYBARSABE]

Modern welfare programs that don't take into account the adaptation of local populations to local conditions (such as lactose intolerance, or a "thrifty gene" that stores fat more efficiently) can even create new health problems among the people they're intended to help.

True and sad.

We've wandered a bit from the topic, haven't we?