A Six Course Feast of Dangerous Foods

about for example, polar bear liver and dangerous within. Yeah, it was a fun episode, and uh, it's it's perfect for the holidays because the holidays are a time when so many of us eat things that we feel we should not or no, we should not. I shouldn't be eating this. I shouldn't eating this is delicious, but I shouldn't be eating this. The cranberry sauce from a can. You know that's wrong. It comes out in the cylinder. You can still see the ridges where the and is

sort of bent a little bit. You know. It's eat eat stuff like that stuff you have kind of in a stout before, but also just like a bunch of rich foods that you know, you shouldn't be eating at least in these quantities, but hey, it's the holidays and it's about fattening up to survive the horrors of winter. But here's my advice. If you are eating turkey and the turkey is overcooked, because it always is, don't waste your time on it, you know, just skip the turkey

and move on to something else well with it. With a turkey based meal, especially the Thanksgiving Day meal, there are so many side dishes you can really just pick your poison as it were. Right, Well, Robert, if you don't have anything else to add, I think we should make way for our episode on a six course feast of dangerous foods. Yes, let's roll the repeat. And hey, the next episode after this one I believe will be

a a second course dangerous foods too. So if you like this episode, stay tuned, come back for another course of all new dangerous foods. For the revenge, for the regurgitation, we have quite a feast prepared for ourselves here today, A dangerous feast. Yeah. We wanted to think about an interesting aspect of human life, which is how often we put trust trust at a very level of life and death into people who do a very mundane task for us, which is preparing food. Yeah, I mean I did basic

level mundane right. Yeah. Obviously with the appropriate skill it becomes our an art form. But we tend to think of just like the very basic idea of someone, say, opening a can of noodles there cooking it up for us.

It didn't require any high science. Yeah. And even if you even if you're talking about preparing food yourself and it not being something that someone else has cooked for you, a lot of times you're going to be using ingredients that you just assume, you know are properly vetted, these are safe to eat, That the nuts I'm getting out of a jar of nuts are not contaminated with the cole I, that the peanut butter I'm using doesn't have

salmonella in it. But that may not be a safe assumption depending on I don't know where you live, what kind of industry regulations are in place, and how well they're enforced. Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes down to just the human history of cooking and just culinary preparation, right, because early on humans learned the value of cooking. I means to basically externalized digestion, and eight is in the consumption of things that we would not

otherwise be able to eat. Yeah, that's the thing that's easy to forget about. I mean, if you're if you're sitting down to a piece of chicken or steak, I mean you you probably wouldn't want to eat it just straight up raw, But it could be done if you were in a pinch, you know, you could chew it.

There are a lot of foods that you just simply can't eat without some cooking, right, things, Yeah that would just kill us we ate it without proper prop or they'd be just inedible, you know, too tough for to you know what I mean. Yeah, Cooking improves the taste, It can tenderize the food in question. It can kill

off pathogens that would otherwise be of dire consequence. Of course, another interesting thing about cooking is that it in some cases, I think d nature's our food in a way that allows us to sort of separate ourselves from the means of production of the food when we're eating it, so we you know, like cooking a steak makes you think about it as a fundamentally different thing from the flesh

of a dead animal. That had to be murdered in order for you to eat this, Oh indeed, yeah, and so it kind of it kind of allows you to put some distance. Yeah, yeah, I mean we and then we layered language on top of that. You don't go to the restaurant in order pig. You don't go to the restaurant in order cow. You order pork and beef. Um. Yeah, Poyo and guyin know very different words. Yeah and so.

And on top of that, you know, the butchering. Butchering of animals, Culinary preparation in general allows us to more precisely choose what parts we're going to eat, what parts are delicious, what parts are nutritious, what parts are inedible? Uh? And or deadly? So you you keep that tasty crab cloth meat, but you throw out the dead man's fingers. You know, I've always wondered this, and I've never been able to find a good answer so far. Maybe there

is one out there. Supposedly, apple seeds have a little tiny bit of cyanide in them, and I wondered if has anybody ever eaten so many, so many apples seeds and all that they've gotten cyanide poisoning? There have been days where I feel like I've eaten that many apples. But I'll have to I have to start counting this Robert or u s secret competitive apple eater someday, because that's like the I find myself eating more and more apples.

I think maybe it's Michael Paulin who pointed out that if you're if you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not really hungry. Then you shouldn't snack. If you are going to snack, hey, and apples great. Oh. I just tend to go to the apple for my snack needs if I'm you know, in any level of self conscious about my my diet. But you know, sometimes you're just hungry enough to eat poutine and not anything else. It's true sometimes that the apple is not going to

scratch that itch. Well, speaking of fruits, it looks like our first course is arriving. What is this here? Ah, we have some acky fruit to enjoy here. Now I've never had aki fruit before. What's the deal with acky fruit? Acky fruit is really interesting and I had I had not actually experienced docky fruit until just a couple of weeks ago when I went on a family vacation to Jamaica. U Aki is like that the national dish, the national fruit of Jamaica. It's a it's a fruit, but it's

not your typical like Western idea of a fruit. For example, what's you have this yellowish or orange is fruit on a tree and then when it ripens, it pops open and it looks like a like a three eyed feature of some kind of with the big black glassy eyes inside of it. Glassy eyes are seeds. Um, So it's kind of a Jim Henson dark crystal kind of creature. Yeah, it really, it really looks kind of alien and weird.

But then uh, even properly prepared at what they do is they they take the seeds out, they cut out some of the membrane, and you're left with these, uh, these little yellowish looking lumps. And the main dish that is prepared there is that they take it and they fry it in a skillet with some bits of codfish so achi and saltfish is the dish, some onions in there as well, and it ends up tasting about like

scrambled eggs. It has that kind of consistency. It's not a sweet fruit at all, but it's very good that's nice. So it's not sweet. What does it taste like? Is it kind of spicy or is it kind of it's kind of I think it kind of. It doesn't have I was I never had a real sense that it had much of a taste. But it's in there with a little bit of fish, some onions. It's fried up more of a texture, kind of more of a texture. And the texture is I think closest to scrambled eggs.

That would be my main comparison there. But it sounds like something worth trying. Yeah, I highly recommended for anybody goes Jamaica for no other reason because it's you know, it's the national dish there. And you said they tossed the seeds out right, Yes, because as I'll lay out here, the seeds are are poisonous um. This plant was originally native to West Africa, migrated to Jamaican seventy eight, apparently due to Jamaica's first botanist, Thomas Clark, who introduced it there.

The aki tree is actually known as bliah sepeda and it's named after Captain William blythe the notorious pirate. So interesting history there. But where the poison comes in is that unripe aki fruit contains a poison called hypoglycin. And actually there are two different varieties in the fruit. There's hypoglyin A and hypoglycin B, which one is worse. Well, A is the main problem here, and so you have extremely high levels of hypoglycin BE in the unripe fruit.

But then the fruit ripens, It pops open like some sort of alien creature and stares at you with its three black eyes. Uh. And at that point you know you you open it up, you remove the seeds. The only edible proportion is the yellow a really, which is surrounded by on again the toxic seeds. And there's a membrane at the base of the seed mantle that's also poisonous. You have to take that out to Okay, So it sounds like if you don't know what you're doing, you

shouldn't try to eat a knocky fruit, right. Talk to somebody who's familiar with this fruit and knows what knows how to carve it up. Right. Yeah, But luckily if it's on the menu at a place in Jamaica, like they know how to cook it, Like everyone has familiarity with this particular dish there. But you are saying, in a survival situation, stick to the scrambled eggs. Not probably not the black hole eggs. Yeah. Yeah, because someone who knows how to deal with this, they're gonna clean it.

They're gonna wash the fruit after it's gonna be boiled in water. Then they're gonna throw out that water because that could contain a trace of the poison. And it's gonna be perfectly good to eat. It's gonna be rich and you know, fatty acids, vitamin A, zinc, and protein. But if you were to eat it, uh, the unripened version, you could get what's called called Jamaican vomiting sickness. That sounds like a not very fun sickness. Yeah, it causes a lot of vomiting and can lead to coma and death.

And uh, in the biochemistry of it is pretty interesting. It kills you via a form of hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. Oh. So, normally, as the body uses up the glucose in the blood, your liver releases glucose that it formed that it stores in the form of glycogen. The toxin, however, halts the process, so a few hours after ingesting all of this, your body glucose crashes and

and just leaves you hypoglocemic. Oh this sounds similar to some not poisons, but venoms I've heard of before the attack by causing an insulin spike in the body and drop in the victim's blood sugar to dangerously low levels. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like those are probably similar. I think there's like a there's a snail in the ocean that does that or something. Alright, well, what do we have next

on the mediu here? Ah? Well, it looks like the next thing arriving is something I'm a little bit familiar with but haven't had the courage to eat myself. It's it's something that's straight out of Iceland, and from what I've heard, it's well, it's bad news if you're not game, but if you are game, I guess some people really like it. So, so what do we have sitting here before us? It looks like some little cubes of cheese, like the kind of the tasters hand out at the

grocery store in the Delhi. So it's a little white cube with a toothpick stuck in it, and I guess there there's nothing else on the plate, So it looks like you just eat it by itself. Oh, except there's a shot of clear liquor sitting next to it, so I guess maybe you're supposed to take that with it. Now, what's this smell I'm getting from the dish here, Joe? You know, as as one person, I watched a video online of somebody eating this stuff and the first comment

was smells like windex. That is a that is a common description of what this is, which is rotten greenland shark meat, a a national delicacy of Iceland, also known as hakl and uh. And I apologize if I'm not pronouncing that the right way. I don't know the best way to say, ha, Carl, But there it is. It's uh. It's compared to industrial cleaning products. Often in the aroma, it's very high in ammonia, so it's gonna smell like windex, or like bleach, or like urine. That is the most

common point of comparison other than cleaning products. So it's it's urine, it's bleach, and then also kind of like ambient rotting fishiness of ancient days. Okay, now it's of course we're throwing in at this point and reminding everyone at far northern cultures typically have a lot of survival foods. Yes, where Yeah, it may not seem as as delightful, but you have to put it in the context of surviving

the winter with the foods that could be preserved. Yeah, this is this is a common feature of of far northern climates where you you have dishes that were kind of fermented or preserved in a way that produces chemical combinations that might seem unappealing to people not accustomed to them. So, yeah, so this is Greenland shark meat, and I've never had

it before. I've read that the texture is also sort of sometimes compared to cheeses, like it's a it's a little bit chewy at first, but then it kind of descends into a powdery grain kind of texture as it dissolves in the mouth. And they say you are supposed to chase it with a shot of Brinnavin, which is an unsweetened caraway schnops from Iceland that I did taste that when I was in Iceland, and you know, I love Iceland. It was not a fan of that liquor. It was it potent that it like warm me up.

It was very herbal, you know, it was like it's like somebody got some herbal tea and then reduced it down by like not making it thicker, but just concentrated the flavor by about ten thousand times, and that that's what it was. So how do you get some of this, he carl, how do you make it? You? Well, first, like I said, you start with a nice freshly called greenland shark or another shark from the same family, the

sleeper sharks, the somniosis sharks. The greenland shark in particular is the somniosis microcephalus, which sounds like it means a sleepy, tiny head. But the greenland shark is a really cool animal. It's It's also known as the ecolossuac, which is the an Inuit term. I've seen a lot of variations on the Inuit spelling and pronunciation, so I think they're just different transliterations of the same term. And it's a huge shark. The greenland shark gets as big or bigger than great whites.

It grows uh lives probably for more than two of years. It grows very slowly, and it can get more than twenty ft long ways, more than a ton, and they dwell in some of the coldest waters of the earth, between like freezing and about ten degrees celsius. And it's funny that it's known for appearing very sluggish. They say, when you see it in the water, it looks lethargic and impassive. Is just not really impressed by anything. I read one account that said that people just you can.

You can catch them by literally just dragging them out of the water with your bare hands. If they get close enough to the surface. They don't fight much. So it sounds like if all the sharks, it's kind of the most stoic and resigned to the whims of fate. But the question that I had was like, wait a minute, why does it taste like urine? Uh? This knowledge about the taste of greenland shark meat apparently goes back a

long way. I found an interesting article by Lindsay O'Reilly and Canadian Geographic Magazine about the Greenland sharks significan against an Inuit culture and uh, it's it's offering another variation on that same name. This time it's Skalougsuak. Yeah, I love that scalouksuak, And I want to read a little

quote from this article. She says Inuit legend has it that once long ago, an old woman was drying her hair after washing it with urine, when the wind suddenly whipped the damp cloth from her hand and carried it out to see. This cloth, the Inuit say, became skalouksuak, the greenland shark. I love that because it sounds like there's been a recent trend I think in a couple of different skits where you have individuals coming up with elaborate descriptions of how bad a beer is, and this

seems like a more primal version of that. I can imagine Inuit setting around eating some of this and saying, you know this, uh, this particular meat taste as if an old woman washed her hair in urine and then threw that hair into the water and it became a shark. Yeah, it's very flowery. Yeah, it's like somebody is really overriding the Spear Advocate article. But anyway, getting to the point about the dangers associated with it. If not prepared properly,

you don't want to eat greenland shark meat fresh. You might not want to eat it anyway because it smells like bleach and urine. But let's say you're really really hungry, or you're looking for something to feed your dogs, don't go with fresh greenland shark meat because it is poisonous as hack. So when it's fresh and raw, the meat of a greenland shark contains high levels of uric acid or urea and trimethylamine oxide, and so if it's eaten in high enough doses, it can cause effects that from

the outside resemble drunkenness. Sometimes people can say like, this person is drunk on shark, but it can lead to really bad things like nausea and vomiting, oral burning sensations, explosive diarrhea, muscle twitching and convulsions, trouble breathing, and even in some cases coma and death. And the most toxic ingredient in the greenland shark meat is the triethlamine oxide.

This is a chemical used by the shark as a kind of natural anti freeze for the proteins and enzymes in its body, and it it does a good thing for the shark because it allows the shark to survive the freezing temperatures of the water that it lives in without the formation of ice crystals and the destruction of proteins inside the body, so it's it's a fish that's got anti freeze in it, and you you know, you know the rule about not eating anti freeze. Yeah, that

one's drilled in at an early age, you know. I think there was an episode of the documentary series Human Planet in which you see some some fishermen actually pull one of these creatures out of the water and then I believe they feed it to a dog. I can't remember if they cooked it or not. Yeah, actually, I I've read that sometimes the meat is fed to dogs and it's it makes the dog dog's drunk essentially, but

it doesn't sound like something. Don't feed greenland shark to your pet if you happen to have some fresh greenland shark. I don't know why you would, because you typically don't get it fresh unless you catch it yourself, because it's so poisonous and and so how do you get the hakarl the version that's okay to eat, even if some

people find it very disgusting. Well, the traditional Icelandic way of preparation is let it rot, and specifically let it rot under pressure, So you bury it under rocks or gravel for like three months, and then you'll let it rot there and then you dig it up and you hang it out to dry for another three or four months. So this has had, you know, many months of rotting under pressure to press out some of the liquids and

then hanging up to dry. And this process supposedly makes the shark safer to eat, as the poisons are removed through the pressing and through the chemical action of the fermentation. But another method of preparing greenland shark would simply be to boil it in several changes of water to leach out the toxins. But the several changes of water is important. You don't want to eat greenland sharks soup made from

a you know, a broth of the meat. But anyway, if prepared in the correct way they say it is. It is very pungent and likely to terrify tourists, but it's safe to eat. You can eat this rotten shark and not die. I'm I'm reminded of the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer had an especially long sub sandwich Marge made him throw out ended up hiding behind a radiator and he would sneak it out from the radiator and eat it gray and rotten. Um that sounds

very familiar. All right, Well, let's clear these dishes away because we have we have another Arctic dish coming out for us. Well, it is labeled on the menu as boreal wild game. Uh, it smells very gamy. Oh, I see the description here. This is polar bear meat. We're being offered polar bear. Okay, Well, I don't seem like there could be a problem there, right, No, it seems like bear probably shouldn't eat polar bear? Should well? Probably not.

But I imagine before I think when, because when I was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for about three years, occasionally interesting meat to present themselves, such as moose or in I think one case there was bear stew. You have to put yourself in a pretty extreme situation, I think for the question to even come up, should I

eat this polar bear? Yeah? But it turns out that the polar bear, like the acky fruit and the Greenland shark, is a food that if you're in a position where you find yourself needing to eat it, you better have somebody on hand who knows how to prepare it and

knows which parts to avoid. That's right, because you know, the native peoples of the Arctic they've done for a long time that some days the bear eats you, and some days you eat the bear, right, but on the days some days you eat the bear, and then it gets you back, yes, because you when you do eat the bear, you got to know not to eat the

bear's liver. And as early as fifteen nine six you had European explorers who learned this lesson the hard way, uh, coming down with just horrible illness, like nightmarish illness following the consumption of polar bear liver. Because with many different animals, certainly the kind of animals that European would consume back home, the liver is totally fair game. The liver is a delicacy. The liver should be eaten. Right. Yeah, you have a fine French restaurant making a foix gras or liver moose

or something. Yeah, but then you start dining on polar bear liver and you might feel drowsy, sluggish, irritable. Suddenly you have a severe headache, you get bone pain. Hold on bone pain, bone pain. What does bone pain even feel like? Well, there's one way to find out. Blurred vision, and then you're vomiting. And finally, this is where it gets just really crazy. Is you start experiencing skin peels, peeling skin? Yeah, I think you accidentally did your research

from the plot synopsis of a hell Raiser movie. It sounds like a hell raisor movie. Yeah, because in the milder cases, you're talking just flaking skin around the mouth, alright, you know, unpleasant, but hey, not too bad. But some accounts reported cases of full body skin loss. Even even the thick skin on the bottoms of a patient's feet could peel away, leaving the underlying flesh bloody and expire and exposure and on the top of that liver damage, hemorrhage, coma,

and death. Save your tears, man, that is messed up. So, so what's the deal with the Polar bears liver? Why is it? Why is it so poisonous? Well, it all comes down to vitamin A. Interestingly enough, vitamin A people take pills of that. It's in carrots. It should be fine. Yeah, I mean, I mean we've been and it being in some of like being one of the pro who's to some of the foods that we're mentioning in this episode.

But because a vitamin A is important for eyesight, reproduction, fetal development, growth, immune response and the sellular formation of tissue. Can that's key? Can I go on a little side tangent here? This is the thing I had to research for a brain stuff video once. It's a myth that vitamin A increases your eyesight beyond normal capacity. Okay, this is the whole Like if you eat enough carrots to

improve your eyesight. Right. What is true is that vitamin A and carrots are a good source of vitamin A, though plenty of other vegetables are too. Anything has beta caroteen in it, as like spinach is great too. Uh. They will help maintain normal vision, but they're not gonna

upgrade your vision above the baseline. Okay, alright, good to know. Now, if you like me to take a lot of vitamins, you probably noticed that on days when you take extra vitamins, you end up with, you know, just splendidly golden urine. Extra vitamins lee your body. Um. And that's the case with the number of items. They simply dissolve in water

leave your body in urine. A. However, vitamin A only dissolves in fat, so that means it does an exit the body and urine instead it collects in the body's filtration oregan the liver where it can reach toxic levels, and generally this occurs over a pro long period of time, and if it does get out of control, then you end up with chronic hyper vitaminosis A, and that in humans involves all the various symptoms that we've already mentioned.

That sounds pretty horrible. So so wait a minute. How much polar bear liver do you have to eat for it to be dangerous? All right? Well, well, to put it in in context here, uh, an average healthy human liver contains five hundred and seventy five international units of vitamin A program while a polar bears liver contains between twenty four thousand and thirty five thousand international units per gram.

So you compare that to the tolerable upper level of vitamin A in tank for a healthy adult human, that's ten thousand I U like supercharging your vitamin A consumption to just absurd levels. Why is there this much vitamin A and a polar bear liver? Well, it all comes down, I mean a lot of it comes down to the hostile environment than necessary biological adaptations. So in the case of the bear, the bear doesn't need that much vitamin

A in its diet. You put a bear in a in a zoo, it can get by with with far lower quantities of vitamin A. But in its natural environment, bears are eating a lot of bearded seals, ring seals, both of which store high levels of vitamin A in their livers and blubber. Uh. And a lot of this seems to have to do with the the again, the role that vitamin A plays and growth and naval development, so that the seals need all that extra vitamin A in order to advance their vulnerable pups into a more

survivable stage. So it all comes down to the polar bear needs to eat those seals. It needs to to tolerate high levels of vitamin A, so it is evolved to roll with higher levels of vitamin A. It can store those higher levels of vitamin A in its filtration system, in its liver. It's when we eat its filtration system. If when we eat its liver we end up with quantities of vitamin A that we have totally not evolved

to deal with. You know, this might be a different kind of category of food than our others where I would say, you know, if if you're having your food prepared by somebody who knows what they're doing. Aki fruit and Hakarl, go for it. I'd probably say, don't eat a polar bear. Yeah, it's hard for me to get given the polar bear is recent plight. Uh. Yeah, I can't get excited about the idea of eating one of

these creatures. I mean, unless it's eat or be eaten. Uh. Certainly in the survival okay, survivalist case, Uh, they would say eat the polar bear, but know what you're doing, not the liver, not the liver, and don't feed it to a dog, et cetera. And it's just a little

fun fact. I once wrote a short story in which Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton meets Frankenstein, or actually he ends up with meeting Frankenstein's monster, I believe, and the creature in this particular story, I had him consumed polar bear liver and that's how he gets all this figured and gross. Wow, I'd like to read that, dude. It's out there somewhere. Maybe I'll have to throw up a link somewhere. Okay, Well, oh wait, it looks like another

course is arriving. What do we have here, Well, it's a very beautiful plate. It's an ornately decorated plate, and it's covered in very thinly sliced, pale, translucent sashimi, tiny, just tiny tissue, thin slices of fish. It looks good. So imagine you are in this scenario. You're sitting down to a plate that looks like this, and you know it does look good. So it looks so good you eat the whole plate by yourself. But what would you do if you're just eating a big plate of suit

she and then suddenly you start feeling some strange sensations. Uh, well, I generally do. But generally that's just the saki. Oh yeah, well that's a different thing entirely. Know that this would be more like a you're sitting at the table and there's kind of a burning and tingling on the lips, and then it kind of turns into some pins and needles pricking at the lips, tongue, mouth, the throat. Okay, that's a problem. Yeah, And then suddenly you might start

to lose some coordination. That might still be the saki, could be, but it starts to feel more like there's a nervous system disruption going on throughout your body. You you eventually collapse to the floor. That's bad. Yeah, And you find your muscles are very weak and sluggish, and eventually you are mostly unable to move your body of your own free will. And then the vomiting begins, leaving

you barely able to order seconds on the big dish. Now, this is a worst case scenario leading up potentially to death in the event of improperly prepared fugu or puffer fish. Now, I again, like the other cases, I don't want a bad mouth a perfectly good food if it's prepared well and and fugu is a perfectly excellent sushi fish, and it's not inherently dangerous wind served the right way, when prepared by a trained chef who knows what they're doing, who has a license to prepare this kind of food.

And since the introduction the introduction of protective measures like government restrictions on who's allowed to prepare and serve fugu, fugu poisonings and deaths have been rare. But there is a reason that these protective measures have been put in place. I've read that sometimes in Japan or maybe in certain places, fugu is known by the nickname tepo meaning gun and like so like gun sushi, and that kind of makes

sense us. So, some organs in the puffer fish are naturally equipped with tetra detoxin, which is an extremely potent neurotoxin. You all talked about tetra to toxin on the show before. I feel like it's come up a time or two in passing. It's very, very toxic by mass ingested. It's reportedly about a hundred times as toxic as potassium cyanide.

So you at least the scene in the James Bond movie where the bad guy, you know, he's committing suicide with the cyanide pill, he would need a tetra to toxin pill one one hundred the size of the cyanide pill be very easy to hide in a little compartment. But anyway, tetra to toxin, what does it duty? Why? Why does it cause all these problems? Essentially, it works by messing up communication between the bodies, nerves and muscles by blocking sodium ion channels uh and uh. And this

can lead to paralysis. Especially. The really creepy thing I've heard is that it's conscious paralysis. That sounds especially horrifying. You don't yeah, like you're you're aware of what's going on. It doesn't necessarily knock you unconscious, but you can't move and you you might might be having trouble breathing, having a fast beating or irregularly beating heart. It sounds very scary, but like I said, if this is properly prepared foogu meat,

this this is not a problem you should have. You you'll find this tetra to toxin and especially high concentrations in the fishes liver and go nads. So the chef who knows what he or she is doing can cut around the right parts of the fish, knows what to do to prepare it right. They're not going to serve you the parts that are going to kill you. But what happens when when I don't know things go wrong? When somebody doesn't know what they're doing, Uh, it's not pretty.

I wanted to read from a little case study of fugu poisoning from nine that was hosted on a report on the CDC website. So this is a case where and there were three guys hanging out and they get some fugu that was I believe shipped to them from a friend in Japan. Yeah, and they're like, well, let's try it out. So here's one of the cases. So case one is a twenty three year old man who he ate a piece of fougo quote the size of a quarter approximately one quarter ounce, so that's not that much.

About ten or fifteen minutes later, it says he had onset of tingling in his mouth and lips, followed by dizziness, fatigue, headache, a constricted feeling in his throat, difficulty speaking, tightness in his upper chest, facial flushing, shaking, nausea, and vomiting. His legs weakened, and he collapsed on examination in the e D his blood pressure was a hundred and fifty over ninety, heart rate was a hundred and seventeen beats per minute, respiratory rate twenty two per minute uh, and he had

a slightly elevated temperature. And there there were a couple other guys who had the same thing. Uh. One of them reported that he noticed a tingling in his tongue in the right side of his mouth, followed by quote light feeling, anxiety, and thoughts of dying. It induces thoughts of dying. It's kind of interesting, or maybe this is maybe he just knew what was up at that point he's like, oh, yeah, I just dates some fugu time

to have thoughts of dying. Yeah. I wonder if he went into that scenario, you know, knowing the because that's it seems to be one of the attractive things about the fish, about the quote the gun, right, is that it is there's a sense of danger to it. Yes, it's it's uh in this sense, it's not just a really tasty food, but it's kind of a thrill experience with the knowledge that you know, oh, if this goes wrong, we could all die. It's I don't know, maybe kind

of like bungee jumping or something. You know that it's inherently safe if your instructor has secured everything properly, but the thrill of knowing that maybe something could go wrong and I could die makes it more exciting. And in a sense it's it's kind of you need to go into any kind of restaurant scenario and you know, you trust that the chef knows what they're doing and yeah, but in most cases it's the difference between like, all right, if the food taste good and there's a good chance

that the chef knows what they're doing. Here is a case where it's it's live or die. But but then again, this is something we touched on at the beginning of the episode. But I don't think this is inherently all that different from very mundane, familiar foods, not just interesting delicacies.

It's like, you go to eat a hamburger and if this is you know, maybe uh meat that was ground under unclean facilities and it was served to you undercooked, and you know, the right set of circumstances line up with people failing to do their jobs right and giving you safe food. Yes, this could kill you too, Yeah yeah. Indeed, like most of the items were discussing here today, they are extreme and exotic examples of a truth that spreads just across the menu for humans. But I wanted to

return to this case. These three guys who got foogu poisoning in nine. Now, this isn't the only case of food poisoning it It happens every now and then, but this was the one case I looked at. All three of these guys survived, so it's not necessarily a death sentence even if you do get the poisoning. All three were treated with intravenous hydration gastric lovage that means like

stomach pumping and cleaning the inside of your stomach. And and activated charcoal, which I think the idea is that the the toxins that were still in the digestive system would bind the charcoal rather than entering the body's chemistry. So another interesting fact about the tetra detoxin and fugu and some there are other sea creatures that have tetra detoxin to like blue ringed octopus and stuff. Uh, the puffer fish raised in aquariums with clean water tend to

be non toxic. Okay, Well, that would lead one to believe that they're acquiring these toxic property from something in their diet exactly you see with a number of different animals, including some some poison frogs from example. Yeah, and this seems to be the case with the fugu. So it what scientists think now is that they get their tetra detoxin producing capabilities through something in their food, specifically through

eating foods containing bacteria. And it now appears to be the case that fugu become toxic by capturing and using tetra detoxin produced by bacteria that produced the tetra detoxin. So they don't make the poison. They get that. They get it from the bacteria, and they have evolved a resistance to that poison that allows them to store it

as a defensive mechanism within their bodies. So, if you are a spy extracting eurotoxins from a puffer fish in order to assassinate your target, you're using essentially a third party. There's a middleman puffer fish generation poison. Okay, but yeah, I do want to stress one more time. I don't want to be an alarmist about fugu. They say, you know, the chefs who are licensed to serve fugu know what they're doing, and it's it's supposed to be a very

safe experience. Yeah, just maybe it's just some guy in your dorm or apartment. What I'd really what I'd really be worried about is if you're out, i don't know, snorkeling or something and one of your buddies catches one and says, let me prepare some boat side sashimi for us. Yeah, that would be a good, a good opportunity to turn them down. Probably, what do we have next here? Oh, we have a nice cassava roots salad and oh a little tapioca pudding on the side. Um, now here's one

I've had before. I've had tapioca pudding. Oh yeah, I feel like most of us have probably had tapioca pudding. Perhaps you've had bubble tea with tapioca bubbles in it? Is that? What that is? I believe in most cases I always get the kind with the tapioca, but that there may be another variety that is available as well. I've never liked bubble tea. I found it kind of gross, Like, why do you want little lumps in the stuff you're drinking? I need flavorful fold lumps in my beverages. I I

kind of dig it. Robert lamb endorser of lumps. Yeah. U. Tapioca itself has its roots, if you will, in the cassava root. So cassava is cultivated throughout the tropical world for its roots, which are just superstarchy. They contain nearly the maximum theoretical concentration of of starch on a dry weight basis among food crops. So we're we're exceeding potato territory here. Yeah. Um, And you can think of them in terms of potato. There essentially like a tropical potato. Uh,

fresh roots contain about starch, very little protein. But yeah, they have a number of different uses. They're used to produce a cassava flour. So you get breads, you get tapioca, you can get a laundry starch derive a laundry starch from it. Uh, there's an alcoholic beverages that are made from it, of course there are, yeah, and uh oh yeah, there's also a cyanide producing sugar derivative that occurs in varying amounts in most varieties of cassava. Wait wait, wait

wait cyanide. Yeah, so there's yeah, essentially cyanide in the cassava. Well, good thing, there'd have to be as a hundred times as much of that as there would be a the tetrator toxin. Yeah, it's um. Just to back up a little bit, Cassava probably was first cultivated by the Maya and the Yucatanda peninsula, so quite a while ago. There's been a lot of cultivation of this, a lot of time for for humans to work out the kinks to

know what to eat what not to eat. Um. And even back then, they developed a complex refining system to remove poison from the plant by grating, pressing, and heating the tubers, okay, and then they also they also used some of the poison for darts and arrows. So basically, you want to avoid the leaves, which have the highest concentration of these cyanogenic glucosides, and you also want to peel the roots as well, because the peel is also

fairly potent. But all the nutritions in the outside I know, Oh no, wait, that's carrots. I mean I always when I'm eating something, say, um, like a potato or what is that delicious kind of German cross between an art of choke and a sun choke. Yeah, I love sun chokes, but I love the texture of the sun choke. I would never want to eat a peeled sunchoke. But apparently most methods call for peeling the cassava roote just to

avoid any potential poisoning UM. On top of this, cooking the cassava tends to remove the toxicity UM, and adequately processed cassava flour and cassava based products have a very low cyanide content and are just very safe to eat. Okay, So this is this is one of these foods, and I believe there are other foods like this that are sort of standard saples that are fine once they've been cooked properly, but you wouldn't want to eat them raw.

Are Lima beans also in that cara beans are off are also on the list of things that, yeah, you definitely want to kick cook. I want to say red beans as well. Red a de beans uh as well are also on that list. Yeah, just things where you know, we were fortunate to live in a time where long ago people went through the painful and potentially lethal process of figuring out which part of the plan is good

and under what circumstances is it good to eat? Uh So, yeah, today we can enjoy tapioca putting, even though at some point in the past um some Mayan's went to an early grave because they had to figure out how it works. That's something I think about often, the the the debt we owe to our ancestors, the people of many, many years ago who figured out what you couldn't eat and

paid for that research with their lives. Yeah. I mean, without even getting into so many processing food processing technology, I mean just the basic ability to turn grain into bread, etcetera. It's just you know, I anytime I read about all this stuff. I just imagined myself in the wilderness, starving, trying to figure out which berries I dare eat ones will kill me dead? Can I eat these mushrooms? I

don't know? God? Yeah, mushrooms is an entire that's an entirely different area to consider there, because you have so many delicious, food worthy mushrooms even in our our own local environment here, and then so many just deadly ones as well. Again, the rule with mushrooms is if you really don't know, don't eat it. Yes, indeed, yes, And people continue to learn that one the hard way. Okay, Well,

I wanted to find out though. All of these we've talked about are are interesting to me in that they become perfectly fine as long as you can trust the person who prepared them. They're they're not gonna hurt you if if you've acquired the food properly, prepared it in the right way, and you check all the boxes, and you're gonna be fine. But what is the food out there that is not just interestingly dangerous in potentsia, you know,

in potential, but that that actually gets the most people. Well, you know, prior to this episode, I might have guessed poor yeah, you know, that could especially, yeah, or barbecue pork, because they've been some headlines in recent years where where there have been barbecue competitions and illness springs up. So

that would have been that would have been my guests. Well, there was one report from September of two thousand nine that the f d A issued, and it was it was a list of the top ten most dangerous foods in the United States at the time, based on the number and severity of food poisoning outbreaks by food vector. So not just like three guys eating fugu and stealing the headlines, but actually actual thousands of people. Yeah, so what was the culprit? You know, is it was it fugu?

Was it aki? No? It was none of these None of these foods we've talked about even made the list. The real criminal was salad, a specifically leafy greens, which you know often feels like the safest thing. I know. Yeah, as the Simpsons once observed, you don't make friends with salad, especially if the salad is funneling listeria into your friends bodies.

Uh So, I want to read from the report. They say iceberg let us, romaine let us, leaf let us butter let us, baby leaf let us, immature let us, or leafy greens, eskarrol in, dive, spring mix, spinach, cabbage, kale, arugula, or shard account for of all the outbreaks linked to the f d A Top ten UH. Those outbreaks sickened over thirteen thousand, five hundred and sixty eight people who were reported to have become ill, almost thirty percent of all the reported illnesses caused by the f d A

Top ten UH. I don't know if it's still the same today as it was in two thousand nine. I hope this has changed in the past six years or so. But as for food that not only sickened people but killed them, I tried to look up food poisoning outbreaks with the most fatalities to see if there was a running thread, but I couldn't find one. It seems like it was all over the place, and meats, cheeses, vegetables,

packaged food products like peanut, butter, bag spinach. I mean, it seems like no matter where you turn, something that you're probably consuming could kill you if something has failed somewhere in the process between the farm and your face. So what you're saying is that We could have many more six course dinners like this one if listeners choose

to uh to attend it with us, right. But I'd say the real takeaway here is that I think the most dangerous foods are not the kinds of foods, uh that that make people feel uneasy because they're unfamiliar, you know, delicacies from other countries that many Americans wouldn't be familiar with. That They're going to be things that you eat every day. Yeah, things without that overt danger factor, but still with a very inherent uh sense of danger if not prepared with

you know, a monicum of of decency and in awareness. Now, let me let me offer a caveat even to the last thing about salad. I I hope you don't take this as a recommendation to stop eating salad. You know, leafy greens are a wonderful thing we have as part of your diet. And here's my recommendation. Don't buy the pre bagged, pre wash stuff and just eat it straight up. Buy ahead of let us cut it up and wash it yourself. Get you a salad spinner. It's worth the work.

It's very nice. I don't know, that's a lot of work. Joe, I kind of like just opening the bag, dumping it and then opening the little packets and then I have a salad. But well, okay, and no accounting for keeps me from dying. I guess I'll try it, all right. So there you have it. Uh, they we're going to clear the dishes away here. Thanks to everybody for for joining us for this dinner. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. All right, So there you

have it, Dangerous Foods Part One. There will be a brand new part two coming out in the days ahead. Oh, you're gonna love it. There's some good stuff in. There's some dangerous stuff, some poison the stuff, and some misunderstood stuff. Things we think that our poisonous that have kind of a reputation for being bad, but maybe aren't, or at least aren't in the way that we, you know, think

that they are. Maybe they'll just poison your mind. Yeah, And if you want to poison your mind a little more, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is where you will find all of our podcast episodes. You will find links out to our various social media accounts. You also find blog post videos, you name it all right there, Stuff to blow your Mind dot com And if you want to get into this directly, you can

email us. As always said, blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, because that how stuff works dot com. Twined twenty fine part proper