From the Vault: Dangerous Foods II

too much. It's traditionally a time when we've explored foods that, at least in some cases, can be a danger to your health. I think these episodes we we were sort of doing a mix of things. We were highlighting some actual dangers associated with certain types of food in certain scenarios, but also sort of mocking food danger panic right right, Yeah, So, as I'm sure we touch on in the actual episode, this episode is not meant to make you panic about what you eat, but maybe just to think a little

more about some of the peculiar qualities of our food. Now, we actually did three of these episodes, I think, so this is going to be the second one we did. We've already rerun the first one at some point back there. This was the second one that originally aired December twenty Yeah. Luckily for you, you don't have to listen to an order all you know, these are these are potpourri episodes for sure, a smorgess board of of of potentially horrifying foods.

Let's hop right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's the holidays. We know what we do during the holidays, at least here in the United States of A. You put a lot of stuff in your body that maybe shouldn't be there. That's right, you you eat. You have these various feasts that are all about getting through the winter ahead, getting through the cold,

dark winter and surviving to the spring. It's a it's a it's it's a it's a riot as old as human history and we're still doing it. Yeah, even with with nasty, weird contraptions like candy canes. Yes, I have a question, a question, does anybody really like candy canes? Um? I'm sure my son would like them, if if we we steer him away from it. Like, he got a candy cane at some event recently and brought it home and we kind of convinced him, actually, this is a

candy that is best served hanging on the tree. This is more of a this is more of a decoration. Really, that's a candy. You don't even have to lie to him to discourage him about you just be like, this will cut your tongue and it's gonna you're gonna be sad you ate it. Your mouth will feel weird and

you'll have injuries. Yeah, it doesn't have the hyper marketing of many modern candies because we we we limit the amount of candy that my son uh eats, and that means we like at Halloween, he was he had access to all of these candies, but then he traded them into the switch which and got a toy in exchange. But there were some candies were just so well marketed he was convinced they were his favorite. Like Ike and Mike for some reason. Hike and Mike, Yeah it marketed.

Do they have marketing? Well, I mean they have the No, wait, it's Mike and Ike, Mike and I Mike first. Yeah, I don't. I don't know that those guys that well, I forget which one comes first, but the package is like bright green, and they're these colors, and he's instantly connecting with it and he's saying, oh, this one, this one's good. Look, those are fruits on there. It's bright, it's it's potent. I want to eat that. That's my

favorite candy. He's never actually had it. Huh well, okay, so today's episode is going to be a sequel to our last episode about Dangerous Foods that aired last year, and uh so today is Dangerous Foods to the Revenge, No, the second course, the return of the food. There was never a good thing. Yes, a dish best served cold, And there is gonna be a lot of wonderful, dangerous,

poisonous weirdness out there to talk about. But we do want to say at the beginning that at least I feel deeply Robert, I hope you feel the same way that being alarmist is very much against the stuff to blow your mind ethos. So we are not going to tell you there is a silent killer lurking in your pantry. That that save that for those websites that demonize MSG

and stuff. We've already debunked. This episode is going to be about dangerous and poisonous misadventures involving rare foods everyday foods.

But no matter what case it is, it's not designed to scare you, but it should be a reminder that we live in a world of very complex and sometimes fragile biochemical interactions, and for those of us living in industrialized countries, I think sometimes our consumer mindset leads us to believe that our food should meet the industry quality controls standards you'd get in the dead products you buy

at Walmart or Ikea. Maybe so if every version of the same product number table at Ikea really is the same no matter which I Kea you go to anywhere in the world, shouldn't every baked potato be the same everywhere you go in the world. But it's not, is it.

I mean foods, the foods we eat, our organisms or substances derived from organisms, plants, animals, fungi, and as as much as we might like our food products to be contained and tamed and dependable as the output of a furniture factory, as we all know, sometimes life uh finds a way. Yeah, I mean, these are organisms. Now in some cases especially with various fruits and whatnot. Uh. It is the the organisms game for you to eat it.

It wants you to eat it. But in many other cases the organism does not want to be eaten and has certain biological systems in place to prevent it, to discourage it, to make it difficult for you to carry this. Uh, this this act of gluttony out and uh. And also any type of food that is produced, if it's you know, a grown part of a thing's body, or it comes out of the soil or a creature makes it, it is the It is the inn of a production line,

a production line that is not standardized exactly exactly. No, it depends on the region, It depends on the environment, the climate, the conditions, what materials are available for the organism to work with. So yeah, biochemistry is a deep web of complex interactions, and the stuff we're getting is not fresh. It's the process. It's the end of a very long process, and it's just very common around the world in various ways for something weird to happen somewhere

along that process. Alright, So what's what's first? First up? What's the first course here? Joe? Okay, Well, I want to tell you a story. Okay. So, in his work known as the Antibossis the ancient Greek historians, Xenophon tells the story from his time as a general in the Greek war against the Persians, and one of his accounts tells of a story that took place in four oh one BC while while Xenophon in his true coops are

returning home from battle with a group. Xenophons got about ten thousand Greek fighters with him, and they're traveling through col Chiefe, which is a region along the coast of the Black Sea and what is now the country of Georgia, and Xenophon's troops come across a place that is swarming

with thousands of bees. They're just bees everywhere. And you might think, oh, that sounds horrible, but for a bunch of Greek soldiers, this is actually good news because they knew they're in for a treat, fresh honey from the hive. That's right. They weren't packing any candy canes or I can Mike uh and and Mike uh. It might have maybe it was reversed back then. I don't know how

they got the Greeks. The ancient Greeks world oh yeah, the Greek alphabet, yeah, I come before M. I'm not sure at any rate, they probably weren't getting their their sweet tooth satisfied quite like they would they would wish it to be. You know, I comes before him and our alphabet apologize to the manufacturers of this candy. A

little bit of brain problems here with me anyway. So so the Greek fighters, they've got honey delicious, right, But after eating the honey, the soldiers started to give off signs of a strange reaction, and so Xenophon rights that the soldiers began to go out of their heads, and they suffered from diarrhea and vomiting. Then the soldiers collapsed to the ground and wallowed about as if dead drunk, and in some cases they seemed to have lost their minds uh. In others the men were like men on

their deathbeds Xenophon rights quote. So they lay there in great numbers, as though the army had suffered to defeat, and great despondency prevailed. On the next day, however, no one had died, and it approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey. They began to come to their senses, and on the third or fourth day, they got up as if from a drugging bad honey. So what happened? Yeah, I had the local bees risen up

against them. Uh No, Xenophon's fighters had stumbled into a trove of the substance well known to inhabitants of the Black seacoast, mad honey. This is what the ancients called it. Plenty called it. Uh Oh, I forget the term now, I think it's millymnomenon the honey, that is, a mad maker like that. And there are other ancient accounts of

mad honey poisoning. So in sixty b C. The Roman military leader Pompey the Great is taking a Roman army near the southern shore the Black Sea again while chasing the Persian army of King Mithridates of Pontus and the Persians. They've got a group of allies apparently who know about the mad honey, and these allies set a trap for

Pompey's army. They placed honey combs full of mad honey from the local bees into containers and left them along Pompey's path, knowing that some of the soldiers would not be able to resist a sweet indulgence and they were right the home. The Romans were basically Winnie the Pooh, they were poop, I've got to get the honey. Uh. So many Roman troops ate the honey. They became incredibly

sick and disoriented, went out of their heads. While the Romans were wallering, wallowing around, you know, in a bit of a sugary stupor. The Persian army came back, killed him, led to a battle with very asymmetrical outcome. I've read that more than a thousand Roman soldiers were killed and very few Persians died, a very asymmetrical outcome. It's a wonderful exactly. Yeah, a little bit of a call back there. Uh, that's I think the term would be a massacre. Actually

that's the non massacre, sticky massacre. But there's an excellent article on mad honey. Actually I came across by none other than Adrian Mayor. If you remember from our episode on geo mythology. Adrian Mayor is the main scholar we talked about in that that episode, and she's known for the theory that various mythological beasts were inspired by ancient

people's coming across the dinosaur fossils. So for example, people in Central Asia may have found triceratops remains in the Gobi Desert and this led to the creation of Griffin myths. And so we talked about her in that episode. But she has this article in a nine edition of Archaeology magazine called Mad Honey. It's a great read, you can look it up online. But she talks about also how in a d N a ruler of the Kievan russ called Olga of Kiev, who in general I looked her up.

She seems like she she's pretty be a she's like bad, she's cool. Um. She used fer minted honey from the Black Sea region to poison a group of about five thousand of her enemies and then had them massacred, So that there's a there's a long history of military missteps or or outright uh poisonings and massacres with Mad Honey. Yeah, and with all these ancient accounts, I mean, you have to wonder to what extent we're we're getting the true story.

But these are the accounts as presented by these ancient

historians and authors. Because I can also see where this would be a narrative to invoke if you're on the losing side, you know to say, well, yes, our troops were were massacred and our troops were ambushed, but they were also poisoned by his local honey or or this not because I was a commander, right, But but we do know now that this is totally plausible because mad honey is absolutely a real thing, and mad honey the problem is not the bees themselves but the flowers they pollinate.

So in the Black Sea coastal region, bees often consume huge quantities of nectar from the flowers of the rhododendron plant, and rhododendrons produce a potentially deadly neurotoxin called gray anotoxin. So I'm going to be referring to a paper published in Cardiovascular Toxicology by Sue us A. Jansen at All called Granotoxin Poisoning, mad Honey Disease and Beyond from two

thousand twelve. And what they report is that grayanotoxin is also known as andromedo toxin, acetyal, andromed al and rhodotoxin, and it can be derived from the body parts of plants in the family er Cassier, which includes rhododendron, pierists, agarista, and Calmia and in reality, granno toxin is a family of related toxins. So there are a bunch of different grano toxins. We should probably speak about it in the plural. There are more than twenty five is a forms that

have been derived from rhododendron. And here's the basic way it works in your body. So grannotoxins are poisonous because of their ability to bind to the group to receptor site in voltage gated sodium channels or v g s c s. And so I'll break that down. Basically, v gs c s are protein structures there a little structures within the body that span across membranes and they facilitate the transfer of sodium ions which has charged particles of sodium.

And so the transfer of these charged particles is important for communication between the body's different tissues, allowing the passage of action potential in cells like neurons. If you introduce a toxin that binds too receptor sites in the sodium channels, you can essentially prevent effective communication between body tissues and disrupt the nervous system. Specifically, the researchers think that gray anotoxins work by preventing the inactivation of the sodium channel.

To use a metaphor, it would be like leaving the light switch stuck in the on position. You can imagine how this would have negative systemic effects on the nerve cells and the body at large, but specifically, the authors think it probably leads to continuous uninterrupted stimulation of the vagueal nervous system, the vegas nerve, which of course is

very important in the body. It interfaces between the brain, uh the autonomic nervous system, and many muscles in the body from the heart and the lungs to the voice production center. So this is bad stuff. You don't you don't want it in your body, Its right, But grannotoxin contamination of honey occurs most often just in the Black Sea region of Turkey, especially from the plant's rhododendron Rhododendron

ponticum and Rhododendron lutam. But rhododendron isn't the only plant to produce nectar containing grayannotoxin, which can filter down into the honey that the bees produced. Of course, honey containing grayannotoxin has also been found in North America, for example in North Carolina, where in the nineteen fifties a sample was found to contain about a hundred parts per million of granotoxin and what did that come from? While the authors speculated it was probably derived from bees that eight

the nectar of the mountain laurel or Calmia latifolia. So I know, if you're a honey fan, you're probably worrying like, oh, no, am I gonna get mad honey? Probably not, probably, depending on where you are and how you get your honey. According to a Texas A and M University article citing anthropologist Vaughan Bryant, you can find honey in the United States, but not not so often so, Bryant says, quote, Normally, there are not enough rhododendrons in one area for the

bees to make concentrated mad honey. However, sometimes there is a late cold snap in the Eastern US that kills a lot of flowers but doesn't seem to stun the rhododendrons. Thus they're the only thing blooming and the bees will focus all their attention on those flowers and produce concentrated mad honey during that period. These flowers are mostly in the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern US. That also goes with something I've read about this type of poisoning being

more common in the early spring. When I guess also some of these granotoxin producing flowers are that they're more cold resistant, might might bloom earlier where other flowers aren't available. Interesting, so it would be the it would be these rare incidences where the poisonous flowers, the toxic flowers are the the only source for the bees. Yeah, because the bees don't love them the most. The bees would rather have

another flower. But if all the other flowers are out of the game for some reason, they will go to the granotoxin plants and make their honey from that sweet, sweet nectar that people also some people have a taste for. Now, I'm guessing too that this is going to be more of a situation with your certainly your wild honeys these affected areas and may and maybe maybe with with some like extreme indie honey. I guess you're probably not going to get this from a mass produced honey because that

that involves. I mean, number one, there's just quality control, so they tend to know what types of flowers the nectar is coming from. But then there is also massive mixing involved. So when you get mass produced honey. They're blending together huge batches of honey from different hives, and even if there were some containing toxin, it would probably be mixed and thus diluted way down to a level

that's not a threat. Okay, So outside of the Black Sea region, you would have to you would have to really have a string of bad luck, I think, to run across this stuff, right probably. I mean you could come across if somebody's like a wild honey collector, you know, or like you said, extreme indie honey uh and there are they don't necessarily know what they're doing, or they have some bad luck with with what flowers there bees have access to, and they don't realize it in time

before they give it to somebody to eat. You could encounter mad honey in other parts of the world, but it's gonna definitely going to be most common in the Black Sea region, especially in Turkey. So if you eat some mad honey today, what's going to happen to you? Well, clinical characteristics are gonna list a few. This is also this is back to Jansen at all. So there's hypotension meaning low blood pressure, problems with cardiac rhythm, nausea, vomiting, sweating, dizziness,

and quote impaired consciousness. It's kind of a euphemism, right. Uh. There's also less often but still noted, fainting, blurred vision, diplopia or double visions, salivation, convulsions, atrial fibrillation, cardiac arrest, and myocardial infarction meaning a heart attack. All that really from a hit of bad honey. Yes, if you get enough of a concentrated dose you and eat, you eat

enough of it, you can have symptoms like these. I would have liked to have have have seen a clinical list of symptoms that also included the various injuries that the Persian military have afflicted on you in ancient times. Side effects include massacre, yeah, dismemberment. But here's one more thing. Not all known cases of mad honey poisoning or accidental Sometimes people take grand a toxin contaminated honey intentionally as

an aphrodisiac or as an alternative medicine. And I think the jury is still out as to whether at low doses gryannotoxin may actually have some kind of positive effects. I think it's not clear yet whether that actually is effective. But the authors of the study I mentioned speculate that regularly taking contaminated honey for these reasons may lead to

a condition called chronic mad honey intoxication syndrome. That sounds like a syndrome you don't want to have to put on your little form you fill out when you get a new doctor. That's right. Alright, On that note, let's take a quick breaking. When we come back, we will discuss the dead man's fingers. All right, we're back, Robert. You have piqued my interest dead man's fingers? Are you literally talking about eating the fingers of a corpse? Um? No,

but in a way it's kind of figurative. So are you? Are you? Are you? Yeah? Digitally if you will. But here's the thing. Are you a crap band? Do you enjoy eating crab? I don't eat it that often, but I do like it. Do you What is the most crab like form of your crab consumption? So? Do you? Do you? Do you enjoy soft shell crab on the sandwich, the legs and the claws sticking out on the sides. It's another thing. I don't eat that often, but when I've had it, I've liked it. Okay, It's it's my

absolute favorite. I think it's the it is the best way to eat an animal where there's just there's there's less deniability about what you're doing. You're just you're biting into this crab. The whole shape is their shape is there might as well eat a cockroach. Yeah, yeah, And it's it's the meat, but also all these other substances that are all fried up, all the other bits of its anatomy. It's I feel like it's a very honest mode of consumption, even though it is cooked. So it's

not like you're just eating the raw living crab. No. I can get with that. Okay, well, this is uh, we're not just talking about crabs here though, of course, we're talking about about the dead man's fingers, which if you've ever actively in gay in the cook cooking of crabs, and catching of crabs, then you you probably have some degree of familiarity of what I'm talking about here. So in our last Dangerous Foods episode, we discussed the manner by which food goo puffer fish become edible via the

skilled culinarya removal of certain tetrodo toxin laden inerts. Right, if it's got certain organs that have especially high concentrations of this toxin. Right, so you need a skilled chef to cut that little sliver out, cook it up and it's good to go, right, Yeah, But a good sushi chef will know what they were, what they're doing, right, they'll be able to get it out of there, and you shouldn't have to worry about it if if you're in good hands. Exactly. So this is faintly similar to that.

But but this is definitely a category where we're going to be dispelling a lot of ideas about dangerous foods rather than uh, you know, giving you the science but behind why it's actually dangerous. Okay, Well, you've got to tell me where the name comes from, Okay, Uh, as far as I can tell that, the name itself is just kind of lost to to history. You know, we don't know like where, you know, what region this came from. But you do find dead man's fingers in edible crabs,

and it's a it's of course, it's it's wonderful fear marketing. Right. Decide if you have this rotting hand of the drowned dead that's inside your food, and if you eat it, according to the you know, the the urban legends It depends what. It depends on the legend what happens. Maybe you're gonna become violently ill, maybe you're going to contract a disease. I found people who said, oh, yeah, when when we were cleaning crabs as a kid, Um, my

parents are a big brother. You know. It depends who's screwing with you, basically, and who's saying, oh, don't eat those parts. If you eat the dead man's fingers, you'll die, or you'll catch a disease, or or you'll become violently ill. Uh. The versions are various, but I find the stories particularly interesting given our relationship with crabs, creatures that we have to keep alive and then cook alive in order to

to eat them. So it's it's perfectly strange that we summon this tiny, rotting humanoid hand inside the body of our victim. Yeah, that is a nice metaphor. Is like that the hand that places them into the pot of boiling water comes back from inside the shell. Yeah, So it's kind of kind of beautiful in its own way. And uh, and in trying to figure this out, because

I'm not gonna spoil it just yet. If you don't know what the dead man's hand is you might expect it to be something related to digestion, right, Yeah, I'm guessing crab anus or I don't know. No, as far as I know, you you you eat the that portion of the crab, at least with the soft show crab. But but but you know, there are plenty of examples of animals for which we cast aside certain internal organs um, either out of necessity or just we don't want to

bother processing them into sausages or dog food or whatever. Uh. Even the komodo dragon will sling the intestines of intestines of a kill around in order to loosen the feces from the intestines so that they can eat them. So yeah, I've never heard that. Yeah, it's pretty great because they yeah, they don't like, uh, eating feces, but they do want the large intestine. Yeah. Yeah, they're tasty. They'll eat everything but that. And the baby komodo dragons there's no child

rearing and komodo dragon culture. Uh so the baby komotos have to have to climb up trees to get away from the adults who will try to eat them, but they can. They've also been observed to smear themselves in feces and or at least they wind up covered in feces, and then the parents will not eat them because they're disgusting. So it's kind of like Predator with Arnold Swartzenegger in the mud, but they can't see them, they're just not tasty. Yeah,

that would be a good interpretation on Predator. Oh yeah, what if all all the mud was poop and then the predators just like, look, I can't do this exactly. That's what was going on the whole time. He could

see him. But you know, but anyway, but based on all of this, it feels somewhat accurate that there would be the sickening, disease spreading or even deadly portion of the common food crap, Right, Yeah, I would think so minds up with the off or at least with just intuitively looking at a crab it looks like something that would have poisonous parts. Yeah, you would look at it, it looks back at you, and you might ask yourself, can I eat all of this? Clearly not, because a

lot of it's very very hard and pointy. So the fingers that we're talking about here are nothing more than the crabs gills, and this is where respiration and filtration takes place. And they consist of uh many different plume like filaments arranged around a central axis. In the blue crab,

for instance, there are eight gills on either side. So and and if I guess, if you, you kind of squint at them, and I've I've looked at him when cleaning crabs and instructed by my my in laws who know what they're doing, and I do not know what I'm doing, but they tell me, oh, that's the dead man's hand right there. Are they like crab country people? Oh yeah, yeah, my uh, my wife's family has Cajun blood and her brother lives down in um in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

So yeah, they look like constantly crabbing, catching crabs, bringing them back. The whole family have taken them apart um, and it's it's good eating. But but yeah, if you really, if you, if you want to interpret it as such, the dead man's hand might look like a little diseased lepre con claw or something or two of them. Now, the reality here, of course, is the crab is an organism, so there's a lot going on underneath that shell um

or you know, underneath where the shell would be. If you're using a soft shell, the white muscle meat, that's the prize stuff. That's the stuff that gets picked away and put into other other recipes. That's the stuff you might buy in bulk, pre picked for an exaggerated price. But you also find all these other things. If you've ever cleaned a crab, or if you've ever eaten soft shell crab, you know what I'm talking about. There's just

some weird, nasty sauce inside the carapace. Potentially a lot of it's open to interpretation because there's there's a yellowish mustard that is the fat. In females you'll find orange ovaries, and in males who find a small white testies. There's a stomach, there's a little gray heart, there are intestines, there is an anus. Everything you might expect to find when you're taking apart an animal. Uh, certainly one that was just living before you know, boiled it up or um.

And and also if you're eating a s fried sauceshell crab right off the bun, you definitely encounter that that yellow mustard fat and all these other ingredients. So we're you supposed to get rid of that stuff or what. Well, the instructions vary, so you know, some people are gonna be very pure about their about the picked crab, right because that's that's the meat, and that if you're if you're picking apart cooked crabs, you're just gonna probably eat the meat out of it. Right. But uh, but but

it it depends. I mean, the most of this is edible. The fat is certainly edible, and with soft shell crabs you just kind of bite into the whole thing and just eat it whole like a monster. But at at most what generally what is is prescribed as that you remove the eyes, and you remove the gills the dead man's fingers, and it's not because they're poise, no, but because they're chewy and its cartilage and and they might be a bit bitter. But it's not a do or

die situation. It's merely a these are the parts of the crab that are not delicious and or are not fun to eat, but they're not poisonous, they don't carry diseases, and interestingly enough, you know it also is going to depend on the culture. I ran across a wonderful Serious Eats article by writer Chee Chee Wang and she does this series titled The Nasty Bits, where she she she talks about the the Nasty Bits of various um foods sources uh and in particular she talks about about crabs.

In one of these, she cuts open a live crab and tries out crab miso or connie miso, which is this Japanese tradition that typically involves cooking a partially vivisected crab directly over a low burning flame. Wow. Yeah, it's like cooking it in its little shell after you just cut it open. That's brutal. It well, I mean, it's all of its brutal, that's true. But but here's a quote from it, because she sums it up really nicely. I poured a bit of saki into the shell. The

grayish green contents bubbled vigorously over the small flame. I cooked the parts until they were just heated through, soft and rich, with a taste not unlike liver. The kenny miso was a delight to eat right out of the shell, though I saved a portion of it to have on toast, and yet another to have with rice. And did you look very you know, very cool. We eat all sorts of weird parts of animals. Uh, some are more acquired

taste than others. So it makes sense, especially in a within Japanese cuisine, right, that is so dependent upon the riches of the ocean, that there would be uh, a finer use of the crab inerts here. Well, I gotta respect that. But the dead man dead man's fingers, specifically the gills. So you're saying, not poisonous, nothing to this myth at all. Nope, not poisonous, not gonna cause a disease, not gonna kill you. It's just a taste issue. It's uh and uh and and the consistency of it. And

yet some would find even a way to appreciate that. Yeah, that's right. I mean there are diverse flavors to play with there beyond the white meat of the crab. And uh. If you want to learn more about this, especially if you have access or obligations of surrounding live crabs and freshly cooked crabs and and you know, pulling them apart. I ran across a wonderful pdf from math in science

dot info. It's like an educational website, and this particular pdf guides you through a quote edible dissection of a blue crab. And so it's it's kind of a combination between a you know, like a school like a biology class, dissection, and culinary preparation. So it it takes you through the creatures anatomy as you take it apart, and also tells you what you can eat and how you go about

eating it. Well. I do think in general for people, if you're gonna eat meat, if you're gonna eat the body parts of an organism, I think it's good to familiar yourself, familiarize yourself with that organism and the parts you're reading are and where they come from. Yeah, I agree. I mean I think we do we do ourselves. We do our and we do our animals a disservice when we distance ourselves from the source and the reality of

our sustenance. Yeah, if you just think about the meat that you're eating as a thing that arrives wrapped in plastic wrap. Yeah, maybe with a mystical dead leprica in hand there at some point. So I'll include links out to both the Nasty Bits Uh article as well as the edible dissection instructions on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blame. Mind dot Com Okay, Robert, I have a food to ask about, and I only know about it because of a line in Monty Python

and the Holy Grail. I remember, you remember the scene with the French character who's taunting Arthur and his nights. I think that's played by John Cleese, right, yes, yeah, and he outrageous French knights. Yeah. Yeah, So he gives a lot, he gives a lot of great insults to the Knights of Camelot, and at one point he alleges that their father smelled of elderberries. And I always found

that funny. But it's one of those things where I'm sure you've had this experience where you find something funny without knowing what it means. It's just the sound of the words that makes you laugh. I've never seen an elderberry. I've never, as far as I know, never tasted an elderberry. I don't know what the deal with them is. But

are they poisonous? Um? Yeah? This is an interesting, uh subject, because elderberries are another example of a food item that can prove dangerous if you consume it raw and under the rise circumstances. But it's also regularly traditionally used in

you know, cooking for in various consumable forms. It's been used in medicine for ages, it has antioxidant properties, it's used to treat sinus infection, cold and flu and then on on the culinary side, has been used in jams, pies, liqueurs and according to BBC Good Food, it is a must for quote the famous German black forest ham that

is salted in seasoned with spices, elderberries and juniper berries. Yeah, and the liqueur in particular, it's actually similar to gin, which is created with the with juniper berries, so it's

uh similar to that. But um, but this is an elder berries is something you tend to pick wild, and it's especially a thing in traditional English cooking because this is something you would you would run out to the hedgerow and you'd pick some elder berry and you'd bring it back, but not stand there at the hedgerow eating raw. Right aspect, Well, there are accounts of people eating it, and there are accounts of people eating it raw and not feeling any symptoms from it. But this is not

this is certainly not recommended. Um. So the the UK's Food Standards Agency recommends cooking elderberries to destroy toxins that are present in the raw berries. And it's also a general rule of thumb to avoid unrighte berries. So generally the way this, uh, this is gonna work is that you you're only gonna deal with blue or purple berries, and you're gonna avoid the red ones completely. So they tend to like dark nd as they age. Yes, yes, so you avoid the ripe ones. Uh. It's also also

a general good rule of thumb. Pregnant breastfeeding individuals as well as people with autoimmune conditions autoimmune deficiencies rather are encouraged to skip elder berries because there is that possibility for there's also a possibility for for interactions with various UH drugs. But but generally speaking, if it's cooked, it's prepared properly, especially like you know, jams, desserts, etcetera. It's not being consumed on its own, then you're you're you're fine.

It's been used without incident, you know, for for for ages, um, they're There are different varieties of elderberry, and the main ones that you encountered. There's uh sambusis nigra, which is uh the European elder, also called the black elder, and that one is most often used for medicinal purposes. And then it's generally advised to avoid the dwarf elder to samboosis elvis uh completely and because he gives you a

cursed magical stone. Yeah, it's it sounds wonderful that the black elder in the forest meet the black elder at the hedgerow. But uh, but yeah so but but in terms of what's toxic here, the active alkaloids in elderberry plants are hydrocyanic acid and uh samboosin, and both will cause nausea sam boosey. And is there any connection to sambuca or those just set a false cognate? That may be a false cognate. I cannot say one way or

another on that, but I doubt it. Okay, So, so far, we've talked about mad Honey, We've talked about dead man's fingers, We've talked about elder berries. Uh, what what is next? Surely there's some exotic food item that you have for us to discuss. Well, Robert, I want to take you on a food poisoning mystery adventure in nineteen seventies England.

This is fitting to follow elderberry So in nineteen seventy nine, on the second day of the autumn term at a school in South London, bunch of schoolboys, all the boys, they're lined up for a school lunch including steak pie, gravy, boiled potatoes, cabbage and or canned carrots, followed by a dessert of apricots or something called quote syrup sponge pudding. Oh, that sounds delicious. If our British listeners can tell me what that is, I would love to know sponge pudding. Anyway.

After this lunch, seventy eight boys who had eaten the school lunch became sick with things like abdominal pain or diarrhea or vomiting, headache, fever. Seventeen had to go to the hospital, and three of those were considered dangerously ill. Uh two had what was reported as minimal pain, but quote diarrhea was copious. And what I'm quoting from here is the nine edition of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine

and article by Mary McMillan and J. C. Thompson. Continuing, the three boys considered dangerously ill were comatose or in a stupor and had peripheral circulatory collapse when they were admitted to the hospital. The others admitted to the hospital had symptoms such as convulsive twitching or spasms, confusion, hallucination, and general delirium. Now, fortunately nobody died. All of the boys were well enough to go back home within six to eleven days of admission, but with a few of

them it seemed very close. So what had made them sick? Onto the hunt lab tests for bacterial and viral infection. All are negative, so it was not a microbial infection of any kind. Doctors also tested the boy's blood and feces to see if they could detect other toxic substances, for example, elevated levels of lead, arsenic copper. They also looked for zinc because at the time, zinc phosphide was

used as a common rat poison. They looked for signs of organic compounds such as nicotine, organophosphor us, various pesticides, and defoliants. All of it negative. Okay, So if we ruled out the syrup sponge putting it no, not necessarily no, all of these could be suspect. What if it was the gravy. We don't know what's in gravy. Finally, well, that is what's in school lunch. Maybe the same thing

that's in syrup sponge putting mostly circus animals. Right. Finally, one doctor Mary Whittaker of the University of Exeter, as well as the authors of the study I just mentioned, Mary McMillan and J. C. Thompson, Um they determine the culprit. They found that the sick boy's blood plasma had a deficiency of something called pseudocolonesterrace. Okay, now I gotta explain a little body chemistry here. Colonester race is a naturally

occurring enzyme in your body. It's in your blood plasma, and it's necessary for the correct functioning of an animal's nervous system. So your body, like other animal bodies, has a nervous system as its command center, and your muscles, skin, inner organs don't do much without the nervous system telling

them to do it. And you shouldn't just think about this in the you know, conscious, deliberate sense of using your brain to move your skeletal muscles to jump over a pothole or throw a bowl of soup at somebody, or whatever it is you do with your body. Uh. This also applies to the unconscious functioning of most of your internal organs. They need electrical stimulation or inhibition from the nervous system, and these electrical signals are transported through

the body through structures called synapses. Synapses, of course we've talked about them on the show before, but they're the gateways between neurons or nerve cells, and they allow electrical and chemical signals to pass through. And so these signals are often carried by a chemical called acetal coline. Meanwhile, you can stop these signals with a specific colon ester as enzyme called acetal colon ester ace, which breaks down the acetal coline that allows the passage of the signals.

So you need both. You need both chemicals in your body to allow and regulate proper functioning of the nervous system. If you don't have enough colon ester as to break down the acetal coline, your nervous system is going to start to experience the equivalent of a street congested with lots of cars and the cars won't stop, so you can experience negative effects all over the body as a result of the nervous system being unable to effectively inhibit

signals firing across synapses. Okay, so if this were a game of clue. At this point, we kind of know what the murder weapon was, but not who or whether what the murder is? Is it the Yeah? What was it was? It? Was it Colonel Syrup, sponge Pudding, or General Gravy or one of these other fine suspects, or in the British version, Reverend Gravy. Uh yeah, good questions. So, so, the boys had been poisoned by something that inhibited the production of colon ester as in their bodies, or it

generally inhibited colonester as. Actually I can't remember if it was the production or if it naturally lowered. Anyway, they had decreased colon ester as and this allowed the researchers to isolate the cause of the outbreak because they knew what in the meal had the ability to do that. Potatoes poisoned potatoes. And before you think what, who on earth would try to poison a group of English schoolboys with a weapon as pure and honest as the potato,

The answer is nobody. It wasn't intentional at all. The poisoning was traced to a act of old potatoes in the school kitchen that had been sitting around since summer long enough to develop a formidable poison profile. The potatoes were poisoned by their very own nature, and this was backed up by interviews with the students, where it was later found that the really the only thing all of the students who became sick had in common was that

they'd eaten the potatoes. For example, like a vegetarian student was poisoned, and the other things had different options about desserts and stuff, but all the sick boys had eaten those old potatoes from the summer term. So how on earth would an old potato from the summer term do

something that crazy, dear nervous system. Well, the everyday potato is the tuber of a plant called Solanum tuberosum, which is a member of the plant family uh solanassier, or the nightshade family, which of course you might recall is sort of known for its poisons. Eggplants, tomatoes, and some

of their fruits are also members of this family. Potato plants naturally contain a range of defensive poisons called glycoalkaloids, and two primary alkaloids, and potatoes are called solanine and check a seine, and in most cases of potato poisoning. The solanine is the one that gets most often singled out by name as the primary cause of illness, but there there are multiple glycoalkaloids at work, and these toxins

can be found in many parts of the plant. So if you ever decide to grow a potato plant for yourself and your home garden, do not eat the fruit of this plant, do not eat its flowers, and don't get it in your head to make yourself a nice cup of potato leaf tea, because all throughout the plant you will find the presence of these glycoalkaloid poisons that can do to you what happened to these South London

school boys. Now, most recorded cases of solanine poisoning do not end in death, but in some cases, especially where they're like aggregating factors such as malnutrition or starvation and at play, solanine poisonings can be deadly. And I want to give a few examples from a book about food intolerance called Was It Something You Ate? By John Emsley and Peter Fell, published by Oxford University Press in two

thousand two. Uh they signed an example where during the Korean War, food shortages in North Korea forced people in many communities to survive on things like rotten potatoes, and in one area, three and eighty two people became sick from solanine poisoning, of which fifty five were hospitalized and twenty two died. Symptoms included weak pulse, blue lips and ears, pale skin, enlargement of the heart and liver, swelling of the face, abdomen and extremities, and death usually occurred within

five to ten days. In the cases where people died in the last stages before death, people experienced excitability and attacks of shaking all over the body, and they eventually died from respiratory failure. It's reported, and there are a couple of other cases. In nineteen eighteen in Glasgow, Scotland, sixty one people got sick with vomiting, diarrhea and headache after eating potatoes. Of them, one boy died of strangulation

of the bowel. And also in nineteen a family of seven was poisoned by green potatoes and two of them died. Well Joe, At this point, I imagine a lot of our listeners are thinking, well, heck, we live in of a French fry nation, live in a a fully loaded baked potato nation. This is this is bad news. I mean, we eat so much potato, our children eat so many potato products. The how do we steer clear of this potato poisoning? Are we begging for death? Yeah? How to

avoid uh? The reaper soulanine and its chemical brethren in hoods Uh. No, So most potatoes are fine. This is the thing you really shouldn't worry about. And there are clear signals to look out for, and I'll tell you what they are. But there's no reason to freak out about potatoes in general. Potatoes do contain some amount of solanine naturally, and actually Dr Harriet hall Over at Science Based Medicine has a really good blog post about this

about general souleanine content and potatoes. She writes, quote, it's estimated that it would take two to five milligrams per kilogram of body weight to produce toxic symptoms. And she's referring to soulanine there and the glycoalkaloids. A large potato weighs about three hundred grams and has a soulanine content of less than zero point two milligrams per gram. That works out to about zero point zero three milligrams per kilogram for an adult, a hundredth of the toxic dose.

I figure a murderous wife would have to feed something like sixty seven large potatoes to her husband in a single meal to poison him, unless he's a phenomenally big eater or arsenic would be a better bet. So regular potatoes with normal soulenine content. This is not something you need to worry it, right, unless you're eating hundreds of potatoes, and then you probab we need to worry about all those sunfries. Yeah, yeah, you'll probably have I don't know,

a reaction to the salt first or something. But properly farmed potatoes produced by experienced growers tend to be bread for really low glcoalkaloid and specifically solanine content in the tuber much lower than you'd find in a wild potato. Uh And according to that Emsley and fell book I mentioned earlier, the average potato has maybe three to six milligrams of solanine per grams of mass, so that might be a different figure than Hall had, but either way,

this is not a threat. Most of this also is going to be on the outside near the peel, so if you peel the potato, you're probably getting rid of most of it, and the concentration of solanine and the potato tends to increase if the potato is bruised or exposed to light, which tends to cause greening. You've seen green potatoes before, those are the ones you don't eat. Solanine is generally found in UH in higher proportions, and potatoes that are have turned green or especially have begun

to sprout. I think that, Yeah, where I've seen the green potatoes the most have been the the sort of science classroom potato experiments. Yes, well you you have it, have toothpicks stuck in it, and you're you're you're growing it out or something. Yeah, and it's been exposed to light for a long period or Mr or classic Mr Potato head. I imagine. I don't know that I've ever actually encountered one of those. Oh, I've never thought about him being poisoned, but he really probably is. It gets

out on the counter all day. Well, so you're thinking, how can I know to avoid this kind of poisoning? How do I keep the glycoalkaloids out of my body? Well? Simple steps. Store your potatoes in a cool, dry place. Don't eat old potatoes, don't eat a potato that is green or sprouting. And if you're in doubt, peel your potatoes because there is likely much more poison in the peel than in the starchy center. All right, I feel better At this point, I was a little nervous, so

now I feel better. Okay. Another fun fact about the green potatoes, though, the green you see in a green potato that maybe quite poisonous is not soulanine or any other glycoalkaloid itself, but regular old chlorophyll stuff that makes plants green. The solanine and the chlorophyll chlorophyll, they're just correlated. So if you see chlorophyll, it probably means there are metabolic processes going on in the potato. Uh that This means it's probably been exposed to sun or something which

tends to increase the soulanine content. One last historical side note. In the mid nineteen sixties, researchers in the United States bred a new strain of potato that was known as the Lenape potato, and it was released in November nineteen sixty seven by the Crops Research Division of the U. S Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural Experiment Station of Pennsylvania. And it was a cross between some existing potato varieties selected to create a tuber perfect for making potato chips.

So it had a high specific gravity, meaning a high solids content that's a dry matter, and a resistance to common parasites and potato diseases such as late blight, potato scab, mild mosaic and tuber necrosis from leaf roll and stem end browning. No potatoes have the best disease name, do I mean? I guess that they're just they're just ready for they're always already a little bit grotesque, right, Yeah.

And it was also considered to make potato chips with good color, could make good potato chips even after it's been in cold storage. So new superior potato. But this is the age if you want to pristine, just shining like ivory white potato chip. Before we reached this age of like cool multicolored potato chips exactly people wanted it. It should look like it was made out of plastic. But unfortunately there was a problem. The lenape varietal was

found to have a defect. It was poisonous. Reportedly able to cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, fever, bad symptoms. And what was the culprit. Well, the potato naturally contained elevated levels of glycoalkaloids. So the lenape potato was withdrawn from consumer consumer production production and shame. I don't I don't think it actually ever made it to the stores to the consumers themselves, or if it did, it was pretty soon

after withdrawn. But reading up on this, I wanted to note it was my first occasion to check out a nineteen sixties edition of the American Potato Journal. Oh yeah, this is your first experience. You're not picked up this

this journal previously. It's so fascinating journal. But also I wanted to mention that I think because of its inclusion and influential book, the story about the lenape potato was often referenced in the nineteen nineties during the first big debate on GMO crops, though the poison potato itself was the product of more traditional plant breeding. Yeah, like that's the thing, right, I mean, we've been with our with

our cultivated um agricultural products. We have been manipulating them for quite a while, exactly regular levels like non genetic manipulation. I mean really by the virtue, I mean it's still genetic manipulation. We've been we've been manipulating these plants for ages. Yeah, exactly. I think it was just generally considered an example of the dangers of what happens when you use science to

mess around with pure natural foods. But of course, the other potato varieties that you know, we know and love are the product of agriculture and breeding, and you know, scientific investigation into the Mendalian genetics of potato varietals. Uh, and a much less dangerous you can produce a much less dangerous potato through these processes than the glycoalkaloid rich wild potato. So I'm not sure what kind of argument that makes really, So we're continuing to to to try

and breathe the quizettees Hadiac of the potato. But there's always any potatoes. There's always the chance you'll create these various monsters on the way, right, I think, So all right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will jump into another dangerous food example, and yes, there will be at least one more dune reference. All right, we're back so this is a big one. Of course.

I think everybody's run across an example of this, someone saying the apple, the sweet, innocent apple, the everyday apple a day keeps the doctor away. Fruit. This contains seeds, and if you eat these seeds, you will you will be become poisoned and you will die. If you heard variations of this, I don't know if I've been told I would die, but I've heard that the seeds contain poison, and I think in a limited sense that is true, correct,

I mean, it is true. It's one of is as we'll discussed, it's definitely one of these cases where you are not going to poison yourself eating the seeds of apples. It's just there. There's there's no there's no record of this ever happening, And when you start looking at the math and the quantity of toxins and the seeds, it's just it's just impossible. Yeah. I think, as almost everything else we've talked about in this episode, the old adage

in chemistry holds true. Or is it chemistry toxicology? The dose makes the poison anything, including water, including sugar, including whatever. Anything in the correct dose had just poisonous. So the question is how much of it are you getting and how little does it take to hurt you? Yeah, So the reality here is that, yes, the seeds, pits, and

stones of many varieties of fruit contains small amounts of cyanide. Uh. There are a number of forms of cyanide, and if you take enough of the wrong one or the right one, depending on what your your goal is, you can suffer poisoning. Symptoms include headache, dizziness, fast heart rate, shortness of breath, and vomiting. Uh. This may be followed by seizure, slow heart rate, low blood pressure, loss of consciousness, and you know, cardiac arrest and death. I mean it's cyanide. It's it's

a poison. Now. Apples in particular contain a compound called amygdalin in their seed, and this is a cyanide and sugar based molecule. All right, So if you start chewing the seeds, uh, your saliva enzymes they hit this particular compound, They cut off the sugar part from the molecule, and the remainder then can decompose to produce the poisonous gas

hydrogen cyanide. Yeah, which which sounds crazy and and definitely makes me think of that scene in Dune where where where the duke bites into the poison tooth in his mouth, uh, and then breathes out in an attempt to kill his captors, to kill the Vladimir Harconin. Oh, that's a that's a good scene. It's a great scene. Yeah, and and it makes you think, well, maybe you should just bitten into an apple and just doesn't He fails to kill Harcona.

He does. He kills Peter. Oh, Peter de Fries. Yeah, he's he's so he's able to take out one of the batties. But uh, but but luck, pure luck saves the baron as you allude to. Yeah, that scene would have been much more awkward if he'd been trying to hold on while I eat sixty apples. You allow me to to the My final request is that you give me unlimited apple seeds to chew, and you hang out really close to my face. It would have it was not that that is not a ment at created plan,

a mentat approved plan. Okay, but so how many seeds does it really take? Okay? So here's another case, as like we did in a previous example, where you have to bust out some grams and milligrams. So cyanide toxicity and humans, you're generally talking point five to three point five milligrams per kilogram of body weight, so you know, it depends on your body how big you are. Um for a fatal dose, you'd need to hit at least one point five milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Okay,

so that's kind of you. Now you have a basic range of toxicity and death. The seeds of the apple themselves. You're looking at three milligrams of cyanide per gram of seeds, and one seed is approximately point seven grams, so you would be like two points something milligrams of cyanide per seed. Yeah, you need to Basically, you would need to chew an

absurd number of apple seeds to pull this off. And there are no reports of anyone actually doing it, either intentionally, you know, out of I don't know, madness, or or accidentally. Even Johnny apple Seed running around two and on apples all day was not able to kill himself. But I think there are some other seeds in natural fruits that we eat all the time that are a little bit

more dangerous than apple pits. Right, this is true? Uh, And there's there's actually an excellent article that came out in the Guardian Um last year actually uh really good and has a wonderful chart that just shows you the different levels of cyanide and these different fruits. Often include a link to it on the landing page for this episode it stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But the basics are that apple seeds with three milligrams per gram.

That places apple somewhere in the middle of our spectrum between the point one milligram program of the common nectarine, so that's the low end up to the seventeen point five milligrams program in the European green gauge plum. I've never heard of that, Yeah, I had not either. It's a European specialty. Uh and it's yeah, that's that's a

big one. Likewise, the apricot is pretty big too. The kernels of the apricot fourteen point four, and there have been plenty of cases of problematic ingestion of apricot kernels, typically by children, as well as a cherry pits or another one. Cherry pits have three point nine. Now with those, I think I've read that you have to do some processing to make them especially dangerous, right, Like if you chew up cherry pits, there's something they're more dangerous, that's right.

So remember the saliva that I mentioned earlier in the apple seeds, So there's that breaking down in the separation of that compound. Uh So, yeah, chewing the seeds, chewing the kernel. Also, I've i've I've heard that if you were to do grind up a bunch of cherry pits, you might have a similar scenario as well. I mean

you would have a similar scenario. So those are those are the areas where you there's more concern, and generally that means that the concern with cherries, for example, is going to be improper food preparation, like somebody who has no idea what they're doing and they grind up a bunch of cherries for something without removing the pit. Or it's a case where child gets ahold of a bunch of kernels from apricots or a bunch of of cherry

pits and starts chewing them. Those are situations where the condition often escalates and there is you know, some serious toxicity that a doctor has to deal with. Well, I gotta invite you all over for a taste of my fresh made pasta with home ground apricot pit pasto. But he's one of these situations where, yeah, the average person might not realize that the the average cherry with the with the pit in it does contain bits of cyanide, and you could you could have a lethal dose of

cyanide in your house. It's just if you're following the rules, you're going to be throwing all that cyanide out. If you eat it the normal way, there's no danger, right, But this is maybe a good reason why I remember when I was a kid having there being games about spitting fruit pits. Did you have games I feel like spitting fruit fruit pits? Yeah, it's like you you you know, how far can you spit the watermelon seedslon seeds saying they're dangerous? But maybe the same is true of cherry

pits and stuff like that. Maybe this is a way of culturally preserving the instinct to not chew up and swallow those those poisonous apricot pits and cherry seeds. Huh. Well, you know I was, I was thinking about this when we have first discussed this, because just last night, my son, he's four and a half, he eats all the time. And I was giving him some some orange slices to eat in the bathtub, because you have to there has to be some overlap. Otherwise he would there would be

no going to bed. Uh. And he is, he's he's especially recently he's been very demanding about how he doesn't want seeds in anything. And he and I bring him the fruit and he says, oh, do you have seeds in it? I don't want the seeds. And I explain, if you you you take the seeds out, you spit the seeds out. This is how fruit works, and you just have to to roll with Yeah, well not into the bath, you know. He asked the same thing. I can just spit him in the bath. No, you can't

spit him in the bath. Just come back. And this is why you have a bowl with fruit in it.

But but I wonder, like to what extent this is a you know, this is a natural instinct for for young children, especially to be appalled by the seed, because in fact, the seed of some fruits could prove dangerous to them, you know, in the same way that I've I've heard some there's some theories about picky eating and children that are basically amounts to the same thing that that that picky eating and children is a natural, inborn

defense mechanism against potentially dangerous foods that are gonna be more dangerous for them given their their small body size. That's funny because I see the exact same evolutionary process working itself out in some babies and in my dog, where it seems like just anything that will fit in the mouth will go in there but then come back

out right. Sometimes with the dogs, Oh yeah, sometimes, I mean I don't know, my dog wants to eat things that I often think like that doesn't make biological sense to have a drive to try to eat that rock. Well, am I correct in this that with dogs like that's part of their tasting process, like to to to judge the food it goes in the mouth first. Oh yeah,

I guess that kind of makes sense. Yeah, I could be wrong and that I'm not a dog expert, but but at any rate, that also the the you know, the the the whole incident here with with seeds also comes up, I understand with some pats. I didn't really explore that thread, but I was seeing a number of different posts and articles out there about oh, do I

need to be concerned about my dog eating these pits? Well, there's certainly lots of foods that are probably not dangerous to you, but might be dangerous to a pet for a couple of reasons, for different body chemistry, but also just because of different body size. A serving that is contains nothing all that, you know, nothing in concentration dangerous to you, might be a big dose for a small animal, right, Yeah,

especially a small dog, small cat, etcetera. All right, you know, on on a final note here, you know, so many of the things we've been talking about, we've been talking about, like the dosage level, the quantities. Uh, keep in mind the spice rack. Okay. Uh. We actually have an older episode of Stuff to blow your mind that is all about nutmeg. Nutmeg, and I encourage you to check that

episode out because nutmeg is fascinating. It has this weird, wonderful history full of like Eastern medicine, um, European fashion, um, medieval medieval manipulation of the humors. Also like bloody colonial monopolies. It's I've definitely read about its use as a recreational drug. Yeah. There a Malcolm X wrote about it's it's use in prisons, you would take a match box full of nutmeg and you would have, you know, an altered state. Uh. There

are various other accounts from from history. Samuel Samuel Peeps wrote about an individual who who took nutmeg and ran naked through the streets of London. Samuel Peeps. Yeah, yeah, so so there's a lot. There's a rich history with nutmeg. But yeah, nutmeg is an example of something where if you you uh, use just a few sprinkles here and there on top of your egg nog or whatever, and it's it's perfectly fine. I put a little on my

smoothie every morning, um. But if you take larger quantities there can be toxic effects sic trans yes, spice trands essentially except a very unpleasant spice trans uh with lots of nausea and like a really horrible hangover. I've read no accounts of recreational nutmeg use beyond sprinkles for flavoring that end. Well, it's all grotesque, and nobody tries at a secon in time, uh for the most part, unless they have no other option. There are just extremely bored.

But but it serves as a I think a fine lesson because if you look at your spice rack in your house, you were looking at a number of different substances that are in many cases toxins. There. They they evolved in the original plants that they came from as a deterrent to keep people from eating them, or to keep people from eating them beyond you know, certain portions. Yeah, in many cases, the pungency and flavor that we prize them for, when applied to a very small amount in

our food, is by itself disgusting. This is it's by design disgusting. It's supposed to be that way as a defense mechanism. Yeah, food technologies essentially are mastery of all of these elements. We figured out how to manipulate them, how to change them, often with fire, and then and then utilize even these these these potent poisons in very

small quantities that to changes the flavor. So, yeah, anything in your spice rack, if you took it in sufficient quantities, you in many cases could have an altered experience, probably not a good altered experience, but an altered one and or experienced the toxic effects. So it's just you know, worth keeping in mind. I think nutmeg is a great example of that, and I love nutmeg and uh uh, and yet I would I would definitely not advise eating

a matchbox full of it. Okay, So main takeaways from this episode don't eat the green potatoes the dose makes the poison. Don't grind up cherry wrapper coop pits and make a pesto out of them. Don't freak out over the dead man's fingers though you know, take them out, uh for flavor purposes. Don't eat four cups of nutmeg.

I mean basically the take home is, don't take your food for granted, Like, no, have some basic idea of where food comes from, the processes that that lead it to your plate, uh, the organisms from that they stem from. Like if you have, the more you know about about what your food actually is, the less shocking any of these dangers are, and also the better prepared you are for these for for the often you know, small chances that you might encounter these problems. I think that's a

really good point. Maybe that's the main takeaway from this episode. When you think about your food, think about organisms. Don't think about it as a product that came from a factory, though in many cases it probably was. Probably you know, if it's a package product probably was processed in a factory somewhere, but it is an organism or derived from an organism. Think about the organism it came from, the plant,

the animal, whatever it is. Think about its place in nature, all the things that fed it and grew its bones, as it in turn feeds you and grows your bones and hopefully doesn't poison you. And I think that's a perfect message for the holiday. So on that note, if you would like to certainly check out any of the links we mentioned here, that older episode on Nutmeg, last year's episode onundangerous foods, etcetera. You can check all of that out It's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

You also find blog posts, you will find videos. You will find links out to various social media accounts as well, And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com