January 28, 2016 • 52 mins
Join Robert and Joe for a six-course meal of culinary danger! In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, discover six foods that deliver a lethal taste profile when carelessly prepared or consumed by the uninitiated diner.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
works dot com. Hey you working with Stuff to below
your Mind. My name is Robert Wham and Joe McCormick.
And we're just sitting down to its little dinner here,
aren't we. Oh? Yes, I mean we get the white tablecloth.
(00:23):
We have all the various different dining implements here, extra
little forks and spoons that I'm unfamiliar with their for
gouging good. Good, because 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 to the very
(00:48):
level of life and death into people who do a
very mundane task for us, which is preparing food. Yeah,
I mean I had basic level mundane right. Yeah. Obviously
a with 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
(01:08):
of noodles. They're 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
(01:29):
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, in a lot of it comes down to
(01:50):
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 aid us 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
(02:12):
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. And if
we we ate it without proper preparation, or they'd be
just inedible, you know, too tough for to you know
what I mean. Yeah, Cooking improves the taste, It can
(02:34):
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
(02:55):
we you know, like cooking a steak makes you think
about it as a fun a mentally different thing from
the flesh of a dead animal that had to be
murdered in order for you to eat this. Oh indeed. Yeah,
so it kind of it kind of allows you to
put some distance. Yeah, yeah, I mean we And then
what we layer a 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
(03:17):
and beef. Um, yeah, poyo and guya a very different word. Yeah,
and so yeah, 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
(03:39):
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. Mm hmm.
(04:01):
There have been days where I feel like I've eaten
that many apples. But but but I'll have to have
to start counting this Robert or Us secret competitive apple
eater someday, because that's like the I find myself eating
more and more apples. I think maybe it was 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,
(04:23):
and apple is great. So 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.
(04:44):
What is this year we have some ocky fruit to
enjoy here? Now I've never had acky 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. Uh Aki is like
(05:04):
the national dish on the national fruit of Jamaica. It's
a it's a fruit, but it's not your typical like
Western idea of the fruit. For example, what's you have
this yellowish or orangeish fruit on a tree and then
when it ripens, it pops open and it looks like
a like a three eyed creature of some kind of
(05:25):
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 when
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.
(05:47):
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 aki 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.
(06:08):
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 that sounds like something worth trying. Yeah,
(06:31):
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,
(06:52):
who introduced it there. The aki tree is actually known
as Blaia sapita. It's named after Captain William Blythe the
notorious pirate. So interesting history there. But where the poison
comes in is that unripe acy fruit contains a poison
called hypoglycin. And actually there are two different varieties in
(07:15):
the fruit. There's hypoglycin A and hypoglycin B, which one
is worse. Well, A is the main problem here, and
so you have extremely high levels of hypoglycin B 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, um,
(07:36):
you know, you you open it up, you remove the seeds,
and the only edible proportion is the yellow a really
which is surrounded by 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 too. Okay.
So it sounds like if you don't know what you're doing,
you shouldn't try to eat an acy fruit, right. Talk
(07:56):
to somebody who's familiar with this fruit and knows what
no is, 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
(08:17):
who knows how to deal with this, they're gonna clean it,
They're gonna wash the fruit afterwards, 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
(08:40):
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 glue close in the blood,
your liver releases glucose that it formed, that it stores
(09:02):
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 hypocoscenic. Oh.
This sounds similar to some not poisons, but venoms I've
heard of before the attack by causing an insulin spike
(09:22):
in the body and dropping the victims blood sugar to
dangerously low levels. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like that was
probably similar. I think there's like a there's a snail
in the ocean that does that or something. All right, 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
(09:43):
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 cube of cheese, like the kind of the tasters
hand out at the grocery store in the Delhi. So
(10:04):
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
(10:25):
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
(10:46):
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
(11:07):
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 that far northern cultures typically have a lot of
survival foods. Yes, where yeah it may not seem as
is delightful, but you have to put it in the
(11:28):
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 are 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
(11:50):
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 Brinevin, which is an unsweetened caraway schnops from Iceland.
(12:14):
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, did it
like warm me up? It was very herbal, you know,
it was like it was 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
(12:38):
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
(13:00):
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
(13:20):
grows uh lives probably for more than two hundred 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,
(13:42):
when you see it in the water, it looks lethargic
and impassive. It's 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
(14:02):
the most stoic and resigned to the whims of fate.
But the question that I had is 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 significance in
(14:24):
Inuit culture, and uh, it's it's offering another variation on
that same name. This time it's Skalougsuak. Yeah, I love
that scalougsuak. 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
(14:47):
the damp cloth from her hand and carried it out
to see. This cloth, the Inuit say, became skalougsuak, the
greenland shark. I love that because it sounds like there's
been a recent trend. I think in a couple of
prince skits where you have individuals coming up with elaborate
descriptions of how bad a beer is, and this seems
(15:08):
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 throw
that hair into the water and it became a shark. Yeah,
it's very flowery. Yeah, it's like somebody is really overriding
(15:29):
the spear Advocate article. Yeah, 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,
(15:50):
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, oh,
(16:12):
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 triethylamine oxide.
(16:36):
This is a chemical use 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
(16:56):
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
(17:16):
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 dogs 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
(17:38):
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
(17:58):
rot there and then you get 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.
(18:21):
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
(18:46):
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 and ended up hiding behind
a radiator and he would sneak it out from behind
the radiator and eat it gray and rotten. Um. That
(19:08):
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 doesn't seem
(19:29):
like there could be a problem there, right, No, it
seems like bear probably shouldn't eat polar bear? Should you? Well?
Probably not. But I imagine bear before I think when,
Because when I was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for
about three years, occasionally interesting meats would present themselves, such
as moose or and I think one case there was
(19:50):
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 aki 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
(20:11):
prepare it and knows which parts to avoid. That's right,
because you know, the native peoples of the Arctic, they've
known 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've got to know not
(20:32):
to eat the bear's liver. And as early as 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,
(20:53):
the liver is totally fair game. The liver is a delicacy.
The liver should be eaten, right, Yeah, you have a
fine French rest drown making a fua gras or liver
moose or something. Yeah, but then you start dining on
polar bear liver and you might feel drowsy, sluggish, irritable,
suddenly have a severe headache. You get bone pain. Hold
on bone pain, bone pain. What does bone pain even
(21:15):
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 Raisor movie. It
sounds like a hell Razor movie. Yeah, because in the
(21:36):
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 exposure.
On the top of that, liver damage, hemorrhage, coma, and death.
(22:00):
A vial t is 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 mentioned it being in some
(22:20):
of like being one of the pros 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 severlar formation of tissue, can I
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
(22:42):
increases your eyesight beyond normal capacity. 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
(23:02):
normal vision, but they're not gonna upgrade your vision above
the baseline. Okay, all right, good to know. Now if
you like me to take a lot of vitamins. Uh,
you've probably noticed that on days when you take extra vitamins,
you end up with you know, just splendidly golden urine.
Extra vitamins leave your body. Um, And that's the case
with the number of items. They simply dissolve in water,
(23:24):
leave your body and urine A. However, vitamin A only
dissolves in fat, so that means it doesn't 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 prolonged period of time, and
if it does get out of control, then you end
up with chronic hyper vitaminosis A and that in humans
(23:48):
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, we'll put it in
in context here. Uh. An average healthy human liver contains
five hundred and seventy five international units of vitamin A
(24:08):
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 us like supercharging your vitamin A consumption to
just absurd levels. Why is there this much vitamin A
(24:32):
and a polar bear liver? Well, it all comes down,
I mean a lot of it comes down to the
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,
(24:56):
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 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 you know, a
(25:19):
more survivable stage. So it all comes down to the
polar bar 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. When we eat its liver, we end up
(25:40):
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 hawkarl, go for it. I'd probably say, don't
eat a polar bear. Yeah, it's hard me to get
(26:00):
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 a 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. Oh and it's just a
little fun fact. I once wrote a short story in
(26:24):
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 in. Gross. Wow, I'd like to read that. Dude,
it's out there somewhere. Maybe I'll throw up a link somewhere. Okay, well,
(26:46):
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 tiny tissue, thin slices
of fish. It looks good. So imagine you are in
(27:06):
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 sushi, and then suddenly you start feeling
some strange sensations. Uh, well, I generally do, but generally
that's just the sai. Oh yeah, well that's a different
(27:29):
thing entirely. No, 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
(27:50):
be the saki, 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,
(28:11):
leaving you barely able to order seconds on the delicious 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 of perfectly good food if it's prepared well
(28:31):
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,
(28:51):
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 times 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
(29:13):
fish are naturally equipped with tetra to toxin, which is
an extremely potent neurotoxin. If y'all talked about tetra detoxin
on the show before, I feel like it's come up
with 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 at least the scene in
(29:35):
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
(29:57):
and muscles by blocking sodium I on 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 in yeah, like you you're aware
of what's going on. It doesn't necessarily knock you unconscious,
but you can't move and you you might you might
(30:20):
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 gonads. So the chef who knows what he
(30:42):
or she is doing can cut around the right parts
of the fish, knows what to do to prepare it
right there, 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
(31:02):
n that was hosted on a report on the c
d C 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
(31:24):
one is a twenty three year old man who he
ate a piece of fugu, 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
(31:46):
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 were there were a
(32:07):
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.
(32:27):
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
this 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
(32:49):
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 you're at 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,
(33:11):
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, then there's a good chance
of the chef knows what they're doing. Here's 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.
(33:37):
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,
(33:59):
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 nineteen Now, this isn't the only case of
fugu poisoning. It it happens every now and then, but
this was the one case I looked at. All three
(34:19):
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
(34:39):
would bind to 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 sick. Okay, Well, that would lead one
(35:02):
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 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
(35:25):
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
(35:48):
order to assassinate your target, you're using essentially a third party.
There's a middleman. 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 said, 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
(36:09):
safe experience. Yeah, just maybe it's just some guy in
your dorm 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
(36:32):
them down. 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
(36:54):
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 lumps in my beverages. I I kind
of dig it. Robert lamb endorser of lumps. Yeah. Um.
(37:14):
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
(37:37):
in terms of potatoes, 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 start
from it. Uh. There's an alcoholic beverages that are made
(37:58):
from it, of course there are yeah, and uh oh yeah,
there's also a cyanide producing sugar uh, derivative that occurs
in varying amounts in most varieties of cassava. Wait wait
wait wait cyanide. Cyanide. Yeah, so there's yeah, essentially cyanide
in the cassava. Well, good thing. That would have to
(38:19):
be as a hundred times as much of that as
there would be a the tetrat to toxin. Yeah, it's um.
Just to back up a little bit, Cassava probably was
first cultivated by the Maya and the Yucatanba peninsula, so
quite a while ago, there's been a lot of cultivation,
and there's a lot of time for for humans to
work out the kinks to know what to eat what
(38:40):
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 content atration of these cyanogenic glucosides,
(39:04):
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.
(39:25):
Oh so yeah, I love sunchokes, 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 root 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
(39:47):
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 there as at a standard,
say poles that are fine once they've been cooked properly,
but you wouldn't want to eat them raw. Our lima
beans also in that lima beans are off are also
(40:08):
on the list of of things that yeah, you definitely
want to cook. I want to say, red beans as well,
red kidney 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
(40:31):
of the plant 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
(40:52):
figured out what you couldn't eat and paid for that
research with their lives. Yeah. I mean, without even getting
into so many pros listening, 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 imagine myself in the wilderness, starving,
trying to figure out which berries I dare eat and
(41:15):
the 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,
(41:38):
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 is and
(42:00):
you're gonna be fine. But what is the food out
there that it's 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 pork, Yeah,
you know, that could especially yeah, or barbecue pork, because
there's been some headlines in recent years where or there
(42:22):
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 of the time, based on the
number and severity of food poisoning outbreaks by food vector.
(42:42):
So not just like three guys eating fugu and stealing
the headlines, but actually 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. Uh, specifically leafy greens, which,
(43:03):
who 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
(43:24):
eskirrol 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
(43:44):
the reported illnesses caused by the f D a top ten.
H 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,
(44:05):
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
(44:27):
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
(44:48):
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 decency and in awareness. Now,
let me let me offer a caveat even to the
(45:09):
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 by ahead of let us cut it up and
wash it yourself. Get you a salad spinner. It's worth
(45:29):
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 alright. 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
(45:51):
you enjoyed it as much as we did. Whoa, hey,
and what do you know, folks? It it looks like
Julie Douglas is just teleported into the studio. Julie, what
are you doing in here? I don't know? And why
am I still pixelated the guy? We gotta work out
some of the kinks in the system here. I stay
(46:12):
away from our our corners. All right. Well, hey, welcome
back to Stuff to Blow your mind. You have some
some tremendous news to share with everybody. I do. We
we have a new podcast that's coming out called The
Stuff of Life, and it is a weekly podcast, and uh,
we're really excited by it. Noel Brown, our producer, and
(46:33):
I have been working away at it um. He's been
creating some amazing sound design to go along with it.
And basically each week we take a topic and we
talked to a couple of experts and then we we
even some discussion from the house to works collective and
Joe has actually been on a couple of round tables
for some topics. That's been a lot of fun. Yeah,
(46:54):
it's been great. I'm very excited to hear these Julie
can you give us any kind of preview about what
the first episode going to be about? Yeah, the first
episode is the power of Fear. And so we we
talked to a couple of people who kind of have
their boots on the ground, so to speak. A former
firefighter and then a SWAT team member, and they talked
(47:15):
about like the physiological effects of what's going on when
you meet that moment where you really have to marshal
all your resources. And then we talked to a professor
at Chapman University who has an American Surveyor of Fears,
and he talks about what Americans are obsessing about and
the scary things that fill our nightmares? What are they?
(47:39):
Is it mostly mummies? I gotta it's mostly mummies? Right? Uh? No,
mummies didn't make it on the list this year. Actually,
Barbart and I have talked about this survey before, and uh, yeah,
it was something like the It was in two thousand
and fourteen. The number one fear was the dark. Oh yeah, okay,
I think I'm remembering this. Yeah. Yeah, honestly I would
have guessed public speak, king is it not public speaking?
(48:01):
Public speaking makes it into the top five, which we
actually have a companion episode on as well, we'll see
the dark can always contain mummies, so that that mummy
demographic is probably boosting the dark, whereas public speaking rarely
contains mommies. You're safe there yet for now, audience is
full of mummies. Are surprisingly forgiving you, Well, well, yeah,
(48:23):
I guess they would be moan. Yeah, you can't really
tell if it's like a good moan, bad moan. That's
maybe why they're so forgiving. And what kind of topics
can listeners expect to roll out in the future. Yeah,
besides the power of fear and the fear of public speaking,
which is the second episode, will have another episode about
(48:43):
eternity and this idea that we try to immortalize ourselves.
And we talked to Marius Ursake, who is a co
founder of eternomy, and this is a website in which
you can build an avatar of yourself, but he's doing
it in such a way that you would interact with
this avatar for decades and it will aggregate all of
(49:07):
your online information. I joined the show to talk in
the roundtable about this topic, and I thought it had
some very weird implications. It sounds very black mirror to
a certain extent, Yes, that came up. Yes, in fact,
that is one of his influences, and not that he
wants to create version of that, want to bring this
to life with my work right, No, No, he's he's
(49:29):
all about the sort of utopian version of this and
and trying to um actually use this as a tool
for living, as opposed to have it be some sort
of representation of yourself after you die, although it can
certainly do that too. Cool, So it's less a headstone
and more just one more social media platform, possibly one
(49:52):
more hole to fall into. Well, I'm really excited to
hear these, Julian. I'm really excited for this show, and
I think all of our listeners, all of you guys
out there, really should be too, because they put a
lot of work into this and it sounds like it's
going to be amazingly interesting and super fun. Yeah. I've
heard one of the episodes myself. Great content, really appreciating
the amount of work that you know we're putting into it.
(50:14):
Um Now, I'm going to make sure that there's a
link on the landing page with this episode for listeners
to to explore the show. But where else can they
go to get it? They can go to really any
place that they get their podcast from, including iTunes, so
you can you can subscribe, they might say, oh, yes
you can, yes, yes, so they should subscribe to the
(50:35):
Stuff of Life. And by the way, by the time
this episode airs, the episode of the Power of Fear
will be out on iTunes, so that now we're in
the future now, but it actually dropped on January, so
if you're listening, you don't have to wait. You can
go check it out right this minute. Yes, and you're
on social media as well. We are. You can find
(50:55):
us on the Stuff of Life on Facebook and also Twitter.
Stuff of Life show. Cool. Well, thank you so much
for joining us today, Julie. And and see it works out.
Just when you started to smooth out on the edge
of pixels are disappearing and now it's time for you
to zap away into the ether. That's always how it comes, right, um,
thank you so much for having me. And by the way,
(51:16):
I love what you guys have done with the dicks here.
It's great and I love what you guys are doing.
Thank you. I really like you guys have taken the
show into this beautiful direction. So alright, kudos. I well,
thank you and best of luck with Stuff of Life.
Everybody check it out. In the meantime, be sure to
check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is our mothership. That's where you will find all the
(51:37):
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Follow us on those feeds. Keep up with what we're doing.
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(51:57):
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And if you want to get in touch with us
with any feedback on this episode or other recent ones,
or let us know your favorite dangerous food or if
you've tried any of the foods we talked about today,
(52:18):
you can email us at Blow the Mind at how
step works dot com. Well more on this embassi that
they happened how stup works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
works dot com. Hey you working with Stuff to below
your Mind. My name is Robert Wham and Joe McCormick.
And we're just sitting down to its little dinner here,
aren't we. Oh? Yes, I mean we get the white tablecloth.
(00:23):
We have all the various different dining implements here, extra
little forks and spoons that I'm unfamiliar with their for
gouging good. Good, because 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 to the very
(00:48):
level of life and death into people who do a
very mundane task for us, which is preparing food. Yeah,
I mean I had basic level mundane right. Yeah. Obviously
a with 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
(01:08):
of noodles. They're 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
(01:29):
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, in a lot of it comes down to
(01:50):
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 aid us 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
(02:12):
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. And if
we we ate it without proper preparation, or they'd be
just inedible, you know, too tough for to you know
what I mean. Yeah, Cooking improves the taste, It can
(02:34):
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
(02:55):
we you know, like cooking a steak makes you think
about it as a fun a mentally different thing from
the flesh of a dead animal that had to be
murdered in order for you to eat this. Oh indeed. Yeah,
so it kind of it kind of allows you to
put some distance. Yeah, yeah, I mean we And then
what we layer a 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
(03:17):
and beef. Um, yeah, poyo and guya a very different word. Yeah,
and so yeah, 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
(03:39):
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. Mm hmm.
(04:01):
There have been days where I feel like I've eaten
that many apples. But but but I'll have to have
to start counting this Robert or Us secret competitive apple
eater someday, because that's like the I find myself eating
more and more apples. I think maybe it was 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,
(04:23):
and apple is great. So 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.
(04:44):
What is this year we have some ocky fruit to
enjoy here? Now I've never had acky 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. Uh Aki is like
(05:04):
the national dish on the national fruit of Jamaica. It's
a it's a fruit, but it's not your typical like
Western idea of the fruit. For example, what's you have
this yellowish or orangeish fruit on a tree and then
when it ripens, it pops open and it looks like
a like a three eyed creature of some kind of
(05:25):
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 when
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.
(05:47):
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 aki 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.
(06:08):
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 that sounds like something worth trying. Yeah,
(06:31):
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,
(06:52):
who introduced it there. The aki tree is actually known
as Blaia sapita. It's named after Captain William Blythe the
notorious pirate. So interesting history there. But where the poison
comes in is that unripe acy fruit contains a poison
called hypoglycin. And actually there are two different varieties in
(07:15):
the fruit. There's hypoglycin A and hypoglycin B, which one
is worse. Well, A is the main problem here, and
so you have extremely high levels of hypoglycin B 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, um,
(07:36):
you know, you you open it up, you remove the seeds,
and the only edible proportion is the yellow a really
which is surrounded by 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 too. Okay.
So it sounds like if you don't know what you're doing,
you shouldn't try to eat an acy fruit, right. Talk
(07:56):
to somebody who's familiar with this fruit and knows what
no is, 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
(08:17):
who knows how to deal with this, they're gonna clean it,
They're gonna wash the fruit afterwards, 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
(08:40):
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 glue close in the blood,
your liver releases glucose that it formed, that it stores
(09:02):
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 hypocoscenic. Oh.
This sounds similar to some not poisons, but venoms I've
heard of before the attack by causing an insulin spike
(09:22):
in the body and dropping the victims blood sugar to
dangerously low levels. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like that was
probably similar. I think there's like a there's a snail
in the ocean that does that or something. All right, 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
(09:43):
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 cube of cheese, like the kind of the tasters
hand out at the grocery store in the Delhi. So
(10:04):
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
(10:25):
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
(10:46):
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
(11:07):
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 that far northern cultures typically have a lot of
survival foods. Yes, where yeah it may not seem as
is delightful, but you have to put it in the
(11:28):
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 are 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
(11:50):
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 Brinevin, which is an unsweetened caraway schnops from Iceland.
(12:14):
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, did it
like warm me up? It was very herbal, you know,
it was like it was 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
(12:38):
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
(13:00):
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
(13:20):
grows uh lives probably for more than two hundred 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,
(13:42):
when you see it in the water, it looks lethargic
and impassive. It's 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
(14:02):
the most stoic and resigned to the whims of fate.
But the question that I had is 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 significance in
(14:24):
Inuit culture, and uh, it's it's offering another variation on
that same name. This time it's Skalougsuak. Yeah, I love
that scalougsuak. 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
(14:47):
the damp cloth from her hand and carried it out
to see. This cloth, the Inuit say, became skalougsuak, the
greenland shark. I love that because it sounds like there's
been a recent trend. I think in a couple of
prince skits where you have individuals coming up with elaborate
descriptions of how bad a beer is, and this seems
(15:08):
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 throw
that hair into the water and it became a shark. Yeah,
it's very flowery. Yeah, it's like somebody is really overriding
(15:29):
the spear Advocate article. Yeah, 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,
(15:50):
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, oh,
(16:12):
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 triethylamine oxide.
(16:36):
This is a chemical use 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
(16:56):
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
(17:16):
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 dogs 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
(17:38):
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
(17:58):
rot there and then you get 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.
(18:21):
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
(18:46):
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 and ended up hiding behind
a radiator and he would sneak it out from behind
the radiator and eat it gray and rotten. Um. That
(19:08):
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 doesn't seem
(19:29):
like there could be a problem there, right, No, it
seems like bear probably shouldn't eat polar bear? Should you? Well?
Probably not. But I imagine bear before I think when,
Because when I was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for
about three years, occasionally interesting meats would present themselves, such
as moose or and I think one case there was
(19:50):
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 aki 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
(20:11):
prepare it and knows which parts to avoid. That's right,
because you know, the native peoples of the Arctic, they've
known 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've got to know not
(20:32):
to eat the bear's liver. And as early as 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,
(20:53):
the liver is totally fair game. The liver is a delicacy.
The liver should be eaten, right, Yeah, you have a
fine French rest drown making a fua gras or liver
moose or something. Yeah, but then you start dining on
polar bear liver and you might feel drowsy, sluggish, irritable,
suddenly have a severe headache. You get bone pain. Hold
on bone pain, bone pain. What does bone pain even
(21:15):
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 Raisor movie. It
sounds like a hell Razor movie. Yeah, because in the
(21:36):
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 exposure.
On the top of that, liver damage, hemorrhage, coma, and death.
(22:00):
A vial t is 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 mentioned it being in some
(22:20):
of like being one of the pros 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 severlar formation of tissue, can I
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
(22:42):
increases your eyesight beyond normal capacity. 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
(23:02):
normal vision, but they're not gonna upgrade your vision above
the baseline. Okay, all right, good to know. Now if
you like me to take a lot of vitamins. Uh,
you've probably noticed that on days when you take extra vitamins,
you end up with you know, just splendidly golden urine.
Extra vitamins leave your body. Um, And that's the case
with the number of items. They simply dissolve in water,
(23:24):
leave your body and urine A. However, vitamin A only
dissolves in fat, so that means it doesn't 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 prolonged period of time, and
if it does get out of control, then you end
up with chronic hyper vitaminosis A and that in humans
(23:48):
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, we'll put it in
in context here. Uh. An average healthy human liver contains
five hundred and seventy five international units of vitamin A
(24:08):
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 us like supercharging your vitamin A consumption to
just absurd levels. Why is there this much vitamin A
(24:32):
and a polar bear liver? Well, it all comes down,
I mean a lot of it comes down to the
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,
(24:56):
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 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 you know, a
(25:19):
more survivable stage. So it all comes down to the
polar bar 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. When we eat its liver, we end up
(25:40):
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 hawkarl, go for it. I'd probably say, don't
eat a polar bear. Yeah, it's hard me to get
(26:00):
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 a 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. Oh and it's just a
little fun fact. I once wrote a short story in
(26:24):
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 in. Gross. Wow, I'd like to read that. Dude,
it's out there somewhere. Maybe I'll throw up a link somewhere. Okay, well,
(26:46):
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 tiny tissue, thin slices
of fish. It looks good. So imagine you are in
(27:06):
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 sushi, and then suddenly you start feeling
some strange sensations. Uh, well, I generally do, but generally
that's just the sai. Oh yeah, well that's a different
(27:29):
thing entirely. No, 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
(27:50):
be the saki, 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,
(28:11):
leaving you barely able to order seconds on the delicious 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 of perfectly good food if it's prepared well
(28:31):
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,
(28:51):
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 times 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
(29:13):
fish are naturally equipped with tetra to toxin, which is
an extremely potent neurotoxin. If y'all talked about tetra detoxin
on the show before, I feel like it's come up
with 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 at least the scene in
(29:35):
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
(29:57):
and muscles by blocking sodium I on 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 in yeah, like you you're aware
of what's going on. It doesn't necessarily knock you unconscious,
but you can't move and you you might you might
(30:20):
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 gonads. So the chef who knows what he
(30:42):
or she is doing can cut around the right parts
of the fish, knows what to do to prepare it
right there, 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
(31:02):
n that was hosted on a report on the c
d C 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
(31:24):
one is a twenty three year old man who he
ate a piece of fugu, 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
(31:46):
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 were there were a
(32:07):
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.
(32:27):
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
this 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
(32:49):
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 you're at 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,
(33:11):
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, then there's a good chance
of the chef knows what they're doing. Here's 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.
(33:37):
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,
(33:59):
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 nineteen Now, this isn't the only case of
fugu poisoning. It it happens every now and then, but
this was the one case I looked at. All three
(34:19):
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
(34:39):
would bind to 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 sick. Okay, Well, that would lead one
(35:02):
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 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
(35:25):
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
(35:48):
order to assassinate your target, you're using essentially a third party.
There's a middleman. 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 said, 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
(36:09):
safe experience. Yeah, just maybe it's just some guy in
your dorm 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
(36:32):
them down. 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
(36:54):
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 lumps in my beverages. I I kind
of dig it. Robert lamb endorser of lumps. Yeah. Um.
(37:14):
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
(37:37):
in terms of potatoes, 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 start
from it. Uh. There's an alcoholic beverages that are made
(37:58):
from it, of course there are yeah, and uh oh yeah,
there's also a cyanide producing sugar uh, derivative that occurs
in varying amounts in most varieties of cassava. Wait wait
wait wait cyanide. Cyanide. Yeah, so there's yeah, essentially cyanide
in the cassava. Well, good thing. That would have to
(38:19):
be as a hundred times as much of that as
there would be a the tetrat to toxin. Yeah, it's um.
Just to back up a little bit, Cassava probably was
first cultivated by the Maya and the Yucatanba peninsula, so
quite a while ago, there's been a lot of cultivation,
and there's a lot of time for for humans to
work out the kinks to know what to eat what
(38:40):
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 content atration of these cyanogenic glucosides,
(39:04):
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.
(39:25):
Oh so yeah, I love sunchokes, 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 root 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
(39:47):
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 there as at a standard,
say poles that are fine once they've been cooked properly,
but you wouldn't want to eat them raw. Our lima
beans also in that lima beans are off are also
(40:08):
on the list of of things that yeah, you definitely
want to cook. I want to say, red beans as well,
red kidney 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
(40:31):
of the plant 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
(40:52):
figured out what you couldn't eat and paid for that
research with their lives. Yeah. I mean, without even getting
into so many pros listening, 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 imagine myself in the wilderness, starving,
trying to figure out which berries I dare eat and
(41:15):
the 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,
(41:38):
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 is and
(42:00):
you're gonna be fine. But what is the food out
there that it's 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 pork, Yeah,
you know, that could especially yeah, or barbecue pork, because
there's been some headlines in recent years where or there
(42:22):
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 of the time, based on the
number and severity of food poisoning outbreaks by food vector.
(42:42):
So not just like three guys eating fugu and stealing
the headlines, but actually 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. Uh, specifically leafy greens, which,
(43:03):
who 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
(43:24):
eskirrol 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
(43:44):
the reported illnesses caused by the f D a top ten.
H 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,
(44:05):
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
(44:27):
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
(44:48):
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 decency and in awareness. Now,
let me let me offer a caveat even to the
(45:09):
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 by ahead of let us cut it up and
wash it yourself. Get you a salad spinner. It's worth
(45:29):
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 alright. 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
(45:51):
you enjoyed it as much as we did. Whoa, hey,
and what do you know, folks? It it looks like
Julie Douglas is just teleported into the studio. Julie, what
are you doing in here? I don't know? And why
am I still pixelated the guy? We gotta work out
some of the kinks in the system here. I stay
(46:12):
away from our our corners. All right. Well, hey, welcome
back to Stuff to Blow your mind. You have some
some tremendous news to share with everybody. I do. We
we have a new podcast that's coming out called The
Stuff of Life, and it is a weekly podcast, and uh,
we're really excited by it. Noel Brown, our producer, and
(46:33):
I have been working away at it um. He's been
creating some amazing sound design to go along with it.
And basically each week we take a topic and we
talked to a couple of experts and then we we
even some discussion from the house to works collective and
Joe has actually been on a couple of round tables
for some topics. That's been a lot of fun. Yeah,
(46:54):
it's been great. I'm very excited to hear these Julie
can you give us any kind of preview about what
the first episode going to be about? Yeah, the first
episode is the power of Fear. And so we we
talked to a couple of people who kind of have
their boots on the ground, so to speak. A former
firefighter and then a SWAT team member, and they talked
(47:15):
about like the physiological effects of what's going on when
you meet that moment where you really have to marshal
all your resources. And then we talked to a professor
at Chapman University who has an American Surveyor of Fears,
and he talks about what Americans are obsessing about and
the scary things that fill our nightmares? What are they?
(47:39):
Is it mostly mummies? I gotta it's mostly mummies? Right? Uh? No,
mummies didn't make it on the list this year. Actually,
Barbart and I have talked about this survey before, and uh, yeah,
it was something like the It was in two thousand
and fourteen. The number one fear was the dark. Oh yeah, okay,
I think I'm remembering this. Yeah. Yeah, honestly I would
have guessed public speak, king is it not public speaking?
(48:01):
Public speaking makes it into the top five, which we
actually have a companion episode on as well, we'll see
the dark can always contain mummies, so that that mummy
demographic is probably boosting the dark, whereas public speaking rarely
contains mommies. You're safe there yet for now, audience is
full of mummies. Are surprisingly forgiving you, Well, well, yeah,
(48:23):
I guess they would be moan. Yeah, you can't really
tell if it's like a good moan, bad moan. That's
maybe why they're so forgiving. And what kind of topics
can listeners expect to roll out in the future. Yeah,
besides the power of fear and the fear of public speaking,
which is the second episode, will have another episode about
(48:43):
eternity and this idea that we try to immortalize ourselves.
And we talked to Marius Ursake, who is a co
founder of eternomy, and this is a website in which
you can build an avatar of yourself, but he's doing
it in such a way that you would interact with
this avatar for decades and it will aggregate all of
(49:07):
your online information. I joined the show to talk in
the roundtable about this topic, and I thought it had
some very weird implications. It sounds very black mirror to
a certain extent, Yes, that came up. Yes, in fact,
that is one of his influences, and not that he
wants to create version of that, want to bring this
to life with my work right, No, No, he's he's
(49:29):
all about the sort of utopian version of this and
and trying to um actually use this as a tool
for living, as opposed to have it be some sort
of representation of yourself after you die, although it can
certainly do that too. Cool, So it's less a headstone
and more just one more social media platform, possibly one
(49:52):
more hole to fall into. Well, I'm really excited to
hear these, Julian. I'm really excited for this show, and
I think all of our listeners, all of you guys
out there, really should be too, because they put a
lot of work into this and it sounds like it's
going to be amazingly interesting and super fun. Yeah. I've
heard one of the episodes myself. Great content, really appreciating
the amount of work that you know we're putting into it.
(50:14):
Um Now, I'm going to make sure that there's a
link on the landing page with this episode for listeners
to to explore the show. But where else can they
go to get it? They can go to really any
place that they get their podcast from, including iTunes, so
you can you can subscribe, they might say, oh, yes
you can, yes, yes, so they should subscribe to the
(50:35):
Stuff of Life. And by the way, by the time
this episode airs, the episode of the Power of Fear
will be out on iTunes, so that now we're in
the future now, but it actually dropped on January, so
if you're listening, you don't have to wait. You can
go check it out right this minute. Yes, and you're
on social media as well. We are. You can find
(50:55):
us on the Stuff of Life on Facebook and also Twitter.
Stuff of Life show. Cool. Well, thank you so much
for joining us today, Julie. And and see it works out.
Just when you started to smooth out on the edge
of pixels are disappearing and now it's time for you
to zap away into the ether. That's always how it comes, right, um,
thank you so much for having me. And by the way,
(51:16):
I love what you guys have done with the dicks here.
It's great and I love what you guys are doing.
Thank you. I really like you guys have taken the
show into this beautiful direction. So alright, kudos. I well,
thank you and best of luck with Stuff of Life.
Everybody check it out. In the meantime, be sure to
check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is our mothership. That's where you will find all the
(51:37):
podcast episodes, blog post videos, links out to our various
social media accounts. Were m Blow the Mind on Facebook
and Twitter. We are Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tumbler.
Follow us on those feeds. Keep up with what we're doing.
Uh and hey, if you listen to us on iTunes
or Stitcher or uh you know you're using Google, using Spotify,
however you do it. If there is some way to
(51:57):
rate us and give us a positive rating or review,
do that because that really helps out the show, helps
a boost the algorithm, and you know, ensures that we
get to continue to produce content like this for you.
And if you want to get in touch with us
with any feedback on this episode or other recent ones,
or let us know your favorite dangerous food or if
you've tried any of the foods we talked about today,
(52:18):
you can email us at Blow the Mind at how
step works dot com. Well more on this embassi that
they happened how stup works dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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