44 - Were The Salem Witch Trials Caused By Infected Food?

If ever you’ve doubted food's integral place in history, today’s stories are sure to remind us all, that no matter what life and history in general, wouldn’t and in fact, couldn’t be the same without the daily rituals that food brings.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
In the last episode, we sawhow food and household ingredients could be and
were extensively used to try to peerinto the murky depths of what the future
held for individuals desperate to know.It seems that mostly all people wanted to
know was who they were going tomarry, and today's stories aren't wildly far
from that same theme. However,where today's stories do take a detail is

(00:24):
that not only do we explore someof the causes for suspicion during the now
infamous Salem witch trials. In fact, we dive even deeper to see how
food and the poor farming practices ofthe age may have led to the whole
disaster starting in the first place.So if you've ever doubted food's integral place
in history, today's stories are sureto remind us all that, no matter

(00:46):
what, life and history in generalwouldn't and in fact couldn't be the same
without the daily rituals that food brings. These are the bizarre but true stories
from history that in some way involvedfood. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and

(01:08):
this is the Fantastic History of food. One of today's sponsors is Athletic Greens.
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(01:33):
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(01:57):
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(02:21):
nutrition. It's just one scoop ina cup of water every day. That's
it. No need for a milliondifferent pearls and supplements to look out for
your health to make it easy.Athletic Greens is going to give you a
free one year supply of immune supportingVitamin D and five free travel packs with
your first purchase. All you haveto do is visit Athletic Greens dot com

(02:43):
slash emerging again that's Athletic Greens dotcom slash em R g I NNG to
take ownership over your health and pickup the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Today,
we start off by looking at oneof the stranger foodstuffs used for divination

(03:07):
purposes, the humble onion. Nowalso known as chrom neomancy. It was
historically found to have been performed acrossEurope, Africa, and Northern Asia.
The onion itself was already regarded asa mystical symbol of spirituality and eternity,
so much so that the ancient Egyptianstook sacred oaths while holding an onion in

(03:27):
their right hand, much like howwe today use a holy book like the
Bible to swear upon while taking anoath. Chromnomancy had various forms and outcomes
from which they hoped to divine thefuture. They were of course the marriage
related ones, but they were alsosometimes used to predict the weather. By
judging the thickness of an onion's skin. Onions were often used to gain insight

(03:50):
into the health and well being ofloved ones far from home. They would
be placed upon a sacred altar inthe home and then have the names of
the loved ones carved into them.Onions would then be left alone, undisturbed
until they began to sprout. Thereal magic began, because the faster an
onion sprouted, the better the healththan the well being of the loved one

(04:11):
inscribed upon the onion. As usual, they were also used to provide advice
for those who found themselves caught ina love triangle. Not knowing which of
the suitors to choose, the lovelornwoman would carve the names of the two
lovers on too separate onions, andthen whichever onions sprouted first would tell her
everything she needed to know about whichlover would be most suitable and worthy of

(04:32):
her affections. In fact, thismethod didn't just work for choosing between two
lovers, who could have been usedto answer any yes or no question by
simply inscribing yes or no on tootwo separate onions and applying the same methodology.
In Southern Germany. They would alsoattempt to predict the weather of the
entire following year by means of oniondivination with the use of his vibal calendar,

(04:57):
literally an onion calendar. Twelve largeround onions were removed from the fields
and placed inside a barn, linedup in a row along a large wooden
board. There were twelve onions toeach represent one of the twelve months of
the coming year. In a simplemethod to try to divine how much rain
would fall in each of the comingmonths, Salt was then sprinkled onto each

(05:18):
of the onions. They were thenleft over night in a barn without heating
but also warm enough to prevent frost, and then inspected the following morning.
The amount of liquid present in eachof the onions the next day would tell
them how much rain and or snowthere would be in each of the respective
months to come. Now we moveon to and in fact end with the

(05:40):
rich history of a particular foodstuff's influenceon witchcraft and fortune telling, and this
practice went by the name of umancy. Do you know yet which ingredients this
involves? Well, you've got afew minutes to work it out while I
give you some of the backstory.Back in the seventeen hundreds, the witchcraft
panic was in full swing and aboy by the name of John Hale would

(06:02):
witness his first execution of a witchwhen he was just twelve years old,
and this moment was burned into John'sconsciousness and would dictate much of the life
that lay before him. He wouldgrow up to become a Puritan reverend in
his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts,and would end up being one of the

(06:25):
pivotal figures in the now infamous Salemwitch trials. Just before his death in
seventeen hundred, he would write downhis memoirs in a book published after his
death titled A Modest Inquiry into theNature of Witchcraft Now. In his time
as a reverend, he listened tomany confessions from his parishioners and would then

(06:46):
use these secretive confessions to accuse certainwoman of witchcraft, testifying against at least
two of them at their trials.One of them was rather ironically named Goody
Bishop, and the other poor womanwho was accused had possibly one of the
most unfortunate names in history, acertain Missus Dorcas Hall. These women was

(07:08):
simply just two out of more thantwo hundred women accused just in the span
between sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninetythree. Conveniently, however, John would
go on to regret much of theaccusations, in which trial nonsense, right
around the time that his own wifewas accused herself of being a witch.
But what does this have to dowith food and fortune telling? While in

(07:30):
the sixteen hundreds, the Puritans andtheir clergymen were strongly opposed to any form
of magic at all, and oneof the most pervasive and therefore most heinous,
was fortune telling. Now, naturally, this didn't stop people from practicing
it, despite the severe potential fordownside should one be caught. But in
John's book he describes one particularly fascinatingform of divination. That's right, oomancy,

(07:56):
the practice of using eggs to interpretthe few. But even by this
time, the idea of umancy wasseveral hundreds, if not thousands of years
old. Ancient Greek fortune tellers knownas soothsayers, coined the term itself,
stemming from the words un for eggand manchia, meaning divination. Gaius Suetonius

(08:18):
tranquilis a Roman historian who lived fromone twenty two BC until sixty nine BC.
Once described how the Roman Empress LiviaDrusilla kept a chicken egg in her
cleavage in the belief that the sexof the chick that hatched from it would
determine the sex of her unborn child. Cultures all across the globe have relied
on eggs to predict the future.From Asia to South America, a variety

(08:41):
of different methods were employed, andone method was described as the venus glass.
The concept for this one is simple. All you needed to do was
take a glass of warm water andslowly pour your raw egg whites into the
water. Then watch and wait asthe proteins and the egg whites began to
denature. The shapes left behind offeredclues to such things as who you may

(09:05):
marry or how you may die,and in a very similar way to how
people interpreted the shapes left behind intea leaves. If the egg whites formed
the shape of a plow or ahorse, your husband might be a farmer.
If it looked like a castle ora fortress, he may be a
soldier, or better yet, anobleman. And if it looked like a
boat, then your husband was goingto be a Fisherman. This episode is

(09:35):
presented by Chemists in the Kitchen bylab x, a YouTube video series spotlighting
the power of chemistry and how scienceand food can bring people together. In
each episode, real scientists walk youthrough things like making your own pickles,
the chemistry behind ceviche, or theformula for perfect homemade pretzels, and so

(09:58):
much more. Essentially, it's alove letter to science, cooking, and
individuality, with some great tips onhow you can apply real scientific principles to
your everyday cooking. On top ofthat, it's just a lot of fun.
Season two is airing right now,and you can catch up with every
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(10:22):
to YouTube dot com slash lab xnas. Again, that's YouTube dot com
slash lab x nas now. Aquick detour to the Ozarks of all places,
where there is a commonly held superstitionthat if a girl hollowed out a

(10:43):
hard boiled egg, filled that hollowedout egg with salt, then ate it
and went to bed desperately thirsty,she would then dream of her future beloved
bringing her a glass of much neededwater. But back to ancient history,
and in the Celtic plans Umancy wasan important part of the aforementioned Sammayan festival,
celebrating the end of the harvest seasonand the winter that was fast approaching.

(11:09):
Druids would employ this egg greeting ritualinto their festival celebrations to predict what
lay ahead for the coming year.Similarly, German pagans also did this ritual
and referred to it as the eggoracle or air oracol. Jacob Grimm even
describes a similar ritual in his eighteenseventy eight book Deutschen Mythology as a means

(11:30):
to determine if a child had beenbewitched by the devil. The connection of
eggs to spirituality is fairly clear inits deep connection to birth and the cycle
of life, as well as itsalmost ubiquitous availability to almost every culture.
And perhaps it was just that factthat almost anyone could make one of these
so called venus glasses that the Puritanministers took particular umbradge with it. But

(11:54):
it's hard to stop people who atthe best of times were living in an
uncertain world from wanting to try theirvery best to know what lay ahead of
them. And there were few moreunstable times for the villagers in Salem than
Right around this time, immigrants andrefugees from all over Europe were flooding into
New England, mostly thanks to KingWilliam's war with the French. As the

(12:16):
population numbers grew, so did themelting pot of cultural practices and rituals.
No one knew what to expect inthis new land that they had arrived in,
and so they consulted with astrologers andfortune tellers to help them navigate what
lay ahead of them, even ifthat meant ignoring the advice of the local
reverend. Particularly for single women rippedfrom communities in which they knew almost everyone.

(12:39):
Now they found themselves at a pivotalmoment in their young lives, knowing
that they needed to find a partner, but not knowing how or where to
find one, let alone a goodone amongst a sea of unknown faces.
The Venus glass was therefore a simpleway to provide these women with at least
an inkling of what to look outfulgoing forward. But it also may not

(13:03):
then be a coincidence that food basedmagic was such a large proponent of the
Salem which trials themselves Accusations of witchcraftoften scented around food and its tangential elements.
If a farmer's butter would in churnproperly, it was because a witch
had put a curse on the creamitself. If food spoiled faster than usual,

(13:24):
or a cow produced rotten milk outof its udders, this could surely
only be the work of a localwitch. And the tie in is obvious
when you remember that at the time, women were responsible for almost all of
the food production, including the brewingof beer for people to drink because the
water was too unsanitary. So ifa woman dared to disrupt the domestic order
of things, it was a seriousthreat to the social hierarchy and the stability

(13:48):
of these young and still extremely fragilecommunities. So when a woman was seen
to show curse so called responsibilities,by heaven forbid, living according to her
own it's not then a major leapto see how people could begin to view
that woman as a threat. Andwhen even the smallest thing went wrong in
a housewives food production, rather thanincur the wrath of an angry husband,

(14:11):
how much easier it was to simplysay that the old crone who actively shuns
the requirements of society must have beenthe one behind the mishap. Eventually,
however, the mass hysteria around witchesbegan to fade. But only recently have
we potentially discovered that the entire witchpanic saga itself may have in fact also

(14:33):
been caused by food. As weknow, the panic in Salem all began
when two young girls began having unexplainedconvulsions and illnesses. Then when other townsfolk
also began to experience these same illnesses, that was when the accusations began.
But in nineteen seventy six, doctorLinda Corporeal found evidence that supported a truly

(14:54):
mind boggling hypothesis that in fact,witches had nothing to do with these illnesses
all, but rather it was theinfestation of the town's rye bread with a
particular fungus known as ergot Interestingly,the behavior exhibited by the townsfolk as a
whole fits the bill perfectly for whathas been studied in other cases of rye

(15:15):
bread induced ergotism. Now, ergotismforms in Rye after a particularly harsh winter
followed by a damp spring, exactlythe same conditions experienced in Salem. The
year the panic started. After therye plant contracts the ergot fungus, it
grows and replaces the shoots on thegrain itself with purplish black growths containing lysurgic

(15:39):
acid and ergotamine. Being that thecommunities back then were still finding their feet
and didn't have a wealth of expertknowledge, it's theorized that even when the
villagers saw the darker shoots, theymore than likely simply attributed them to overexposure
to the sun. Alongside this,they also didn't have the luxury of throwing
away an entire crop of food inwhat was already a fairly under resourced time,

(16:03):
and so the rye was turned intobread and consumed anyway. Or Once
the rye bread is eaten, theergotism can cause severe convulsions, can cause
muscle spasms, and the sensation ofinsects crawling under the skin, the exact
symptoms described by the girls in Salem. Now in another entirely coincidental turn of

(16:25):
events, this can also cause extremedelusions, hallucinations, and paranoia in people
due to the lysurgic acid from whichthe drug LSD is manufactured. At the
time in Salem, the village doctorwas also part of the clergy of the
church, and so was predisposed tofirst assume the cause was something evil,
especially considering his lack of intensive formaltraining leading to his lack of any knowledge

(16:48):
of ergotism as a viable disease.So when he began making accusations of witchcraft,
the townsfolk were quick to jump onboard with his theory, not helped
by their own experiences with ergot induceddelusion and paranoia, and in surely one
of the strongest cases for this argument. The panic which so quickly engulfed this
town just as quickly disappeared a yearlater, very much coinciding with the town

(17:14):
running out of the ergot contaminated grain. So as you can see, food,
for all of its joy and sustenance, can also bring with it the
means by which to debilitate an entirepopulation. For most of us, we're
lucky to live in a time anda place when quality control, food availability,
and for the most part, foodsecurity are just a part of daily

(17:36):
life. But let's never forget thereare still many parts of our world to
day with human beings just like youand I, who are still living each
day not knowing within next meal maycome from, So maybe take a minute
think about how you and I canactively make a difference in seeing that come
to an end, possibly even inour own lifetimes. This show is made

(18:03):
entirely by me, Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having been made
by the Enigma that is, themysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to
support the show, the simplest wayto do that is over on our Patreon
account. There's just one option,so for just two bucks a month,

(18:25):
you'll help me keep producing the show, and in return, you'll get your
name forever etched onto our supporters Wallof Fame over on our website, and
then maybe listen out for your namein an upcoming episode. So until next
time, bonappetit.