December 20, 2016 • 49 mins
Considering a holiday feast of toxic sushi and deadly casserole? Then this encore presentation is for you. Join Robert and Joe for a six-course meal of culinary danger! Discover six foods that deliver a lethal taste profile when carelessly prepared or consumed by the uninitiated diner -- and tune in for a brand NEW 'Deadly Foods' episode on Thursday.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormack. And
today we are going to be introducing a classic stuff
to the Blow your Mind episode. It's a new classic.
(00:23):
How old is it now? Maybe nine or ten months?
Like it's maybe it's about a year give a take,
you know. Uh, sometime last winter we recorded this episode
about dangerous foods, uh, including some of my favorite stories
about for example, polar bear liver and dangerous within. Yeah,
it was a fun episode, and uh, it's it's perfect
for the holidays because the holidays are a time when
(00:46):
so many of us eat things that we feel we
should not or no, we should not. I shouldn't be
eating this. I shouldn't eating this is delicious, but I
shouldn't be eating this. The cranberry sauce from a can.
You know that's wrong. It comes out in the cylinder.
You can still see the ridges where the and is
sort of bent a little bit. You know. It's eat
eat stuff like that stuff you have kind of in
(01:06):
a stout before, but also just like a bunch of
rich foods that you know, you shouldn't be eating at
least in these quantities, but hey, it's the holidays and
it's about fattening up to survive the horrors of winter.
But here's my advice. If you are eating turkey and
the turkey is overcooked, because it always is, don't waste
your time on it, you know, just skip the turkey
(01:26):
and move on to something else well with it. With
a turkey based meal, especially the Thanksgiving Day meal, there
are so many side dishes you can really just pick
your poison as it were. Right, Well, Robert, if you
don't have anything else to add, I think we should
make way for our episode on a six course feast
of dangerous foods. Yes, let's roll the repeat. And hey,
the next episode after this one I believe will be
(01:47):
a a second course dangerous foods too. So if you
like this episode, stay tuned, come back for another course
of all new dangerous foods. For the revenge, for the regurgitation,
(02:08):
we have quite a feast prepared for ourselves here today,
A dangerous feast. Yeah. We wanted to think about an
interesting aspect of human life, which is how often we
put trust trust at a very level of life and
death into people who do a very mundane task for us,
(02:30):
which is preparing food. Yeah, I mean I did basic
level mundane right. Yeah. Obviously with the appropriate skill it
becomes our an art form. But we tend to think
of just like the very basic idea of someone, say,
opening a can of noodles there cooking it up for us.
It didn't require any high science. Yeah. And even if
you even if you're talking about preparing food yourself and
(02:54):
it not being something that someone else has cooked for you,
a lot of times you're going to be using ingredients
that you just assume, you know are properly vetted, these
are safe to eat, That the nuts I'm getting out
of a jar of nuts are not contaminated with the
cole I, that the peanut butter I'm using doesn't have
salmonella in it. But that may not be a safe
(03:17):
assumption depending on I don't know where you live, what
kind of industry regulations are in place, and how well
they're enforced. Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes
down to just the human history of cooking and just
culinary preparation, right, because early on humans learned the value
of cooking. I means to basically externalized digestion, and eight
is in the consumption of things that we would not
(03:38):
otherwise be able to eat. Yeah, that's the thing that's
easy to forget about. I mean, if you're if you're
sitting down to a piece of chicken or steak, I
mean you you probably wouldn't want to eat it just
straight up raw, But it could be done if you
were in a pinch, you know, you could chew it.
There are a lot of foods that you just simply
can't eat without some cooking, right, things, Yeah that would
just kill us we ate it without proper prop or
(04:02):
they'd be just inedible, you know, too tough for to
you know what I mean. Yeah, Cooking improves the taste,
It can tenderize the food in question. It can kill
off pathogens that would otherwise be of dire consequence. Of course,
another interesting thing about cooking is that it in some cases,
I think d nature's our food in a way that
(04:24):
allows us to sort of separate ourselves from the means
of production of the food when we're eating it, so
we you know, like cooking a steak makes you think
about it as a fundamentally different thing from the flesh
of a dead animal. That had to be murdered in
order for you to eat this, Oh indeed, yeah, and
so it kind of it kind of allows you to
put some distance. Yeah, yeah, I mean we and then
(04:47):
we layered language on top of that. You don't go
to the restaurant in order pig. You don't go to
the restaurant in order cow. You order pork and beef. Um. Yeah,
Poyo and guyin know very different words. Yeah and so.
And on top of that, you know, the butchering. Butchering
of animals, Culinary preparation in general allows us to more
precisely choose what parts we're going to eat, what parts
(05:08):
are delicious, what parts are nutritious, what parts are inedible? Uh?
And or deadly? So you you keep that tasty crab
cloth meat, but you throw out the dead man's fingers.
You know, I've always wondered this, and I've never been
able to find a good answer so far. Maybe there
is one out there. Supposedly, apple seeds have a little
tiny bit of cyanide in them, and I wondered if
(05:29):
has anybody ever eaten so many, so many apples seeds
and all that they've gotten cyanide poisoning? There have been
days where I feel like I've eaten that many apples.
But I'll have to I have to start counting this
Robert or u s secret competitive apple eater someday, because
that's like the I find myself eating more and more apples.
I think maybe it's Michael Paulin who pointed out that
(05:52):
if you're if you're not hungry enough to eat an apple,
then you're not really hungry. Then you shouldn't snack. If
you are going to snack, hey, and apples great. Oh.
I just tend to go to the apple for my
snack needs if I'm you know, in any level of
self conscious about my my diet. But you know, sometimes
you're just hungry enough to eat poutine and not anything else.
(06:12):
It's true sometimes that the apple is not going to
scratch that itch. Well, speaking of fruits, it looks like
our first course is arriving. What is this here? Ah,
we have some acky fruit to enjoy here. Now I've
never had aki fruit before. What's the deal with acky fruit?
Acky fruit is really interesting and I had I had
not actually experienced docky fruit until just a couple of
(06:34):
weeks ago when I went on a family vacation to Jamaica.
U Aki is like that the national dish, the national
fruit of Jamaica. It's a it's a fruit, but it's
not your typical like Western idea of a fruit. For example,
what's you have this yellowish or orange is fruit on
a tree and then when it ripens, it pops open
(06:56):
and it looks like a like a three eyed feature
of some kind of with the big black glassy eyes
inside of it. Glassy eyes are seeds. Um, So it's
kind of a Jim Henson dark crystal kind of creature. Yeah,
it really, it really looks kind of alien and weird.
But then uh, even properly prepared at what they do
is they they take the seeds out, they cut out
(07:18):
some of the membrane, and you're left with these, uh,
these little yellowish looking lumps. And the main dish that
is prepared there is that they take it and they
fry it in a skillet with some bits of codfish
so achi and saltfish is the dish, some onions in
there as well, and it ends up tasting about like
scrambled eggs. It has that kind of consistency. It's not
(07:39):
a sweet fruit at all, but it's very good that's nice.
So it's not sweet. What does it taste like? Is
it kind of spicy or is it kind of it's
kind of I think it kind of. It doesn't have
I was I never had a real sense that it
had much of a taste. But it's in there with
a little bit of fish, some onions. It's fried up
more of a texture, kind of more of a texture.
And the texture is I think closest to scrambled eggs.
(08:02):
That would be my main comparison there. But it sounds
like something worth trying. Yeah, I highly recommended for anybody
goes Jamaica for no other reason because it's you know,
it's the national dish there. And you said they tossed
the seeds out right, Yes, because as I'll lay out here,
the seeds are are poisonous um. This plant was originally
native to West Africa, migrated to Jamaican seventy eight, apparently
(08:25):
due to Jamaica's first botanist, Thomas Clark, who introduced it there.
The aki tree is actually known as bliah sepeda and
it's named after Captain William blythe the notorious pirate. So
interesting history there. But where the poison comes in is
that unripe aki fruit contains a poison called hypoglycin. And
(08:48):
actually there are two different varieties in the fruit. There's
hypoglyin A and hypoglycin B, which one is worse. Well,
A is the main problem here, and so you have
extremely high levels of hypoglycin BE in the unripe fruit.
But then the fruit ripens, It pops open like some
sort of alien creature and stares at you with its
(09:08):
three black eyes. Uh. And at that point you know
you you open it up, you remove the seeds. The
only edible proportion is the yellow a really, which is
surrounded by on again the toxic seeds. And there's a
membrane at the base of the seed mantle that's also poisonous.
You have to take that out to Okay, So it
sounds like if you don't know what you're doing, you
(09:29):
shouldn't try to eat a knocky fruit, right. Talk to
somebody who's familiar with this fruit and knows what knows
how to carve it up. Right. Yeah, But luckily if
it's on the menu at a place in Jamaica, like
they know how to cook it, Like everyone has familiarity
with this particular dish there. But you are saying, in
a survival situation, stick to the scrambled eggs. Not probably
not the black hole eggs. Yeah. Yeah, because someone who
(09:52):
knows how to deal with this, they're gonna clean it.
They're gonna wash the fruit after it's gonna be boiled
in water. Then they're gonna throw out that water because
that could contain a trace of the poison. And it's
gonna be perfectly good to eat. It's gonna be rich
and you know, fatty acids, vitamin A, zinc, and protein.
But if you were to eat it, uh, the unripened version,
you could get what's called called Jamaican vomiting sickness. That
(10:15):
sounds like a not very fun sickness. Yeah, it causes
a lot of vomiting and can lead to coma and death.
And uh, in the biochemistry of it is pretty interesting.
It kills you via a form of hypoglycemia or low
blood sugar. Oh. So, normally, as the body uses up
the glucose in the blood, your liver releases glucose that
(10:36):
it formed that it stores in the form of glycogen.
The toxin, however, halts the process, so a few hours
after ingesting all of this, your body glucose crashes and
and just leaves you hypoglocemic. Oh this sounds similar to
some not poisons, but venoms I've heard of before the
attack by causing an insulin spike in the body and
(10:59):
drop in the victim's blood sugar to dangerously low levels. Yeah, yeah,
it sounds like those are probably similar. I think there's
like a there's a snail in the ocean that does
that or something. Alright, well, what do we have next
on the mediu here? Ah? Well, it looks like the
next thing arriving is something I'm a little bit familiar
with but haven't had the courage to eat myself. It's
(11:20):
it's something that's straight out of Iceland, and from what
I've heard, it's well, it's bad news if you're not game,
but if you are game, I guess some people really
like it. So, so what do we have sitting here
before us? It looks like some little cubes of cheese,
like the kind of the tasters hand out at the
grocery store in the Delhi. So it's a little white
(11:41):
cube with a toothpick stuck in it, and I guess
there there's nothing else on the plate, So it looks
like you just eat it by itself. Oh, except there's
a shot of clear liquor sitting next to it, so
I guess maybe you're supposed to take that with it. Now,
what's this smell I'm getting from the dish here, Joe?
You know, as as one person, I watched a video
online of somebody eating this stuff and the first comment
(12:03):
was smells like windex. That is a that is a
common description of what this is, which is rotten greenland
shark meat, a a national delicacy of Iceland, also known
as hakl and uh. And I apologize if I'm not
pronouncing that the right way. I don't know the best
way to say, ha, Carl, But there it is. It's uh.
(12:26):
It's compared to industrial cleaning products. Often in the aroma,
it's very high in ammonia, so it's gonna smell like windex,
or like bleach, or like urine. That is the most
common point of comparison other than cleaning products. So it's
it's urine, it's bleach, and then also kind of like
(12:46):
ambient rotting fishiness of ancient days. Okay, now it's of
course we're throwing in at this point and reminding everyone
at far northern cultures typically have a lot of survival foods. Yes,
where Yeah, it may not seem as as delightful, but
you have to put it in the context of surviving
the winter with the foods that could be preserved. Yeah,
(13:09):
this is this is a common feature of of far
northern climates where you you have dishes that were kind
of fermented or preserved in a way that produces chemical
combinations that might seem unappealing to people not accustomed to them. So, yeah,
so this is Greenland shark meat, and I've never had
it before. I've read that the texture is also sort
(13:31):
of sometimes compared to cheeses, like it's a it's a
little bit chewy at first, but then it kind of
descends into a powdery grain kind of texture as it
dissolves in the mouth. And they say you are supposed
to chase it with a shot of Brinnavin, which is
an unsweetened caraway schnops from Iceland that I did taste
that when I was in Iceland, and you know, I
(13:53):
love Iceland. It was not a fan of that liquor.
It was it potent that it like warm me up.
It was very herbal, you know, it was like it's
like somebody got some herbal tea and then reduced it
down by like not making it thicker, but just concentrated
the flavor by about ten thousand times, and that that's
what it was. So how do you get some of this,
(14:14):
he carl, how do you make it? You? Well, first,
like I said, you start with a nice freshly called
greenland shark or another shark from the same family, the
sleeper sharks, the somniosis sharks. The greenland shark in particular
is the somniosis microcephalus, which sounds like it means a sleepy,
tiny head. But the greenland shark is a really cool animal.
(14:37):
It's It's also known as the ecolossuac, which is the
an Inuit term. I've seen a lot of variations on
the Inuit spelling and pronunciation, so I think they're just
different transliterations of the same term. And it's a huge shark.
The greenland shark gets as big or bigger than great whites.
It grows uh lives probably for more than two of years.
(15:01):
It grows very slowly, and it can get more than
twenty ft long ways, more than a ton, and they
dwell in some of the coldest waters of the earth,
between like freezing and about ten degrees celsius. And it's
funny that it's known for appearing very sluggish. They say,
when you see it in the water, it looks lethargic
and impassive. Is just not really impressed by anything. I
(15:23):
read one account that said that people just you can.
You can catch them by literally just dragging them out
of the water with your bare hands. If they get
close enough to the surface. They don't fight much. So
it sounds like if all the sharks, it's kind of
the most stoic and resigned to the whims of fate.
But the question that I had was like, wait a minute,
(15:43):
why does it taste like urine? Uh? This knowledge about
the taste of greenland shark meat apparently goes back a
long way. I found an interesting article by Lindsay O'Reilly
and Canadian Geographic Magazine about the Greenland sharks significan against
an Inuit culture and uh, it's it's offering another variation
(16:04):
on that same name. This time it's Skalougsuak. Yeah, I
love that scalouksuak, And I want to read a little
quote from this article. She says Inuit legend has it
that once long ago, an old woman was drying her
hair after washing it with urine, when the wind suddenly
whipped the damp cloth from her hand and carried it
(16:25):
out to see. This cloth, the Inuit say, became skalouksuak,
the greenland shark. I love that because it sounds like
there's been a recent trend I think in a couple
of different skits where you have individuals coming up with
elaborate descriptions of how bad a beer is, and this
seems like a more primal version of that. I can
(16:46):
imagine Inuit setting around eating some of this and saying,
you know this, uh, this particular meat taste as if
an old woman washed her hair in urine and then
threw that hair into the water and it became a shark. Yeah,
it's very flowery. Yeah, it's like somebody is really overriding
the Spear Advocate article. But anyway, getting to the point
(17:09):
about the dangers associated with it. If not prepared properly,
you don't want to eat greenland shark meat fresh. You
might not want to eat it anyway because it smells
like bleach and urine. But let's say you're really really hungry,
or you're looking for something to feed your dogs, don't
go with fresh greenland shark meat because it is poisonous
(17:30):
as hack. So when it's fresh and raw, the meat
of a greenland shark contains high levels of uric acid
or urea and trimethylamine oxide, and so if it's eaten
in high enough doses, it can cause effects that from
the outside resemble drunkenness. Sometimes people can say like, this
person is drunk on shark, but it can lead to
(17:52):
really bad things like nausea and vomiting, oral burning sensations,
explosive diarrhea, muscle twitching and convulsions, trouble breathing, and even
in some cases coma and death. And the most toxic
ingredient in the greenland shark meat is the triethlamine oxide.
This is a chemical used by the shark as a
(18:14):
kind of natural anti freeze for the proteins and enzymes
in its body, and it it does a good thing
for the shark because it allows the shark to survive
the freezing temperatures of the water that it lives in
without the formation of ice crystals and the destruction of
proteins inside the body, so it's it's a fish that's
got anti freeze in it, and you you know, you
(18:35):
know the rule about not eating anti freeze. Yeah, that
one's drilled in at an early age, you know. I
think there was an episode of the documentary series Human
Planet in which you see some some fishermen actually pull
one of these creatures out of the water and then
I believe they feed it to a dog. I can't
remember if they cooked it or not. Yeah, actually, I
I've read that sometimes the meat is fed to dogs
(18:58):
and it's it makes the dog dog's drunk essentially, but
it doesn't sound like something. Don't feed greenland shark to
your pet if you happen to have some fresh greenland shark.
I don't know why you would, because you typically don't
get it fresh unless you catch it yourself, because it's
so poisonous and and so how do you get the
hakarl the version that's okay to eat, even if some
(19:18):
people find it very disgusting. Well, the traditional Icelandic way
of preparation is let it rot, and specifically let it
rot under pressure, So you bury it under rocks or
gravel for like three months, and then you'll let it
rot there and then you dig it up and you
hang it out to dry for another three or four months.
(19:39):
So this has had, you know, many months of rotting
under pressure to press out some of the liquids and
then hanging up to dry. And this process supposedly makes
the shark safer to eat, as the poisons are removed
through the pressing and through the chemical action of the fermentation.
But another method of preparing greenland shark would simply be
(20:00):
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
(20:21):
it's safe to eat. You can eat this rotten shark
and not die. I'm I'm reminded of the episode of
The Simpsons in which Homer had an especially long sub
sandwich Marge made him throw out ended up hiding behind
a radiator and he would sneak it out from the
radiator and eat it gray and rotten. Um that sounds
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
being offered polar bear. Okay, Well, I don't seem like
there could be a problem there, right, No, it seems
like bear probably shouldn't eat polar bear? Should well? Probably not.
But I imagine before I think when, because when I
was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for about three years,
occasionally interesting meat to present themselves, such as moose or
(21:29):
in I think one case there was bear stew. You
have to put yourself in a pretty extreme situation, I
think for the question to even come up, should I
eat this polar bear? Yeah? But it turns out that
the polar bear, like the acky fruit and the Greenland shark,
is a food that if you're in a position where
you find yourself needing to eat it, you better have
(21:50):
somebody on hand who knows how to prepare it and
knows which parts to avoid. That's right, because you know,
the native peoples of the Arctic they've done for a
long time that some days the bear eats you, and
some days you eat the bear, right, but on the
days some days you eat the bear, and then it
gets you back, yes, because you when you do eat
(22:10):
the bear, you got to know not to eat the
bear's liver. And as early as fifteen nine six you
had European explorers who learned this lesson the hard way, uh,
coming down with just horrible illness, like nightmarish illness following
the consumption of polar bear liver. Because with many different animals,
certainly the kind of animals that European would consume back home,
(22:33):
the liver is totally fair game. The liver is a delicacy.
The liver should be eaten. Right. Yeah, you have a
fine French restaurant making a foix gras or liver moose
or something. Yeah, but then you start dining on polar
bear liver and you might feel drowsy, sluggish, irritable. Suddenly
you have a severe headache, you get bone pain. Hold
on bone pain, bone pain. What does bone pain even
(22:55):
feel like? Well, there's one way to find out. Blurred vision,
and then you're vomiting. And finally, this is where it
gets just really crazy. Is you start experiencing skin peels,
peeling skin? Yeah, I think you accidentally did your research
from the plot synopsis of a hell Raiser movie. It
sounds like a hell raisor movie. Yeah, because in the
(23:16):
milder cases, you're talking just flaking skin around the mouth, alright,
you know, unpleasant, but hey, not too bad. But some
accounts reported cases of full body skin loss. Even even
the thick skin on the bottoms of a patient's feet
could peel away, leaving the underlying flesh bloody and expire
and exposure and on the top of that liver damage, hemorrhage, coma,
(23:38):
and death. Save your tears, man, that is messed up. So,
so what's the deal with the Polar bears liver? Why
is it? Why is it so poisonous? Well, it all
comes down to vitamin A. Interestingly enough, vitamin A people
take pills of that. It's in carrots. It should be fine. Yeah,
(23:59):
I mean, I mean we've been and it being in
some of like being one of the pro who's to
some of the foods that we're mentioning in this episode.
But because a vitamin A is important for eyesight, reproduction,
fetal development, growth, immune response and the sellular formation of tissue.
Can that's key? Can I go on a little side
tangent here? This is the thing I had to research
for a brain stuff video once. It's a myth that
(24:21):
vitamin A increases your eyesight beyond normal capacity. Okay, this
is the whole Like if you eat enough carrots to
improve your eyesight. Right. What is true is that vitamin
A and carrots are a good source of vitamin A,
though plenty of other vegetables are too. Anything has beta
caroteen in it, as like spinach is great too. Uh.
They will help maintain normal vision, but they're not gonna
(24:44):
upgrade your vision above the baseline. Okay, alright, good to know. Now,
if you like me to take a lot of vitamins,
you probably noticed that on days when you take extra vitamins,
you end up with, you know, just splendidly golden urine.
Extra vitamins lee your body. Um. And that's the case
with the number of items. They simply dissolve in water
(25:04):
leave your body in urine. A. However, vitamin A only
dissolves in fat, so that means it does an exit
the body and urine instead it collects in the body's
filtration oregan the liver where it can reach toxic levels,
and generally this occurs over a pro long period of time,
and if it does get out of control, then you
end up with chronic hyper vitaminosis A, and that in
(25:27):
humans involves all the various symptoms that we've already mentioned.
That sounds pretty horrible. So so wait a minute. How
much polar bear liver do you have to eat for
it to be dangerous? All right? Well, well, to put
it in in context here, uh, an average healthy human
liver contains five hundred and seventy five international units of
(25:48):
vitamin A program while a polar bears liver contains between
twenty four thousand and thirty five thousand international units per gram.
So you compare that to the tolerable upper level of
vitamin A in tank for a healthy adult human, that's
ten thousand I U like supercharging your vitamin A consumption
(26:08):
to just absurd levels. Why is there this much vitamin
A and a polar bear liver? Well, it all comes down,
I mean a lot of it comes down to the
hostile environment than necessary biological adaptations. So in the case
of the bear, the bear doesn't need that much vitamin
A in its diet. You put a bear in a
(26:29):
in a zoo, it can get by with with far
lower quantities of vitamin A. But in its natural environment,
bears are eating a lot of bearded seals, ring seals,
both of which store high levels of vitamin A in
their livers and blubber. Uh. And a lot of this
seems to have to do with the the again, the
(26:50):
role that vitamin A plays and growth and naval development,
so that the seals need all that extra vitamin A
in order to advance their vulnerable pups into a more
survivable stage. So it all comes down to the polar
bear needs to eat those seals. It needs to to
tolerate high levels of vitamin A, so it is evolved
to roll with higher levels of vitamin A. It can
(27:11):
store those higher levels of vitamin A in its filtration system,
in its liver. It's when we eat its filtration system.
If when we eat its liver we end up with
quantities of vitamin A that we have totally not evolved
to deal with. You know, this might be a different
kind of category of food than our others where I
would say, you know, if if you're having your food
(27:31):
prepared by somebody who knows what they're doing. Aki fruit
and Hakarl, go for it. I'd probably say, don't eat
a polar bear. Yeah, it's hard for me to get
given the polar bear is recent plight. Uh. Yeah, I
can't get excited about the idea of eating one of
these creatures. I mean, unless it's eat or be eaten. Uh.
Certainly in the survival okay, survivalist case, Uh, they would
(27:52):
say eat the polar bear, but know what you're doing,
not the liver, not the liver, and don't feed it
to a dog, et cetera. And it's just a little
fun fact. I once wrote a short story in which
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton meets Frankenstein, or actually he
ends up with meeting Frankenstein's monster, I believe, and the
(28:13):
creature in this particular story, I had him consumed polar
bear liver and that's how he gets all this figured
and gross. Wow, I'd like to read that, dude. It's
out there somewhere. Maybe I'll have to throw up a
link somewhere. Okay, Well, oh wait, it looks like another
course is arriving. What do we have here, Well, it's
a very beautiful plate. It's an ornately decorated plate, and
(28:34):
it's covered in very thinly sliced, pale, translucent sashimi, tiny,
just tiny tissue, thin slices of fish. It looks good.
So imagine you are in this scenario. You're sitting down
to a plate that looks like this, and you know
it does look good. So it looks so good you
eat the whole plate by yourself. But what would you
(28:57):
do if you're just eating a big plate of suit
she and then suddenly you start feeling some strange sensations. Uh, well,
I generally do. But generally that's just the saki. Oh yeah,
well that's a different thing entirely. Know that this would
be more like a you're sitting at the table and
there's kind of a burning and tingling on the lips,
(29:19):
and then it kind of turns into some pins and
needles pricking at the lips, tongue, mouth, the throat. Okay,
that's a problem. Yeah, And then suddenly you might start
to lose some coordination. That might still be the saki,
could be, but it starts to feel more like there's
a nervous system disruption going on throughout your body. You
you eventually collapse to the floor. That's bad. Yeah, And
(29:41):
you find your muscles are very weak and sluggish, and
eventually you are mostly unable to move your body of
your own free will. And then the vomiting begins, leaving
you barely able to order seconds on the big dish. Now,
this is a worst case scenario leading up potentially to
death in the event of improperly prepared fugu or puffer fish. Now,
(30:05):
I again, like the other cases, I don't want a
bad mouth a perfectly good food if it's prepared well
and and fugu is a perfectly excellent sushi fish, and
it's not inherently dangerous wind served the right way, when
prepared by a trained chef who knows what they're doing,
who has a license to prepare this kind of food.
And since the introduction the introduction of protective measures like
(30:27):
government restrictions on who's allowed to prepare and serve fugu,
fugu poisonings and deaths have been rare. But there is
a reason that these protective measures have been put in place.
I've read that sometimes in Japan or maybe in certain places,
fugu is known by the nickname tepo meaning gun and
like so like gun sushi, and that kind of makes
(30:50):
sense us. So, some organs in the puffer fish are
naturally equipped with tetra detoxin, which is an extremely potent neurotoxin.
You all talked about tetra to toxin on the show before.
I feel like it's come up a time or two
in passing. It's very, very toxic by mass ingested. It's
reportedly about a hundred times as toxic as potassium cyanide.
(31:13):
So you at least the scene in the James Bond
movie where the bad guy, you know, he's committing suicide
with the cyanide pill, he would need a tetra to
toxin pill one one hundred the size of the cyanide
pill be very easy to hide in a little compartment.
But anyway, tetra to toxin, what does it duty? Why?
Why does it cause all these problems? Essentially, it works
by messing up communication between the bodies, nerves and muscles
(31:38):
by blocking sodium ion channels uh and uh. And this
can lead to paralysis. Especially. The really creepy thing I've
heard is that it's conscious paralysis. That sounds especially horrifying.
You don't yeah, like you're you're aware of what's going on.
It doesn't necessarily knock you unconscious, but you can't move
(31:59):
and you you might might be having trouble breathing, having
a fast beating or irregularly beating heart. It sounds very scary,
but like I said, if this is properly prepared foogu meat,
this this is not a problem you should have. You
you'll find this tetra to toxin and especially high concentrations
in the fishes liver and go nads. So the chef
(32:21):
who knows what he or she is doing can cut
around the right parts of the fish, knows what to
do to prepare it right. They're not going to serve
you the parts that are going to kill you. But
what happens when when I don't know things go wrong?
When somebody doesn't know what they're doing, Uh, it's not pretty.
I wanted to read from a little case study of
(32:41):
fugu poisoning from nine that was hosted on a report
on the CDC website. So this is a case where
and there were three guys hanging out and they get
some fugu that was I believe shipped to them from
a friend in Japan. Yeah, and they're like, well, let's
try it out. So here's one of the cases. So
(33:04):
case one is a twenty three year old man who
he ate a piece of fougo quote the size of
a quarter approximately one quarter ounce, so that's not that much.
About ten or fifteen minutes later, it says he had
onset of tingling in his mouth and lips, followed by dizziness, fatigue, headache,
a constricted feeling in his throat, difficulty speaking, tightness in
(33:26):
his upper chest, facial flushing, shaking, nausea, and vomiting. His
legs weakened, and he collapsed on examination in the e
D his blood pressure was a hundred and fifty over ninety,
heart rate was a hundred and seventeen beats per minute,
respiratory rate twenty two per minute uh, and he had
a slightly elevated temperature. And there there were a couple
(33:47):
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
(34:08):
he's like, oh, yeah, I just dates some fugu time
to have thoughts of dying. Yeah. I wonder if he
went into that scenario, you know, knowing the because that's
it seems to be one of the attractive things about
the fish, about the quote the gun, right, is that
it is there's a sense of danger to it. Yes,
it's it's uh in this sense, it's not just a
really tasty food, but it's kind of a thrill experience
(34:30):
with the knowledge that you know, oh, if this goes wrong,
we could all die. It's I don't know, maybe kind
of like bungee jumping or something. You know that it's
inherently safe if your instructor has secured everything properly, but
the thrill of knowing that maybe something could go wrong
and I could die makes it more exciting. And in
a sense it's it's kind of you need to go
into any kind of restaurant scenario and you know, you
(34:51):
trust that the chef knows what they're doing and yeah,
but in most cases it's the difference between like, all right,
if the food taste good and there's a good chance
that the chef knows what they're doing. Here is a
case where it's it's live or die. But but then again,
this is something we touched on at the beginning of
the episode. But I don't think this is inherently all
that different from very mundane, familiar foods, not just interesting delicacies.
(35:17):
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,
(35:39):
like most of the items were discussing here today, they
are extreme and exotic examples of a truth that spreads
just across the menu for humans. But I wanted to
return to this case. These three guys who got foogu
poisoning in nine. Now, this isn't the only case of
food poisoning it It happens every now and then, but
this was the one case I looked at. All three
(35:59):
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
(36:19):
would bind the charcoal rather than entering the body's chemistry.
So another interesting fact about the tetra detoxin and fugu
and some there are other sea creatures that have tetra
detoxin to like blue ringed octopus and stuff. Uh, the
puffer fish raised in aquariums with clean water tend to
be non toxic. Okay, Well, that would lead one to
(36:42):
believe that they're acquiring these toxic property from something in
their diet exactly you see with a number of different animals,
including some some poison frogs from example. Yeah, and this
seems to be the case with the fugu. So it
what scientists think now is that they get their tetra
detoxin producing capabilities through something in their food, specifically through
eating foods containing bacteria. And it now appears to be
(37:05):
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
(37:28):
order to assassinate your target, you're using essentially a third party.
There's a middleman puffer fish generation poison. Okay, but yeah,
I do want to stress one more time. I don't
want to be an alarmist about fugu. They say, you know,
the chefs who are licensed to serve fugu know what
they're doing, and it's it's supposed to be a very
(37:50):
safe experience. Yeah, just maybe it's just some guy in
your dorm or apartment. What I'd really what I'd really
be worried about is if you're out, i don't know,
snorkeling or something and one of your buddies catches one
and says, let me prepare some boat side sashimi for us. Yeah,
that would be a good, a good opportunity to turn
(38:12):
them down. Probably, what do we have next here? Oh,
we have a nice cassava roots salad and oh a
little tapioca pudding on the side. Um, now here's one
I've had before. I've had tapioca pudding. Oh yeah, I
feel like most of us have probably had tapioca pudding.
(38:33):
Perhaps you've had bubble tea with tapioca bubbles in it?
Is that? What that is? I believe in most cases
I always get the kind with the tapioca, but that
there may be another variety that is available as well.
I've never liked bubble tea. I found it kind of gross, Like,
why do you want little lumps in the stuff you're drinking?
I need flavorful fold lumps in my beverages. I I
(38:54):
kind of dig it. Robert lamb endorser of lumps. Yeah. U.
Tapioca itself has its roots, if you will, in the
cassava root. So cassava is cultivated throughout the tropical world
for its roots, which are just superstarchy. They contain nearly
the maximum theoretical concentration of of starch on a dry
(39:15):
weight basis among food crops. So we're we're exceeding potato
territory here. Yeah. Um, And you can think of them
in terms of potato. There essentially like a tropical potato. Uh,
fresh roots contain about starch, very little protein. But yeah,
they have a number of different uses. They're used to
produce a cassava flour. So you get breads, you get tapioca,
(39:37):
you can get a laundry starch derive a laundry starch
from it. Uh, there's an alcoholic beverages that are made
from it, of course there are, yeah, and uh oh yeah,
there's also a cyanide producing sugar derivative that occurs in
varying amounts in most varieties of cassava. Wait wait, wait
wait cyanide. Yeah, so there's yeah, essentially cyanide in the cassava. Well,
(40:03):
good thing, there'd have to be as a hundred times
as much of that as there would be a the
tetrator toxin. Yeah, it's um. Just to back up a
little bit, Cassava probably was first cultivated by the Maya
and the Yucatanda peninsula, so quite a while ago. There's
been a lot of cultivation of this, a lot of
time for for humans to work out the kinks to
(40:24):
know what to eat what not to eat. Um. And
even back then, they developed a complex refining system to
remove poison from the plant by grating, pressing, and heating
the tubers, okay, and then they also they also used
some of the poison for darts and arrows. So basically,
you want to avoid the leaves, which have the highest
(40:44):
concentration of these cyanogenic glucosides, and you also want to
peel the roots as well, because the peel is also
fairly potent. But all the nutritions in the outside I know,
Oh no, wait, that's carrots. I mean I always when
I'm eating something, say, um, like a potato or what
(41:05):
is that delicious kind of German cross between an art
of choke and a sun choke. Yeah, I love sun chokes,
but I love the texture of the sun choke. I
would never want to eat a peeled sunchoke. But apparently
most methods call for peeling the cassava roote just to
avoid any potential poisoning UM. On top of this, cooking
the cassava tends to remove the toxicity UM, and adequately
(41:30):
processed cassava flour and cassava based products have a very
low cyanide content and are just very safe to eat. Okay,
So this is this is one of these foods, and
I believe there are other foods like this that are
sort of standard saples that are fine once they've been
cooked properly, but you wouldn't want to eat them raw.
Are Lima beans also in that cara beans are off
(41:53):
are also on the list of things that, yeah, you
definitely want to kick cook. I want to say red
beans as well. Red a de beans uh as well
are also on that list. Yeah, just things where you know,
we were fortunate to live in a time where long
ago people went through the painful and potentially lethal process
(42:14):
of figuring out which part of the plan is good
and under what circumstances is it good to eat? Uh So, yeah,
today we can enjoy tapioca putting, even though at some
point in the past um some Mayan's went to an
early grave because they had to figure out how it works.
That's something I think about often, the the the debt
(42:34):
we owe to our ancestors, the people of many, many
years ago who figured out what you couldn't eat and
paid for that research with their lives. Yeah. I mean,
without even getting into so many processing food processing technology,
I mean just the basic ability to turn grain into bread, etcetera.
It's just you know, I anytime I read about all
this stuff. I just imagined myself in the wilderness, starving,
(42:57):
trying to figure out which berries I dare eat ones
will kill me dead? Can I eat these mushrooms? I
don't know? God? Yeah, mushrooms is an entire that's an
entirely different area to consider there, because you have so
many delicious, food worthy mushrooms even in our our own
local environment here, and then so many just deadly ones
(43:17):
as well. Again, the rule with mushrooms is if you
really don't know, don't eat it. Yes, indeed, yes, And
people continue to learn that one the hard way. Okay, Well,
I wanted to find out though. All of these we've
talked about are are interesting to me in that they
become perfectly fine as long as you can trust the
person who prepared them. They're they're not gonna hurt you
(43:39):
if if you've acquired the food properly, prepared it in
the right way, and you check all the boxes, and
you're gonna be fine. But what is the food out
there that is not just interestingly dangerous in potentsia, you know,
in potential, but that that actually gets the most people. Well,
you know, prior to this episode, I might have guessed
(43:59):
poor yeah, you know, that could especially, yeah, or barbecue pork,
because they've been some headlines in recent years where where
there have been barbecue competitions and illness springs up. So
that would have been that would have been my guests. Well,
there was one report from September of two thousand nine
that the f d A issued, and it was it
was a list of the top ten most dangerous foods
(44:20):
in the United States at the time, based on the
number and severity of food poisoning outbreaks by food vector.
So not just like three guys eating fugu and stealing
the headlines, but actually actual thousands of people. Yeah, so
what was the culprit? You know, is it was it fugu?
Was it aki? No? It was none of these None
of these foods we've talked about even made the list.
(44:42):
The real criminal was salad, a specifically leafy greens, which
you know often feels like the safest thing. I know. Yeah,
as the Simpsons once observed, you don't make friends with salad,
especially if the salad is funneling listeria into your friends bodies.
Uh So, I want to read from the report. They
say iceberg let us, romaine let us, leaf let us
(45:05):
butter let us, baby leaf let us, immature let us,
or leafy greens, eskarrol in, dive, spring mix, spinach, cabbage, kale, arugula,
or shard account for of all the outbreaks linked to
the f d A Top ten UH. Those outbreaks sickened
over thirteen thousand, five hundred and sixty eight people who
(45:25):
were reported to have become ill, almost thirty percent of
all the reported illnesses caused by the f d A
Top ten UH. I don't know if it's still the
same today as it was in two thousand nine. I
hope this has changed in the past six years or so.
But as for food that not only sickened people but
killed them, I tried to look up food poisoning outbreaks
(45:47):
with the most fatalities to see if there was a
running thread, but I couldn't find one. It seems like
it was all over the place, and meats, cheeses, vegetables,
packaged food products like peanut, butter, bag spinach. I mean,
it seems like no matter where you turn, something that
you're probably consuming could kill you if something has failed
(46:08):
somewhere in the process between the farm and your face.
So what you're saying is that We could have many
more six course dinners like this one if listeners choose
to uh to attend it with us, right. But I'd
say the real takeaway here is that I think the
most dangerous foods are not the kinds of foods, uh
that that make people feel uneasy because they're unfamiliar, you know,
(46:32):
delicacies from other countries that many Americans wouldn't be familiar with.
That They're going to be things that you eat every day. Yeah,
things without that overt danger factor, but still with a
very inherent uh sense of danger if not prepared with
you know, a monicum of of decency and in awareness. Now,
let me let me offer a caveat even to the
(46:54):
last thing about salad. I I hope you don't take
this as a recommendation to stop eating salad. You know,
leafy greens are a wonderful thing we have as part
of your diet. And here's my recommendation. Don't buy the
pre bagged, pre wash stuff and just eat it straight up.
Buy ahead of let us cut it up and wash
it yourself. Get you a salad spinner. It's worth the work.
(47:14):
It's very nice. I don't know, that's a lot of work. Joe,
I kind of like just opening the bag, dumping it
and then opening the little packets and then I have
a salad. But well, okay, and no accounting for keeps
me from dying. I guess I'll try it, all right.
So there you have it. Uh, they we're going to
clear the dishes away here. Thanks to everybody for for
joining us for this dinner. I hope you enjoyed it
(47:37):
as much as we did. All right, So there you
have it, Dangerous Foods Part One. There will be a
brand new part two coming out in the days ahead. Oh,
you're gonna love it. There's some good stuff in. There's
(47:58):
some dangerous stuff, some poison the stuff, and some misunderstood stuff.
Things we think that our poisonous that have kind of
a reputation for being bad, but maybe aren't, or at
least aren't in the way that we, you know, think
that they are. Maybe they'll just poison your mind. Yeah,
And if you want to poison your mind a little more,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is where you will find all of our podcast episodes.
You will find links out to our various social media accounts.
(48:21):
You also find blog post videos, you name it all
right there, Stuff to blow your Mind dot com And
if you want to get into this directly, you can
email us. As always said, blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(48:43):
of other topics, because that how stuff works dot com.
Twined twenty fine part proper
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormack. And
today we are going to be introducing a classic stuff
to the Blow your Mind episode. It's a new classic.
(00:23):
How old is it now? Maybe nine or ten months?
Like it's maybe it's about a year give a take,
you know. Uh, sometime last winter we recorded this episode
about dangerous foods, uh, including some of my favorite stories
about for example, polar bear liver and dangerous within. Yeah,
it was a fun episode, and uh, it's it's perfect
for the holidays because the holidays are a time when
(00:46):
so many of us eat things that we feel we
should not or no, we should not. I shouldn't be
eating this. I shouldn't eating this is delicious, but I
shouldn't be eating this. The cranberry sauce from a can.
You know that's wrong. It comes out in the cylinder.
You can still see the ridges where the and is
sort of bent a little bit. You know. It's eat
eat stuff like that stuff you have kind of in
(01:06):
a stout before, but also just like a bunch of
rich foods that you know, you shouldn't be eating at
least in these quantities, but hey, it's the holidays and
it's about fattening up to survive the horrors of winter.
But here's my advice. If you are eating turkey and
the turkey is overcooked, because it always is, don't waste
your time on it, you know, just skip the turkey
(01:26):
and move on to something else well with it. With
a turkey based meal, especially the Thanksgiving Day meal, there
are so many side dishes you can really just pick
your poison as it were. Right, Well, Robert, if you
don't have anything else to add, I think we should
make way for our episode on a six course feast
of dangerous foods. Yes, let's roll the repeat. And hey,
the next episode after this one I believe will be
(01:47):
a a second course dangerous foods too. So if you
like this episode, stay tuned, come back for another course
of all new dangerous foods. For the revenge, for the regurgitation,
(02:08):
we have quite a feast prepared for ourselves here today,
A dangerous feast. Yeah. We wanted to think about an
interesting aspect of human life, which is how often we
put trust trust at a very level of life and
death into people who do a very mundane task for us,
(02:30):
which is preparing food. Yeah, I mean I did basic
level mundane right. Yeah. Obviously with the appropriate skill it
becomes our an art form. But we tend to think
of just like the very basic idea of someone, say,
opening a can of noodles there cooking it up for us.
It didn't require any high science. Yeah. And even if
you even if you're talking about preparing food yourself and
(02:54):
it not being something that someone else has cooked for you,
a lot of times you're going to be using ingredients
that you just assume, you know are properly vetted, these
are safe to eat, That the nuts I'm getting out
of a jar of nuts are not contaminated with the
cole I, that the peanut butter I'm using doesn't have
salmonella in it. But that may not be a safe
(03:17):
assumption depending on I don't know where you live, what
kind of industry regulations are in place, and how well
they're enforced. Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes
down to just the human history of cooking and just
culinary preparation, right, because early on humans learned the value
of cooking. I means to basically externalized digestion, and eight
is in the consumption of things that we would not
(03:38):
otherwise be able to eat. Yeah, that's the thing that's
easy to forget about. I mean, if you're if you're
sitting down to a piece of chicken or steak, I
mean you you probably wouldn't want to eat it just
straight up raw, But it could be done if you
were in a pinch, you know, you could chew it.
There are a lot of foods that you just simply
can't eat without some cooking, right, things, Yeah that would
just kill us we ate it without proper prop or
(04:02):
they'd be just inedible, you know, too tough for to
you know what I mean. Yeah, Cooking improves the taste,
It can tenderize the food in question. It can kill
off pathogens that would otherwise be of dire consequence. Of course,
another interesting thing about cooking is that it in some cases,
I think d nature's our food in a way that
(04:24):
allows us to sort of separate ourselves from the means
of production of the food when we're eating it, so
we you know, like cooking a steak makes you think
about it as a fundamentally different thing from the flesh
of a dead animal. That had to be murdered in
order for you to eat this, Oh indeed, yeah, and
so it kind of it kind of allows you to
put some distance. Yeah, yeah, I mean we and then
(04:47):
we layered language on top of that. You don't go
to the restaurant in order pig. You don't go to
the restaurant in order cow. You order pork and beef. Um. Yeah,
Poyo and guyin know very different words. Yeah and so.
And on top of that, you know, the butchering. Butchering
of animals, Culinary preparation in general allows us to more
precisely choose what parts we're going to eat, what parts
(05:08):
are delicious, what parts are nutritious, what parts are inedible? Uh?
And or deadly? So you you keep that tasty crab
cloth meat, but you throw out the dead man's fingers.
You know, I've always wondered this, and I've never been
able to find a good answer so far. Maybe there
is one out there. Supposedly, apple seeds have a little
tiny bit of cyanide in them, and I wondered if
(05:29):
has anybody ever eaten so many, so many apples seeds
and all that they've gotten cyanide poisoning? There have been
days where I feel like I've eaten that many apples.
But I'll have to I have to start counting this
Robert or u s secret competitive apple eater someday, because
that's like the I find myself eating more and more apples.
I think maybe it's Michael Paulin who pointed out that
(05:52):
if you're if you're not hungry enough to eat an apple,
then you're not really hungry. Then you shouldn't snack. If
you are going to snack, hey, and apples great. Oh.
I just tend to go to the apple for my
snack needs if I'm you know, in any level of
self conscious about my my diet. But you know, sometimes
you're just hungry enough to eat poutine and not anything else.
(06:12):
It's true sometimes that the apple is not going to
scratch that itch. Well, speaking of fruits, it looks like
our first course is arriving. What is this here? Ah,
we have some acky fruit to enjoy here. Now I've
never had aki fruit before. What's the deal with acky fruit?
Acky fruit is really interesting and I had I had
not actually experienced docky fruit until just a couple of
(06:34):
weeks ago when I went on a family vacation to Jamaica.
U Aki is like that the national dish, the national
fruit of Jamaica. It's a it's a fruit, but it's
not your typical like Western idea of a fruit. For example,
what's you have this yellowish or orange is fruit on
a tree and then when it ripens, it pops open
(06:56):
and it looks like a like a three eyed feature
of some kind of with the big black glassy eyes
inside of it. Glassy eyes are seeds. Um, So it's
kind of a Jim Henson dark crystal kind of creature. Yeah,
it really, it really looks kind of alien and weird.
But then uh, even properly prepared at what they do
is they they take the seeds out, they cut out
(07:18):
some of the membrane, and you're left with these, uh,
these little yellowish looking lumps. And the main dish that
is prepared there is that they take it and they
fry it in a skillet with some bits of codfish
so achi and saltfish is the dish, some onions in
there as well, and it ends up tasting about like
scrambled eggs. It has that kind of consistency. It's not
(07:39):
a sweet fruit at all, but it's very good that's nice.
So it's not sweet. What does it taste like? Is
it kind of spicy or is it kind of it's
kind of I think it kind of. It doesn't have
I was I never had a real sense that it
had much of a taste. But it's in there with
a little bit of fish, some onions. It's fried up
more of a texture, kind of more of a texture.
And the texture is I think closest to scrambled eggs.
(08:02):
That would be my main comparison there. But it sounds
like something worth trying. Yeah, I highly recommended for anybody
goes Jamaica for no other reason because it's you know,
it's the national dish there. And you said they tossed
the seeds out right, Yes, because as I'll lay out here,
the seeds are are poisonous um. This plant was originally
native to West Africa, migrated to Jamaican seventy eight, apparently
(08:25):
due to Jamaica's first botanist, Thomas Clark, who introduced it there.
The aki tree is actually known as bliah sepeda and
it's named after Captain William blythe the notorious pirate. So
interesting history there. But where the poison comes in is
that unripe aki fruit contains a poison called hypoglycin. And
(08:48):
actually there are two different varieties in the fruit. There's
hypoglyin A and hypoglycin B, which one is worse. Well,
A is the main problem here, and so you have
extremely high levels of hypoglycin BE in the unripe fruit.
But then the fruit ripens, It pops open like some
sort of alien creature and stares at you with its
(09:08):
three black eyes. Uh. And at that point you know
you you open it up, you remove the seeds. The
only edible proportion is the yellow a really, which is
surrounded by on again the toxic seeds. And there's a
membrane at the base of the seed mantle that's also poisonous.
You have to take that out to Okay, So it
sounds like if you don't know what you're doing, you
(09:29):
shouldn't try to eat a knocky fruit, right. Talk to
somebody who's familiar with this fruit and knows what knows
how to carve it up. Right. Yeah, But luckily if
it's on the menu at a place in Jamaica, like
they know how to cook it, Like everyone has familiarity
with this particular dish there. But you are saying, in
a survival situation, stick to the scrambled eggs. Not probably
not the black hole eggs. Yeah. Yeah, because someone who
(09:52):
knows how to deal with this, they're gonna clean it.
They're gonna wash the fruit after it's gonna be boiled
in water. Then they're gonna throw out that water because
that could contain a trace of the poison. And it's
gonna be perfectly good to eat. It's gonna be rich
and you know, fatty acids, vitamin A, zinc, and protein.
But if you were to eat it, uh, the unripened version,
you could get what's called called Jamaican vomiting sickness. That
(10:15):
sounds like a not very fun sickness. Yeah, it causes
a lot of vomiting and can lead to coma and death.
And uh, in the biochemistry of it is pretty interesting.
It kills you via a form of hypoglycemia or low
blood sugar. Oh. So, normally, as the body uses up
the glucose in the blood, your liver releases glucose that
(10:36):
it formed that it stores in the form of glycogen.
The toxin, however, halts the process, so a few hours
after ingesting all of this, your body glucose crashes and
and just leaves you hypoglocemic. Oh this sounds similar to
some not poisons, but venoms I've heard of before the
attack by causing an insulin spike in the body and
(10:59):
drop in the victim's blood sugar to dangerously low levels. Yeah, yeah,
it sounds like those are probably similar. I think there's
like a there's a snail in the ocean that does
that or something. Alright, well, what do we have next
on the mediu here? Ah? Well, it looks like the
next thing arriving is something I'm a little bit familiar
with but haven't had the courage to eat myself. It's
(11:20):
it's something that's straight out of Iceland, and from what
I've heard, it's well, it's bad news if you're not game,
but if you are game, I guess some people really
like it. So, so what do we have sitting here
before us? It looks like some little cubes of cheese,
like the kind of the tasters hand out at the
grocery store in the Delhi. So it's a little white
(11:41):
cube with a toothpick stuck in it, and I guess
there there's nothing else on the plate, So it looks
like you just eat it by itself. Oh, except there's
a shot of clear liquor sitting next to it, so
I guess maybe you're supposed to take that with it. Now,
what's this smell I'm getting from the dish here, Joe?
You know, as as one person, I watched a video
online of somebody eating this stuff and the first comment
(12:03):
was smells like windex. That is a that is a
common description of what this is, which is rotten greenland
shark meat, a a national delicacy of Iceland, also known
as hakl and uh. And I apologize if I'm not
pronouncing that the right way. I don't know the best
way to say, ha, Carl, But there it is. It's uh.
(12:26):
It's compared to industrial cleaning products. Often in the aroma,
it's very high in ammonia, so it's gonna smell like windex,
or like bleach, or like urine. That is the most
common point of comparison other than cleaning products. So it's
it's urine, it's bleach, and then also kind of like
(12:46):
ambient rotting fishiness of ancient days. Okay, now it's of
course we're throwing in at this point and reminding everyone
at far northern cultures typically have a lot of survival foods. Yes,
where Yeah, it may not seem as as delightful, but
you have to put it in the context of surviving
the winter with the foods that could be preserved. Yeah,
(13:09):
this is this is a common feature of of far
northern climates where you you have dishes that were kind
of fermented or preserved in a way that produces chemical
combinations that might seem unappealing to people not accustomed to them. So, yeah,
so this is Greenland shark meat, and I've never had
it before. I've read that the texture is also sort
(13:31):
of sometimes compared to cheeses, like it's a it's a
little bit chewy at first, but then it kind of
descends into a powdery grain kind of texture as it
dissolves in the mouth. And they say you are supposed
to chase it with a shot of Brinnavin, which is
an unsweetened caraway schnops from Iceland that I did taste
that when I was in Iceland, and you know, I
(13:53):
love Iceland. It was not a fan of that liquor.
It was it potent that it like warm me up.
It was very herbal, you know, it was like it's
like somebody got some herbal tea and then reduced it
down by like not making it thicker, but just concentrated
the flavor by about ten thousand times, and that that's
what it was. So how do you get some of this,
(14:14):
he carl, how do you make it? You? Well, first,
like I said, you start with a nice freshly called
greenland shark or another shark from the same family, the
sleeper sharks, the somniosis sharks. The greenland shark in particular
is the somniosis microcephalus, which sounds like it means a sleepy,
tiny head. But the greenland shark is a really cool animal.
(14:37):
It's It's also known as the ecolossuac, which is the
an Inuit term. I've seen a lot of variations on
the Inuit spelling and pronunciation, so I think they're just
different transliterations of the same term. And it's a huge shark.
The greenland shark gets as big or bigger than great whites.
It grows uh lives probably for more than two of years.
(15:01):
It grows very slowly, and it can get more than
twenty ft long ways, more than a ton, and they
dwell in some of the coldest waters of the earth,
between like freezing and about ten degrees celsius. And it's
funny that it's known for appearing very sluggish. They say,
when you see it in the water, it looks lethargic
and impassive. Is just not really impressed by anything. I
(15:23):
read one account that said that people just you can.
You can catch them by literally just dragging them out
of the water with your bare hands. If they get
close enough to the surface. They don't fight much. So
it sounds like if all the sharks, it's kind of
the most stoic and resigned to the whims of fate.
But the question that I had was like, wait a minute,
(15:43):
why does it taste like urine? Uh? This knowledge about
the taste of greenland shark meat apparently goes back a
long way. I found an interesting article by Lindsay O'Reilly
and Canadian Geographic Magazine about the Greenland sharks significan against
an Inuit culture and uh, it's it's offering another variation
(16:04):
on that same name. This time it's Skalougsuak. Yeah, I
love that scalouksuak, And I want to read a little
quote from this article. She says Inuit legend has it
that once long ago, an old woman was drying her
hair after washing it with urine, when the wind suddenly
whipped the damp cloth from her hand and carried it
(16:25):
out to see. This cloth, the Inuit say, became skalouksuak,
the greenland shark. I love that because it sounds like
there's been a recent trend I think in a couple
of different skits where you have individuals coming up with
elaborate descriptions of how bad a beer is, and this
seems like a more primal version of that. I can
(16:46):
imagine Inuit setting around eating some of this and saying,
you know this, uh, this particular meat taste as if
an old woman washed her hair in urine and then
threw that hair into the water and it became a shark. Yeah,
it's very flowery. Yeah, it's like somebody is really overriding
the Spear Advocate article. But anyway, getting to the point
(17:09):
about the dangers associated with it. If not prepared properly,
you don't want to eat greenland shark meat fresh. You
might not want to eat it anyway because it smells
like bleach and urine. But let's say you're really really hungry,
or you're looking for something to feed your dogs, don't
go with fresh greenland shark meat because it is poisonous
(17:30):
as hack. So when it's fresh and raw, the meat
of a greenland shark contains high levels of uric acid
or urea and trimethylamine oxide, and so if it's eaten
in high enough doses, it can cause effects that from
the outside resemble drunkenness. Sometimes people can say like, this
person is drunk on shark, but it can lead to
(17:52):
really bad things like nausea and vomiting, oral burning sensations,
explosive diarrhea, muscle twitching and convulsions, trouble breathing, and even
in some cases coma and death. And the most toxic
ingredient in the greenland shark meat is the triethlamine oxide.
This is a chemical used by the shark as a
(18:14):
kind of natural anti freeze for the proteins and enzymes
in its body, and it it does a good thing
for the shark because it allows the shark to survive
the freezing temperatures of the water that it lives in
without the formation of ice crystals and the destruction of
proteins inside the body, so it's it's a fish that's
got anti freeze in it, and you you know, you
(18:35):
know the rule about not eating anti freeze. Yeah, that
one's drilled in at an early age, you know. I
think there was an episode of the documentary series Human
Planet in which you see some some fishermen actually pull
one of these creatures out of the water and then
I believe they feed it to a dog. I can't
remember if they cooked it or not. Yeah, actually, I
I've read that sometimes the meat is fed to dogs
(18:58):
and it's it makes the dog dog's drunk essentially, but
it doesn't sound like something. Don't feed greenland shark to
your pet if you happen to have some fresh greenland shark.
I don't know why you would, because you typically don't
get it fresh unless you catch it yourself, because it's
so poisonous and and so how do you get the
hakarl the version that's okay to eat, even if some
(19:18):
people find it very disgusting. Well, the traditional Icelandic way
of preparation is let it rot, and specifically let it
rot under pressure, So you bury it under rocks or
gravel for like three months, and then you'll let it
rot there and then you dig it up and you
hang it out to dry for another three or four months.
(19:39):
So this has had, you know, many months of rotting
under pressure to press out some of the liquids and
then hanging up to dry. And this process supposedly makes
the shark safer to eat, as the poisons are removed
through the pressing and through the chemical action of the fermentation.
But another method of preparing greenland shark would simply be
(20:00):
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
(20:21):
it's safe to eat. You can eat this rotten shark
and not die. I'm I'm reminded of the episode of
The Simpsons in which Homer had an especially long sub
sandwich Marge made him throw out ended up hiding behind
a radiator and he would sneak it out from the
radiator and eat it gray and rotten. Um that sounds
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
being offered polar bear. Okay, Well, I don't seem like
there could be a problem there, right, No, it seems
like bear probably shouldn't eat polar bear? Should well? Probably not.
But I imagine before I think when, because when I
was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for about three years,
occasionally interesting meat to present themselves, such as moose or
(21:29):
in I think one case there was bear stew. You
have to put yourself in a pretty extreme situation, I
think for the question to even come up, should I
eat this polar bear? Yeah? But it turns out that
the polar bear, like the acky fruit and the Greenland shark,
is a food that if you're in a position where
you find yourself needing to eat it, you better have
(21:50):
somebody on hand who knows how to prepare it and
knows which parts to avoid. That's right, because you know,
the native peoples of the Arctic they've done for a
long time that some days the bear eats you, and
some days you eat the bear, right, but on the
days some days you eat the bear, and then it
gets you back, yes, because you when you do eat
(22:10):
the bear, you got to know not to eat the
bear's liver. And as early as fifteen nine six you
had European explorers who learned this lesson the hard way, uh,
coming down with just horrible illness, like nightmarish illness following
the consumption of polar bear liver. Because with many different animals,
certainly the kind of animals that European would consume back home,
(22:33):
the liver is totally fair game. The liver is a delicacy.
The liver should be eaten. Right. Yeah, you have a
fine French restaurant making a foix gras or liver moose
or something. Yeah, but then you start dining on polar
bear liver and you might feel drowsy, sluggish, irritable. Suddenly
you have a severe headache, you get bone pain. Hold
on bone pain, bone pain. What does bone pain even
(22:55):
feel like? Well, there's one way to find out. Blurred vision,
and then you're vomiting. And finally, this is where it
gets just really crazy. Is you start experiencing skin peels,
peeling skin? Yeah, I think you accidentally did your research
from the plot synopsis of a hell Raiser movie. It
sounds like a hell raisor movie. Yeah, because in the
(23:16):
milder cases, you're talking just flaking skin around the mouth, alright,
you know, unpleasant, but hey, not too bad. But some
accounts reported cases of full body skin loss. Even even
the thick skin on the bottoms of a patient's feet
could peel away, leaving the underlying flesh bloody and expire
and exposure and on the top of that liver damage, hemorrhage, coma,
(23:38):
and death. Save your tears, man, that is messed up. So,
so what's the deal with the Polar bears liver? Why
is it? Why is it so poisonous? Well, it all
comes down to vitamin A. Interestingly enough, vitamin A people
take pills of that. It's in carrots. It should be fine. Yeah,
(23:59):
I mean, I mean we've been and it being in
some of like being one of the pro who's to
some of the foods that we're mentioning in this episode.
But because a vitamin A is important for eyesight, reproduction,
fetal development, growth, immune response and the sellular formation of tissue.
Can that's key? Can I go on a little side
tangent here? This is the thing I had to research
for a brain stuff video once. It's a myth that
(24:21):
vitamin A increases your eyesight beyond normal capacity. Okay, this
is the whole Like if you eat enough carrots to
improve your eyesight. Right. What is true is that vitamin
A and carrots are a good source of vitamin A,
though plenty of other vegetables are too. Anything has beta
caroteen in it, as like spinach is great too. Uh.
They will help maintain normal vision, but they're not gonna
(24:44):
upgrade your vision above the baseline. Okay, alright, good to know. Now,
if you like me to take a lot of vitamins,
you probably noticed that on days when you take extra vitamins,
you end up with, you know, just splendidly golden urine.
Extra vitamins lee your body. Um. And that's the case
with the number of items. They simply dissolve in water
(25:04):
leave your body in urine. A. However, vitamin A only
dissolves in fat, so that means it does an exit
the body and urine instead it collects in the body's
filtration oregan the liver where it can reach toxic levels,
and generally this occurs over a pro long period of time,
and if it does get out of control, then you
end up with chronic hyper vitaminosis A, and that in
(25:27):
humans involves all the various symptoms that we've already mentioned.
That sounds pretty horrible. So so wait a minute. How
much polar bear liver do you have to eat for
it to be dangerous? All right? Well, well, to put
it in in context here, uh, an average healthy human
liver contains five hundred and seventy five international units of
(25:48):
vitamin A program while a polar bears liver contains between
twenty four thousand and thirty five thousand international units per gram.
So you compare that to the tolerable upper level of
vitamin A in tank for a healthy adult human, that's
ten thousand I U like supercharging your vitamin A consumption
(26:08):
to just absurd levels. Why is there this much vitamin
A and a polar bear liver? Well, it all comes down,
I mean a lot of it comes down to the
hostile environment than necessary biological adaptations. So in the case
of the bear, the bear doesn't need that much vitamin
A in its diet. You put a bear in a
(26:29):
in a zoo, it can get by with with far
lower quantities of vitamin A. But in its natural environment,
bears are eating a lot of bearded seals, ring seals,
both of which store high levels of vitamin A in
their livers and blubber. Uh. And a lot of this
seems to have to do with the the again, the
(26:50):
role that vitamin A plays and growth and naval development,
so that the seals need all that extra vitamin A
in order to advance their vulnerable pups into a more
survivable stage. So it all comes down to the polar
bear needs to eat those seals. It needs to to
tolerate high levels of vitamin A, so it is evolved
to roll with higher levels of vitamin A. It can
(27:11):
store those higher levels of vitamin A in its filtration system,
in its liver. It's when we eat its filtration system.
If when we eat its liver we end up with
quantities of vitamin A that we have totally not evolved
to deal with. You know, this might be a different
kind of category of food than our others where I
would say, you know, if if you're having your food
(27:31):
prepared by somebody who knows what they're doing. Aki fruit
and Hakarl, go for it. I'd probably say, don't eat
a polar bear. Yeah, it's hard for me to get
given the polar bear is recent plight. Uh. Yeah, I
can't get excited about the idea of eating one of
these creatures. I mean, unless it's eat or be eaten. Uh.
Certainly in the survival okay, survivalist case, Uh, they would
(27:52):
say eat the polar bear, but know what you're doing,
not the liver, not the liver, and don't feed it
to a dog, et cetera. And it's just a little
fun fact. I once wrote a short story in which
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton meets Frankenstein, or actually he
ends up with meeting Frankenstein's monster, I believe, and the
(28:13):
creature in this particular story, I had him consumed polar
bear liver and that's how he gets all this figured
and gross. Wow, I'd like to read that, dude. It's
out there somewhere. Maybe I'll have to throw up a
link somewhere. Okay, Well, oh wait, it looks like another
course is arriving. What do we have here, Well, it's
a very beautiful plate. It's an ornately decorated plate, and
(28:34):
it's covered in very thinly sliced, pale, translucent sashimi, tiny,
just tiny tissue, thin slices of fish. It looks good.
So imagine you are in this scenario. You're sitting down
to a plate that looks like this, and you know
it does look good. So it looks so good you
eat the whole plate by yourself. But what would you
(28:57):
do if you're just eating a big plate of suit
she and then suddenly you start feeling some strange sensations. Uh, well,
I generally do. But generally that's just the saki. Oh yeah,
well that's a different thing entirely. Know that this would
be more like a you're sitting at the table and
there's kind of a burning and tingling on the lips,
(29:19):
and then it kind of turns into some pins and
needles pricking at the lips, tongue, mouth, the throat. Okay,
that's a problem. Yeah, And then suddenly you might start
to lose some coordination. That might still be the saki,
could be, but it starts to feel more like there's
a nervous system disruption going on throughout your body. You
you eventually collapse to the floor. That's bad. Yeah, And
(29:41):
you find your muscles are very weak and sluggish, and
eventually you are mostly unable to move your body of
your own free will. And then the vomiting begins, leaving
you barely able to order seconds on the big dish. Now,
this is a worst case scenario leading up potentially to
death in the event of improperly prepared fugu or puffer fish. Now,
(30:05):
I again, like the other cases, I don't want a
bad mouth a perfectly good food if it's prepared well
and and fugu is a perfectly excellent sushi fish, and
it's not inherently dangerous wind served the right way, when
prepared by a trained chef who knows what they're doing,
who has a license to prepare this kind of food.
And since the introduction the introduction of protective measures like
(30:27):
government restrictions on who's allowed to prepare and serve fugu,
fugu poisonings and deaths have been rare. But there is
a reason that these protective measures have been put in place.
I've read that sometimes in Japan or maybe in certain places,
fugu is known by the nickname tepo meaning gun and
like so like gun sushi, and that kind of makes
(30:50):
sense us. So, some organs in the puffer fish are
naturally equipped with tetra detoxin, which is an extremely potent neurotoxin.
You all talked about tetra to toxin on the show before.
I feel like it's come up a time or two
in passing. It's very, very toxic by mass ingested. It's
reportedly about a hundred times as toxic as potassium cyanide.
(31:13):
So you at least the scene in the James Bond
movie where the bad guy, you know, he's committing suicide
with the cyanide pill, he would need a tetra to
toxin pill one one hundred the size of the cyanide
pill be very easy to hide in a little compartment.
But anyway, tetra to toxin, what does it duty? Why?
Why does it cause all these problems? Essentially, it works
by messing up communication between the bodies, nerves and muscles
(31:38):
by blocking sodium ion channels uh and uh. And this
can lead to paralysis. Especially. The really creepy thing I've
heard is that it's conscious paralysis. That sounds especially horrifying.
You don't yeah, like you're you're aware of what's going on.
It doesn't necessarily knock you unconscious, but you can't move
(31:59):
and you you might might be having trouble breathing, having
a fast beating or irregularly beating heart. It sounds very scary,
but like I said, if this is properly prepared foogu meat,
this this is not a problem you should have. You
you'll find this tetra to toxin and especially high concentrations
in the fishes liver and go nads. So the chef
(32:21):
who knows what he or she is doing can cut
around the right parts of the fish, knows what to
do to prepare it right. They're not going to serve
you the parts that are going to kill you. But
what happens when when I don't know things go wrong?
When somebody doesn't know what they're doing, Uh, it's not pretty.
I wanted to read from a little case study of
(32:41):
fugu poisoning from nine that was hosted on a report
on the CDC website. So this is a case where
and there were three guys hanging out and they get
some fugu that was I believe shipped to them from
a friend in Japan. Yeah, and they're like, well, let's
try it out. So here's one of the cases. So
(33:04):
case one is a twenty three year old man who
he ate a piece of fougo quote the size of
a quarter approximately one quarter ounce, so that's not that much.
About ten or fifteen minutes later, it says he had
onset of tingling in his mouth and lips, followed by dizziness, fatigue, headache,
a constricted feeling in his throat, difficulty speaking, tightness in
(33:26):
his upper chest, facial flushing, shaking, nausea, and vomiting. His
legs weakened, and he collapsed on examination in the e
D his blood pressure was a hundred and fifty over ninety,
heart rate was a hundred and seventeen beats per minute,
respiratory rate twenty two per minute uh, and he had
a slightly elevated temperature. And there there were a couple
(33:47):
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
(34:08):
he's like, oh, yeah, I just dates some fugu time
to have thoughts of dying. Yeah. I wonder if he
went into that scenario, you know, knowing the because that's
it seems to be one of the attractive things about
the fish, about the quote the gun, right, is that
it is there's a sense of danger to it. Yes,
it's it's uh in this sense, it's not just a
really tasty food, but it's kind of a thrill experience
(34:30):
with the knowledge that you know, oh, if this goes wrong,
we could all die. It's I don't know, maybe kind
of like bungee jumping or something. You know that it's
inherently safe if your instructor has secured everything properly, but
the thrill of knowing that maybe something could go wrong
and I could die makes it more exciting. And in
a sense it's it's kind of you need to go
into any kind of restaurant scenario and you know, you
(34:51):
trust that the chef knows what they're doing and yeah,
but in most cases it's the difference between like, all right,
if the food taste good and there's a good chance
that the chef knows what they're doing. Here is a
case where it's it's live or die. But but then again,
this is something we touched on at the beginning of
the episode. But I don't think this is inherently all
that different from very mundane, familiar foods, not just interesting delicacies.
(35:17):
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,
(35:39):
like most of the items were discussing here today, they
are extreme and exotic examples of a truth that spreads
just across the menu for humans. But I wanted to
return to this case. These three guys who got foogu
poisoning in nine. Now, this isn't the only case of
food poisoning it It happens every now and then, but
this was the one case I looked at. All three
(35:59):
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
(36:19):
would bind the charcoal rather than entering the body's chemistry.
So another interesting fact about the tetra detoxin and fugu
and some there are other sea creatures that have tetra
detoxin to like blue ringed octopus and stuff. Uh, the
puffer fish raised in aquariums with clean water tend to
be non toxic. Okay, Well, that would lead one to
(36:42):
believe that they're acquiring these toxic property from something in
their diet exactly you see with a number of different animals,
including some some poison frogs from example. Yeah, and this
seems to be the case with the fugu. So it
what scientists think now is that they get their tetra
detoxin producing capabilities through something in their food, specifically through
eating foods containing bacteria. And it now appears to be
(37:05):
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
(37:28):
order to assassinate your target, you're using essentially a third party.
There's a middleman puffer fish generation poison. Okay, but yeah,
I do want to stress one more time. I don't
want to be an alarmist about fugu. They say, you know,
the chefs who are licensed to serve fugu know what
they're doing, and it's it's supposed to be a very
(37:50):
safe experience. Yeah, just maybe it's just some guy in
your dorm or apartment. What I'd really what I'd really
be worried about is if you're out, i don't know,
snorkeling or something and one of your buddies catches one
and says, let me prepare some boat side sashimi for us. Yeah,
that would be a good, a good opportunity to turn
(38:12):
them down. Probably, what do we have next here? Oh,
we have a nice cassava roots salad and oh a
little tapioca pudding on the side. Um, now here's one
I've had before. I've had tapioca pudding. Oh yeah, I
feel like most of us have probably had tapioca pudding.
(38:33):
Perhaps you've had bubble tea with tapioca bubbles in it?
Is that? What that is? I believe in most cases
I always get the kind with the tapioca, but that
there may be another variety that is available as well.
I've never liked bubble tea. I found it kind of gross, Like,
why do you want little lumps in the stuff you're drinking?
I need flavorful fold lumps in my beverages. I I
(38:54):
kind of dig it. Robert lamb endorser of lumps. Yeah. U.
Tapioca itself has its roots, if you will, in the
cassava root. So cassava is cultivated throughout the tropical world
for its roots, which are just superstarchy. They contain nearly
the maximum theoretical concentration of of starch on a dry
(39:15):
weight basis among food crops. So we're we're exceeding potato
territory here. Yeah. Um, And you can think of them
in terms of potato. There essentially like a tropical potato. Uh,
fresh roots contain about starch, very little protein. But yeah,
they have a number of different uses. They're used to
produce a cassava flour. So you get breads, you get tapioca,
(39:37):
you can get a laundry starch derive a laundry starch
from it. Uh, there's an alcoholic beverages that are made
from it, of course there are, yeah, and uh oh yeah,
there's also a cyanide producing sugar derivative that occurs in
varying amounts in most varieties of cassava. Wait wait, wait
wait cyanide. Yeah, so there's yeah, essentially cyanide in the cassava. Well,
(40:03):
good thing, there'd have to be as a hundred times
as much of that as there would be a the
tetrator toxin. Yeah, it's um. Just to back up a
little bit, Cassava probably was first cultivated by the Maya
and the Yucatanda peninsula, so quite a while ago. There's
been a lot of cultivation of this, a lot of
time for for humans to work out the kinks to
(40:24):
know what to eat what not to eat. Um. And
even back then, they developed a complex refining system to
remove poison from the plant by grating, pressing, and heating
the tubers, okay, and then they also they also used
some of the poison for darts and arrows. So basically,
you want to avoid the leaves, which have the highest
(40:44):
concentration of these cyanogenic glucosides, and you also want to
peel the roots as well, because the peel is also
fairly potent. But all the nutritions in the outside I know,
Oh no, wait, that's carrots. I mean I always when
I'm eating something, say, um, like a potato or what
(41:05):
is that delicious kind of German cross between an art
of choke and a sun choke. Yeah, I love sun chokes,
but I love the texture of the sun choke. I
would never want to eat a peeled sunchoke. But apparently
most methods call for peeling the cassava roote just to
avoid any potential poisoning UM. On top of this, cooking
the cassava tends to remove the toxicity UM, and adequately
(41:30):
processed cassava flour and cassava based products have a very
low cyanide content and are just very safe to eat. Okay,
So this is this is one of these foods, and
I believe there are other foods like this that are
sort of standard saples that are fine once they've been
cooked properly, but you wouldn't want to eat them raw.
Are Lima beans also in that cara beans are off
(41:53):
are also on the list of things that, yeah, you
definitely want to kick cook. I want to say red
beans as well. Red a de beans uh as well
are also on that list. Yeah, just things where you know,
we were fortunate to live in a time where long
ago people went through the painful and potentially lethal process
(42:14):
of figuring out which part of the plan is good
and under what circumstances is it good to eat? Uh So, yeah,
today we can enjoy tapioca putting, even though at some
point in the past um some Mayan's went to an
early grave because they had to figure out how it works.
That's something I think about often, the the the debt
(42:34):
we owe to our ancestors, the people of many, many
years ago who figured out what you couldn't eat and
paid for that research with their lives. Yeah. I mean,
without even getting into so many processing food processing technology,
I mean just the basic ability to turn grain into bread, etcetera.
It's just you know, I anytime I read about all
this stuff. I just imagined myself in the wilderness, starving,
(42:57):
trying to figure out which berries I dare eat ones
will kill me dead? Can I eat these mushrooms? I
don't know? God? Yeah, mushrooms is an entire that's an
entirely different area to consider there, because you have so
many delicious, food worthy mushrooms even in our our own
local environment here, and then so many just deadly ones
(43:17):
as well. Again, the rule with mushrooms is if you
really don't know, don't eat it. Yes, indeed, yes, And
people continue to learn that one the hard way. Okay, Well,
I wanted to find out though. All of these we've
talked about are are interesting to me in that they
become perfectly fine as long as you can trust the
person who prepared them. They're they're not gonna hurt you
(43:39):
if if you've acquired the food properly, prepared it in
the right way, and you check all the boxes, and
you're gonna be fine. But what is the food out
there that is not just interestingly dangerous in potentsia, you know,
in potential, but that that actually gets the most people. Well,
you know, prior to this episode, I might have guessed
(43:59):
poor yeah, you know, that could especially, yeah, or barbecue pork,
because they've been some headlines in recent years where where
there have been barbecue competitions and illness springs up. So
that would have been that would have been my guests. Well,
there was one report from September of two thousand nine
that the f d A issued, and it was it
was a list of the top ten most dangerous foods
(44:20):
in the United States at the time, based on the
number and severity of food poisoning outbreaks by food vector.
So not just like three guys eating fugu and stealing
the headlines, but actually actual thousands of people. Yeah, so
what was the culprit? You know, is it was it fugu?
Was it aki? No? It was none of these None
of these foods we've talked about even made the list.
(44:42):
The real criminal was salad, a specifically leafy greens, which
you know often feels like the safest thing. I know. Yeah,
as the Simpsons once observed, you don't make friends with salad,
especially if the salad is funneling listeria into your friends bodies.
Uh So, I want to read from the report. They
say iceberg let us, romaine let us, leaf let us
(45:05):
butter let us, baby leaf let us, immature let us,
or leafy greens, eskarrol in, dive, spring mix, spinach, cabbage, kale, arugula,
or shard account for of all the outbreaks linked to
the f d A Top ten UH. Those outbreaks sickened
over thirteen thousand, five hundred and sixty eight people who
(45:25):
were reported to have become ill, almost thirty percent of
all the reported illnesses caused by the f d A
Top ten UH. I don't know if it's still the
same today as it was in two thousand nine. I
hope this has changed in the past six years or so.
But as for food that not only sickened people but
killed them, I tried to look up food poisoning outbreaks
(45:47):
with the most fatalities to see if there was a
running thread, but I couldn't find one. It seems like
it was all over the place, and meats, cheeses, vegetables,
packaged food products like peanut, butter, bag spinach. I mean,
it seems like no matter where you turn, something that
you're probably consuming could kill you if something has failed
(46:08):
somewhere in the process between the farm and your face.
So what you're saying is that We could have many
more six course dinners like this one if listeners choose
to uh to attend it with us, right. But I'd
say the real takeaway here is that I think the
most dangerous foods are not the kinds of foods, uh
that that make people feel uneasy because they're unfamiliar, you know,
(46:32):
delicacies from other countries that many Americans wouldn't be familiar with.
That They're going to be things that you eat every day. Yeah,
things without that overt danger factor, but still with a
very inherent uh sense of danger if not prepared with
you know, a monicum of of decency and in awareness. Now,
let me let me offer a caveat even to the
(46:54):
last thing about salad. I I hope you don't take
this as a recommendation to stop eating salad. You know,
leafy greens are a wonderful thing we have as part
of your diet. And here's my recommendation. Don't buy the
pre bagged, pre wash stuff and just eat it straight up.
Buy ahead of let us cut it up and wash
it yourself. Get you a salad spinner. It's worth the work.
(47:14):
It's very nice. I don't know, that's a lot of work. Joe,
I kind of like just opening the bag, dumping it
and then opening the little packets and then I have
a salad. But well, okay, and no accounting for keeps
me from dying. I guess I'll try it, all right.
So there you have it. Uh, they we're going to
clear the dishes away here. Thanks to everybody for for
joining us for this dinner. I hope you enjoyed it
(47:37):
as much as we did. All right, So there you
have it, Dangerous Foods Part One. There will be a
brand new part two coming out in the days ahead. Oh,
you're gonna love it. There's some good stuff in. There's
(47:58):
some dangerous stuff, some poison the stuff, and some misunderstood stuff.
Things we think that our poisonous that have kind of
a reputation for being bad, but maybe aren't, or at
least aren't in the way that we, you know, think
that they are. Maybe they'll just poison your mind. Yeah,
And if you want to poison your mind a little more,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That is where you will find all of our podcast episodes.
You will find links out to our various social media accounts.
(48:21):
You also find blog post videos, you name it all
right there, Stuff to blow your Mind dot com And
if you want to get into this directly, you can
email us. As always said, blow the mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(48:43):
of other topics, because that how stuff works dot com.
Twined twenty fine part proper
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Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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