Dangerous Foods II: The Second Course

In a world… where few people know the source of their foods and everyday meals seem the safest refuge, some dishes have deadly designs. From the masters of terror who brought you last year’s Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode 'A Six Course Feast of Dangerous Foods' comes the holiday dread of 'Dangerous Foods II: The Second Course.' Can your heart stand the shocking facts about toxic potatoes, mad honey and the mysteries of the dead man’s fingers? 'Dangerous Foods II: The Second Course.' This time, it’s personal.

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Episode Transcript

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 McCormick. And
it's the holidays. We know what we do during the holidays,
at least here in the United States of A. You

(00:24):
put a lot of stuff in your body that maybe
shouldn't be there. That's right, you you eat. You have
these various feasts that are all about getting through the
winter ahead, getting through the cold, dark winter and surviving
to the spring. It's a it's a it's it's a
it's a riot as old as human history and we're
still doing it. Yeah, even with with nasty, weird contraptions

(00:45):
like candy canes. Yes, I have a question, a question.
Does anybody really like candy canes? Um? I'm sure my
son would like them if if we we'd see him
away from it, Like you got a candy cane at
some event recently and brought it home and we kind
of convinced him, actually, this is a candy that is
best served hanging on the tree. This is more of

(01:06):
a this is more of a decoration. Really, that's a candy.
You don't even have to lie to him to discourage
him about you just be like, this will cut your
tongue and it's gonna you're gonna be sad you ate it.
Your mouth will feel weird and you'll have injuries. Yeah,
it doesn't have the hyper marketing of many modern candies
because we we we limit the amount of candy that
my son uh eats, and that means we like at Halloween,

(01:27):
he was he had access to all these candies, but
then he traded them into the switch, which and got
a toy in exchange. But there were some candies were
just so well marketed he was convinced they were his favorite,
Like Ike and Mike for some reason. Pike and Mike, yeah,
market they have marketing. Well, I mean they have the
no wait, it's Mike and Ike, Mike and I Mike first. Yeah,
I don't. I don't know that those guys that well,
forget which one comes first. But the package is like

(01:49):
bright green, and they're these colors and he's instantly connecting
with it and he's saying, oh, this one, this one's good.
Look those are fruits on there. It's bright, it's it's potent.
I want to eat that. That's my favorite candy he's
actually had it. Huh Well, okay, So today's episode is
going to be a sequel to our last episode about
dangerous Foods that aired last year, and uh so today

(02:09):
is Dangerous Foods to the Revenge, No, the second course,
the return of the food. There is never a good thing, yes,
a dish best served cold, and there is gonna be
a lot of wonderful, dangerous, poisonous weirdness out there to
talk about. But we do want to say at the
beginning that at least I feel deeply Robert, I hope

(02:30):
you feel the same way that being alarmist is very
much against the stuff to blow your mind ethos. Right,
So we are not going to tell you there is
a silent killer lurking in your pantry, that that saved that.
For those websites that demonize MSG and stuff we've already debunked,
this episode is going to be about dangerous and poisonous
misadventures involving rare foods, everyday foods. But no matter what

(02:53):
case it is, it's not designed to scare you, but
it should be a reminder that we live in a
world of very complex and sometimes fragile biochemical interactions. And
for those of us living in industrialized countries, I think
sometimes our consumer mindset leads us to believe that our
food should meet the industry quality controls standards you'd get

(03:16):
in the dead products you buy at Walmart or Ikea.
Maybe so if every version of the same product number
table at Ikea really is the same, no matter which
I Kea you go to anywhere in the world, shouldn't
every baked potato be the same everywhere you go in
the world. But it's not, is it. I mean foods,

(03:38):
the foods we eat, our organisms or substances derived from organisms, plants, animals, fungi,
and as as much as we might like our food
products to be contained and tamed and dependable as the
output of a furniture factory, as we all know, sometimes
life uh finds a way. Yeah, I mean these are organisms. Now.

(03:59):
In some cases, especially with various fruits and whatnot. Uh,
it is the the organism's game for you to eat it.
It wants you to eat it. But in many other cases,
the organism does not want to be eaten and has
certain biological systems in place to prevent it, to discourage it,
to make it difficult for you to carry this uh,

(04:20):
this this act of gluttony out and uh. And also
any type of food that is produced, if it's you know,
a grown part of a thing's body, or it comes
out of the soil or a creature makes it, it
is the It is the end of a production line,
a production line that is not standardized exactly exactly. No,
it depends on the region. It depends on the environment,

(04:42):
the climate, the conditions, what materials are available for the
organism to work with. So, yeah, biochemistry is a deep
web of complex interactions, and the stuff we're getting is
not fresh. It's the process. It's the end of a
very process, and it's just very common around the world

(05:04):
in various ways for something weird to happen somewhere along
that process. All right, So what's what's first? First up?
What's the first course here? Joe? Okay, Well, I want
to tell you a story. Okay. So, in his work
known as the Antibossis the ancient Greek historians, Xenophon tells
a story from his time as a general in the

(05:24):
Greek war against the Persians, and one of his accounts
tells of a story that took place in four oh
one BC. While while Xenophon and his troops are returning
home from battle with a group. Xenophon has got about
ten thousand Greek fighters with him, and they're traveling through
a col Chiefs, which is a region along the coast

(05:44):
of the Black Sea and what is now the country
of Georgia. And Xenophon's troops come across a place that
is swarming with thousands of bees. It just bees everywhere.
And you might think, oh, that sounds horrible, but for
a bunch of Greek soldiers, this is actually good news
because they knew they're in for a treat, fresh honey
from the hive. That's right. They weren't packing any candy

(06:04):
canes or I can Mike uh and and Mike ull.
It might have. Maybe it was reversed back then. I
don't know how they get the Greeks, the ancient Greeks world.
Oh yeah, the Greek alphabet I come before M. I'm
not sure. At any rate, they probably weren't getting their
their sweet tooth satisfied quite like they would they would
wish it to be. You know, I comes before M,
and our alphabet to the manufacturers of this candy. A

(06:31):
little bit of brain problems here with me anyway. So
so the Greek fighters, they've got honey delicious, right, But
after eating the honey, the soldiers started to give off
signs of a strange reaction, and so Xenophon writes that
the soldiers began to go out of their heads, and
they suffered from diarrhea and vomiting. Then the soldiers collapsed

(06:53):
to the ground and wallowed about as if dead drunk,
and in some cases they seem to have lost their minds. Uh.
In others the men were like men on their deathbeds.
Xenophon rights quote. So they lay there in great numbers,
as though the army had suffered to defeat, and great
despondency prevailed. On the next day, however, no one had died,

(07:16):
and it approximately the same hour as they had eaten
the honey. They began to come to their senses, and
on the third or fourth day they got up as
if from a drugging bad honey. So what happened? Yeah,
I had the local bees risen up against them. Uh. No,
Xenophon's fighters had stumbled into a trove of the substance
well known to inhabitants of the Black Seacoast, mad honey.

(07:41):
This is what the ancients called it. Plenty called it
uh oh, I forget to turn out. I think it's
millymnomenon the honey that is a mad maker like that.
And there are other ancient accounts of mad honey poisoning.
So in sixty seven b c. The Roman military leader
Pompy the Great is taking a Roman army near the

(08:02):
southern shore the Black Sea again while chasing the Persian
army of King Mithridates of Pontus and the Persians. They've
got a group of allies apparently who know about the
mad honey, and these allies set a trap for Pompey's army.
They placed honey combs full of mad honey from the
local bees into containers and left them along Pompey's path,

(08:24):
knowing that some of the soldiers would not be able
to resist a swede indulgence. And they were right the home.
The Romans were basically Winnie the Pooh. They were Pooh bear,
I've got to get the honey. Uh. So many Roman
troops ate the honey. They became incredibly sick and disoriented,
went out of their heads. While the Romans were wallering,
wallowing around, you know, in a bit of a sugary stupor.

(08:48):
The Persian army came back, killed him, led to a
battle with very asymmetrical outcome. I've read that more than
a thousand Roman soldiers were killed and very few Persians died,
very asymmetrical outcome. It's a wonderful exactly. Yeah, a little
bit of a call back there. Uh, that's I think

(09:09):
the term would be a massacre. Actually that's the non massacre,
sticky massacre. But there's an excellent article on Mad Honey.
Actually I came across by none other than Adrian Mayor.
If you remember from our episode on geo mythology. Adrian
Mayor is the main scholar we talked about in that
that episode, and she's known for the theory that various

(09:31):
mythological beasts were inspired by ancient people's coming across the
dinosaur fossils. So, for example, people in Central Asia may
have found Triceratops remains in the Gobi Desert and this
led to the creation of griffin myths. And so we
talked about her in that episode. But she has this
article in a nine edition of Archaeology magazine called mad Honey.

(09:54):
It's a great read. You can look it up online.
But she talks about also how in a d a
ruler of the Kiev and russ called Olga of Kiev,
who in general I looked her up. She seems like
she she's pretty be a she's like bad, she's cool. Um,
she used fer minted honey from the Black Sea region

(10:16):
to poison a group of about five thousand of her
enemies and then had them massacred. Wow. So there's a
there's a long history of of military missteps or or
outright uh poisonings and massacres with mad honey. Yeah, and
with all these ancient accounts, I mean, you have to
wonder to what extent we're we're getting the true story.
But these are the accounts as presented by these ancient

(10:38):
historians and authors. Because I can also see where this
would be a narrative to invoke if you're on the
losing side, right, you know, to say, well, yes, our
troops were were massacred, and our troops were ambushed, but
they were also poisoned by his local honey or or
this not because I was right, but but we do

(11:00):
know now that this is totally plausible because mad honey
is absolutely a real thing, and mad honey the problem
is not the bees themselves, but the flowers they pollinate.
So in the Black Sea coastal region, bees often consume
huge quantities of nectar from the flowers of the rhododendron plant,

(11:20):
and rhododendrons produce a potentially deadly neurotoxin called grayanotoxin. So
I'm gonna be referring to a paper published in Cardiovascular
Toxicology by suz A. Jansen at All called Granotoxin Poisoning
Mad Honey Disease and Beyond from two thousand twelve, And

(11:42):
what they report is that grayanotoxin is also known as
andromedo toxin, acetyal, andromedol and rhodotoxin, and it can be
derived from the body parts of plants in the family
eric Cassier, which includes rhododendron, pierists, Agarista and Calmia uh.
And in reality, granno toxin is a family of related toxins.

(12:04):
So there are a bunch of different grano toxins. We
should probably speak about it in the plural. There are
more than twenty five is a forms that have been
derived from rhododendron. And here's the basic way it works
in your body. So grannotoxins are poisonous because of their
ability to bind to the group too receptor site in
voltage gated sodium channels or v g s c s,

(12:28):
and so I'll break that down basically, v gs c
s are protein structures there a little structures within the
body that span across membranes, and they facilitate the transfer
of sodium ions which has charged particles of sodium. And
so the transfer of these charged particles is important for
communication between the bodies different tissues, allowing the passage of

(12:50):
action potential in cells like neurons. If you introduce a
toxin that binds too receptor sites in these sodium channels,
you can essentially event effective communication between body tissues and
disrupt the nervous system. Specifically, the researchers think that gray
anna toxins work by preventing the inactivation of the sodium channel.

(13:12):
To use a metaphor, it would be like leaving the
light switch stuck in the on position. You can imagine
how this would have negative systemic effects on the nerve
cells and the body at large. But specifically, the authors
think it probably leads to continuous uninterrupted stimulation of the
vaguel nervous system, the vegas nerve, which of course is
very important in the body. It interfaces between the brain

(13:36):
uh the autonomic nervous system, and many muscles in the body,
from the heart and the lungs to the voice production center.
So this is bad stuff. You know, you don't want
it in your body. It racks the nerves, right. But
grayanatoxin contamination of honey occurs most often just in the
Black Sea region of Turkey, especially from the plant's rhododendron
Rhododendron ponticum and Rhododendron lutam. But rhododendron isn't the only

(14:01):
plant to produce nectar containing grayannotoxin, which can filter down
into the honey that the bees produced. Of course, honey
containing grayannotoxin has also been found in North America, for
example in North Carolina, where in the nineteen fifties a
sample was found to contain about a hundred parts per
million of granotoxin. And what did that come from? While

(14:22):
the authors speculated was probably derived from bees that aint
the nectar of the mountain laurel or Kalmia latifolia. So
I know, if you're a honey fan, you're probably worrying like, oh, no,
am I gonna get mad honey? Probably not, probably depending
on where you are and how you get your honey.
According to a Texas A and M University article citing

(14:43):
anthropologist Vaughan Bryant, you can find honey in the United States,
but not not so often so, Bryant says, quote, Normally
there are not enough rhododendrons in one area for the
bees to make concentrated mad honey. However, sometimes there a
late cold snap in the Eastern US that kills a
lot of flowers but doesn't seem to stun the rhododendrons.

(15:06):
Thus they're the only thing blooming, and the bees will
focus all their attention on those flowers and produce concentrated
mad honey during that period. These flowers are mostly in
the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern US. That also goes
with something I've read about this type of poisoning being
more common in the early spring, when I guess also

(15:27):
some of these granotoxin producing flowers are they're more cold resistant,
might might bloom earlier where other flowers aren't available. Interesting,
so it would be the it would be these rare
incidences where the poisonous flowers. Toxic flowers are the only
source for the bees, yeah, because the bees don't love
them the most. The bees would rather have another flower.

(15:50):
But if all the other flowers are out of the
game for some reason, they will go to the granotoxin
plants and make their honey from that sweet, sweet nectar
that people also some people have a taste for. Now,
I'm guessing too that this is going to be more
of a situation with your certainly your wild honeys in
these affected areas, and maybe maybe maybe with with some

(16:13):
like extreme indie honey. I guess you're probably not going
to get this from a mass produced honey because that
that involves. I mean, number one, there's just quality control,
so they tend to know what types of flowers the
nectar is coming from. But then there is also massive
mixing involved. So when you get mass produced honey, they're
blending together huge batches of honey from different hives, and

(16:35):
even if there were some containing toxin, it would probably
be mixed and thus diluted way down to a level
that's not a threat. Okay, So outside of the Black
Sea region, you would have to you would have to
really have a string of bad luck, I think to
run across this stuff, right probably. I mean you could
come across if somebody's like a wild honey collector, you know,

(16:57):
or like you said, extreme indie honey. Uh, and there
are they don't necessarily know what they're doing, or they
have some bad luck with with what flowers there bees
have access to and they don't realize it in time
before they give it to somebody to eat. You could
encounter mad honey in other parts of the world, but
it's gonna definitely going to be most common in the
Black Sea region, especially in Turkey. So if you eat

(17:20):
some mad honey today, what's going to happen to you? Well?
Clinical characteristics gonna list a few. This is also this
is back to Jansen at all. So there's hypotension meaning
low blood pressure, problems with cardiac rhythm, nausea and vomiting, sweating, dizziness,
and quote impaired consciousness. It's kind of a euphemism, right. Uh.

(17:42):
There's also less often but still noted, fainting, blurred vision,
diplopia or double visions, salivation, convulsions, atrial fibrillation, cardiac arrest,
and myocardial infarction meaning a heart attack. All that really
from a hit of bad honey. Yes, if you get
enough of a concentrated dose you and eat, you eat

(18:03):
enough of it, you can have symptoms like these. I
would have liked to have seen a clinical list of
symptoms that also included the various injuries that the Persian
military have afflicted on you in ancient times. Side effects
include massacre, yeah, dismemberment, etcetera. But here's one more thing.

(18:24):
Not all known cases of mad honey poisoning or accidental
Sometimes people take granna toxin contaminated honey intentionally as an
aphrodisiac or as an alternative medicine. And I think the
jury is still out as to whether at low doses
granna toxin may actually have some kind of positive effects.
I think it's not clear yet whether that actually is effective.

(18:47):
But the authors of the study I mentioned speculate that
regularly taking contaminated honey for these reasons may lead to
a condition called chronic mad honey intoxication syndrome. That sounds
like a syndrome you don't want to have to put
on your little form you fill out when you get
a new doctor. That's right, alright. On that note, let's
take a quick breaking. When we come back, we will

(19:09):
discuss the dead man's fingers. Alright, we're back, Robert. You
have piqued my interest dead man's fingers. Are you literally
talking about eating the fingers of a corpse? Um? No,
but in a way it's kind of figurative. So are you?
Are you? Yeah? Digitally if you will. But here's the thing.

(19:33):
Are you a crab band? Do you enjoy eating crab?
I don't eat it that often, but I do like it.
Do you what is the most crab like form of
your crab consumption? So? Do do you? Do you enjoy
soft shell crab on the sandwich, the legs and the
claws sticking out on the sides. It's another thing. I
don't eat that often, but when I've had it, I've
liked it. Okay, it's it's my absolute favorite. I think

(19:54):
it's the It is the best way to eat an
animal where there's just there's there's less deniable about what
you're doing. You're just you're biting into this crab. The
whole shape is their shape? Is there might as well
eat a cockroach? Yeah? Yeah, And it's it's the meat,
but also all these other substances that are all fried up,
all the other bits of its anatomy. It's I feel

(20:14):
like it's a very honest mode of consumption, even though
it is cooked. So it's not like you're just eating
the raw living crab. No, I can get with that. Okay,
well this is uh, we're not just talking about crabs
here though, of course, we're talking about about the dead
man's fingers. Which if you've ever actively engaged in the

(20:34):
cook cooking of crabs, and catching of crabs, then you
you probably have some degree of familiarity of what I'm
talking about here. So in our last Dangerous Foods episode,
we discussed the manner by which food goo puffer fish
become edible via the skilled culinary removal of certain tetrodo
toxin laden inerts. If you it's got certain organs that

(20:55):
have especially high concentrations of this toxin. Right, so you
need a skilled chef to cut that little sliver out,
cook it up and it's good to go. Right, Yeah,
But a good sushi chef will know what they were,
what they're doing, right, They'll be able to get it
out of there and you shouldn't have to worry about it.
If if you're in good hands exactly. So this is
faintly similar to that. But but this is definitely a

(21:18):
category where we're going to be dispelling a lot of
ideas about dangerous foods rather than uh, you know, giving
you the science behind why it's actually dangerous. Okay, Well
you've got to tell me where the name comes from. Okay. Uh,
As far as I can tell that, the name itself
is just kind of lost to history. You know, we
don't know like where, you know, what region this came from.

(21:39):
But you do find dead man's fingers in edible crabs,
and it's a it's of course, it's it's wonderful fear
marketing right decided you have this rotting hand of the
drowned dead that's inside your food, and if you eat it,
according to the you know, the the urban legends, it
depends what. It depends on the legend. What happens. Maybe

(21:59):
you're to become violently ill, maybe you're going to contract
a disease. I found people who said, oh yeah, when
when we were cleaning crabs as a kid, um, my
parents are a big brother. You know, it depends who's
screwing with you, basically, and who's saying, oh, don't eat
those parts. If you eat the dead man's fingers, you'll die,
or you'll catch a disease, or or you'll become violently ill. Uh.
The versions are various, but I find the stories particularly

(22:23):
interesting given our relationship with crabs, creatures that we have
to keep alive and then cook alive in order to
to eat them. So it's it's perfectly strange that we
summon this tiny, rotting humanoid hand inside the body of
our victim. Yeah, that is a nice metaphor. Is like
that the hand that places them into the pot boiling

(22:43):
water comes back from inside the shell. Yeah, so it's
kind of kind of beautiful in its own way. And uh,
And in trying to figure this out, because I'm not
gonna spoil it just yet, if you don't know what
the dead man's hand is, you might expect it to
be something related to digestion, right, Yeah, I'm guessing crab
anus or I don't know. No, as far as I
know you, you you eat the that portion of the crab,

(23:05):
at least with the soft show crab. But but but
you know, there are plenty of examples of animals for
which we cast aside certain internal organs um, either out
of necessity or just we don't want to bother uh
processing them into sausages or dog food or whatever. Uh.
Even the komodo dragon will sling the intestines of intestines

(23:26):
of a kill around in order to loosen the feces
from the intestines so that they can eat them. So yeah,
I've never heard of that. Yeah, it's pretty great because
they they don't like uh being feces, but they do
want the large intestine. Yeah. Yeah, they're tasty. They'll eat
everything but that and the baby komodo dragons there's no

(23:47):
child rearing and komodo dragon culture. Uh. So the baby
komotos have to have to climb up trees to get
away from the adults who will try to eat them,
but they can. They've also been observed to smear themselves
in feces and or at least they wind up covered
in feces, and then the parents will not eat them
because they're disgusting. So it's kind of like Predator with
Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mud, but they can't see them.

(24:10):
They're just not tasty. Yeah, that would be a good
interpretation on Predator. Oh yeah, what if all the mud
was poop, and then the predators just like, look, I
can't do this exactly. That's what was going on the
whole time. He could see him, but you know. But anyway,
but based on all of this, it feels somewhat accurate
that there would be the sickening, disease spreading or even
deadly portion of the common food crap. Right, Yeah, I

(24:32):
would think so it winds up with the puffer at
least would just intuitively looking at a crab, it looks
like something that would have poisonous parts. Yeah, you would
look at it. It looks back at you, and you
might ask yourself, can I eat all of this? Clearly not,
because a lot of it's very, very hard and pointy.
So the fingers that we're talking about here are nothing

(24:53):
more than the crabs gills, and this is where respiration
and filtration takes place, and they consist of uh many
different plume like filaments arranged around a central axis. In
the blue crab, for instance, there are eight gills on
either side. So and and if I guess, if you
you kind of squint at them, and I've I've looked
at him when cleaning crabs, and instructed by my my

(25:15):
in laws who know what they're doing, and I do
not know what I'm doing, but they tell me, oh,
that's the dead man's hand right there. Are they like
crab country people? Oh yeah, yeah, my uh, my wife's
family has a Cajun blood and her brother lives down
in um In Ocean Springs, Mississippi. So yeah, they're like
constantly crabbing, catching crabs, bringing them back. The whole family

(25:36):
have taken them apart um, and it's it's good eating.
But but yeah, if you really, if you, if you
want to interpret it as such, the dead man's hand
might look like a little diseased lepre con claw or
something or two of them. Now, the reality here, of course,
is the crab is an organism, so there's a lot
going on underneath that shell um or you know, underneath

(25:56):
where the shell would be if you're using a soft shell,
The white muscle meat, that's the prize stuff. That's the
stuff that gets picked away and put into other other recipes.
That's the stuff you might buy in bulk, pre picked
for an exaggerated price. But you also find all these
other things. If you've ever cleaned a crab, or if
you've ever eaten soft shell crab. You know what I'm
talking about. There's just some weird, nasty sauce inside the carapace.

(26:20):
Potentially a lot of it's open to interpretation because there's
there's a yellowish mustard that is the fat. In females
you'll find orange ovaries, and in males who find a
small white testies. There's a stomach, there's a little gray heart. Uh,
there are intestines, there is an anus. Everything you might
expect to find when you're taking apart an animal. Uh,

(26:43):
certainly one that was just living before you boiled it
up or um. And and also if you're eating a
spried soft shell crab right off the bun, you definitely
encounter that that yellow mustard fat and all these other ingredients.
So we're you supposed to get rid of that stuff
or what? Well, the instructions vary. So you know, some
people are gonna be very pure about there about the

(27:05):
picked crab, right because that's that's the meat, and that
if you're if you're picking apart cooked crabs, you're just
gonna probably eat the meat out of it. Right. But uh,
but but it it depends. I mean, they're a lot
most of this is edible. The fat is certainly edible,
and with soft shell crabs you just kind of bite
into the whole thing and just eat it whole like
a monster. But at at most what generally what is

(27:28):
is prescribed as that you remove the eyes, and you
remove the gills the dead man's fingers, and it's not
because they're poisonous, but because they're chewy and it's cartilage,
and and they might be a bit bitter. But it's
not a do or die situation. It's merely a these
are the parts of the crab that are not delicious
and or are not fun to eat, but they're not poisonous,

(27:50):
they don't carry diseases, and interestingly enough, you know it
also is going to depend on the culture. I ran
across a wonderful Serious Eats article by writer cheech Wing,
and she does this series titled the Nasty Bits, where
she she kind of she talks about the nasty bits
of various um foods sources uh, and in particular she
talks about about crabs. In one of these, she cuts

(28:13):
open a live crab and tries out crab miso or
connie miso, which is this Japanese tradition that typically involves
cooking a partially vivisected crab directly over a low burning flame. Yeah,
it's like cooking it in its little shell after you
just cut it open. That's brutal. It well, I mean,
it's all of its brutal, that's true. But here's a

(28:35):
quote from it, because she sums it up really nicely.
I poured a bit of saki into the shell. The
grayish green contents bubbled vigorously over the small flame. I
cooked the parts until they were just heated through, soft
and rich, with a taste not unlike liver. But kenny
miso was a delight to eat right out of the shell,
though I saved a portion of it to have on toast,

(28:56):
and yet another to have with rice. And it did
it look very you know, very cool. We eat all
sorts of weird parts of animals. Uh, some are more
acquired taste than others. So it makes sense, especially in
a within Japanese cuisine, right that is so dependent upon
the riches of the ocean, that there would be uh
a finer use of the crab innerds here. Well, I

(29:17):
gotta respect that. But but the dead man dead man's fingers,
specifically the gills so you're saying, not poisonous, nothing to
this myth at all. No, not poisonous, not going to
cause a disease, not gonna kill you. It's just a
taste issue. It's uh and uh and and the consistency
of it. And yet some would find even a way
to appreciate that. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there are

(29:38):
diverse flavors to play with there beyond the white meat
of the crab. And uh. If you want to learn
more about this, especially if you have access or obligations
of surrounding live crabs and freshly cooked crabs and and
you know, pulling them apart. I ran across a wonderful
pdf from math in science dot info. It's like an

(29:59):
educational web site, and this particular pdf guides you through
a quote edible dissection of a blue crab. And so
it's it's kind of a combination between a you know,
like a school like a biology class dissection and culinary preparation.
So it it takes you through the creatures anatomy as
you take it apart, and also tells you what you

(30:21):
can eat and how you go about eating it. Well,
I do think in general, for people, if you're gonna
eat meat. If you're gonna eat the body parts of
an organism, I think it's good to familiar yourself. Familiarize
yourself with that organism and what the parts you're eating
are and where they come from. Yeah, I agree. I mean,
I think we do we do ourselves. We do our
and we do our animals a disservice when we distance

(30:44):
ourselves from the source and the reality of our sustenance. Yeah,
if you just think about the meat that you're eating
as a thing that arrives wrapped in plastic wrap. Yeah,
maybe with a mystical dead leprecha in hand at some point.
So I'll include links out to both the Nasty Bits
article as well as the edible dissection instructions on the

(31:06):
landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blame mind
dot Com. Okay, Robert, I have a food to ask about,
and I only know about it because of a line
in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I remember you
remember the scene with the French character who's taunting Arthur
and his knights. I think that's played by John Cleese, right, Yeah,

(31:26):
and he outrageous French knights. Yeah, and yeah, so he
gives a lot he gives a lot of great insults
to the Knights of Camelot, and at one point he
alleges that their father smelled of elderberries. And I always
found that funny. But it's one of those things where
I'm sure you've had this experience where you find something

(31:47):
funny without knowing what it means. It's just the sound
of the words that makes you laugh. I've never seen
an elderberry. I've never, as far as I know, never
tasted an elderberry. I don't know what the deal with
him is, but they poisonous um. Yeah, this is an interesting,
uh subject, because elder berries are another example of a
food item that can prove dangerous if you consume it

(32:10):
raw under the right circumstances. But it's also regularly traditionally
used in h cooking for in various consumable forms. It's
been used in medicine for ages, it has antioxidant properties,
it's used to treat sinus infection, cold and flu, and
then on on the culinary side, has been used in jams, pies, liqueurs,

(32:32):
and according to BBC Good Food, it is a must
for quote the famous German black forest ham that is
salted in seasoned with spices, elderberries and juniper berries. Yeah,
and the liqueur in particular, it's actually similar to gin,
which is uh created with the with juniper berries, so

(32:53):
it's uh similar to that. But um, but this is
elder berries is something you tend to pick wild, and
it's especially a thing in traditional English cooking because this
is something you would you would run out to the
hedgerow and you pick some elderberry and you bring it back,
but not stand there at the hedgerow eating raw, right expect. Well,
there are accounts of people eating it, and there are

(33:14):
accounts of people eating it raw and not feeling any
symptoms from it. But this is not this is certainly
not recommended. Um. So the the UK's Food Standards Agency
recommends cooking elder berries to destroy toxins they're present in
the raw berries. And it's also a general rule of
thumb to avoid unripe berries. So generally, the way this, uh,

(33:36):
this is gonna work is that you you're only gonna
deal with blue or purple berries, and you're gonna avoid
the red ones completely. Uh So they tend to like
dark end as they age. Yes, yeah, so you have
avoid the ripe ones. Uh, it's also also a general
good rule of thumb. Pregnant breastfeeding individuals as well as

(33:57):
people with autoimmune conditions auto and the deficiencies rather are
encouraged to skip elder berries because there is that possibility
for there's also a possibility for for interactions with various
uh drugs. But but generally speaking, if it's cooked, it's
prepared properly, especially like you know, jams, deserts, etcetera. It's
not being consumed on its own, then you're you're you're fine,

(34:21):
it's been used without incident, you know, for for for ages, um,
they're There are different varieties of elderberry, and the main
ones that you encountered. There's a Sambosis negra, which is
uh the European elder, also called the black elder, and
that one is most often used for medicinal purposes. And

(34:42):
then it's generally advised to avoid the dwarf elder to
Sambosis elbas uh completely and because he gives you a
cursed magical stone. Yeah, it sounds wonderful that the black
elder in the forest meet the black elder at the hedgerow.
But uh, yeah, so, but been in tern of what's
toxic here. The active alkaloids in elderberry plants are hydrocyanic

(35:06):
acid and uh SAM boosting, and both will cause nausea
Sam boosey. And is there any connection to sambuca or
those just set a false cognate? That may be a
false cognate. I cannot say one way another on that,
but I doubt it. Okay, So, so far we've talked
about mad Honey, We've talked about dead Man's fingers, We've

(35:26):
talked about elderberries. Uh what what is next? Surely there's
some exotic food item that you have for us to
discuss here. Well, Robert, I want to take you on
a food poisoning mystery adventure. Okay, in nineteen seventies England. Okay,
this is fitting to follow elderberry. So in nineteen nine,

(35:47):
on the second day of the autumn term, at a
school in South London, a bunch of schoolboys, all the boys.
They're lined up for a school lunch including steak pie, gravy,
boiled potatoes, cabbage and or canned carrots, followed by a
dessert of apricots or something called quote syrup sponge pudding.

(36:10):
Oh that sounds delicious if our British listeners can tell
me what that is. I would love to know sponge pudding. Anyway,
after this lunch, seventy eight boys who had eaten the
school lunch became sick with things like abdominal pain or
diarrhea or vomiting, headache, fever. Seventeen had to go to

(36:34):
the hospital, and three of those were considered dangerously ill.
U two had what was reported as minimal pain, but
quote diarrhea was copious. And what I'm quoting from here
is the ninet edition of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine
and article by Mary McMillan and J. C. Thompson. Continuing,

(36:56):
the three boys considered dangerously ill were homatose or in
a stupor and had peripheral circulatory collapse when they were
admitted to the hospital. The others admitted to the hospital
had symptoms such as convulsive twitching or spasms, confusion, hallucination,
and general delirium. Now, fortunately nobody died. All of the

(37:19):
boys were well enough to go back home within six
to eleven days of admission, but with a few of
them it seemed very close. So what had made them sick?
Onto the Hunt lab tests for bacterial and viral infection.
All return negative, so it was not a microbial infection
of any kind. Doctors also tested the boy's blood and

(37:42):
feces to see if they could detect other toxic substances,
for example, elevated levels of lead, arsenic copper. They also
looked for zinc because at the time zinc phosphide was
used as a common rat poison. They looked for signs
of organic compounds such as nicotine, organophile, us for us,
various pesticides, and defoliants. All of it negative. Okay, So

(38:05):
if we ruled out the syrup sponge putting it not
necessarily no, all of these could be suspect. What if
it was the gravy. We don't know what's in gravy. Finally, well,
that is what's in school lunch, maybe the same thing
that's in syrups sponge putting mostly circus animals. Right. Finally,
one doctor Mary Whittaker of the University of Exeter, as

(38:28):
well as the authors of the study I just mentioned,
Mary McMillan and J. C. Thompson um they determined the culprit.
They found that the sick boys blood plasma had a
deficiency of something called pseudocolon ester race. Okay, now I
gotta explain a little body chemistry here. Colon ester Race
is a naturally occurring enzyme in your body. It's in

(38:50):
your blood plasma, and it's necessary for the correct functioning
of an animal's nervous system. So your body, like other
animal bodies, has a nervous dome as its command center,
and your muscles, skin, inner organs don't do much without
the nervous system telling them to do it. And you
shouldn't just think about this in the you know, conscious,
deliberate sense of using your brain to move your skeletal

(39:13):
muscles to jump over a pothole or throw a bowl
of soup at somebody, or whatever it is you do
with your body. Uh, this also applies to the unconscious
functioning of most of your internal organs. They need electrical
stimulation or inhibition from the nervous system, and these electrical
signals are transported through the body through structures called synapses. Synapses,

(39:35):
of course we've talked about it on the show before,
but they're the gateways between neurons or nerve cells, and
they allow electrical and chemical signals to pass through. And
so these signals are often carried by a chemical called
acetal coline. Meanwhile, you can stop these signals with a
specific colon ester ace enzyme called acetal colon ester ace,

(39:58):
which breaks down the acetal coal and that allows the
passage of the signals. So you need both. You need
both chemicals in your body to allow and regulate proper
functioning of the nervous system. If you don't have enough
colon ester as to break down the acetal colin, your
nervous system is going to start to experience the equivalent
of a streak congested with lots of cars, and the

(40:20):
cars won't stop, so you can experience negative effects all
over the body as a result of the nervous system
being unable to effectively inhibit signals firing across synapses. Okay,
so if this were a game of clue, at this
point we kind of know what the murder weapon was,
but not who or whether what the murder is? Is

(40:41):
it the what was it? Was? It? Was it Colonel Syrup,
Sponge Pudding, or General Gravy or one of these other
fine suspects, or in the British version, Reverend Gravy. Uh yeah,
good questions. So, so the boys have been poisoned by
something that inhibited the production of colon strays in their bodies,

(41:01):
or it generally inhibited colonester as. Actually I can't remember
if it was the production or if it naturally lowered. Anyway,
they had decreased colon ester as and this allowed the
researchers to isolate the cause of the outbreak because they
knew what in the meal had the ability to do that.
Potatoes poisoned potatoes. And before you think, what, who on

(41:22):
earth would try to poison a group of English schoolboys
with a weapon as pure and honest as the potato,
The answer is nobody. It wasn't intentional at all. The
poisoning was traced to a sack of old potatoes in
the school kitchen that had been sitting around since summer,
long enough to develop a formidable poison profile. The potatoes

(41:44):
were poisoned by their very own nature, and this was
backed up by interviews with the students, where it was
later found that the really the only thing all of
the students who became sick had in common was that
they'd eaten the potatoes. For example, like a vegetarian student
was boys and the other things had different options about
desserts and stuff. But all the sick boys had eaten

(42:05):
those old potatoes from the summer term. So how on
earth would an old potato from the summer term do
something that crazy, dear nervous system. Well, the everyday potato
is the tuber of a plant called Solanum tuberosum, which
is a member of the plant family uh Solanassia, or
the night shade family, which, of course you might recall,

(42:27):
is sort of known for its poisons. Eggplants, tomatoes, and
some of their fruits are also members of this family.
Potato plants naturally contain a range of defensive poisons called glycoalkaloids,
and two primary alkaloids, and potatoes are called solanine and
check a scene, And in most cases of potato poisoning,

(42:49):
the solanine is the one that gets most often singled
out by name as the primary cause of illness, But
there there are multiple glycoalkaloids at work, and these toxins
can be found in many parts of the plant. So
if you ever decide to grow a potato plant for
yourself in your home garden, do not eat the fruit
of this plant, do not eat its flowers, and don't

(43:10):
get it in your head to make yourself a nice
cup of potato leaf tea, because all throughout the plant
you will find the presence of these glycoalkaloid poisons that
can do to you what happened to the South London
school boys. Now, most recorded cases of solenine poisoning do
not end in death, but in some cases, especially where
they're like aggregating factors such as malnutrition or starvation at play,

(43:34):
solanine poisonings can be deadly. And I want to give
a few examples from a book about food intolerance called
Was It Something You Ate? By John Emsley and Peter Fell,
published by Oxford University Press in two thousand two. Uh
they signed an example where during the Korean War, food
shortages in North Korea forced people in many communities to

(43:55):
survive on things like rotten potatoes, and in one area,
three and eighty two people became sick from soulanine poisoning,
of which fifty five were hospitalized and twenty two died.
Symptoms included weak pulse, blue lips and ears, pale skin,
enlargement of the heart and liver, swelling of the face,

(44:15):
abdomen and extremities, and death usually occurred within five to
ten days. In the cases where people died in the
last stages before death, people experienced excitability and attacks of
shaking all over the body, and they eventually died from
respiratory failure. It's reported, and there are a couple of
other cases. In nineteen eighteen in Glasgow, Scotland, sixty one

(44:38):
people got sick with vomiting, diarrhea and headache after eating potatoes.
Of them, one boy died of strangulation of the bowel.
And also in nineteen five a family of seven was
poisoned by green potatoes and two of them died. Well Joe.
At this point, I imagine a lot of our listeners
are thinking, well, heck, we live in of a French

(44:59):
fry nation. We live in a a fully loaded baked
potato nation. This is this is bad news. I mean,
we eat so much potato, our children eat so many
potato products. The how do we steer clear of this
potato poisonous? Are we begging for death? Yeah? How to
avoid uh? The reaper soulanine and its chemical brethren in

(45:21):
hoods Uh? No, So most potatoes are fine. This is
the thing you really shouldn't worry about. And there are
clear signals to look out for, and I'll tell you
what they are. But there's no reason to freak out
about potatoes in general. Potatoes do contain some amount of
solanine naturally, And actually Dr Harriet hall Over at Science
Based Medicine has a really good blog post about this,

(45:44):
about general soulanine content and potatoes. She writes, quote, it's
estimated that it would take two to five milligrams per
kilogram of body weight to produce toxic symptoms, and she's
referring to soulanine there and the glycoalkaloids. A large potato
ways about three d rams and has a soulanine content
of less than zero point two milligrams per gram. That

(46:05):
works out to about zero point zero three milligrams per
kilogram for an adult, a hundredth of the toxic dose.
I figure a murderous wife would have to feed something
like sixty seven large potatoes to her husband in a
single meal to poison him, unless he's a phenomenally big
eat or arsenic would be a better bet. So regular

(46:27):
potatoes with normal soulanine content. This is not something you
need to worry it right, unless you're eating hundreds of potatoes,
and then you probably need to worry about all those somethings. Yeah, yeah,
you'll probably have I don't know, a reaction to the
salt first or something. But properly farmed potatoes produced by
experienced growers tend to be bread for really low glcoalkaloid

(46:49):
and specifically solanine content in the tuber much lower than
you'd find in a wild potato UH and according to
that Emsley and fell book I mentioned earlier, the average
potato has maybe three to six milligrams of solanine perms
of mass, so that might be a different figure than
Hall had, but either way this is not a threat.

(47:09):
Most of this also is going to be on the
outside near the peel, so if you peel the potato,
you're probably getting rid of most of it, and the
concentration of solanine and the potato tends to increase if
the potato is bruised or exposed to light, which tends
to cause greening. You've seen green potatoes before, those are
the ones you don't eat. Solanine is generally found in

(47:32):
UH in higher proportions, and potatoes that are have turned
green or especially have begun to sprout. I think that. Yeah,
where I've seen the green potatoes, the most have been
the uh, the sort of science classroom potato experiments. Yes,
where you have it have toothpick stuck in it and
you're you're you're growing it out or something. Yeah, and
it's been exposed to light for a long period, or

(47:54):
or classic Mr potato head, I imagine, though I don't
know that I've ever actually encountered one of those. Oh
I've never thought about him being poisoned, but he really
probably is gets out on the counter all day. Well,
so you're thinking, how can I know to avoid this
kind of poisoning? How do I keep the glycoalkaloids out
of my body? Well, simple steps. Store your potatoes in
a cool, dry place, don't eat old potatoes, don't eat

(48:18):
a potato that is green or sprouting, and if you're
in doubt, peel your potatoes because there's likely much more
poison in the peel than in the starchy center. Alright,
I feel better At this point, I was a little nervous,
So now I feel better. Okay. Another fun fact about
the green potatoes, though, the green you see in a
green potato that maybe quite poisonous. Is not soulanine or

(48:38):
any other glycoalkaloid itself, but regular old chlorophyll stuff that
makes plants green. The soulanine and the chlorophyll chlorophyll, they're
just correlated. So if you see chlorophyll, it probably means
there are metabolic processes going on in the potato. Uh
that this means it's probably been exposed to sun or
something which tends to increase the sulanine content. Okay, One

(49:00):
last historical side note. In the mid nineteen sixties, researchers
in the United States bred a new strain of potato
that was known as the Lenape potato and it was
released in November nineteen sixty seven by the Crops Research
Division of the U. S Department of Agriculture and the
Agricultural Experiment Station of Pennsylvania. And it was a cross

(49:21):
between some existing potato varieties selected to create a tuber
perfect for making potato chips. So it had a high
specific gravity, meaning a high solids content that's a dry matter,
and a resistance to common parasites and potato diseases such
as late blight, potato scab, mild mosaic and tuber necrosis

(49:44):
from leaf roll and stem end browning. No potatoes have
the best disease name, do I mean? I guess that
they're just they're just ready for they're always already a
little bit grotesque, right, Yeah. And it was also considered
to make potato chips with good color. Could make good
potato chips even after it's been in cold storage. So
new superior potato. This is the age if you want
to Christine just shining like ivory white potato chip. Yes,

(50:07):
before we reached its age of like cool multicolored potato chips.
Exactly people wanted it. It should look like it was
made out of plastic. But unfortunately there was a problem.
The lenape varietal was found to have a defect. It
was poisonous, reportedly able to cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, fever,

(50:28):
bad symptoms. And what was the culprit, Well, the potato
naturally contained elevated levels of glycoalkaloids. So the lenape potato
was withdrawn from consumer consumer production production and shame, I don't.
I don't think it actually ever made it to the
stores to the consumers themselves, or if it did, it
was pretty soon after withdrawn. But reading up on this

(50:52):
I wanted to note it was my first occasion to
check out a nineteen sixties edition of the American Potato Journal.
Oh yeah, the youth is your first experience. You're not
picked up this this journal previously. It's a fascinating general
But also I wanted to mention that I think because
of its inclusion and influential book, the story about the
lenape potato was often referenced in the nineteen nineties during

(51:14):
the first big debate on GMO crops, though the poison
potato itself was the product of more traditional plant breeding. Yeah. Like,
so that's the thing, right, I mean, we've been with
our with our cultivated um agricultural products. We have been
manipulating them for quite a while, exactly regular levels, like
non genetic manipulation I mean, and really by the virtue,

(51:36):
I mean, it's still genetic manipulation. We've been we've been
manipulating these plants for ages. Yeah, exactly. I think it
was just generally considered an example of the dangers of
what happens when you use science to mess around with
pure natural foods. But of course the other potato varieties
that you know, we know and love are the product
of agriculture and breeding, and you know, scientific investigation into

(51:59):
the daily in genetics of potato varietals. Uh, and a
much less dangerous You can produce a much less dangerous
potato through these processes than the glycoalkaloid rich wild potato.
So I'm not sure what kind of argument that makes, really,
So we're continuing to to to try and breathe the

(52:21):
quizette's how to rack of the potato. But there's always potatoes.
There's always the chance you'll create these various monsters on
the way, right, I think, So, all right, we're gonna
take a quick break, and when we come back, we
will jump into another dangerous food example, and yes, there
will be at least one more dune reference. All right,

(52:45):
we're back. So this is a big one, of course.
I think everybody's run across an example of this, someone
saying the apple, the sweet innocent apple, the everyday apple
a day keeps the doctor away. Fruit. This contains seeds,
and if you eat these seeds, you will you will
be become poisoned and you will die. If you heard
variations of this, I don't know if I've been told

(53:07):
I would die, but I've heard that the seeds contain poison,
and I think in a limited sense that is true, correct,
I mean, it is true. It's one of it. As
we'll discuss. It's definitely one of these cases where you
are not going to poison yourself eating the seeds of apples.
It's just there. There's there's no there's no record of
this ever happening, And when you start looking at the

(53:28):
math and the quantity of toxins and the seeds, it's
just it's just impossible. Yeah. I think, as with almost
everything else we've talked about in this episode, the old
adage and chemistry holds true. Or is it chemistry toxicology?
The dose makes the poison anything, including water, including sugar,
including whatever. Anything in the correct dose it just poisonous.

(53:50):
So the question is how much of it are you
getting and how little does it take to hurt you. Yeah,
So the reality here is that, yes, the seeds, pits,
and stones of many varieties of fruit contains small amounts
of cyanide. Uh. There are a number of forms of cyanide,
and if you take enough of the wrong one or
the right one, depending on what your your goal is,

(54:11):
you can suffer poisoning. Symptoms include headache, dizziness, fast heart rate,
shortness of breath, and vomiting. Uh. This may be followed
by seizures, slow heart rate, low blood pressure, loss of consciousness,
and you know, cardiac arrest and death. I mean, it's cyanide.
It's it's a poison. Now. Apples in particular contain a

(54:31):
compound called a migdalin in their seeds, and this is
a cyanide and sugar based molecule. All right, So if
you start chewing the seeds, uh, your saliva enzymes they
hit this particular compound. They cut off the sugar part
from the molecule, and the remainder then can decompose to
produce the poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide. Yeah, which which sounds

(54:55):
crazy and and definitely makes me think of that seen
in Dune where where where the duke bites into the
poison tooth in his mouth, uh, and then breathes out
in an attempt to kill his captors, to kill the
Vladimir Harconin. Oh, that's a that's a good scene. It's
a great scene. Yeah, and it makes you think, well,
maybe you should just been into an apple and just done.

(55:16):
He fails to kill Harcona. He does he kills Peter, Oh,
Peter de Friz. Yeah, he's he's so he's able to
take out one of the batties. But but but luck,
pure luck saves the baron, as you allude to. Yeah,
that scene would have been much more awkward if he'd
been trying to hold on while I eat sixty apples.
You allow me to chew the My final request is
that you give me unlimited apple seeds to chew, and

(55:38):
you hang out really close to my face. It would
have it was not that that is not a mentat
created plan, a mentat approved plan. Okay, but so how
many seeds does it really take? Okay? So here's another case,
as like we did in a previous example, where you
have to bust out some grams and milligrams so cyanide
that toxicity and humans, you're generally talking point five to

(56:00):
three point five milligrams per kilogram of body weight, so
you know it depends on your body how big you are.
Um for a fatal dose, you'd need to hit at
least one point five milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Okay,
so that's kind of do Now you have a basic
range of toxicity and death the seeds of the apple themselves.

(56:24):
You're looking at three milligrams of cyanide per gram of seeds,
and one seed is approximately point seven grams, so you
would it would be like two points something milligrams of
cyanide per seed. Yeah, you need to Basically, you would
need to chew an absurd number of apple seeds to
pull this off. And there are no reports of anyone

(56:45):
actually doing it, either intentionally, you know, out of I
don't know madness, or or accidentally. Even Johnny apple Seed
running around two and on apples all day was not
able to kill himself. But I think there are some
other seeds in natural fruits that we eat all the
time that are a little bit more dangerous than apple pits. Right,

(57:06):
this is true. Uh, And there's there's actually an excellent
article that came out in The Guardian uh last year,
actually uh really good and has a wonderful chart that
just shows you the different levels of cyanide and these
different fruits often include a link to it on the
landing page for this episode is Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. But the basics are that apple seeds

(57:27):
with three milligrams. Program that places apple somewhere in the
middle of our spectrum between the point one milligram program
of the common nectarine, So that's the low end up
to the seventeen point five milligrams program in the European
green gauge plum. I've never heard of that. Yeah, I
had not either. It's a European specialty. Uh And it's yeah,

(57:51):
that's that's a big one. Likewise, the apricot is pretty
big too. The kernels of the apricot fourteen point four.
And there have been plenty of cases of problematic ingestion
of apricot kernels, typically by children, as well as a
cherry pits or another one. Cherry pits have three point nine.
Now with those, I think i've read that you have

(58:12):
to do some processing to make them especially dangerous, right,
Like if you chew up cherry pits, there's something they're
more dangerous, that's right. So remember the saliva that I
mentioned earlier in the apple seeds, So there's that breaking
down in the separation of that compound. Uh So, yeah,
chewing the seeds, chewing the kernel. Also, i've i've I've

(58:33):
heard that if you were to just grind up a
bunch of cherry pits. You might have similar scenario as well.
I mean you would have a similar scenario. So those
are those are the areas where you there's more concern,
and generally that means that the concern with cherries, for example,
is going to be improper food preparation, like somebody who
has no idea what they're doing and they grind up

(58:54):
a bunch of of cherries for something without removing the pit.
Or it's a case where child gets ahold of a
bunch of kernels from apricots or a bunch of of
of cherry pits and starts chewing them. Those are situations
where the condition often escalates and there is you know,
some serious toxicity that a doctor has to deal with. Well,
I gotta invite you all over for a taste of

(59:15):
my fresh made pasta with home ground apricot pit pesto.
But it's one of these situations where, yeah, the average
person might not realize that the the average cherry with
the with the pit in it does contain bits of
cyanide and you could you could have a lethal dose
of cyanide in your house. It's just if you're following

(59:39):
the rules, you're going to be throwing all that cyanide out.
If you eat it the normal way, there's no danger, right.
But this is maybe a good reason why I remember
when I was a kid having there being games about
spitting fruit pits. Did you have games I feel like
spitting fruit fruit pits? Yeah, it's like you you you know,
how far can you spit the watermelon seeds? Getting watermelon

(01:00:00):
seeds saying they're dangerous? But maybe the same is true
of cherry pits and stuff like that. Maybe this is
a way of culturally preserving the instinct to not chew
up and swallow those those poisonous apricot pits and cherry seeds. Huh. Well,
you know I was. I was thinking about this when
we first discussed this, because just last night, my son,

(01:00:21):
he's four and a half, he eats all the time,
and I was giving him some some orange slices to
eat in the bathtub, because you have to there has
to be some overlap, otherwise he would there would be
no going to bed. Uh. And he is he's especially
recently he's been very demanding about how he doesn't want
seeds in anything. And he and I bring him the
fruit and he says, oh, does he have seeds in it.

(01:00:41):
I don't want the seeds. And I explain, if you
you take the seeds out, you spit the seeds out.
This is how fruit works. And you just have to
to roll with the Yeah, well not into the bat
you know, he asked the same thing. I can just
spit him in the bath. No, you can't spit him
in the bad and back. And this is why you
have a bowl with fruit now. But but I wonder,
like to what extent this is a you know, this

(01:01:02):
is a natural instinct for for young children, especially to
be appalled by the seed because in in fact, the
seed of some fruits could prove dangerous to them, you know,
in the same way that I've I've heard some there's
some theories about picky eating and children that are basically
amounts to the same thing that that that picky eating

(01:01:22):
and children is a natural inborn defense mechanism against potentially
dangerous foods that are going to be more dangerous for
them given their their small body size. That's funny because
I see the exact same evolutionary process working itself out
in some babies and in my dog, where it seems
like just anything that will fit in the mouth will

(01:01:43):
go in there but then come back out right. Sometimes
with the dogs, Oh yeah, sometimes, I mean I don't know,
my dog wants to eat things that I often think
like that doesn't make biological sense to have a drive
to try to eat that rock. Well, am I correct
in this that with dogs like that's part of their
tasting process, like to to to judge the food it

(01:02:06):
goes in the mouth first. Oh yeah, I guess that
kind of makes sense. Yeah, I could be wrong and
that I'm not a dog expert, but but at any rate,
that also the the you know, the the whole incident
here with with seeds also comes up. I understand with
some pets that I didn't really explore that thread, but
I was seeing a number of different posts and articles
out there about oh do I need to be concerned

(01:02:27):
about my dog eating these pits? Well, there's certainly lots
of foods that are probably not dangerous to you, but
might be dangerous to a pet for a couple of reasons,
for different body chemistry, but also just because of different
body size. A serving that is contains nothing all that,
you know, nothing in concentration dangerous to you, might be

(01:02:48):
a big dose for a small animal. Right, yeah, especially
a small dog, small cat, etcetera. All right, you know,
on on a final note here, you know, so many
of the things we've been talking about, we've been talking
about like the dosage level, the quantity ease. Uh, keep
in mind the spice rack. Okay. Uh. We actually have
an older episode of Stuff to blow your mind that

(01:03:08):
is all about nutmeg nutmeg, and I encourage you to
check that episode out because nutmeg is fascinating. It has
this weird, wonderful history full of like Eastern medicine, um,
European fashion, um, medieval medieval manipulation of the humors. Also
like bloody colonial monopolies. It's I've definitely read about its

(01:03:29):
use as a recreational drug. Yeah, they're a Malcolm x
uh wrote about it's it's use in prisons. You would
take a match box full of nutmeg and you would have,
you know, an altered state. Uh. There are various other
accounts from from history. Samuel Samuel Peeps wrote about an
individual who who took nutmeg and ran naked through the

(01:03:50):
streets of London. Samuel Peeps. Yeah, yeah, so so there's
a lot there's a rich history with nutmeg. But yeah,
nutmeg is an example of something where if you you uh,
use just a few sprinkles here and there on top
of your egg nog or whatever, and it's it's perfectly fine.
I put a little on my smoothie every morning. Um.

(01:04:11):
But if you take larger quantities there can be toxic
effects spice trans yes, spice trands essentially except a very
unpleasant spice trans uh with lots of nausea and a
really horrible hangover. Now I've read no accounts of recreational
nutmeg use beyond sprinkles for flavoring that end. Well, it's

(01:04:31):
all grotesque, and nobody tries at a second time uh
for the most part unless they have no other option.
There are just extremely bored. But but it serves as
a I think a fine lesson because if you look
at your spice rack in your house, you were looking
at a number of different substances that are in many
cases toxins. There. They they evolved in the original plants

(01:04:55):
that they came from as a deterrent to keep people
from eating them, or to keep people from eating them
on you know, certain portions. Yeah, in many cases the
pungency and flavor that we prize them for when applied
to a very small amount in our food is by
itself disgusting. This is it's by design disgusting. It's supposed

(01:05:15):
to be that way as a defense mechanism. Yeah, food
technologies essentially our mastery of all of these elements. We
figured out how to manipulate them, how to change them,
often with fire, and then and then utilize even these
these these potent poisons in very small quantities that changes
the flavor. So yeah, anything in your spice rack, if

(01:05:37):
you took it in sufficient quantities, you in many cases
could have an altered experience, probably not a good altered experience,
but an altered one, and or experienced the toxic effects.
So it's just you know, worth keeping in mind. I
think nutmeg is a great example of that. Uh and
I love nutmeg and uh uh and yet I would

(01:05:57):
I would definitely not advise eating a matchbox full of it. Okay,
So main takeaways from this episode. Don't eat the green potatoes.
The dose makes the poison. Don't grind up cherry wrapper
coop pits and make a pesto out of them. Don't
freak out over the dead man's fingers though, you know,
take them out for flavor purposes, don't eat four cups

(01:06:20):
of nutmeg. I mean basically the take home is, don't
take your food for granted, Like, no have some basic
idea of where food comes from, the processes that that
lead it to your plate, uh, the organisms from that
they stem from, and like if you have, the more
you know about about what your food actually is, the

(01:06:41):
less shocking any of these dangers are, and also the
better prepared you are for these for for the often
you know, small chances that you might encounter these problems.
I think that's a really good point. Maybe that's the
main takeaway from this episode. When you think about your food,
think about organisms. Don't think about it as a product
it came from a factory, though in many cases it

(01:07:02):
probably was probably you know, if it's a package product,
probably was processed in a factory somewhere. But it is
an organism or derived from an organism. Think about the
organism it came from, the plant, the animal, whatever it is.
Think about its place in nature, all the things that
fed it and grew its bones, as it in turn
feeds you and grows your bones and hopefully doesn't poison you.

(01:07:23):
And I think that's a perfect message for the holiday.
So on that note, if you would like to certainly
check out any of the links we mentioned here, that
older episode on Nutmeg, last year's episode on dangerous foods, etcetera,
you can check all of that out it's stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. You also find blog posts,
you will find videos, You will find links out to

(01:07:43):
various social media accounts as well, and if you want
to get in touch with us directly, as always, you
can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of

(01:08:03):
other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com. The
f