Saturday, June 14, 2008

What's your poison?

Dr T: Good to see you again. Your blood results just came in this morning.
RG: Geoff, before you proceed with this conversation, just tell me one important detail - should I take up additional life insurance policies?
Dr T: Don’t worry so much!
RG: I can’t help it… I’m 25% fat and 75% cynic.
Dr T: OK, everything’s pretty much in the normal range except your cholesterol. It’s almost double the acceptable average!
RG: Damn, I just made 8 pots of duck liver pate with Grand Marnier and mandarins. What should I do?
Dr T: Start your diet tomorrow.
RG: Isn’t there something easier than dieting? I’m a chef, for God’s sake!
Dr T: Well, you could offload some of that pate to me and I’ll pop extra Lipitor tablets tonight.

Apple seeds contain cyanogenic glycosides. Although the amount found in most apples will not kill a person, one could die if enough seeds were ingested.

As every job has its occupational hazards, I might as well mention a few related to cheffing. Of course, you have the usual back problems due to carrying heavy stockpots full of bones and vegetables. The weekly cuts you get from your knife and burns from pots are a given. But there’s something more sinister than everything mentioned above – carpal tunnel sydrome! This is mainly due to repetitive knife work especially when you are using a knife too large for you or if your work bench is not at the ideal waist level. Carpal tunnel can lead to much pain and discomfort often in the form of numbness or pins and needles that resonate throughout the entire arm.

Fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine. The Japanese pufferfish contains lethal amounts of tetrodotoxin (a sodium channel blocker) in its internal organs and also in the skin. Therefore only specially licensed chefs are allowed to prepare and sell fugu to the public. The poison paralyses the muscles while the victims stay fully conscious, who eventually die from asphyxiation. There is currently no antidote, and the standard treatment is to try to support the respiratory and circulatory system until the effect of the poison wears off (Wikipedia).

Those of you who are aspiring male chefs be warned. As mentioned by Gordon Ramsay, you are more likely to suffer from low sperm counts because your balls are poached in front of the hot stoves the whole day.

Antoine-August Parmentier, a pharmacist-turned soldier, helped popularise the potato in 18th- century France(Stein 2008), where it had been deemed poisonous due to the presence of solanine (a glycoalkaloid poison) found in the leaves, fruit and tubers. Symptoms of solanine poisoning include nausea, diarrhoea, stomach cramps, burning of the throat, heart arrhythmia, headache and dizziness. In large quantities, solanine poisoning can be fatal.