On cannibalism
Is it technically “safe” to eat human flesh, aka cannibalism? Like if you ate it, would it make you medically sick? Asking for a German guy I met on craigslist.
From a strictly food-safety standpoint, human meat is safe to consume. Let’s review:
Unlike lettuce or chicken, human meat isn’t a fantastic vector for the kind of bacteria that would make you sick. This means it’s reasonably safe to gnaw on a forearm al crudé (raw). This assumes that your cannibal-curious friend is a skilled butcher. There’s heaps of harmful bacteria in our gastrointestinal tracts that could make you sick if it intermingled with the choicer cuts. But your guy sounds like he has sharp tools and a clinical approach.
How about parasites? Fortunately, modern humans are typically parasite-free, so there’s not much risk of contracting one from cannibal activity.
Viruses? No major threat. I mean, it’s common sense to avoid meat originating from sick animals, so aim to eat this person shortly after their annual physical exam.
There’s just one risk to human cannibals — a disease called kuru. It was first discovered among populations that practiced cannibalism in New Guinea. Just like mad cow disease, Kuru is a prion disorder. Prions are basically microscopic zombies: they are neither distinctly alive nor dead and they can wait for years before ‘waking up’, at which point they infect everything around them and you can’t destroy them with heat or common disinfectants. (Prions are spooky.)
Back to kuru. You can only get kuru by eating the brains of someone who has the disease. In other words, you can only get kuru by cannibalizing a cannibal. (This is represented mathematically as can²)
But here’s the tricky part about kuru — if you get infected, you won’t show any symptoms for between ten and fifty years. It is possible, though not likely, that your German friend ate an infected brain in 1970 and has not yet manifested symptoms. In this case, you will also catch kuru, which sounds like a fun psychotropic drug but is actually an incurable and 100% fatal disorder.
In summary, do not eat the German.
Noted cannibal Ke$ha
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Slimy baby carrots
Is it ok to eat the "slimy" baby carrots?
Did you know that most baby carrots are not actually infant carrots? Rather, they are big, ugly carrots whittled down to spec. If you look closely, the packaging probably says “baby-cut carrots”.
How did this preference for tiny carrots with smooth, rounded edges emerge? Unclear, but baby humans are also tiny, smooth and rounded so the name fits.
Anyhow. Slimy baby carrots are okay to eat.
When baby carrots are processed, they’re treated with a mild food-grade disinfectant (aka diluted bleach). Don’t let this disturb you. It makes them safer.
I wouldn’t think twice about eating a lil’ slimy boy. If it bothers you aesthetically, rinse them off under cool water, which should wash away the slime. If the slime does not wash away, you could always disinfect them yourself... or just throw them away.
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Kimchi: how old is too old?
Does kimchi ever go bad?
Let’s review kimchi. It is cabbage and ginger and chili and a few other goodies plus a healthy dose of ‘good bacteria’. This slurry of bacteria does a few notable things:
It gives kimchi that trademark flavor— and stank. One time my employer produced so much kimchi that someone reported a gas leak in the building.
It preserves the kimchi. With a healthy population of ‘good bacteria’, the bad stuff — i.e. the bacteria that would make you sick — gets marginalized and can’t grow. This is also known as fermentation.
Kimchi actually gets safer to eat as it continues to ferment. But the composition and flavor of the food change too. After a few months it will taste increasingly acidic and kimchi-ee. Later, it will become carbonated, which is an unsettling trait to find in a solid food. It’s still technically safe to eat though.
Bottom line is this: once kimchi reaches a certain ripeness you will probably find it unpalatable, but this is long before it will make you sick.
If you see a film of mold growing on your kimchi, that’s because you probably contaminated it with a double-dipped spoon. In that case, discard the kimchi and quit being a slob.
Seoul Kimchi Festival 2018, aka heaven
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When food delivery takes too long
Is it ok to eat takeout that took an hour and a half to be delivered?
An hour and a half is a long time to wait for delivery. I have a few questions of my own.
Is this a regular occurrence for you? Does your street address contain a fraction? Do you live in a 60-floor walk up? Do you live in the triangular region between Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Florida? Did the deliveryman arrive via dog sled? Did you offer him a glass of water?
Your concern is that harmful bacteria grew on your food while it was stuck in transit. The general rule is that you should eat or refrigerate food within 2 hours of cooking it or buying it at the store.
So, assuming your food was cooked to order, then it is safe to eat. You could even watch an episode of Friends before safely chowing down.
When I was a kid my mom would send me to school with a frozen chicken tamale and a can of Kern’s guava nectar for lunch. Her idea was that the icy tamale would slowly thaw out and be edible by lunchtime. As a bonus, it would keep the guava nectar cool— like an edible ice pack. This is perhaps the laziest packed lunch ever as well as a moderately negligent food safety practice, since there was a material risk of harmful bacteria growth during those morning hours. But I never got sick from those temperature-abused vittles and I’m sure you’ll be fine with your old-ass delivery food, too.
Your food is here
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On foraging wild berries
There’s a berry bush near my house that appears to be covered in blueberries. I am nearly positive they’re blueberries and want to eat them but I also don’t want to poison myself if they aren’t blueberries. Can I eat them?
It’s hard to answer this without having a baseline understanding of how stupid you are. Are you over the age of 12? Have you ever seen a real blueberry growing on a plant before?
To rephrase your question in food safety terms — you are worried that these berries might contain toxins and that consuming these toxins might cause you injury.
Putting aside your dubious plant-identification skills, this is a perfectly valid question. In fact it’s pretty much the only question that matters. (“Can I eat that?”)
Consider a koala who only eats eucalyptus leaves. It doesn’t need to know very much about food; it only needs to identify eucalyptus leaves and when those leaves are ripe to eat. Although eucalyptus leaves are highly toxic, the koala has adapted to this food source — its gut is fine-tuned to disarm toxins and extract requisite nutrients.
Now back to you. You are an omnivore and this means you can eat just about anything. The downside is that you must accrue a huge amount of Food Knowledge so that you don’t accidentally poison yourself by eating the wrong thing or by eating the right thing at the wrong time.
The simple truth is that you will occasionally eat something poisonous. Whoops. Fortunately, the human body has adapted to your specific brand of stupidity in a few ways:
We can taste most plant toxins. If your mystery berry is toxic then it will taste shitty. Specifically, it will taste bitter and it might make your mouth tingle. This is your cue to spit it out.
Your digestive enzymes have evolved to fight a wide range of toxins. Unlike the koala bear, whose gut is tuned only to fight eucalyptus toxins, the human digestive system has to account for our wider feeding patterns and your apparent propensity for eating random berries. The good news is that your body will naturally protect you when you eat all types of toxic foods. The bad news is that it can only tolerate a small amount of each specific toxin at a time.
So: eat one berry. Aim for a ripe one. You will immediately know whether it is a blueberry (or a blueberry-adjacent berry) or not. If it tastes shitty, spit it out and avoid that plant.
If it tastes fine but you’re still not 100% sure, then wait a day and see if you feel any unpleasantness. If not, repeat the experiment the next day and try eating a tiny bit more. Worst case scenario is that you get a tummy ache. Best case scenario: free blueberries for life!
Me eating an experimental blackberry cultivar.
Last thing — don’t fuck with mushrooms. They all look exactly the same and one bite of the wrong one will kill you.
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Eating expired chicken: good idea or great idea?
How long can I eat chicken past the sell-by date? Hehe.
First, let me commend your instinctive mistrust for sell-by dates. I loathe the frightened sheeple who cull their refrigerators based on expiration dates. Not you! You are a cowboy and you give zero fucks about expiration dates.
The ‘sell-by’ date is not a measure of when food becomes treacherous to eat; it’s a decision by the manufacturer about when the quality of the food will start to decline from ‘peak quality.’ As your chicken (raw, I’m assuming) passes the sell-by date, it might change color or develop a mild stank.
I would go 3 days past the sell by date without batting an eyelash.
I would go 7 days past the sell-by date if the chicken passed a rudimentary smell test.
You sound like you might need a flow chart to keep you in line. Here’s one:
What actually matters is that you cook the chicken to an internal temperature of 165ºF. This will exterminate the bad bacteria in the chicken that could make you sick.
Do this during cooking by plunging a meat thermometer into the thiccest [sic] part of the bird. If it reads 165º then you’re good to go. If not, keep cooking.
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