SO! I’ve spent more time than I like in hospitals with saline drips restoring my dehydrated blood after food-poisoning induced vomiting, and pretty much all of those episodes followed me thinking, “Huh, this tastes a little funny … ehhh, I guess it’s OK.”
That led me to introduce the following strict rule: if you think anything’s off about food, don’t eat it.
Now, that seems to make sense to most people, but in reality, most people don’t practice that. In my direct experience, if the average person gets a piece of fruit or some soup or something that “tastes a little bit funny,” then, after thinking for a moment, they’ll say “ehhh, I guess it’s OK” and chow down straight on the funny-tasting food. Sometimes they even pressure me to have some, to which I say, “You eat it.”
Honestly, most of the time, a funny taste turns out fine: a funny taste is just a sign that something is badly flavored or poorly spiced or too ripe or not ripe enough or just plain weird to the particular eater. And in my experience almost nobody gets sick doing that, which is why we as humans get to enjoy oysters and natto (fermented soybeans) and thousand-year eggs (clay-preserved eggs).
But, frankly speaking, that’s due to survivor bias. All the idiots (I mean, heroic gourmands) who tried nightshade mushroom and botulism-infested soup and toxic preservatives are dead now, so we cook from the books of the survivors. And I’ve learned from unexpectedly bitter-tasting experience that if I had been a heroic gourmand back in the day, I’d have a colorful pathogen named after me.
So if anything tastes or even looks funny, I don’t eat it.
Case in point! I’m alive to write this blog entry. Let me explain.
When I’m on the high end of my weight range and am trying to lose it, I tend to eat a light breakfast during the week to dial it back – usually a grapefruit and toast or half a pummelo. A pummelo is a heritage citrus that’s kind of like the grandfather of a grapefruit – pummelos and mandarins were crossed to make oranges, and crossed again to make grapefruit.
They’re my favorite fruit – like a grapefruit, but sweeter, and so large that one half of a pummelo has as much meat as a whole grapefruit. I usually eat half the pummelo one day, refrigerate it in a closed container, and then eat the other half the next day or day after.
You can see this saved half at the top of the blog – it looked gorgeous and delicious. I popped into my mouth a small bit of meat that had been knocked off by an earlier cut, then picked up my knife to slice it … when I noticed a tiny speck in the columella, the spongy stuff in the middle.
Now, as a paranoid eater, I always look on the columella with suspicion: in many pummelos, there’s so much that it looks like a white fungus growing there – but it’s always been just fruit. Figuring, “Ehh, I guess it’s OK”, I poke it with my knife before cutting the pummelo – and the black specks disappeared as two wedges of the fruit collapsed.
A chunk of this fruit had been consumed by some kind of fungus. You can kinda see the damaged wedges here in a picture I took just before cutting the fruit, and if you look closely, you can even see the fungus itself growing on the inside space. This wasn’t old fruit – I’d eaten the other half of the fruit just two days before, and it was beautiful and unmarred when I washed it. But it was still rotten on the inside, with a fungus I’ve not been able to identify online, other than it is some fungus with a fruiting body:
I spat out the tiny bit of pummelo meat I’d just put in my mouth, and tossed the fruit in the compost. But the next day, curious, I wondered if there were any signs on the other half of the fruit, and went back to find this:
Not only is the newer piece visibly moldy, its compromised pieces rapidly disintegrating, the entire older piece of fruit is now completely covered with fruiting bodies – probably spread around its surface when I cut the fruit open. From what I’ve found online, the sprouting of fruiting bodies means this pummelo had already been infested with a fungus for a week or two prior to the flowering.
So! I was lucky. Either this fungus was not toxic, or I managed to get so little of it in the first piece of fruit that I didn’t make myself sick. But it just confirms my strategy:
If it looks or tastes funny, don’t eat it.
If you don’t agree with me on a particular food, you eat it; I’m going to pass.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I think I said it. Lots of pictures of bad grandpa grapefruit.
