Today I Learned:
1) Banana-scented things don't smell like banana because they smell like the Gros Michel banana, a now-extinct cultivar that was the overwhelmingly dominant banana cultivar until the 1950s, when it was wiped out by pestilence.
2) The mechanisms of action of strychnine (overstimulation of muscular neurons, causing spastic, uncontrollable muscular contractions and death usually by asphyxiation), ricin (ribosome inhibitor, which shuts down all protein production -- it could be interesting to compare the symptoms of ricin vs the symptoms of radiation poisoning, which mostly destroys DNA), and whatever the toxin is in destroying angels (also ribosome inhibition, but specifically targeted to liver and kidney cells, so death is from kidney failure several days after ingestion. Ugh.).
3) Speaking of deadly things, there apparently aren't really deadly mushrooms (like the aforementioned destroying angel) in the far East, which may be why eastern cuisine uses mushrooms more and of a greater variety than Western cuisine. Another consequence is that most mushroom poisoning cases are, if my sources are correct, Eastern immigrants who were used to eating similar-looking mushrooms back home.
No comments:
Post a Comment