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Food and drink: Piquing your poisonous side

Make mine a double, with a strychnine shooter

When I told my husband I was going to be writing about poison and food and some of their wicked little permutations for Halloween this week, he laughed and said, don't do too much research.

Sadly, I think, good old-fashioned poisons have pretty much fallen off the radar screen for killing people these days. Unless you're somebody like P. D. James, Colin Dexter or Agatha Christie, who routinely relied on them for some of their best work, most of us don't even consider poison as a viable murder option.

Guns it is now. Guns, with toxins and chemicals lurking in the background all around us. Number one poisoner of children in the U.S.: cosmetics and personal care products. Number one poisoner of adults: pain medicine.

Nothing like medieval or Victorian times when deliciously romantic poisoning, intentional and otherwise, ran amok.

No, if you're going to be a poisoned corpse these days - and I'm talking big-time thriller-type poisonings here, not your everyday incidents - it's more likely you'll find your tea or cake laced with something terribly post-post-modern, like radioactive waste, as the poor ex-Russian spy, Mr. Litvinenko, did.

Something as dull and pedestrian as arsenic? Forget it.

Although, that said, the KGB did do in a Bulgarian they feared not that long ago with an umbrella tip laced with ricin, a poison that comes from castor beans. So you never know, there could be some decent poisoning going on as a sideline, somewhere, somehow...

I remember being duly terrified of castor bean plants by my in-laws when I first moved to Hawaii, for they grew wild there like devil's club which, by the way, is not poisonous despite its somewhat wicked appearance.

A giant castor bean plant growing in a neglected corner of their garden at the time served as the model for instruction: DO NOT EAT (in all caps), accidentally or otherwise.

Its fleshy carmine stems, fantastic but somewhat sinister-looking leaves and the beautifully coloured beans that looked like they'd been coated with an ancient raku glaze made me feel sorry for it. All that bad PR for such a gorgeous plant.

I was shocked a while back when I saw a castor bean plant growing in a city-landscaped bed at English Bay in Vancouver. What the heck, I thought, didn't they know better? Or maybe they did... Those plump, fleshy, magically coloured beans would be an enticement to all sorts of creatures, unwanted and not.

Still and all, you can pick up more than a few poisonous tips from murder mysteries, either in written or celluloid form, making them not a bad place to start learning about poison and how one might go about taking proper advantage of it.

For instance, last week we enjoyed a tasty little episode of Inspector Poirot wherein the much-anticipated murder was committed by lacing the poor old victim's oysters with a wee bit of strychnine. The culprits knew that their dear rich auntie loved raw oysters so much she would toss them back, like an oyster shooter, say, thus avoiding the distinctively bitter and telling taste of strychnine.

This begs the question, would any of us today know how strychnine tastes, smells or looks? Would we recognize a bottle of arsenic if we tripped over it?

The first is indeed bitter: one of the bitterest substances known, so to succeed in your endeavours, you would have to figure out a way of slipping it quickly past the taste buds and down someone's throat. Cold, viscous oysters would do the trick.

Strychnine comes from the seeds or beans - beans shaped something like castor beans - of a flowering plant commonly called the St. Ignatius plant, which is native to the Philippines and parts of China. You might find it as drops, pills or powder, for it used to be used "medicinally" for fainting young ladies or hysterical old ones, and by athletes as a booster. Who knows? Maybe it still is.

Arsenic, on the other hand has a couple of forms. The more ancient one is a semi-metal, usually present as a powder, yellow, black or grey in colour. It was perfect for poisonings since it is odorless and, therefore, tasteless.

Because arsenic causes general organ failure, the symptoms were pretty vague, making it difficult, in ye olde pre-CSI days, to determine if your victim died an unnatural arsenic-laden death. That is until a special test was developed in the early 1800s that could detect it in a person's system.

So much for the run on arsenic. Except for a pretty vain application (see above reference to cosmetics for an unexpected verisimilitude).

Don't try this for Halloween if you're planning to go as something ghoulish, but women in Victorian times would eat a form of arsenic and rub it into their skin to make it a lovely pale white. Translation: they wanted to look like they were upper class creatures who didn't have to expose their delicate skin to the ravages of the sun as their lower caste sisters out working in the fields had to.

We still use arsenic and strychnine these days, but not for murder, at least not the intentional murder of our fellow humans.

No, it's far more likely that the contemporary "poisons" that "get" us will be something we bought ourselves off the shelf at the grocery or drug store. Or an unwanted microbe on the rind of a cheese you kept too long or wrapped too tightly. Or E. coli swamping some tomatoes or fresh sprouts that weren't handled properly.

If you've already seen Zombieland (if you haven't, you should), then you'll also know that eating meat contaminated with "mad cow" prions can lead to something like mad human disease that will cause all of us, at least all who enter this very sick romp of a flick, to become poisoned in a whole new zombie-esque way that gives "dining out" a whole new meaning.

At least that scenario still has some of the romanticism and imagination and spunk of the golden age of poisoning clinging to it like a spider web sticking to your eyelashes on your neighbour's porch this Halloween.

May all your treats be edible.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award winning freelance writer who could seriously get into the black art of poisoning.