Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where today’s topic is…not so fun. And given how much of the world is a bummer right now, I just wanted to let you know that upfront. To further clarify: today’s topic is going to focus on two food-based illnesses that have claimed multiple lives. Hopefully no one you know, and definitely no one I know, so this isn’t some “too close for comfort” snapshot of tragedy, as some of our more downer posts may have been.  So there is distance, and I will strive to imbue that distance with some levity. I just wanted to give the head’s up that if you’re in an emotionally fragile or anxious state, this might not be the best post for you. Part of the reason I’m writing this is that the topics it covered gave me a couple days of concern. So, that out of the way, let’s explain how I decided if I couldn’t have the fun I wanted, neither could any of you.

A Small Preface, and Plausible Connection

Long-time readers of the site will know that, when working as intended, the site tries to have cohesion on a weekly basis: Thursday’s posts are generally at least tangentially connected to Monday’s, and when they aren’t, it’s because I consumed a new bit of media or found a new article and wanted to talk about it. Well, TODAY’S post is a little different, because it’s…really just a series of implosions. As noted on Tuesday, this week’s recipe was a spur-of-the-moment addition, and there’s not a ton more to discuss about Lettuce wraps, other than, at BEST, the interesting alignment of the wrap as a food tool being more prevalent in equatorial spaces: tortillas in Mexico, the many flat breads of India and the Middle East and Mediterranean. But… that’s probably not as complicated or interesting as I think it is.

For a remarkable while, one of my favorite thriller novels was a book about how these pyramids were actually release valves on a planet-wide machine built by Atlanteans before a solar storm wiped out their civilization.

So I was going to do a Haute for Teacher, and realized that it made more sense to delay that specific post for reasons you’ll learn in about 2 weeks. Then I was going to do a Cookbook review of a new cookbook I got…but it chafed at me that I’d be reviewing a cookbook without a recipe associated with it. And it ESPECIALLY chafed because the new cookbook is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s “The Wok”, and given the respect I hold for Kenji’s work, and his discussions on harmful associations with Asian food culture, It felt in very poor taste to associate that cookbook with a knock-off of P.F. Chang’s, itself a heavily Americanized version of Pan-Asian cooking. (Did you know they’d added Japchae to the P.F. Chang menu? And Pad Thai? I am drawn to the question of “what does P.F. Chang’s Pad Thai taste like” in the same way that the idea of like, an album of Katy Perry doing Prince covers would draw me: “What fresh hell is this?”)

Casting herself as the Little Red Corvette is the obvious choice.

My first two ideas burned, I had to think about what else I’d been interested in, culinarily. And the only things that popped up were 1. That I was a little bummed I hadn’t really done anything for the play I’m currently in, and 2. A couple recent Bacillus cereus news stories that gave me anxiety. And I realized those two points have a connection! So I decided to write about that! So what was the connection? Oho, wouldn’t you like to-

The Hidden Horrors of Grains

Yeah, okay, it was the title of the post. Both (potentially) have to do with grains.

Specifically, and the easier one to address, bacilius cereus is a bacterium that can cause food poisoning. I THOUGHT its name was an explanation of its origin, as it’s standard to get it from grains (“cereal”) but it actually comes from the Latin for ‘waxy”, as it makes waxy nodes when grown in petri dishes. It comes from leaving cooked grains out at room temperature: the bacteria is actually, basically, everywhere, but it gets killed off in cooking…but its spores survive, and often become active in cooked grains due to dense carbs to feed on, moisture, and the right amount of pH and heat. (to kill these kind of spores, you need 5 minutes at above-boiling temps to kill off the spores if you’re like, steaming or boiling something, and an HOUR at 120+ degrees if you’re like, frying or roasting it.)  As such, it’s very hard to kill in cooked grains (since you’d have to OVER-cook them), and if you leave said grains out for extended periods of time, things can get dangerous. (Two big sources are like, pasta dishes on buffet lines, and fried rice or noodles that sit under a hot lamp for a while. Basically, if Panda Express gave you food poisoning, it’s probably this guy’s fault.)

That or undercooked shrimp.

There were a couple semi-recent tragic deaths: a college student meal-prepper left out pasta overnight, didn’t seek medical attention when he got sick, and passed in his sleep (unchecked, the bacteria can survive fairly well in your intestine, and can cause liver failure.), another college student just last month lost both his legs, and all of his fingers (while the disease typically only causes vomiting and diarrhea, as noted, it can cause organ failure)

Which is terrifying news, of course, but there are highlights: if you have the meningococcal vaccine, it will help protect you against the worst potential outcomes (the roommate of the student who lost his legs was also poisoned by the food they ate, but suffered much less devastating effects.) The other important factor is to be careful with cooked grains like rice and pasta: if it’s been left out for more than 4 hours, throw it away.  Don’t try and save money by holding onto them: it’s RICE and PASTA, two of the cheapest carb sources in existence. Don’t lose your leg over $5 of lo mein.

This does look…appealing, but I do love WALKING.

That’s actually the predominance of the immediate bummer-factor of the post: bacilius cereus is something that could hurt you if you’re not careful. The OTHER thing I wanted to talk about is MUCH less likely to, but it’s also more interesting…

By The Pricking of My Thumbs

So, the show I am currently in for the next two weekends is the revival/conclusion of our run on The Crucible, which we started in March 2020, and were shut down during. So we’re getting to finish out our scheduled 4 weeks. Which made for a big of a thorny problem, culinarily speaking: there’s really only one meal of importance in The Crucible, and that’s a rabbit stew that’s mostly in the show so the main character can lie to his wife. (He tastes the stew, doesn’t like it, and seasons it while she is out of the room. When she returns and serves it, he compliments it by saying it is “well-seasoned”.) Rabbit is not a meat I am opposed to eating, but it is one I have never worked with, and thus I was hesitant to try it.  But, there is another connection between food and The Crucible, and it’s called “ergot theory”.

Ergot, if you don’t know, is a kind of fungus that infects certain grains, most famous rye. And it is…complicated stuff. Like “Rye ergot is one of the sources we derive LSD from” ,”ergot can cause an illness that is functionally identical to leprosy”, ”ergot is/was sometimes used as folk medicine to aid in child-birth” levels of complicated. Because of these factors, in 1976, it was proposed that ergot poisoning (or “ergotism”) might be the reason the Salem witch trials happened.

Get ready for a surprising level of depth of discussion about grain rot.

The theory goes that, given the weather preceding the Witch Trials, it’s entirely possible that the rye harvest that year was contaminated with ergot. Given New England social norms, it was more likely at that time that rye bread would be served to the lower class. Rich people got white bread, poor people ate brown. It was ALSO more likely that families would, in lean times, preference feeding their sons over young daughters, due to cultural and financial reasons. This made it more likely that teen girls in New England at the time would be malnourished; in turn making them more likely to have stomach ulcers…meaning things in their stomach were more likely to easily pass into their blood stream.

Thus, it’s possible that the girls in Salem had legitimate medical reasons to be displaying strange symptoms (fainting, convulsion, fevers, even bleeding wounds or catatonic states) due to being POISONED by their food supply, which was relieved when they were brought into the company of the rich elites of the town, such as the various priests called to investigate them, and were able to eat better/purer food.

This dude is indirectly responsible for 2 dozen deaths.

It’s by no means established fact: it’s very hard to “prove” this kind of theory 290+ years after the fact., and it does have problems: for instance. ergot and ergot poisoning is not widely known to the modern world because we have stamped it out. You only really need to know about it if you grow rye (or, I guess, make LSD). But it is one of the first recorded “things we know fuck up our food.” We’ve had notes on this thing since 600 BC. There was a Holy Order of Monks, the Brothers of St Anthony, who by the time of the Salem Witch Trials had been around for 600 years, whose ENTIRE PURPOSE was “handle this specific disease”. This is a thing that, in theory, the local doctor should have known about. Also, none of the girls had limbs swell up or fall off, a failing common symptom of the disease, so they must have gotten VERY lucky in the precise timing the transition between “infected rye bread with their families” and “clean bread with the wealthy”. There are other issues: logically, the girls’ families should have had similar, though less intense effects, and several of the displayed issues such as convulsions and catatonic states are ‘timed’ wrong. (Like, you don’t stop having a medically-induced convulsion because one person touches you. Nor do you and two other girls all spasm at the same time.) And there’s a lot of complex argument that essentially boils down to “the data is too fuzzy to be truly confident about this idea”. But it’s worth noting, if we can slip into the Golden Mean fallacy for a second, that one or two minor cases of ergot poisoning could easily have been the trigger events for a broader mass hysteria: maybe only one or two girls was legitimately sick, and that just gave the others an excuse/put the idea in their head for them to manifest, either malevolently or psychosomatically.

I actually play one of the people in this picture. Specifically, the dude looming behind the table looking pissed at everyone.

We don’t know, and likely can’t know. But it is an interesting idea, one that would take at least some of the villainy from the girls of the Witch Trials. If there WERE real initial medical events that were scary and confusing, it makes more sense that they lash out at people they don’t like, or who they think don’t like them. They were likely, in the end, still settling petty feuds, but at least SOME of them would have had legitimate reasons to believe they were also doing the right thing.

Now, does that diminish the dramatic stakes of the events? Hard to say. On the one hand, it’s easy to argue that this sort of thing exculpates the girls. But I have another take, and it’s one that mixes empathy with…something else.

An Unexpected Resoluton?

Another study has recently been making headlines, and it’s still quite fresh, so take this comparison/analysis with a grain (heh) of salt, but it notes that over 54% of America has suffered SOME DEGREE of ‘brain damage’/reduced development, thanks to childhood exposure to lead and lead fumes. That the average American is 3 IQ points ‘dumber’ than they ‘should be’ due to this. (Though IQ is a very fraught system based on relatively flawed and frequently racist criteria, we can still use it as a semi-consistent measure within itself.) And this effect is exaggerated with age and lifestyles: modern lead exposure limits are an EIGHTH of what they were for children born in the 60’s. The study indicated that those born in the 60’s and 70’s likely lost around twice the average, and those who spent more time around cars burning leaded fuels (mechanics, truck drivers, etc) exposed their children to more. Now, this has been immediately co-opted to political arguments (as it always would be), but I think it connects to another idea. Robert Anton Wilson, a fascinating man to study, has a quote that’s been making the rounds online recently: “Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.” Which I think is a meaningful sentence to remember not just for each other, but for yourself: It is easy, and flip, to hear that millions of Americans have experienced lead poisoning that made them dumber than they should be, and say “so that explains why they voted for (CANDIDATE I DON'T LIKE.)” But…who says they’re in the 54% and you aren’t? Who says you’re not BOTH in it?

I 100% do not know if this is a protest that I would agree or disagree with. Are these anti-vaxxers? Pro Special Counsel? I have no idea, other than “these hats feel fairly rural”.

If you accept the ergot theory, part of the basis of it was a systemic problem in resource distribution: the girls got the short-end of the stick, and that created the toxic paradigm that poisoned them, which paradoxically empowered them to, in turn, drive their community to kill 19 people. Were those 19 people the ones in power creating the systems that abused them? No, they were (predominantly) other women, and society’s other outcasts. We can consider the deeds of the girls with some mercy, if this poisoning did drive them. But as the Crucible says “it seems once you were afflicted, now you afflict others.” Or, in Nietzche’s words: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” Being wounded does not empower one to wound others.

A great many of the struggles we face today are hurt people hurting others. Whether they do so because of lead poisoning, ergotism, narcissism, or a mythologized idea of what their nation should be, and the forces that have torn it down. QAnon ravages the American Right not because it is particularly persuasive, but because it explains their suffering in terms they can understand, and it builds a narrative as inescapable as Salem courts. They are hurt, and lashing out. Their towns and neighborhoods poisoned over decades by a blight as subtle as rye-rot: neglect. Lack of infrastructure and lack of community make them feel alone and besieged, just as Abigail Williams comes to believe her own stories of self-righteousness. Putin invades Ukraine because he feels the West shames and threatens his nation, brought low by the fall of the Soviet Union. In an almost perverse twist, one of the suggested punishments for Russia is removal from the UN Security Council, on the argument that the seat is guaranteed to the Soviet Union, not the Russian Federation. We do not forgive Putin, even if we can understand his actions. He may be wounded, but so are the millions he victimizes. The girls of Salem may have been poisoned, but 24 died at their word, and hundreds were imprisoned.

A FOUR YEAR OLD went to jail. An EIGHTY year old was CRUSHED.

Hatred and abuse beget violence. Neglect begets rot. In countries, cooked grains, rye bread, and young girls. It is only through attention, kindness, and prevention that we can stop these sicknesses from spreading. We are all the walking wounded, but if you can walk, you can make splints, and bandages. You can help others to heal. And this we must do. Or we will all hang together.  

MONDAY: I THINK I’M GOING TO MAKE BOXTY, BECAUSE IT’S IRISH, SIMPLE, AND AS LONG AS I DON’T GO TOO DEEP INTO THE WHOLE “FAMINE” BUSINESS, I CAN’T IMAGINE IT ENDS UP AS HEAVY AS THIS. OTHERWISE, I MIGHT DO ALCOHOLIC CRÈME BRULEE, BECAUSE HOLY SHIT DO I NEED A DRINK.

THURSDAY: IT’S THE HOLIDAY ITSELF! I WILL…MAYBE DO LIKE, A TASTING? I DON’T KNOW.