The Terrible World of Food

Winter is here, and as the air turns crisp and the streets shimmer with frost, all is well in the world of food. Or, DANGER! DANGER! BEWARE OF THE DANGER! The air is thick with the screams of the fallen! The streets shimmer with blood... no, wait, that is actually frost. Still, there seems to have been something of a run of serious lunch-based mishaps in the news, as though food has gained sentience and is plotting to destroy us all. Don’t worry though, as we’re here to set your mind at ease through analysis and sarcastic comments.

DON’T EAT COCKROACHES

We’ll start with the tale of Edward Archbold, a Florida man who wanted a python. Rather than simply buying said python and getting on with his life, he entered an insect-eating competition to win one. After guzzling down dozens of live cockroaches, amongst other delights, he died, but not before spewing a load of the cockroaches back up in homage to every bug-based horror movie death ever.

The interesting thing about the poor fella is that, according to various pathologists and insect experts, cockroaches aren’t inherently poisonous. All the other contestants in this bizarre event were perfectly fine afterwards. Having said that, this is a story about grown men eating cockroaches in order to win a snake, so ‘perfectly fine’ might be a stretch.

SURVIVAL ADVICE

Don’t eat things which aren’t generally considered food. This applies to both organic (insects, trees, other people) and man-made (socks with food on them, plastic apples, cutlery) items.

DON’T DRINK DEADLY CHEMICALS

So you’ll have read the story of the 18-year-old girl who drank a cocktail containing liquid nitrogen, and gone through the standard enthralled-amazed-saddened emotional rollercoaster that those kind of stories rely on. Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s Professor Peter Barham, physicist at the University of Bristol: “As with any very hot or very cold liquid proper safety measures must be taken – just as no-one would drink boiling water or oil or pour it over themselves, so no-one should ingest liquid nitrogen.”

There you go, simple and obvious words from the scientist. But the drinking of dangerous chemicals is not what this is really about, oh no. No, this is about this writer's ongoing beef with Heston Blumenthal. You see, if Heston hadn’t spent the last few years mucking about with foams and chemicals and weird cooking methods while everyone remarked on how clever and benign his mad behaviour seemed, then maybe pubs wouldn’t be mucking about with canisters full of potentially deadly liquids. We’re not saying that Heston’s to blame for liquid-nitrogen-cocktail-gate, obviously. He clearly wasn't involved.

SURVIVAL ADVICE

If your drink appears to be smoking, or suddenly changing from liquid to gas, don’t drink it. If your drink contains hazardous chemicals, don’t drink it. If you see Heston Blumenthal, run away.

EXPLOSIONS AND NOXIOUS GASSES

Seeing as it’s fireworks season, we thought we’d throw on some knockabout chatter about the fact that gummy bears burst into flames when you drop them in fertiliser chemicals, and wouldn’t it be funny but dangerous if that happened tee-hee-hee. Then we learned about Surstromming.

Surstromming is a Swedish ‘delicacy’ of pickled and rotting herring which straddles the borderline between ‘quaint and outdated local snack’ and ‘chemical weapon’. It is banned by several airlines due to unconfirmed reports of its combustibility and entirely confirmed reports of it smelling like bin bags roasting on an open fire. Last month a Stockholm apartment block was evacuated following a gas leak that turned out to be nothing more than a can of the stuff being opened in the top flat. Noxious. We sadly don’t have the contacts of the globe-trotting travel section, so we can’t verify this, but if you’re ever in Scandinavia, be on the lookout. If any Scandinavian food envoys wish to send us to Sweden to be repulsed by their fish, they know where to find us. Back to something we can verify, though. Take a bottle of Coke, throw in some Mentos, and stand back. The thing should erupt in a firework-esque stream of foam and stain the area so badly that cleansing by fire might be your only recourse. Just don’t stand looking directly down the bottle as you begin, or you’ll break your glasses/jaw. Are you sensing a recurring, ‘food won’t get you if you just behave like a sensible human’-type theme here?!?

SURVIVAL ADVICE

Prick your baked potatoes before putting them in the oven. Release your Coke bottle rockets in an open area. Learn Swedish.