Some foods bite back.
For one, have you ever noticed that pineapple makes your mouth feel a little sore? You aren’t imagining it, and it isn’t just a kind of fruity acid akin to the citric acid of lemons and limes. Pineapples actually contain a digestive enzyme that sets about trying to digest your mouth as you chow down – the stuff if literally trying to eat you.
Of course, pineapples don’t have even the slightest hint of sentience with which to deliberately do you some harm, and some creatures put up a fight in a more literal sense.
Fans of the original Korean version of Oldboy will have seen Choi Min-sik wolf down a live octopus for your viewing pleasure, and it’s fair to say the delicacy wasn’t keen on its grim demise. Crazy as that scene might seem to Western audiences, eating live molluscs isn’t all that rare in Korea.
There’s another live delicacy that resists its fate to such a degree that it could even kill you if you don’t eat it fast enough.
Known as ‘sannakji’, the dish involves slicing up a live octopus and serving it while it’s wriggling its last. It sounds pretty nasty regardless, but growing evidence for octopuses’ intelligence makes it even harder to stomach for the meat-averse among us.
Anyway, this fresh-as-they-come delicacy isn’t without its defence mechanisms, namely the suckers on its eight legs. They’re remarkably strong, as anyone who’s ever had the frightening experience of having an octopus latch onto their arm will tell you, and they’re still capable of suction after dismemberment.
Because of this, there have been incidences of diners dying whilst eating their sannakji. As they swallow it, live pieces can attach themselves to the inside of your throat, potentially choking you. The Heimlich Manoeuvre won’t do you much good either.
However, when prepared correctly and eaten with the appropriate care, sannakji is safe to eat.
Chefs must remove the mucus from the octopus tentacles first, simply because it’s a bit gross, before cutting it into pieces small enough that they won’t block a diner’s airways.
When done correctly, this minimises the choking hazard.
It’s one of a few potentially-lethal delicacies that require a lot of skill and craft to cook safely.
Fugu, otherwise known as pufferfish, is a Japanese delicacy that can be extremely dangerous. Its internal organs are packed with the lethal tetrodotoxin poison which has no known antidote. For context, it’s 10,000 times more poisonous than cyanide.
In order to cook it safely, the chef must extract these organs without accidentally piercing them or otherwise allowing the tetrodotoxin to leak out onto the meat. Training to be a fugu-ready chef takes years of steady training but, even then, the stress of cooking one of those things must be absolutely insane.
I’ll just stick to the fish fingers, I reckon.
Featured Image Credit: Raphye Alexius/Getty ImagesTopics: News, Health, Diet, Restaurants and bars
Rachael Davis