Part 1: Poison in Food (Ethnic Biology)

Amanita mushroom - highly poisonous

Dr Abe V Rotor

There are poisonous plants and animals found in nature. But there are those, which ethnic societies learned to deal with the poison they contain, and having removed it, eat them without any apparent harm. One example is nami (Dioscorea hispida), a relative of ubi and tugui'. Hispidine is the poisonous principle that can be extracted by means of repeated washing. Like doubtful mushrooms, natives use dogs to test the safety of the product.

The field of ethnobotany and ethnozoology covers interesting studies on how the natives deal with poisonous plants and animals as food, from snakes and puffer fish to wild gabi and cassava. I learned in Ilocos for example, the way cassava is cooked in order to minimize its cyanide content. The tuber is cleaned and cut into pieces, then boiled with the pot cover removed to allow the deadly cyanogas to escape with the steam. By the way storing cassava tuber should be avoided because the cyanide that is concentrated in the bark spreads into the tuber. This is noticeable by the yellowish spots on the tuber. However, this is difficult to notice in the case of the yellow or glutinous varieties of cassava.

The blood of the tangingi is first drained before it is cut and cooked. There are people who are allergic to this kind of fish. The case of my youngest son, Leo Carlo 11, is a classical example of acute allergy to seafood. In the summer of 1998 while my family was vacationing in our hometown, Carlo ate a lot of talakitok eggs. By midnight, four hours after eating, we had to rush him to the hospital. He could hardly breathe, his eyes were virtually shut, and his body was covered with reddish spots. He was immediately given an antihistamine injection. It took him one week to fully recover.

Symptoms of food poisoning from natural toxins appear to have similar patterns, but mortality rates vary depending on the kind and amount of poison. When Red Tide first appeared in the early eighties in Maqueda Bay in Western Samar, there was very little knowledge about PSP (Paralytic Shellfish Poison). This poison accumulates in tahong or green mussel and talaba or oyster without apparent harming them. There were reported deaths due to eating tahong during the red tide season. The affect is on the nerves and muscles, and probably the brain.

Continued...