Dangerous Foods: 5 Global Delicacies That Can Kill You

Not every dangerous food is the result of poor judgement. Sometimes it’s the result of generations of people looking at something poisonous, toxic, or otherwise inedible and deciding to figure it out anyway.

Of all the food safety advice out there, perhaps the most fundamental is: if it can kill you, don’t eat it. Sounds sensible enough, doesn’t it? And not exactly difficult to adhere to either. Yet humanity has spent millennia treating that maxim as more of a suggestion than a rule.

Nature is not short on poisonous plants, toxic animals, and all manner of ingredients that seem determined not to become food under any circumstances. But did we say, “okay, fair enough,” and just leave them alone? No. That doesn’t much sound like us. We’ve somehow managed to weaponise the very particles that make up matter itself, remember?

Our response to nature’s quite reasonable insistence on not being eaten is to take things and subject them to all sorts of culinary experimentation in an effort to quash that resistance. Whether it’s boiling, fermenting, hanging them out to dry, or just straight up burying them, we’ve gone to great lengths indeed to pummel nature into submission for even having the audacity to want to live.

And you know what? We’ve largely succeeded in this regard. Here is a collection of dishes that, to an outsider, can seem completely baffling, but to the people who eat them, are beloved fixtures of their local cuisine.

Pangium Edule (Buah Keluak) – Southeast Asia

Starting a little closer to home, we’ve got our own entry in the “who thought this was a good idea?” list. You might think this sort of thing only happens elsewhere—in some far-off, vaguely “exotic” culinary tradition. I regret to inform you that questionable judgement is, in fact, universal. The seeds of the Pangium edule tree, more commonly known as buah keluak, contain hydrogen cyanide.

In their raw state, they’re decidedly not something you’d want to snack on. Fortunately, generations before us figured out that if you boil the seeds, bury them in ash and soil, and then leave them to ferment for weeks on end, something rather remarkable happens. The once-toxic seeds emerge black, earthy, and intensely savoury.

They’re perhaps best known for their role in Peranakan cooking, where they lend their distinctive flavour to dishes such as ayam buah keluak. Across the region, they also appear in stews and soups, adding a certain kind of richness you’d be hard-pressed to find in anything else.

There’s something admirable, in a way, about the persistence involved. Here you have a poisonous seed and instead of leaving it at that, somebody said, “how about we bury it for a month and see what happens?”

Sannakji – South Korea

Sannakji is a Korean dish made from small octopus that is chopped and served immediately. It’s not poisonous, unlike most of the entries on this list, but rather its danger comes from its vigorous propensity to resist ingestion. The octopus isn’t alive anymore, so that’s a plus at least, but its nervous system remains active for a short time afterwards, causing its tentacles to continue writhing across the plate.

It’s an arresting (read: unnerving) sight for sure, but the real risk comes from the suction cups. They can remain functional long enough to attach themselves to the inside of the mouth or throat, creating a genuine choking hazard if eaten carelessly. So if you ever decide you have the stomach for it, just make sure you have a healthy helping of patience to go with it—the kind required for very thorough chewing.

Hákarl – Iceland

Normally, you’d like your seafood to be as fresh as it possibly can. With the Greenland shark, however, it’s quite the opposite. You see, its flesh contains compounds that render it toxic when fresh, owing largely to the fact that the animal lacks a urinary system and, as a result, stores waste products directly in its tissues.

For most people, this would probably be where the conversation ends. The Icelanders, however, had other ideas. To make the meat safe to eat, it is traditionally buried beneath gravel and stones, where the pressure helps force out the toxic fluids. After that, it is hung to dry for several months, allowing the remaining compounds to break down over time.

The finished product, known as hákarl, has developed a reputation that extends well beyond Iceland’s remote borders. Depending on who you ask, it draws tantalising comparisons to things like very strong blue cheese, urine, and old rubber. Yet for many Icelanders, it remains an important culinary tradition, a holdover from a time when making use of every available food source was a matter of survival rather than any sort of curiosity.

Ackee – Jamaica

After reading everything else on this list, ackee seems almost reasonable in comparison. The bright red fruit is Jamaica’s national fruit and forms one half of the country’s national dish, ackee and saltfish. It has a creamy texture and a mild flavour that has been likened to scrambled eggs.

There is, however, one small caveat, as you’d expect from an entrant in this article. When unripe, ackee contains high levels of hypoglycin A, a toxin capable of causing severe illness, including vomiting, seizures, and potentially fatal drops in blood sugar. The condition became so associated with the fruit that it earned its own name: Jamaican Vomiting Sickness.

Thankfully though, the solution is remarkably straightforward. You just wait, that’s it. Once the fruit ripens and naturally splits open on the tree, the toxic compounds fall to safe levels and the flesh becomes suitable for consumption. One of the few foods on this list where patience is the primary safety precaution.

Cassava – Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia

Now you might be thinking, “Cassava? What? Isn’t that a staple food in a bunch of different countries?” And yes, you’re right, it feeds hundreds of millions of people across Africa, South America, and parts of Asia every day, but it’s also, in its raw state at least, mildly poisonous.

The roots of cassava harbour cyanogenic compounds that can release cyanide if eaten without proper processing. Symptoms of poisoning can range from dizziness and vomiting to, in severe cases, paralysis and death. And yet cassava is everywhere.

That’s because communities across the world have developed sophisticated methods to make it safe for eating. These include peeling, grating, soaking, fermenting, drying, and thoroughly cooking the root before eating it. In many places, these steps are so ingrained in daily life that they’re not thought of as “food safety procedures” anymore, so much as simply how cassava is prepared.

It’s this expertise that makes cassava as fascinating as it is. It isn’t some thrill seeker’s latest exploit or some niche, out-there delicacy, it’s just ordinary dinner for millions of people around the world, made possible by generations of accumulated knowledge about how to neutralise a natural toxin.

The takeaway

For most of us, there’s a temptation to dismiss these as little more than culinary dares. But that would be doing these ingredients a disservice, because what stands out about them isn’t so much the danger as the ingenuity behind them. 

Every one of these dishes exists because generations of people learned precisely how to handle an ingredient that might otherwise have been inedible. They discovered when to harvest, how long to ferment, what to bury, what to dry, and, perhaps most importantly, what not to do.

In that sense, these dishes are really monuments to the human capacity to adapt. Faced with something toxic, unpleasant, or seemingly impossible to eat, our ancestors didn’t always walk away. They started experimenting, more often than not. Ferment it. Dry it. Bury it. Boil it. Repeat the process until the thing that was trying to kill you becomes tonight’s dinner.

Opening image: JJ Jordan | Pexels