175 | Phyto-whatsit toxin? | Smoked Meat Safety | Announcing Our New and Improved Index
I poisoned my family on New Year
This is The Rotten Apple, an inside view on food fraud and food safety for professionals, policy-makers and purveyors. Subscribe for insights, latest news and emerging trends straight to your inbox each Monday.
Legume poisoning;
Best back catalogue ever: Announcing our new and improved index;
What I’m reading (misinformation, authenticity and smoked meat);
Food Safety News and Resources, including 2 “not a good look” recalls;
I poisoned my family (just for fun);
Food fraud news, emerging issues and recent incidents.
OMG you guys! It’s World Pulses Day!
Who doesn’t love a legume? Well some people don’t, obviously… but…
Hi, welcome to issue 175 where I have a legume love-in and learn about phytohaemagglutinin poisoning, to celebrate World Pulses Day. There’s even a slightly gross and not-100 percent safe-for-work story about a legume-related culinary mishap in this week’s ‘Just for Fun’.
On a more sombre note, in this week’s food safety news and resources there’s a link to a story about the deaths of three children in Pakistan who allegedly ate toxic fried snacks - it’s eerily similar to the situation in South Africa that I talked about a couple of weeks ago.
Have a great week,
Karen
P.S. Big shoutout to all the wonderful readers who renewed their subscriptions in the past month, and to 👏👏 Cameron from Australia 👏👏 who signed up to join their ranks. Thank you, I couldn’t do this without you.
Unveiling our new and improved back catalogue
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes this past month to update our index of articles. With 175 issues, each containing three or four articles, cataloguing them is no mean feat.
The articles are grouped by topic: food safety, food fraud, sustainable supply chains, food defence and more. The most popular topics, food safety and food fraud, are further divided into sub-topics, such as food safety microbial hazards and food fraud adulteration.
Each topic now has a page of its own, making it easier to find what you’re looking for.
The index is exclusively for paying subscribers but past issues are available on the website for everyone.
Legumes and legume poisoning
Gotta love a legume.
Legumes are the plants, seeds and fruit of plants in the family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae). Legume seeds used as a grain for human food are sometimes called pulses.
Legumes include soy beans, kidney beans, green beans, chickpeas, peanuts, lentils, lupins, mesquite, carob, tamarind, alfalfa, and clover.
Legumes are nutritious and an excellent source of plant-based protein, making them ideal in areas where meat and dairy foods are not accessible.
Humans have been eating wild pulses for 70,000 years, and cultivating legumes since the seventh millennium B.C. Famous legume-containing dishes include dal (India), falafel (Middle East), kuli-kuli (West Africa), laping (Tibet), minestrone (Italy), pease pudding (Britain), refried beans (Mexico), succotash (USA).
As well as being important for human food, legumes are used for forage in animal raising, with alfalfa, clover and other legumes sown in pasture to be grazed by livestock.
Did you know: Most legumes are nitrogen-fixing plants, due to the presence of Rhizobia bacteria within their roots. The bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonium ions, making it available to plants – a form of natural fertiliser.
Poisonous component of legumes: phytohaemagglutinin
Despite being nutritious and an environmentally friendly source of protein, legumes have a couple of red flags when it comes to food safety.
The first is phytohaemagglutinin, a flavourless natural toxin, found in most raw beans and pulses.
See today’s Just for Fun for a first-person account of a phytohaemagglutinin poisoning event.
Phytohaemagglutinin is a flavourless toxin, found in most raw beans and pulses. Red kidney beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) contain significant amounts, and if not properly cooked can cause acute symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhoea from as few as 4 or 5 beans.
Other legumes contain lower concentrations of phytohaemagglutinin. For example, broad beans (Vicia faba) contain just 5 to 10 percent of the amount of phytohaemagglutinin in red kidney beans.
Phtyohaemagglutinin is a protein that can cause mammalian red blood cells to agglutinate, and can interfere with metabolism in addition to causing abdominal distress. It also prevents the absorption of minerals from the diet, including calcium, iron, phosphorous and zinc.
It can be destroyed by boiling for at least ten minutes. Soaking pulses for at least 5 hours in fresh water before cooking is also recommended.
Interestingly, multiple sources online say that cooking beans at lower temperatures will not only fail to destroy phytohaemagglutinin but will actually increase its toxicity. (I couldn’t find the original peer-reviewed source for this).
Food safety information sheets warn consumers not to cook raw beans in a slow cooker or crockpot as the cooking temperatures may not be high enough to destroy the toxin. It's also advised to be wary of preparing beans at high altitudes where the boiling point is lower.
Additionally, dry heat may not be effective at destroying the toxin. A British family needed urgent medical care due to gastrointestinal symptoms, including vomiting blood after eating a homemade dish in which dried Greek butter beans were used in place of the traditional dried broad beans in ta'amia (falafel) and shallow fried instead of traditional deep frying. Butter beans have higher quantities of phytohaemagglutinin than broad beans.
Phytohaemagglutinin poisoning is generally not life-threatening, and recovery is usually spontaneous, though hospitalisation is occasionally required. All people, regardless of age and gender are equally susceptible, with the severity of symptoms relating to the dose ingested.
Fun fact
Mexican jumping beans are a real thing (though not a real bean, and therefore not a legume, making their presence in this article a bit iffy).
The beans are seed pods that hop when warmed due to the presence of a moth larva inside the pod. The jumping is thought to be an evolutionary trait that gives the larvae a better chance of finding shade and thereby surviving sunny days.
Other food safety considerations for legumes
Many leguminous foods contain antinutrients, including phytic acid, which interrupts vitamin D metabolism and thereby affects bone growth. Phytic acid survives the cooking process in common beans and soybeans.
The antinutrient soybean agglutinin is found in soybeans. It chelates minerals such as iron and zinc and so affects the body’s ability to absorb them from food. It is moderately heat stable, with 20 minutes of boiling reportedly leaving residual activity of 47 – 77%.
Soybean agglutinin has been accused of inducing inflammatory reactions but the evidence is complicated, with it appearing able to induce local inflammation but also exhibiting anti-inflammatory effects when present in circulating blood.
Allergies to peanuts and soybean, both legumes, are among the most common and most severe food allergies. There can be co-sensitivities and co-allergies between legumes, with common patterns of clinical cross-reactivity being peanut and lupin, peanut and soy, and chickpea and lentil.
Finally - not a food safety thing but I had to mention it! - flatulence. Pulses are rich in oligosaccharides which are digested by bacteria in the human gut, producing gases including methane which are released as flatulence. Brrrt!
Takeaways for food professionals
Soak and cook pulses (beans) thoroughly by boiling for at least ten minutes in fresh water (100 °C) to remove phytohaemagglutinin. Slow cooking and dry cooking should be avoided. Canned beans are safe to consume without further cooking.
Be aware of the presence of antinutrients including phytates and soybean agglutinin in pulses and soybeans.
Within allergen programs be aware of possible cross-reactivity between legumes including peanut and lupin, peanut and soy, and chickpea and lentil.
Finally, watch out for the farts.
What I’m Reading
When Misinformation Puts Food (and Science) in the Firing Line | RQA Group via LinkedIn
Prompted by the inexplicable moral outrage which sprung out of Bovaer, a methane-suppressing cow feed additive that sparked fear and conspiracy theories among milk drinkers, this article by long-time supporter Gill Dando of RQA Group (love your work, Gill!) includes examples of past misinformation and how food businesses can respond to them.
Food authenticity – mitigating food crime risks and threats | New Food Magazine
This article is a detailed introduction to, and overview of, food fraud for food professionals. Published in New Food Magazine and written by a leading UK food safety advocate, it explains the cost and impact of food fraud, broad approaches to protecting your food business from risks and resources to help. Recommended.
Unprecedented USDA action on meat smoking - IFSQN
A fascinating discussion on the safety and lawfulness (or not) of hot smoked meat in the US, UK, Europe and Canada, begun by a smoked meat manufacturer who thinks they are doing everything by the book but who got pinged pretty badly by the US regulator (FSIS of USDA) for contamination with smoke-related particles and/or chemicals.
Food Safety News and Resources
My food safety news and resources are expertly curated from around the globe and free from ads, fluff and filler. This week: has the South African epidemic of child poisonings spread to another country?
Click the preview below to read.
I poisoned my wife and her family on New Years with freaking dried beans (just for fun)
This is the story told by a man who made soup on the last day of 2021 and accidentally poisoned his family. As told by him on Reddit.
“The title says it all. I made an Italian wedding soup. Usually, I use a can of cannellini beans. It’s quick, it’s simple, it’s tasty, the internet told me to.
But my wife bought special beans. What makes these beans special? Probably the freaking marketing, but they were on the shelf, dried, in a small plastic bag touting the wonderful properties of beans. She bought them at a bean store in San Francisco. Only in SF could there be a freaking bean store during a pandemic.
Great fanfare was made over this package of beans.
We soaked them for like an hour, tossed them in when we’d normally toss in the can of beans. Cooked another 15 minutes, and served. They were… crunchy, but the broth flavor was really good, so we figured “meh, eat this bowl, let it keep cooking.” Kinda like slightly undercooked rice, you know?
I did not know.
My wife’s sister went first. There was unexplained running during a movie.
My wife went second. Two down.
I’m now sitting on the couch by myself with the pets listening to my brother-in-law make pterodactyl noises with distant cough/vomit sounds in the background from my wife and sister-in-law like a gross harmony.
We’re out of toilets to puke in. I’m feeling about a 7 out of 10. I have yet to determine if time is a friend or an enemy for me tonight.
Turns out, dried beans need to be soaked for 5 hours, then boiled, and always eaten very tender.
Thank you for this final lesson, 2021. “Purging the past” jokes are being received poorly by all those involved.
Anyways, it’s 9:30 pm here. Happy new year. Here’s to freaking 2022.”
Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, research, emerging risks and incident reports
📌 Food Fraud News 📌
In this week’s food fraud news:
📌 Olive oil relief;
📌 Supplements + tariffs = ouch;
📌 Egg fraud;
📌 Growing threats to meat and poultry.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Rotten Apple to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.