Question: hello everybody my question to you is how do you find out if food is dangerous or not.
Comments
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Hi moonta,
I see from your profile that you like Einstein and cars.
Did you know that a car’s battery only works because of relativistic effects (i.e. stuff that happens because of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that is beyond pre-Einstein science)? So “Einstein starts your car”, literally.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/01/einstein_starts_your_car_1.html
(Note this doesn’t mean that these batteries didn’t work before Einstein published his Theory: just that nobody could prove how and why they worked.)
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taste it and if you’re dead its dangerous…
jks 🙂 🙂
juday97
Hi moonta,
Food, by definition, is not supposed to be dangerous stuff.
If you mean how do we find out if some new chemical (a new drug, a new food additive, etc.) is dangerous, what happens is that, first, chemists do their stuff to work out, using their theories, whether it is dangerous, and second, it is tested on different animals to see if it harms them. If it’s shown to be safe for animals, it is then sometimes tested on people (who volunteer to do this).
If you mean how do we know if food has nasty bacteria in it that can cause food poisoning, the answer is that we don’t. We try to stop it happening by keeping the food clean, but as you’ve seen from what happened in Germany a few weeks ago, “food poisoning” can happen. It isn’t the food itself that’s dangerous, but the nasty things that are not supposed to be in it.
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Hi moonta!
The most dangerous ‘food’ I can think of is Fugu or Blowfish. Its a deadly fish but to the Japanese, its a luxury to be able to eat Fugu. There are special ways you have to prepare it and if it is cooked by a chef that is not very experienced, it can still be very dangerous and people die every year from eating it!
Mushrooms are the other thing that can be dangerous – because there are so many types of mushroom. Some are completely harmless whereas others are completely not…!
Some of these foods would have been discovered by trial and error so throughout history when people tried to cook these foods and then died, or got very sick, the village would know not to touch that food!
These days our food is much more regulated and monitored for dangerous ingredients.
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good question!
as others have said, food is not really dangerous with respect to poisoning here in australia.
that said, dangerous is different for different people and situations.
peanuts are fatal for some people….not for others – in that instance peanuts are dangerous, but not to everyone!
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