When it comes to enjoying life and living life on the edge in equal measure, there’s nothing quite like a fine evening of dining that might end you up in the ICU or even a casket. We know some foods can be ridiculously fatal – thankfully often related to the way it’s prepared – yet we can’t resist to eat them over and over again. Most fatal foods have been banned at this point, but there’s a bunch of them that you can still get your hands on relatively easily. Just a quick note: eat the more exotic ones in a restaurant and don’t take the risk of preparing these yourself.
Cassava
Cassava is a pretty versatile food but it can’t be consumed raw as it contains cyanide. If it’s not prepared properly, the toxins aren’t removed from it so eating it can easily lead to stuff like paralysis and even death.
Green Potatoes
Green potatoes are basically regular potatoes that have been kept in a too light environment or otherwise stored improperly. You can most of the time still eat the potato if you remove the green parts, but better not to risk it, right?
Hákarl
This Icelandic delicacy is basically the cured meat of a shark. The way the food is cured and processed causes it to release huge amounts of ammonia and even leads to it smelling like cleaning product. It does make the meat edible, which it isn’t when its raw. So basically don’t touch it if it doesn’t smell like detergent, which is the exact opposite rule of when you want to drink detergent.
Kidney Beans
I know you’re thinking “wait, I have beans all the time and I’m fine”. Well yes, you are. It’s when you eat them raw or undercooked (which shouldn’t happen if you buy them in a store) that stuff gets dangerous. Even a few raw ones can cause food poisoning symptoms.
Ghost Peppers
These bad boys are so spicy that the major risk lies in having too many of them. While one probably won’t kill you but just make you feel like you’re dying, having multiple ghost peppers can actually cause very severe gastro-intestinal issues. If you eat pounds of them, they’ll just flat-out kill you.
Alfalfa Sprouts
No matter how adorable this food might look, this can turn your fresh salad into a one way trip to the hospital. Sprouts thrive in environments that are warm and humid, which is also where most bacteria thrive. While cooking manages to take care of all your E Coli and salmonella worries, the problem with these cute little sprouts is that they’re often eaten raw.
Casu Marzu
This translates literally to “putrid cheese”. Can we just stop it there? No, not good enough? Okay, let me make it more clear that you shouldn’t eat this: it’s sheep milk cheese with live maggots in it. In fact, the cheese is only considered spoiled when the maggots are dead. While the cheese in itself isn’t that dangerous, the problem is that the maggots can survive digestion like Boba Fett did when he fell into the Sarlacc pit, and cause a nasty parasitic infection.
Fugu
Yes, the infamous pufferfish meat. It’s so difficult to prepare properly that it’s actually illegal to prepare it if you’re not properly trained for it. There’s no real middle ground since pretty much every part of the pufferfish meat can kill you if the preparation isn’t up to snuff.
San-Nakji
Leave it to the Asians to make weird dangerous things even weirder and more dangerous. There’s no real sensitive way to put this, so let me just say it: a live octopus gets its tentacles chopped off and since their nervous system is top of the line, the tentacles still wriggle on your plate. That’s how you know an animal got butchered a couple of minutes earlier so you could have a weird food. The risk of the still-moving tentacles is that the suction cups can stick in your throat and choke you to death from the inside. But you’ll still go in a less painful way than the octopus did.
