Don't eat Made in China pine nuts!
This isn't some xenophobic drive to protect the strategic Tuscan pine nut industry, it's a warning against pine mouth.
For the past couple of days I've had a weird metallic taste in my mouth. It's worst after I eat food: a sort of tacky, astringent copper-coin flavour that's impossible to get rid of. I don't know if this is psychosomatic, but it's not unlike the taste of pine nuts that have gone off.
From what I can see, this is a recognised condition that some people pick up from eating pine nuts. The little research that's been done seems to point to the Chinese White Pine as the source of the suspect nuts, though to be fair it seems pretty unconfirmed. This isn't some melamine-contamination China food scare: by all accounts the Chinese have been eating white pine nuts for millennia without problems. It's actually a slightly intriguing mystery that this condition wasn't really spotted until relatively recently.
Still, till further notice I'm going to be wary of Chinese pine nuts when I'm grinding my pesto. The condition supposedly goes away after a few days or weeks at most, and it seemed to peak last night. But while it's more an irritant than a debilitant, I'm not in a hurry to get it again.
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