Photo: GiselleaiDubner got egg on his face earlier this summer when he called out The Economist for a supposed typo that turned out not to be one.
Sometimes, of course, consequential mistakes do make it through, and a simple correction isn’t always the answer.
Tens of thousands of copies of a Swedish food magazine have been recalled this week after an error in an apple cake recipe sent four of its readers to the hospital with nutmeg poisoning.
The recipe should have called for two pinches of nutmeg. Instead, the magazine went to press telling chefs to use 20 whole nutmeg nuts. That was enough nutmeg for at least four adults to seek medical help for headaches and dizziness.
In large doses, nutmeg is a mild hallucinogen.
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How many college kids end up in the hospital this weekend with nutmeg poisoning? I know my friends in college did much stupider things…
Where can I buy some Nutmeg futures?
UK celebrity chef Anthony Worral Thompson managed to make a similar mistake earlier this year, but with a much more potent poison: http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Celebrity-chef39s-recipe–the.4353066.jp
Nutmeg in high doses is actually a very powerful, long lasting hallucinogen with strong disassociative effects. The experience reports in the Erowid vaults(www.erowid.org) are harrowing. Not what I’d call a recreational drug, to say the least.
my cookbook has the typo that hash is good for you
Not only did that cake likely taste horrible, but those chefs must have spent hours grating 20 nutmeg nuts into a form usable for baking.
Typos are sometimes forgivable because they don’t have an externality cost on others, but this typo was different, it had an externality cost. It was supposed that only 2 nutmeg nuts be used and they wrote 20. This simple mistake caused many problems to some people.
An externality charge should be placed on the magazine, because it caused people to go to the hospital and to go through a hard time, meaning it caused others some problems. Since an externality charge is a tax charged when something one does damages the lives of people around, this is the perfect example of when an externality charge should be charged.
If you didn’t know any better or did not cook I can see it happening.
I remember a newly wed who worked in my office telling how she made her husband his favorite, garlic shrimp stir fry. The probles was she thought a clove of garlic was the whole bulb. So instead of making shrimp with 8 cloves she used 8 whole garlic bulbs. Her husband who owned a restaurant only committed it was a bit spicy and ate it anyway.
Ahhh new love you can’t beat it.