Searching for the "grey market" foods of New York City | Hacker News Reader

Searching for the "grey market" foods of New York City

hopesandfears.com

53 pointsfezz16 comments

Sassafrass isn't restricted because of cancer risk, it's restricted because it can be used as a precursor to MDMA (ecstasy).

Well it is a giant cancer risk. It contains large amounts of safrole and other carcinogenic compounds. When it was banned, in 1960 [0], MDMA wasn't yet as much of a "club drug" as it later became.

[0] https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/roc/content/profiles/safrole.p...

The article appears to contradict that sassfras contains large amounts of safrole:

>Safrole may be ingested in edible spices, including sassafras, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, star anise, ginger, black and white pepper, and from chewing betel quid; all of these substances contain naturally occurring safrole at low levels (IARC 1976, Archer and Jones 2002, HSDB 2009). Safrole is also present in herbal products derived from the sassafras tree, including the creole herb gumbo filé (Carlson and Thompson 1997). The concentration of safrole can be reduced during the cooking process (Farag and Abo-Zeid 1997). Based on common ingestion patterns, the estimated daily intake of safrole is 0.3 mg (Rietjens et al. 2005).

Also, does the author seriously not realize that sassafrass grows in pretty much every single park in the city? Not sure if he's just trolling for page views or what.

it's only restricted for being used in commercial foods/drinks... you can buy some on Ebay ... or grow some wherever the climate is good for it

Kind of a fun article, but I felt the premise of, "I track down illicit foods" was diluted somewhat when most of the foods turn out not to be illicit.

For some strange reason I felt compelled to read all the way to the end. But it didn't start off well; I think I would have been content to live out the rest of my life without hitting up Wikipedia to see what "cheese mites" were.

On contrare, I'm glad I did. Because I would've guessed something was up with cheese that looked like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mimolette1.jpg

My cheese doesn't so I'm... probably OK. Haha.

Though I recently found out you can get it at a bourgie EV restaurant, I regularly frequent a joint in Brooklyn that will make kibbe naya (Lebanese lamb tartare, essentially.) You have to call ahead and you have to know the guy. It was the same way when I lived in Sydney. A few joints had it but it was technically against health code.

When I get it at my BK joint the owner will sit down at the table and eat it with us. And he generally makes so much that it's essentially all you can eat.

I've not been to Lebanon, but what you're describing sounds an awful lot like çiğ köfte: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çiğ_köfte . You should give it a try if you can find it!

A friend of mine from Lebanon invited me and a some friends for a huge feast. Among the many dishes was Kibbeh. Both Kibbeh nayyeh (raw), and Kibbeh b'Sinniyeh (baked), I really enjoyed it as well as the many other dishes. I highly recommend it.

What, no Kinder Eggs?

Interesting note at the end: "I was also able to dispell the long-held rumor that opium poppy was legal to grow and purchase if only intended for “ornamental purposes.”".

One can easily buy dried pods of papaver somniferum, found on the first few result pages of a google search. I wonder if this is an enforcement oversight, a loophole, or a scam?

It's a little strange the subtitle used is "Salmiakki". That's the Finnish term for salty liquorice but that section discusses it in general terms, not from a Finnish perspective. It just so happened that the version he tried was salmiakki from Finland.

Yes that threw me off at first as well. When I lived in Denmark I was used to the candy and recognized the picture immediately but I haven't heard it called that before.

Ah now I miss the proliferation of licorice in everything.

No haggis?

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