There’s some weird stuff out there with beans and nuts. One time my wife and I were moving from WI to NY and we stopped in a Denny’s to get some food. We order a couple of breakfast skillets and when she takes a bite of one she instantly spits the food onto her plate. I was freaked out because I’d never seen her do something like that in public. I’m like “What’s wrong?” and she says “This is poisoned. It’s contaminated.” I didn’t believe her so I took a bite of her food and it was fine. Then she drinks some water and spits that up as well. I try it and there’s nothing wrong.

Long story short I freak out and call her doctor, worrying she might be having a stroke or some other weird issue. The doctor can’t help, just says “Schedule an appointment.” So I call my old man who is an immunologist and he’s like “Oh wow, she can’t eat food? Says the water tastes like metal? That’s weird, let me think about this.” Then a minute later he’s like goddamned House MD, he says “you guys are moving right? Did you clean out your fridge?” I’m like “Well, yeah, of course.” So he says “Your wife is into baking right? You’ve got all kinds of shit in your fridge. When you were cleaning it out you didn’t happen to eat any pine nuts, did you?” I thought about it and then I was like “Yeah, we had a bag of frozen pine nuts and we both ate a handful of them.” He laughs and says “She’s got Pine Mouth, it’s a weird olfactory reaction to certain types of pine nuts. She’ll be okay in a day or so.”

I’d never heard of Pine Mouth before. And I guess neither had our doctor. Thankfully we had a drunk seventy five year old immunologist on tap.