Bitter Pistachios

I recently got a 5 lb bag of fresh domestic pistachio nuts in a Woot!-Off. In going thru these, it seems 2% or more are bitter or sour. I recalled a conversation I had years ago with a food science prof who had sworn off eating peanut butter because of aflatoxin risk. Aflatoxins are a class of mycotoxins, and among the most potent naturally occurring carcinogens, found in moldy nuts, grains, fruit, and veggies. Cream hundreds of peanuts together in a jar of peanut butter and who knows how many were moldy or contained aflatoxins. So I started wondering about the safety of these sour pistachios; maybe the bitter taste was because of some mold growing on the pistachio? How would one tell? I don't think I could tell mold from any of the other odd colorations characteristic of roasted & salted pistachios.

I did a little Google-ing on "bad pistachios" and came upon multiple Yahoo! Answers about sour/bitter pistachios. The question was whether eating bitter or sour pistachios was bad for you. To my amazement, the responders replied to a tune that they were NOT bad for your health and some even went so far to say that there was nothing in pistachios that was bad to eat. I wanted to post a follow-up reply, but Yahoo! closes the responses after 4 days.

Some more digging found this quote from the US Dept of Agriculture:
"Aflatoxin contamination of tree nuts (almonds, pistachios and walnuts) is a significant mycotoxin-related problem, now."

So now, while (as of today) I am still eating pistachios and peanut butter, I am much more selective of the nuts I eat. If I encounter a sour or bitter pistachio, I spit it out, gargle, drink glass-after-glass of water, take antioxidants, etc.--maybe all these would be useless against my ingestion of aflatoxins, but I figure it's about all that I can reasonably do if I'm going to eat the things. And maybe I'm ingesting aflatoxins anyway in nuts that seem fine; I just don't know. For peanut butter, I stick to the name brands, as I figure the risk of getting bad peanuts in off-brand labels is higher, especially if those peanuts are acquired as sub-quality rejects from the name brand manufacturers.

Scientists Risking Apocalypse to Prove A Point?

The CERN Hadron collider is scheduled to fire up this fall in Switzerland to study the Big Bang and workings of the universe.. Physicists say that the collider will crash billions of particles into one another every second, and will create small, short-lived black holes in the process. While most particle physicists believe this is a safe and fascinating experiment, other particle physicists believe more research is needed to ensure that the black holes will NOT persist and grow, for if they do, they would eventually swallow the planet and galaxy... And yes, you would have a bad day. Yeah, yeah, science leads us to progress and all that. Scientists favoring start-up say that the possibility for a cataclysmic event happening or a black hole persisting and growing in one of the billion collisions per second is small. SMALL??!!!!

Humans... the smartest species... The sense of self-endangerment by some of our species is greatly outweighed by the magnitude of their collective curiosity. And if curiosity killed the cat, what can we say about this collective curiosity of some of our brightest scientists?