Litfilter: "blue rind of bacon" which is poisonous?

March 4, 2023 12:10 PM

In Péter Esterházy's novella The Transporters (Fuharosok in the original Hungarian), there are a couple references to the "blue rind of bacon" being used to cause death: the titular Transporters feed it to the household's dogs to kill them, and their tragically pathetic companion eats some to commit suicide. Was there some curing chemical used for bacon that was toxic and blue? From Google Books, the second and third references in this search are the relevant events.
posted by jackbishop to Writing & Language (11 answers total)

Nitrates were once preservatives used in curing meats, including bacon. Copper nitrate can turn blue in exposure to air and water, though I don't know of it being used as a food additive, specifically.

Nitrates are carcinogenic, which is why they are no longer used as a preservative, though I suppose cancer is a slower way to kill. Copper arsenate is a pigment that has a blue-green color, exposure to which can cause arsenic poisoning. My copy of A is for Arsenic doesn't have an entry for copper, but it does for arsenic.

Though you might need a fair bit of it, for literary purposes perhaps it is nitrate or copper/arsenic poisoning from one slice? Or a simple color change from exposure to air may be an indirect sign that it is a rancid rasher and not to be consumed. Or it could just be artistic license.

Does the author describe the symptoms leading up to death? Here's one clinical presentation of copper poisoning, for instance, which might be helpful for linking to candidates.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:42 PM on March 4, 2023

One way usually described to tell that bacon that has gone bad is its "green, gray, or brown hue". Here is one photo of brownish "bad bacon" (it's remarkably difficult to locate photos of rotten bacon, for some reason).

I could see that type of coloration being described as "blue" - it is definitely off in the blue-ish direction compared with normal non-rotten bacon, which is way more in the pink-ish direction.

So possibly it is just a way of describing bacon gone bad or spoiled?

The problem with this theory, though, is that eating some rotten bacon usually isn't just going to straight-up kill you. It will give you a good case of food poisoning. Most people (and dogs) would be sick from this for a couple of days, then back to normal.

I did manage to locate one example of actual deliberately created blue bacon and I will say: That stuff just LOOKS poisonous. So it is possible the author is using the term "blue bacon" to conjure up a (possibly/probably) fictitious foodstuff that has a really strong visual connotation of being way "off" and poisonous - spoiled or poisoned in some way as to turn it lethal.

Finally, I did manage to find one reference to "blue bacon" that is actually from Hungary - and it looks like it could kill you dead all right. Though from cholesterol overload/heart attack rather than being spoiled or poisonous.
posted by flug at 2:23 PM on March 4, 2023

Here are a couple of cases of bright blue pork meat and/or fat being found in real animals (including photos).

These post-date your novella by at least 20 years, but possibly some similar cases inspired your author?

One of the cases of bright blue meat was ascribed to bacterial contamination, and presumably eating that raw could be a fatal mistake - or at least, put you in danger of turning blue from the inside out. Scientists thought this would actually be safe if cooked well (to kill the bacteria). But the examples in your book are perhaps eating the blue meat raw?

Regardless, that bright blue meat definitely looks like there is something very, very off with it - poisonous and definitely not safely edible.

Like, you couldn't pay me enough to eat that blue pig meat or bacon. Regardless of what "scientists say" my gut reaction is that it has been contaminated with heavy metals or something.

A "should I eat this" AskMe featuring fluorescent blue meat found in the back of someone's fridge wouldn't be just "no" but a unanimous "oh hell no!"

So again, the author might be referring to a real, or to an imagined, thing that just looks like it is a very visibly lethal variation of everyday food.
posted by flug at 2:36 PM on March 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

As you might surmise from your first three answers, bluish tint can be an indicator of the presence of copper compounds, and it turns out that copper has a surprising ability to neutralize botulinum toxin:

Researchers accidentally discover that copper complexes inhibit the action of botulinum toxin. Could this “mistake” lead to novel therapeutic options for botulism poisoning?

And since we can see from flug's second comment and their links that blue pork is known to occur and has been said to be associated with bacterial contamination, we might speculate that pigs can protect themselves from botulism in some cases (which could be pretty handy for an animal which is often forced to subsist on the worst sorts of garbage) by mobilizing copper compounds, and that when they do, it results in bluish meat.

But that blue color then might also mean that the meat is probably significantly contaminated with botulism bacteria, and might therefore easily be fatal to eat raw, but could be relatively safe when cooked because cooking would destroy the bacteria and the toxin.
posted by jamjam at 5:24 PM on March 4, 2023

I'm thinking maybe it's nitrite burned- which makes bacon turn green*. Certainly sodium nitrate can kill people but it seems somewhat fanciful to do it via bacon. You'd have had to really go overboard with the saltpeter I think.

*Green and blue have a lot of overlap, colorwise. Hungarian language differentiates between them, but perhaps the translation is not quite right? It might be helpful to find the word used in Hungarian. Even so sometimes people visually call blue things green and vice versa.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:30 PM on March 4, 2023

Best answer: Possibly this means bacon that has been soaked in hydrogen cyanide, which is a blue liquid at room temperature.
posted by ananci at 4:49 AM on March 5, 2023

I agree with ananci! I typed the below while falling asleep on my phone last night. Sending anyways for another vote that blue poison flags as cyanide for a reader.

***
I don't know what Transporters are, but my immediate assumption about a blue poison that kills quickly with a small bite was cyanide. Not a bacon curative, but from what you pasted, my assumption was that it was put in the bacon rind to get the dogs to chew it (make it tasty, as well as cover the bitter almond taste). Does it make sense in the story for these Transporters to be prepared to dispatch dogs? Or perhaps they are on a farm, and they would have poisoned bacon to deal with rats? Depending on the time the story takes place, the characters recognizing that blue poison = cyanide is plausible!

And I can't view it anymore on the excerpt you linked, but did it say the knight foamed at the mouth and was moving frantically (seizing?) after chewing? That may be other poisons too...but it does line up with what's expected of chewing cyanide.
posted by neda at 5:14 AM on March 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I was growing up in the 50s, you’d often see a blue USDA stamp on meat, and it wasn’t removed. I think it was reassuring because meat inspection was/ is really necessary. And large sides of meat are commonly marked. There could have been inks that were not safe, or a preservative applied to external portions of meat, intended to be cut off. Refrigeration used to be rare.
posted by theora55 at 5:31 AM on March 5, 2023

Response by poster: The cyanide theory feels best to me. The reactions in both usages of the bacon rind aren't much like spoilage; the illness and death are rapid-onset, more like a potent chemical toxin than most forms of biological contamination (I know botulism toxin can be really fast-acting, but most others, to the best of my knowledge, have hours of onset). I'd wondered if maybe there was a curative agent which was a caustic or similar chemical that built up in toxic levels only on the outside of bacon, so people only ate the inside, but it doesn't look like that's ringing any bells for anyone.

Incidentally, I managed to find a Hungarian-language version of the text. The phrase there is "szalonnabőrke kék". szalonna is a pretty standard term for "bacon". "bőrke" is a variant of "bőr", which is "skin" or "leather. "kék" is the color, and it's a pretty unambiguous color: there are some color terms which are a bit ambiguous (e.g. "sárga" is usually yellow but can be orangish), but "kék" is just blue.

I don't know if cyanide-laced bacon was a thing in Hungary for pest-control or other reasons. AFAICT the story is set in a rural and unindustrialized but presumably Communist locale; horses are the means of transport, and the narrator's family is heavy implied to be disenfranchised aristocracy (an autobiographical detail for Esterházy). Attaching a time and place is pretty difficult; Esterházy's literature is pretty postmodern and elliptical on the whole.
posted by jackbishop at 8:48 AM on March 5, 2023

Speaking of pest control and blue bacon, poisoned grain rodent bait in the US, and perhaps other places, is colored blue with a fat-seeking dye.

It's used as an indicator that the grain is poisoned, so that its not mistaken for a food grade grain, and it also has the side effect of dying the body fat of the animal that consumes it an unmistakable, unnatural blue. Quoting a study:

"The blue dye staining internal and subcutaneous fat served the purpose of confirming the consumption of the warfarin baits, thus reducing potential human risks by preventing the possible entry of warfarin into the human food chain."

Warfarin jas been used in rodent bait since 1948.
posted by the Real Dan at 10:10 AM on March 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

A possible reference or similar concept: In 1999, Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin wrote a book named Blue Bacon Fat (Голубое сало). "The book imagines that the greatest figures of Russian literature are distinguished by having blue fat."

Russian Wikipedia article on Blue Bacon Fat here (Google Translate). In short, the novel revolves around the concept of "blue fat," which is produced only from the clones of great Russian writers, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, etc. and has sort of magical/scientifically important properties. This blue fat is sent into the past via time travel, where it enters the bodies of dictators like Stalin & Hitler (who, interestingly, are all shacked up with prominent figures from the old aristocracy), changes history, etc.

Whether this has any relationship with Fuharosok is, of course, a question. But the reference to any kind of blue fat or meat seems unusual, and also the references to/recasting of the roles of the old aristocracy seems a possible point of reference to Esterházy.

In completely unrelated news, there is an interesting musical adaptation of Fuharosok available on Youtube (by Gergely Vajda and sung by Anna Molnár).
posted by flug at 1:42 PM on March 5, 2023