Asparagus is our favorite dish these weeks, but can you eat too much of it? In the case of the cream of asparagus soup, at least, there is a theoretical limit – not only because of the butter it contains, but also because of the spice, which in our opinion should also be added here in abundance: nutmeg.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Editor in the "Science" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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"The nutmeg has a lot of warmth and its powers are in a good mixing ratio," wrote Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century, unmistakably describing the product as a psychoactive drug: "When a person eats a nutmeg, it opens his heart, purifies his mind and puts him in a good mood." Now it is by no means a nut, but the seed of the bellows fruit of the tree Myristica fragrans from the order of magnolias.
But that is to be seen here of the holy abbess. More than a thousand years before Hildegard, the Roman Pliny, who called the spice Comacum, said it was "juice squeezed from a nut". Whether he means the same thing as the comacon, about which the Greek Theophrastus wrote three hundred years earlier only that it was "added to the most delicious ointments", is unclear, but possible.
Genocide to preserve the nutmeg monopoly
Surely none of these people had ever seen a nutmeg tree. In the 18th century, M. fragrans thrived only on the Banda Islands in present-day Indonesia. Until the Portuguese penetrated there in 1512, the spice always reached Europe through so many intermediaries that no one knew where it really came from. Pliny, for example, located its origin in Syria.
And it was expensive. "The price per pound is 40 aces," writes Pliny – a good ten times the daily earnings of a legionnaire in team rank. But that was nothing compared to the sums that had to be paid for nutmeg from the late 16th century onwards. There was a rumor that it was the only effective remedy for the plague. Soon the equivalent of an apartment building was paid for a sack full.
Of course, the nutmeg farmers on the bandas did not benefit from the increase in demand – quite the opposite: their archipelago had fallen into the hands of the Dutch East India Company VOC soon after 1600, and when the Bandanese had the audacity to sell their product to the English, the VOC Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen sent a punitive expedition in 1620, which only a thousand of the 15,000 inhabitants of the Banda Islands survived.
What provokes the psychotropic symptoms
Capitalism did not re-enter the nutmeg trade until around 1760 when the French succeeded in smuggling nutmeg saplings from the bandas and cultivating them in Mauritius. Today, a seed kernel of Myristica fragrans is available in a German supermarket for just under 1.50 euros, which shows that nutmeg is mainly purchased for seasoning. In order to achieve a psychotropic effect, an adult would have to consume at least one whole "nut" at a time and then endure side effects such as palpitations or nausea. Like the desired changes in consciousness, these symptoms are caused by myristicin, the most common essential oil in nutmeg. Myristicin metabolizes in the body into an amphetamine known in the drug scene as MMDA.
In fact, poisoning occasionally occurs. As many as two deaths have been recorded, according to a 2014 study by the Illinois Poison Center. In Chicago, between 2001 and 2011, the authors counted a total of 32 cases of nutmeg poisoning, only 17 of which were unintentional, and then children were often affected. In other surveys, however, the vast majority of patients had consumed too much nutmeg in order to achieve a drug effect. In one case, a young man had stirred ten teaspoons into his coffee, in another a 16-year-old 25 grams, but only wanted to follow the health tip of a youth magazine, which recommended nutmeg for "colon cleansing".
So if "health benefits" of nutmeg are advertised on Youtube or other platforms, they should only be received and tried out with caution. Against this background, the danger posed by over-seasoned cream of asparagus soup must be assessed as low.