Hello All,
Reports such as these cause me to question whether we can ever get food
safety education across
to the consuming public. The human race has been given the marvelous gift
combination of taste, smell, AND the intellect to appreciate the sublime and
REJECT the abnormal. I don't care how good my dog can smell, that grin on
his face, after a particularly loathsome repast, says it all. Why, oh why,
would anyone continue to eat shellfish that tastes like mothballs????!!!!
Jon McGraw
Seafreeze
Seattle, WA
-----Original Message-----
From: George Chang [mailto:gwchang@uclink4.berkeley.edu]
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 11:54 AM
To: nancy.balcom@uconn.edu
Cc: seafood@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Re: mothball smell to whole belly clams
Nancy Balcom writes...
>I was contacted by someone with our state health department who
>was following up on a consumer complaint. The person and a
>companion ordered and ate orders of deep fried, breaded, whole
>belly clams, prepared on site. The person in question ate two that
>tasted (or smelled, perhaps) in his words, like "mothballs" or
>camphor....
>
>Has anyone ever run across this before or have any ideas of what
>might have caused this smell/taste in the clams?
Hi Nancy,
I haven't heard of mothball-tasting clams, but your account
reminds me of what happened some decades ago in the small college
town where I grew up. A batch of chicken feed got contaminated with
mothballs or the like. The eggs were said to have tasted terrible.
I never had any, but our neighbor, the poultry science professor,
said that they tasted just like mothballs!
Again, this may or may not have any relevance to your
consumer's complaint.
Best regards,
George Chang
Univ of Calif, Berkeley
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