pine nut warning

File this one in the "bizzarre but true" category...

"Basic Pesto" (photo courtesy of Val Lyashov)

Foodies beware! Ever heard of "pine mouth syndrome"?  I hadn't either until earlier this month, when I realized thanks to some online research that I was in fact afflicted by this strange condition. If you're a fan of pine nuts (a.k.a., pignoli, pinon), you might one day find yourself suffering as well.

For four days straight, everything I ate left a bitter, metallic taste in my mouth. After a couple frustrating days of this, I started to worry that something might be really wrong. So I went online to "The Google", where I quickly turned up news reports implicating the pine nuts I had eaten in my homemade pesto a couple nights before this all started.

Pine mouth syndrome can develop one or two days after you consume pine nuts, and it can last for up to two weeks or more. (Miserable as I was, I felt really lucky that my own case went away after only four days.) The only symptom is the taste disturbance. But trust me that it is one symptom you'd really prefer to live without, even for as "short" a period as four days.

If this alone isn't weird enough for you, here are a few other baffling facts:

• This is a relatively new phenomenon. No cases were reported prior to 2001, and the incidence rate has surged since 2009. (Source: ABC News.)
• Implicated pine nuts have been chemically tested and compared to pine nuts that did not cause any taste disturbances. Researchers could find no differences between the two. (Source: USA Today.)
• Not everyone is susceptible. People can eat the same affected batch of pine nuts, and some will develop this reaction whereas others won't. (Source: Daily Mail.)

Apparently, the majority (but not all) of the implicated nuts have been grown in China. The ones that gave me trouble were organic pine nuts that I had purchased just a few days earlier at my local natural foods store. After reading all this online, I dug out the package and squinted at the fine print to learn where they had actually been grown. And you guessed it: China.

I'm not ready to completely write off pine nuts yet. But I think I'm going to be a little more selective from now on when purchasing them.