I know a bit about this, as would any apple pollinator - both streptomycin
and terramycin are sprayed in excessive amounts to combat Fireblight, a
scourge of apples and pears.
So if someone was to have an allergic reaction to streptomycin, an apple pie
would be the more likely source of the allergens.
But a blueberry pie is a unique pie.
If you follow your great-grandma's recipe, you will be instructed to add a
Granny Smith apple to the blueberry pie. The reason is that blueberries
lack pectin, and an apple, especially a Granny Smith, will provide enough
pectin to suspend the blueberries in a gel that will not run all over the
plate when the pie is cut. Some people (cretins!) just add commercial
prepared pectin to blueberry pies, and this is where it gets interesting.
If I want to grow a fungus, like streptomycin, I'd mix up a petri-dish agar
that could have been made from a blueberry pie recipe:
1) Agar itself (gelatin/pectin in a pie)
2) Dextrose (sugar in a pie)
3) Peptones (yeast in a pie crust)
...and I'd want a pH on the acidic side, and pie crust dough will have a pH
of 5 to 6, while blueberries have a pH of around 3. Everything is on the
acid side.
So, I'll play armchair detective here, based upon my education from the King
Arthur Flour Baking School in Norwich, Vermont.
a) The pie was commercially baked, but at a local bakery rather than a
corporate baker like Mrs. Smith's
b) The baker used a yeast pie crust, just to be fancy
c) The baker used too much commercial pectin
d) The pie sat around a bit too long before being sold and eaten, perhaps in
a nice warm glass display case, incubating the fungus
Thus, a much larger amount of the fungus could have been grown and ingested,
not from a mere trace residue, but as a mold grown in a deep-dish
petri-dish!
(And whatever happened to Mrs. Wagner of Mrs. Wagner's Pies? Did she marry
some guy named "Smith", and change her name? Did Little Debbie push her in
front of a crosstown bus? They were horrible disgusting hockey pucks I
would not feed to my dog, but they were everywhere, and they disappeared.
How does someone drive a massive and successful company like that into a
ditch?)
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