Muffin Monday: Opiates, Libraries and Daydreams
Research girl. That was what I called myself in college. I absolutely loved doing the legwork part of research papers. I was good at it and unlike most students, I knew how to go through the databases and interlibrary loan available to us rather using Wikipedia and google for sources. Hell I should have set up a business offering research for cash. Got a paper and need sources? Pay me by the hour and I’ll set you up with more articles than you could ever hope to read.
This past weekend I was helping the boy out with his research and while I haven’t done this in quite a while now, it wasn’t long until I had all my database windows running and I was cursing a contemporary law journal for being out for book binding. I was in a library and I had slipped right back into one of my favorite roles to play. Someday I’ll write about how I always feel like I’m playing some role, acting out a facet of myself, but that’s not today’s post.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a huge part of my life and if you’re going to pick a television show that defines your adolescence that was definitely mine. The role of ass kicking, gorgeous superheroine was probably the primary fantasy that would appeal to my daydreaming ways. The secondary fantasy though? I loved the idea of sitting in that library and doing demonology research. The taste of burnt coffee, library lamps, urgency and the victorious moment when you make that oh so essential Eureka(!) moment of connection from some obscure text that suddenly explains everything. I could just imagine getting to play the part of a Willow/Giles with ancient texts piled up, old pages crinkling under fingertips and a sense of urgency driving adrenaline to an exhausted brain trying to translate Sumerian texts against a triptych cipher.
Blame it on espionage flicks. Blame it on a film noir fantasy of investigative gum shoe journalists uncovering big conspiracies. I just find the whole thing romantic in an intellectually adventurous kind of way. Aren’t there script kiddies out there who like to play some suspenseful music while running code, Bawls in hand, and pretending like they are rebuilding the matrix or breaking into a government secret database? Really please comment in the affirmative if you’ve had any of these fantasies so I feel like less of a lame-o dork.
Sadly journalism as a career field is far less about solving crime and more about regurgitating these days. Detective/CSI careers are more paperwork and lab routine than mystery solving. Spy work…well I don’t actually know anything about that but I’m guessing that since the FBI/CIA/NSA haven’t tapped me on the shoulder for recruiting my skill sets aren’t nearly advanced enough for that. Still I can pretend, even if all I’m doing is gathering interesting information on food for you dear readers.
Food like…poppyseeds!
Poppyseed muffins. Delicious. Also likely to cause you to fail a drug test if you eat too many. Yup this is one myth that a little research reveals to be completely true. Consumption of foods high in poppy seeds, or consumption of many foods (e.g. several of these muffins) can cause you to test positive for opiates in a drug test. Seinfield actually got something factually correct. Mythbusters has an episode Jamie and Adam consumed a great deal of food and tested positive for opiates for about 24 hours after consumption. Now keep in mind that one ate an entire loaf of poppy seed cake and the other had THREE poppyseed bagels. Also consider that poppy seed cake is frakking delicious and you might have every reason to want to consume the entire loaf. This stuff is taken so seriously that US Federal prison rules actually prohibit this foodstuffs. No really, check out snopes.
This is because the flowers that produce the food stuffs also produce a latex used for morphine and opium aka heroin. Don’t worry though, you can’t really get any of the drug side effects from consumption of these seeds. The seeds used in food are harvested far past a time when any latex could be found in the flowers and after processing, contain only traces of opiates. Enough for a test to detect but not enough for you to get high off of which is fortunate for most of us though I’m sure someone out there is disappointed by that. Various medical and forensic journals disagree on what the actual line should be drawn in trying to detect opiate levels in drug tests. Originally set at 300ng/mL this was raised to 2000 ng/mL but supposedly some curry dishes can still have enough poppy, depending on variety of the plant, to get you across that threshold. Therapeutic Drug Monitoring: February 2010 – Volume 32 – Issue 1 – pp 11-18
I suppose this isn’t really related to my personal part of the post today as I would like. Apologies, I usually try to find a strand to connect with, tenuous as it may be. Just enjoy the little bit of research I threw into this and let’s call that the connection shall we? Or just feast your eyes on these lemony, drug test failing muffins. Ooooooh pretty. Thankfully since these muffins are made with sour cream, and therefore incredibly dense, you are unlikely to eat so many that you fail any drug tests. Still they are overloaded with the poppyseeds so be careful! Enjoy at your own risk.
Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins Read more
