Food tasting history and the promise of prevention of poisoning

When members of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently protested at having to do food tasting for VIPs, it seemed an anachronism. Food tasting took place in medieval courts, when poison was a constant threat. Is it still needed today?

Security protocols require samples of food prepared for VIPs to be preserved to test in case they fall ill.FDA officials were also asked to taste food in advance. Quite apart from the physical challenge, many officials were being diverted from regular duties. Medical officers recently managed to escape similar duties by arguing that their regular work was more important. FDA officials are now asking the same.

Perhaps it’s proof that we are not (yet) so paranoid that pre-tasting food seems excessive. In a place like Russia, from imperial tsars to Soviet presidents, food-tasters are a fixture. In 2008, The Times of India reported about how an order for 3,200 mice by the Kremlin could be a way to find non-human tasters for President Vladimir Putin.


In 2012, a 95-yearold Ger man woman named Margaret Wölk revealed how, as a young girl, she was forced to be a taster for Hitler. She recalled his “very good food like white asparagus, wonderful fruits, peppers, cauliflowers”. But there was always the fear of poisoning, as she waited a couple of hours before the food was deemed safe.

Authoritarian rulers often choose trusted aides as tasters. Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil was first a student of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, then his driver and food-taster and finally spokesman and foreign minister. But intimacy brings risks. Kamel Hana Gegeo, the son of one of Saddam Hussein’s chefs, became his food-taster, bodyguard and, even introduced Hussein to his second wife. But this brought the enmity of Hussein’s violent son Uday, who bludgeoned Gegeo to death during an official dinner.


Rather than depend on a single taster, royal courts tended to evolve complex systems for ensuring the safety of food. Tasting would begin in the kitchens, which were usually far from dining rooms, so the food would be covered, with guards, to the dining table, where they would be placed on a side table for more tasting. We still call these side tables credenzas, from the Italian for ‘credence’ tests performed on them. One result of all this was that the food was often cold and any attempt at an appetising display was messed up.

Rich food lovers wanted an alternative, and they hoped bezoars were the answer. These arcane materials have received modern attention after being mentioned in the Harry Potter books. They are solid masses that develop in the stomach of goats (and other ungulates) around hair and other indigestible substances that don’t get excreted. Perhaps because goats have famously formidable digestive systems, bezoars were seen as antidotes to most poisons. Their rarity helped, since unlike with pearls, no one has ever found a way to induce their making. Bezoars traded at huge prices for the rich to dunk in their drinks, or scrape off shreds to eat.

Which is where a Jesuit in Goa, named Gaspar António, spotted an opportunity. Around the mid-17th century, he devised a way to make artificial bezoars called ‘Goa stones’ out of various exotic materials. In an article published in 2020 in Vesalius, the journal of the history of medicine, the Portuguese scholar Maria do Sameiro Bar roso examines recipes for Goa stones preserved in the Jesuit Library in Rome. The ingredients included ivory, pearls, coral, fossil shark teeth, rhino and deer horns, camphor and various minerals.

At the Jesuits’ College of St Paul in Old Goa (only a gate still survives), all these were ground together, allowed to age and then formed into balls. For a while, these were a major export item from Goa. Buyers made elaborate gold containers for them and they are now displayed in museums, proof of the profits that lay in a promise of prevention of poisoning.