Encyclopedia of Food & Culture | Poisoning

POISONING. Throughout history and across cultures food and drink have been used to deliver lethal poison. Since a person's demise from a slow-acting poison mimics so many natural diseases, and there is typically a time lapse between administration and expiration, this method made it almost impossible in early times to prove homicide. With the advent of chemical analyses for poisons (rudimentary arsenic tests were introduced in the 1840s) and autopsy, poisoning in the early twenty-first century, if suspected, is readily detected.

Poisoning in History

Since at least Greek and Roman times, there is historical documentation of poisonings. During the reign of Artaxerxes II of Persia (405–359 B.C.E.), it was said that his queen, Parsysatis, poisoned her daughter-in-law, Satira, by serving slices of fowl carved with a knife that had been coated on one side with venom. This allowed the queen to dine with Satira—Parsysatis reserving for herself the uncontaminated slices.

When selecting food or wine to serve as vehicles for poison, poisoners prefer a substance that will mask the bitter taste of the poison. Consequently, sweet foods were often selected. Wine had the advantage of preventing the victim from being on guard. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, tarts (sweet and savory), jams, puddings, fruit pies, pastries, steak and kidney pie, chocolates, corned beef, porridge, and rice have all been used in poisonings.

According to medieval literature, many prelates, sovereigns, and pretenders or heirs to the throne were victims of poisoning plots. The murderers were most often from the victim's inner circle. In 1152, for example, Hugues d'Amboise was poisoned by a coterie of his knights at a banquet given by his brother. The historical heyday for poisonings was Renaissance Italy (1400–1700). So many deaths occurred that Romans hardly believed that any man of prominence or wealth had died a natural death. The legendary Borgia family, specifically Lucretia, gained a wide reputation for poisonings, especially of cardinals. Cantarella, a slow-acting poison, was said to have been dropped into food or drink, even sacramental wine. These murders were supposedly undertaken on behalf of Lucretia's father, Pope Alexander VI, who as head of the Roman Catholic Church was heir to the cardinals' estates. As these allegations were repeated, they became part of the historical record. More recently, they been revealed to be outright myth.

There are other instances in which an assumed poisoning has profound historical implications. When the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821, his demise was at first attributed to stomach cancer, but examination of his hair has found the presence of arsenic. In the 1960s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) devised a number of food-and drink-based poisons for assassination, including a lethal milkshake intended for Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Ultimately, the spy agency abandoned this, as the delivery system was too unreliable; it was thought to be much easier to get a target to inhale poisonous gas. In his 1962 autobiography, the late King Hussein I of Jordan relates his uncovering of a Syrian Intelligence plot to bribe his cook to poison his food. The tip-off: The untimely deaths of the palace cats, victims of the assassin's experiments.

Poisoning in Fiction

Poisonings have become the stuff of myth and legend, and a staple of mystery writers. The premeditation of the crime—acquisition of poison, calculation of lethal dosage, decision about which food or drink to use, preparation of the concoction, and making the victim consume it—adds to the insidiousness of the murder. In the fairy tale Snow White, a story that has survived for centuries in all European countries and languages, the wicked queen offers Snow White a poisoned apple that will induce a deathlike coma. The duel scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet features a poisoned cup of wine intended for the prince but mistakenly and fatally drunk by his mother, Queen Gertrude. In the 1941 American play "Arsenic and Old Lace," two seemingly innocent sisters in their sixties poison twelve men (a thirteenth as the curtain falls) with their homemade, arsenic-laced elderberry wine. In the 1996 literary mystery bestseller The Debt to Pleasure by John Lancaster, gourmet murderer Tarquin Winot suffers a brief setback when his intended victim turns down one of Winot's famous mushroom (Death Cap) omelets, saying he is allergic to eggs. After arguing that migraine is a small price to pay for gustatory pleasure, Winot recoups and whips up mushrooms on toast. In this poisoning, the food is not simply a disguise for poison, but the poison itself.

Gender and Poisoning

Although poisonings are committed by both men and women, they have been stereotyped as a female crime. In 1584, English writer Reginald Scot claimed women had invented poisoning and were "addicted" to the method. Nineteenth-century European writers, including criminologists, always profiled the poisoner as female. As recently as 1961, criminologist Otto Pollak claimed in The Criminality of Women that poison was the murder method of choice of most female offenders. Women's social roles as wives, meal-preparers, and caretakers, he argued, afford them unique opportunities to commit poisonings.

Throughout the literature, there are numerous examples of poisonings associated not only with women but also with their adultery, magic, and witchcraft. The near hysteria that swept nineteenth-century Victorian England, generated by tabloid reports of trials of forty women for putting arsenic in their husbands' food, was misplaced paranoia. When death records were examined, it was found that spousal murder of all kinds had risen dramatically between 1830 and 1900, with about one thousand people being found guilty. More than 90 percent of these murders were committed by men, the result of beatings and stabbings; only twenty cases were poisonings of wives by husbands.

In the twentieth century, concerns about poisoning of both food and water came to focus on bioterrorism. In a celebrated case in 1984 in The Dalles, Oregon, members of a religious cult inserted salmonella bacteria in salad-bar foods, provoking 751 cases of infection. The purpose (this was only a trial run) was to keep voters away from the polls in an election several weeks hence where a land-use issue involving the cult's property could have an unfavorable outcome. Intentional criminal poisoning was not suspected at first; it was proved a year later. A paper written on the case was not published until 1997 out of fear of stimulating "copy-cat" incidents. Two other cases in Asia in 1996 include a mass poisoning with cyanide inserted into a curry stew at a festival in Japan, killing four people and, in India, the contamination of rice at a canteen with datura, a poisonous weed of the nightshade family, causing fifty-two fatalities. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001, the possibility of intentional poisoning of the food and/or water supply is being taken very seriously, particularly where botulinum toxin, the most deadly chemical known, is concerned. Where heads of state and other dignitaries are concerned, this has translated into extensive background checks on food preparers, servers, and suppliers as well as x-raying of liquor and produce received by restaurants and close surveillance in the kitchen.

Linda Murray Berzok