While the victims and families of the mysterious mushroom mortalities in Leongatha, Victoria, naturally have our sympathies, it’s a bit hard to rise above mordant humour when considering some other recent food-caused fatalities.
Death by cheese, for example. Tragically absurd was the case of the Italian cheese maker who was crushed to death last week when thousands of his cheeses went rogue.
Giacomo Chiapparini was checking on the cheese-maturing machine in his warehouse in Romano di Lombardia, in northern Italy, when a shelf collapsed, causing a domino effect of big 40kg cheeses. Twenty-five thousand wheels of grana padano, a hard cheese resembling parmesan, escaped captivity, rumbling over and burying the 74-year-old factory owner.
It took 20 firefighters 12 hours to dislodge the heavy wheels by hand and uncover Mr Chiapparini’s body beneath the mountain of hard cheese. “Poor Giacomo was so unlucky,” Stefano Berni, director of the grana padano consortium, told the media. “I can’t remember anything similar, not even during the earthquake which disturbed our cheeses in 2012.”
The cheese fatality brought to mind the unfortunate fellow who died under a hill of beans in Colorado not long ago (an event foreshadowed by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca).
Noticing the car of Raymond Segura, 56, remaining in the car park after-hours at the Kelley Bean Company, fellow workers discovered a 6m mountain of pinto beans resulting from a broken conveyor belt. It took 50 emergency personnel plus inmates from a local jail to dig Mr Segura out.
Workplace deaths are so prevalent in the food industries, especially in the US, where an estimated 18 people die every day, that websites exist to list the weirdest examples.
Other recent grisly instances include the death by chocolate of Vincent Smith Jr, 29, who fell into a vat of chocolate at Lyons and Sons in Camden, New Jersey, and Jose Melena, 62, who was cooked and canned among six tons of tuna while repairing an oven at the Bumble Bee plant in California.
Then there was the man who died after falling into a giant pot of porridge in Tamil Nadu, in India, as seen in a current graphic video. The victim, named Muthuswamy, had been overseeing the preparation of porridge for a festival. And pity poor Ng Sew Kuang, the 73-year-old owner of Seng Confectionery in Singapore, praised in The Straits Times for his traditional baked goods, who fell into a dough-making machine and was turned into a gingerbread man.
Macabre and tragic as these deaths were, they were workplace accidents. Harder to understand are self-induced food-and-drink fatalities.
Take the case of Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health and carrot obsessive from Croydon, England, who died from liver damage after consuming 70 million units of vitamin A (10,000 times the recommended daily intake) and 3.8L of carrot juice daily over 10 days, by which time his skin and eyes had turned orange.
And consider the example of the New Zealander Natasha Harris, 30, who drank Coca-Cola first thing every day, until bedtime: 10L a day. Her Coke intake contained 11 times the recommended amount of sugar and twice the amount of caffeine that can be safely ingested.
When prevented access to Coke, Mrs Harris had experienced withdrawal symptoms. Before her sudden death from cardiac arrest she’d needed dental surgery to remove her decayed teeth. Two of her eight children were born without tooth enamel, a condition attributed to her addiction.
Even weirder perhaps was the strange case of the Strange case: the Californian mother who died from drinking too much water. Jennifer Strange, 28, had participated in radio station KDND-FM’s crazy water-drinking competition. In the contest Hold Your Wee for a Wii, whoever drank the most water would win a Nintendo Wii.
Mrs Strange was competing for a gift for her children. The competition called for the participants to drink as much water as possible without going to the toilet. Halfway through the contest the radio hosts upped the amount of water to be consumed.
Mrs Strange quit while in second place, telling the hosts she was in pain. She’d drunk 7.6L of water in three hours without a toilet visit. As bloated as if she were pregnant, she called into work sick, and was found lying dead by the toilet soon after.
The cause of death was found to be water intoxication. Her husband sued the radio station and was awarded $25 million. Ten station employees were fired after the event.
The moral? Mushrooms, cheese, carrots, porridge, soft drinks, beans and biscuits can be deadly if you aren’t careful. But it’s water that you’ve got to watch.