The reason I make my pesto with walnuts, instead of the more traditional pine nuts,

is not only because walnuts are probably healthier.

We're talking 20 times more polyphenols, but also because of a

mysterious phenomenon known as PMS. No, not that PMS. Pine Mouth Syndrome, characterized by what

has become my favorite word of the week, cacajooja, meaning a bad taste in your mouth.

You can get it from heavy metal toxicity, seafood toxins, certain nutritional and neurological

disorders, or from eating the wrong kind of pine nuts, termed pine mouth by the public,

a few days after eating pine nuts, you get this persistent, metallic, or bitter taste in your mouth that can last for weeks.

Thousands of cases have been reported.

Raw versus cooked pine nuts doesn't seem to matter.

Could the cause be some unidentified toxin present in some varieties

of non-edible pine nuts? Out of more than a hundred different kinds of pine trees,

the nuts of only about 30 are considered to be edible. So pine nuts samples from stricken

consumers were analyzed, and indeed they all contained nuts from Chinese white pine, which is not reported to be

edible.

That tree is typically only used for lumber.

These are the good ones.

These are the bad ones.

It's like a game.

Good, bad, good, good.

You don't know it's the Chinese white pine nuts, though, until you put it to the test.

Research said a few folks consume six to eight Chinese white pine nuts.

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