I have hundreds of ingredients in my kitchen made up of various organic and inorganic chemicals that I can freely mix together, apply heat, and then safely ingest. While I’m sure it’s possible to follow some specific kitchen chemistry instructions to create toxic chemicals, it seems to rarely happen by accident. Why is that? What is it about typical food ingredients that make them generally safe to eat even after going through heat and chemical reaction changes?
To a large extent, it’s because the variety of ingredients you use in your kitchen is actually not very diverse from a chemist’s standpoint. Organic molecules use a lot of the same building blocks; sometimes the difference is as simple as the order of amino acids. Most of our cooking procedures result in relatively few changes in fundamental chemistry; mostly you’re breaking the building blocks of organic molecules into components that are themselves also safe.
But it’s also largely a result of selecting the right things to begin with. How often do you cook whole rattlesnake heads? Or fugu? Wild mushroom surprise? Rhododendron salad, anyone? All of these things are seriously dangerous and you’d rarely consider bringing any of them into your kitchen in the first place. We stick to what we know is safe through generations of testing and take it for granted that it wouldn’t be in the supermarket otherwise.
Dangerous chemicals are different. We know they are dangerous, but we have uses for them where a safer chemical isn’t a good substitute. (Or at least we believe it’s not a good substitute.) If you start with something dangerous, it’s a higher likelihood that any change to it is also dangerous.
Usually cooking breaks down toxins in food making them safer to eat.
People are sometimes surprised to hear that new foods can be created by combining ingredients and then marketed without any testing or approval. As long as they are made from other foods already approved there’s no process for such testing, and luckily so, look at the time and expense for testing new drugs, and even then the drugs aren’t always safe. But foods known to be safe combined with other safe foods just aren’t creating new toxic chemicals. I know very little chemistry but it doesn’t sound like the normal heating conditions of foods are going to create any significant chemical reactions.
Cabbage & beans, 'nuff said.
Happens all the time. It’s just that the procedures of safe food handling are so ingrained in your idea of what “mixing and cooking food” is that you automatically discount them.
Simply letting many common foods sit around too long before eating them, or heating them insufficiently, can make them highly toxic. Certain beans, especially red kidney beans, are highly toxic from the get-go if not cooked in a certain way for a certain length of time. Many individuals have allergic reactions to chemicals in some foods that can easily kill them. And so on. Look up “cyanogenic glycosides”, “furocoumarins”, “glycoalkaloids”, “cucurbitacins”, and “ochratoxins”, for example.
We simply take the standard food dangers, and our long experience of (mostly) avoiding them, so much for granted that we don’t associate them in our minds with scary phrases like “toxic chemicals” or “unsafe”.
I thought the only inorganics we use in cooking are salt, baking soda, baking powder, and sometimes lye, cream of tartar, and a few other things. Most of what we mix together is what Larry Niven called CHON Chow. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, plus trace elements. I think Phosphorus, Potassium, and Sulfur are the heaviest traces.
I could be wrong. Feel free to correct.
Nitrate and nitrite as well, I think.
But the OP isn’t asking about working with dangerous things to begin with. Sure, if I go out to the forest and grab a bunch of random flora or fauna, and cook it all into a stew, I might kill my guests, I think we can all expect that. The OP is asking (at least the way I’m reading it), why they can mix just about anything (food safe) “chemical” in their kitchen and it’s still foodsafe. That is, I can mix up a big bowl of baking powder and cream of tarter and molasses and hot sauce and collard greens and vanilla extract and cinnamon and whatever else I can get my hands on (FTR, I took out mustard/mustard greens based on something I heard once) and cook it all up and it’s probably not going to make anything deadly, regardless of what it tastes like.
OTOH, if I start mixing the chemicals under my sink, there’s a good chance I’ll cause a problem. I’ve seen it happen.*
Some are, some aren’t. At least some, proteins can be cooked out. That’s the reason many people that are allergic to certain fruits can still eat fruit flavored jam/jelly. OTOH, in my last food safety class they were talking about a toxin in tuna that can’t be cooked out. Chefs not wanting to throw out their fish will cook it longer trying to make it safe but the customers still end up sick.
*Years and years ago I was renting a house, built in the late 1800’s. The landlord/owner took a lot of pride in it. Sanded the floors himself, would take the doors to his shop to refinish them etc. So, one day we were chit chatting and he said “You only need three things to clean the house: Vinegar, bleach and ammonia” Now, I know he was trying to steer us away from harsh chemicals, but I just jokingly said “So, what? Like I just dump them all in a bucket and go to town with a scrub brush?” His face looked like this :eek: until he realized I was joking. I’ve had employees at work dump bleach and ammonia into the mop bucket trying to get the floor ‘extra clean’. Works great, I’m sure, but we know there’s a problem when they’re out there hacking up a lung. It’s the main reason we don’t keep ammonia in the building anymore.
Burning toast, or other foods for too long and then eating the black burnt areas can cause you to ingest acrylamide, heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These are maybe carcinogenic, seems to be some dispute about that, but it was enough for the EU to issue health warnings about it.
Right. That’s what I was getting at. I’m sure if I start with toxins I could end up with toxins, but it’s pretty rare to create them.
Many animals can create toxins from organic matter. A snake can turn a mouse into venom. But if I make a pot pie with mouse meat, vegetables, spices, cream, and whatever else I have in my pantry, I won’t end up with venom.
As a lay person, when I see molecule diagrams of drugs, they don’t look particularly unique. They look like many other organic molecules made up of a bunch of hexagons and things sticking off in different places. It’s like a bunch of Legos just arranged differently. In some configurations, they are delicious. In other configurations, they are deadly. So it seems odd to me that if I mix safe organic molecules together and apply heat, they don’t end up forming unsafe organic molecules.
What do you call “significant”? My favorite reaction type name is caramelization (“candy making”), aka Mallard reactions, but there’s also many other oxydative ones and even your humble hydrolysis has the advantage of being possible in a pot in ways in which it would not be inside us (there are polysaccharide branchings that we can’t break up enzymatically but boiling water and a bit of catalyst can).
IIRC you have a profound knowledge of chemistry while I have profound ignorance. I was trying to say I had not heard of reactions that would produce dangerous chemicals in any significant amounts through the cooking process. I wasn’t attempting to make a definitive statement there, more of an observation. Later I did wonder about the possibility of a catalytic reaction, knowing only that such things exist, and that iron can be a catalyst and is found in more than trace amounts in food. But I do know quite a bit about food and food safety and it’s just not an issue that comes up relative to that. The creation of some carcinogens as coremelt mentions are known, and most common dangers in food preparation come from existing toxins, contamination, etc, but there certainly could be potential chemical reactions that occur in food that I don’t know about. But short of some massive conspiratorial cover-up they just aren’t considered significant in the field.
Unless you are talking about duck candy, you probably mean Maillard, named for French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard.
You can’t get the crispy skin of a mallard right without Maillarding it.
Those are just different ways of putting nitrogen and oxygen together.
I wasn’t sure until I looked it up, but apparently those aren’t considered organic compounds.
Meo typo, meo typo, meo maximo typo…
OK, and that is generally true, partly through selection as others have explained (when we run into something which kills when cooked, most of us stop eating it rather than play fugu roulette). But the immense majority of cooking is about chemical reactions; even situations where there is no intense heating such as curing processes involve chemical reactions. Take the word “significant” out of that particular line I replied to and it becomes almost as absurd as saying that “I don’t want chemicals in my food”. Take the whole line out of your OP, and it doesn’t lose meaning while avoiding lectures on hydrolysis 
As a side note, the catalysts for hydrolysis will usually not be of the solid kind, but acids or bases which are part of the food in the pot. Lots of organic reactions are catalyzed (made quicker by a reagent which is returned at the end of the reaction cycle) by water, acids or bases.
You *can *make lye in your kitchen. But you probably don’t. Your great-great-great-grandmother likely did (or more likely made it outside, because it’s a smelly, hot process) but she knew better than to eat it.
Humans pass on information to their offspring, and those things which, when mixed and heat applied, caused toxic results, are things that we taught our kids not to cook and eat, mostly by omission - we taught them how to make spaghetti sauce and chili, but we didn’t teach them how to make lye.
It’s largely selection bias. We keep the safe stuff in the kitchen pantry, and the toxic stuff in the garage or under the sink.
Frying or grilling stuff for too long or at too high temperature will produce some highly toxic chemicals like acrolein, acrylamide and benzopyrenes. The reason we normally don’t suffer acute poisoning is that most people don’t like their food scorched…
Well, I addressed that in the first paragraph of my response, I thought. Despite the wide variety of end products, organic molecules are all built from a relatively small number of components like amino acids. Cooking doesn’t make these things dangerous, and if cooking did make them dangerous, we’d call them poisonous and not cook with them in the first place