Weird health thingie

[hudebnik]

Last night I made fried rice, with mixed veggies and Chinese sausage, for dinner. Within a minute or two of starting to eat, shalmestere said the epithelial cells in her mouth were doing something funny, and her sense of taste was off. I replied "Me too: I'm not noticing taste problems, but it feels like there's something stuck to the insides of my gums, yet when I try to scrape it off, nothing comes off." After a few minutes, including swishing water around in our mouths, the weird gum sensation went away.

Neither of us had any subsequent gastrointestinal distress, so it wasn't the sort of food poisoning that makes you sick for 24 hours.

I imagine it was an additive in the Chinese sausage, which was a different brand than we've bought before. But has anybody else encountered this particular symptom?

Comments

[hlinspjalda]

Wow, that's weird all right. I'll keep my eyes open for other mentions of it.

[cellio]

That's very bizarre. I've never heard of anything like that.

I'm not familiar with Chinese sausage. What makes it Chinese? I wonder what they use for casing.

[hudebnik]

Well, it's usually on the sweet side, with a lumpy, irregular but basically cylindrical shape, about 1"x6", fairly firm and dense. I was introduced to it by watching my Szechuan-born, Taiwan-raised stepmother: she would slice it crosswise (at an angle, to maximize surface area) and brown it before adding it to some other dish (often rice gruel, but it goes well in fried rice too). "Kam Yen Jan" is a major brand fairly widely available in the US.

[hlinspjalda]

I found a photo of the ingredient label on Amazon using the brand name hudebnik mentioned. It's pork sausage in a beef collagen casing, flavored with soy sauce and sugar. But I didn't see any weird atypically sausage ingredients mentioned in that brand other than "grain alcohol."