Poppy Seeds

Poppy Seeds/Gasagase(Kannada)/Kasakasa(Tamil)/Gasagasalu (Telugu)/Khuskhus(Hindi).


The seeds of the poppy are widely used as the popular "poppy seed" found in and on many food items such as bagels, bialys, muffins and cakes. The seeds can be pressed to form poppyseed oil, which can be used in cooking, or as a carrier for oil-based paints.
Although the amount of opiates in poppy seeds is not enough to produce a narcotic effect in cooking or consumption,the television show MythBusters demonstrated that one could test positive for narcotics after consuming 4 poppy seed bagels. The show Brainiac: Science Abuse had subjects that tested positive with only 2 poppy seed bagels. This situation was parodied on the show Seinfeld.
Poppy is widely consumed in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe. The sugared, milled mature seeds are eaten with pasta, or they are boiled with milk and used as filling or topping on various kinds of sweet pastry.
Poppy seeds are widely used in Bengali cuisine and in Oriya cuisine.Poppy Seeds are used to flavor breads, cakes, rolls, and cookies in European and Middle Eastern cooking. In Turkey, they are often ground and used in desserts. In India, the seeds are ground and used to thicken sauces. The seeds are also used in noodle, fish, and vegetable dishes in Jewish, German, and Slavic cooking.
In Mexico, Grupo Modelo, the makers of Corona beer, until the 1960s used red poppy flowers in its advertising, where almost any image it used had poppy flowers somewhere in the image.Since antiquity, poppies have symbolized honor. Women in second century Crete cultivated poppy plants for opium and Hippocrates suggested opium in medicine. Islamic and Arabian countries used opium as a medicine and narcotic in the sixth century. By the 17th century, Asians used the poppy plant as an opiate. Europeans began trafficking the drug in the 19th century, culminating in the Opium Wars, in which China lost control of the industry. The Greeks used the seeds as flavoring for breads in the second century, and medieval Europeans used them as a condiment with breads.
Warning:-
Poppy seed tea contains different opiates in various concentrations. Typically morphine and codeine are the main ones. Morphine is recognized as one of the most addictive substances known to man and is, for this reason, also one of the most tightly controlled. Overdoses of morphine can be lethal. The main cause of death for morphine overdose is pulmonary edema, where the lungs fill with fluid passed from the blood stream through the alveoli in the lungs.
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