US treasury secretary Janet Yellen has started a craze in China for a magic mushroom-based dish called Jian shou qing, or “see hand blue”, after she was spotted eating the fungi, known for being hallucinogenic, while on a visit to Beijing in July.
“I went with this large group of people and the person who’d arranged our dinner did the ordering. There was a delicious mushroom dish I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties. I learned that later,” she told CNN.
The dish is made from Lanmaoa asiatica mushrooms, parts of which turn blue when bruised or sliced.
Dr Peter Mortimer, a professor at Kunming Institute of Botany, told CNN on Tuesday: “Lanmaoa mushrooms are considered poisonous as they can be hallucinogenic.
“However, scientists have not, as of yet, identified the compounds responsible for causing the hallucinations. It remains a bit of a mystery, and most evidence is anecdotal. I have a friend who mistakenly ate them and hallucinated for three days.”
Yellen was in China for a four-day visit, which, along with the secretary of state, Antony Blinken’s visit earlier in the summer, was the first by a top US official in over three years.
Yellen praised her trip as having put US ties with China on a “surer footing”.
After a Weibo user posted about Yellen eating at the Yunnan restaurant called In and Out during her trip, a hashtag translated as “US Treasury secretary Yellen’s first meal in Beijing is Yunannese” started trending online.
An aide to Yellen confirmed that the Treasury secretary ate the mushroom dish at the restaurant.
“I can tell you that none of us were affected by the mushrooms,” Yellen told CNN through laughter, before being asked what she meant when she said she learned about the mushrooms’ effects “later”.
“I read that if the mushrooms are cooked properly, which I’m sure they were at this very good restaurant, that they have no impact. But all of us enjoyed the mushrooms [and] the restaurant, and none of us felt any ill-effects from having eaten them,” she said.
The chain said on Weibo that Yellen’s visit and choice of dish had caused several branches to sell out within hours.
“At 2[pm], the Sanlitun store was the first to sell out; from 8pm, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Xi’an, Xiamen, and Tianjin stores were in a hurry until they were completely sold out,” In and Out said on Weibo.
“Two weeks after that meal … colleagues from headquarters in branding, personnel, finance, etc. collectively transferred to another job and turned into mushroom cutting workers,” the restaurant said in a later post.
