How Much Ketchup Is Enough Ketchup to Kill You?
LatestIt’s a normal part of human life to wonder about whether or not eating an excess of condiments could be lethal—specifically about the amount of ketchup it would take to not only disfigure you but take you to the big tomato patch in the sky. Well, your nightly wondering is over, and we’ve got an answer.
Earlier this week, a video of two women fighting began making the rounds on social media. The fight is routine at first, but quickly turns very ketchuppy. While the video reminds us that we should (as Death and Taxes points out) make our fights as novel as possible to ensure their success on YouTube, it also raises the question of whether ketchup could be considered a lethal weapon. Or at least it did for me.
When I brought this up at work, Kate Dries, Jezebel’s resident ketchup militant, began condemning the amount of ketchup used in this fight as a “waste of product.” Knowing that Kate is a champion of efficiency who is also capable of murder, my mission became clear: to discover how much ketchup would be too much ketchup.
My first cry for help was to the Heinz Ketchup empire. While it’s not clear that the unnamed restaurant in the video provides name-brand ketchup for its customers’ needs, many dining establishments pride themselves on carrying Heinz condiments (even if some places do just keep refilling the containers with generic), so this brand was the obvious choice. When Heinz did not respond to my initial request for information—what is big ketchup hiding???—I called the company’s American headquarters directly to get some answers.
After being on hold for less than thirty seconds, my query was picked up by Kierra, who had a hard time with my pointed questions about ketchup’s toxicity and potential lethality. And, she said, she hadn’t even seen the video.
“You’re asking if there’s a lethal dose of Heinz ketchup,” she asked.
“How much ketchup would it take to kill a person?”
“That… is a… great question,” she said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have that information.”
“Has that ever happened?”