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By Laura Goodman After a bucket of coffee, my raspberries tasted odd. But that’s coffee for you. Later, an egg and cress sandwich was peculiar, but I was hungry, so I shoved it in as quickly as I could, tricking my tastebuds with sheer speed. In the evening, at the pub, I was eating bitter, metal-flavoured crisps, counting the hours since the coffee - and I started to whinge. Nothing unusual about that. I’m a whinger. I woke up the next day with a still-fuzzy mouth. I started considering what it tasted like. It was bitter, like an over-brewed green tea. It was metallic, like a tin. And it was wrong, like orange juice after Colgate. It seemed to be located in an unrinseable part of my throat. And so to Google. Did I have mouth cancer? A brain tumour? A baby growing inside me?  I typed: ‘bad taste in mouth after eating’. Google screamed back at me: “PINE NUTS!!!!!!!!!!!” “HAVE YOU EATEN PINE NUTS RECENTLY?” “HAHAHAHA, YOU HAVE PINE MOUTH!” I searched Twitter: ‘Day 5 of pine mouth. Tried drinking Aloe Water for the past 4 days and has not worked’ said @sqlagentman ‘If your pine nuts are from China you could end up with a nasty taste in the mouth! I speak from bitter experience!’ said @MattJF ‘Adventures in Pine Mouth Syndrome: Day #5. Captain’s Log: Dudes, this sucks’ said @bytheseat I scoured articles written in America, where they noticed it first; I located academic studies, citing it as an emerging problem, I unravelled pages of forum chit-chat; and I even read a piece in the Daily Mail. The problem isn’t linked to an allergen or a toxin or anything nearly that logical. It’s a taste disturbance which seems only to affect a small minority of people - the two friends I ate dinner with on that fateful night still have lovely, functioning mouths. The apparent surge in sufferers may be a result of a shortage - rising demand for fancy-pants salads and fresh pesto forces pickers into the forest before the pine cones are mature, which can lead to ‘rancidity issues’. Most cases have been traced to pine nuts from China (including mine). A handful of kindly tweeters have approached me with remedies: charcoal tablets, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, aloe wash and – worst of all – Fisherman’s Friend. They tell me I have up to four weeks of this, and I’ve got news for you: it’s gross. Coffee is disgusting, wine makes me splutter, I struggle through plain cous cous, and a packet of dried mango turned out to be the second worst supermarket purchase of the year. - http://www.thriftygobbler.com/124/

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