For those of you that are not good friends with me or regularly stalk me on Facebook, I went to Brazil this summer for the World Cup (it was as awesome as it sounds).  After getting picked up at the airport in Fortaleza my friend and I decided to stop at a roadside fruit stand and get some locally grown fruit.  One of the fruits that is grown in the region is the cashew fruit.  Yes you read that right, the cashew fruit.  If you are not aware of how the cashew nut grows, prepare to have your mind blown.  

The delicious cashew nut

The not so delicious cashew apple and the raw death nut

The cashew is made of two parts, the apple and the nut.  My first clue that this weird thing should not be messed with was realizing that the fruit part, called the apple, was not in fact an apple.  I tried it, it was edible, but compared to a red delicious, it's more like an orange meh.  For whatever reason I was convinced I also needed to eat the nut, since you know, thats what the cashew is known for.  My second clue that I should have left this thing to the people at Planters, besides the fact that it looks like the nut is prairie doggin out of the apple, was the outer shell was so hard I couldn't get to the nut itself without using a sharp knife.  After frustratingly cutting and digging with the knife I finally got the nut out.  Upon eating the nut I immediately learned 3 things: getting one little nut out of the shell is not worth all the work, these things taste way better roasted and salted, and the nut tastes spicy.  The nut tastes spicy, wait what?  "Interesting," I thought to myself, I didn't expect that and thought nothing of it until about 5 minutes later...

5 minutes later.

My lips are on fire.  You know that feeling when your lips get really dry and end up cracking and its super painful?  Now imagine that, and then imagine putting tabasco sauce on them.  Let me put it this way, my lips were hotter than the Brazilian womens soccer team on Copacabana Beach.  A quick google search informed me that I might be in some serious trouble.  You see, the raw cashew nut contains a little chemical called urushiol.  All you need to know about urushiol is that its the chemical that causes you to break out when you touch poison ivy.  POISON IVY!  The only thing that I am aware of that I am allergic to, and highly allergic at that.  At this point I am now thinking I am going to die in my sleep since I have essentially swallowed a poison ivy nut and my lips feel like they are about to fall off.  I was aware of the potential danger of going to Brazil especially during the World Cup with the tension of the locals, and the millions of tourists flooding the country, but I really didn't expect to be taken out on day 1, by one stupid cashew nut.

Pictured: The cashew nut

Thankfully I survived through the night and thought I got away with only some blistered lips and some poofy eyes.  Unfortunately over the next several days I came to realize that if you have a bad allergic reaction just by touching something, when you eat it, its like you went swimming in it.  The urushiol was in my blood stream and it slowly caused me to break out everywhere, and I mean everywhere. It started on my right forearm and every morning when I would wake up, there would be a new rash.  This happened for over a week.  I finally went to a drug store to get some Benedryl, only to discover the drug store didn't have American brand medicine (the patriotism in this country was really appalling sometimes, I mean first they don't have American medicine, then on the 4th of July I didn't hear a single mention of the founding fathers and I saw zero American flags).  Ok, no Benedryl no problem, I'll just ask for an antihistamine.  Ok, the pharmacist doesn't speak english, no problem, I'll just use hand gestures...Ok, there are no hand gestures for antihistamines, this could be a problem.  After struggling for a few minutes the pharmacist finally let me come around the counter to her computer and type into google translate what I needed.  This seemed to work because she came back with a box of little pink pills that looked like Benedryl.  Of course she couldn't speak English, and I couldn't read Portuguese so I had no idea if this is what I actually needed, no idea how many to take, and no idea how often to take it.  I was desperate to get the toxin out of me so I ended up popping about 12 of them within 9 hours.  Looking back on it now it seems if the urushiol wasn't strong enough to kill me, I was going to let these mystery pills finish the job.  Over the next 2 days the medicine worked and my outbreaks started to heal and about a week later I was totally back to normal.  I was really glad only one nut grows per fruit, because if I had eaten a handful of those things it could have been much much worse.  If you love cashews and are allergic to poison ivy and are wondering why you don't turn into a tomato when you eat them, its because they get steamed after they are harvested and the stream destroys the toxin (who knew!).  I went on to enjoy a crazy World Cup and didn't have any more health issues until I got the flu...and strep throat, but that's a story for another time.