Nigeria's Cucumber Meal Scare
July 15 2015 By Abiodun Giwa
Ac meal of cucumber salad mixed with peanuts Courtesy: Once Upon A Chef)
Cucumber is a green, round and a rod like fruit that has many lovers among men, for reasons that many men will choose to keep to themselves. The fruit has vantage position on shelves in most department store's fruits' section. Women are also known to love the cucumber meal as delicacy.
A news report on Saturday in The Punch, one of Nigeria's major newspapers created a scare. The news report, captioned, "How six cousins die after eating cucumber meal", could not have gone without scares, considering the cucumber's popularity in the market.
If Cucumber is human and capable of reactions, it will doubtless may decide to go to court to seek reparations for damages done to its name and identity. Did Cucumber meal actually killed the six members of a family as reported, will be one of the questions that a court hearing will want answered.
But alas, it is not the cucumber meal that is the killer of the six members of a family as reported. Reading the story to its end showed that it was a poisoned cucumber meal that was the killer. Of course, if the caption has read "Poisoned Cucumber meal Kills Six", many cucumber meal lovers would not bother to read the news further.
Yet, many others would have wished to know what may have constituted the poison in the cucumber meal, to avoid getting into the same trouble eating the cucumber meal. But the story neither establish the fact that the cucumber or the poisoned cucumber meal as the killer.
No known autopsy has been performed on the victims of the said cucumber meal. All that the story relies upon for verification are statements based on suspicion. The death is best as mystery death, which should have been questioned to know, whether or not the cucumber has played any role, in the victims' sudden death.
You don't know whether or not the story is about a mystery death linked questionably to a cucumber meal until you read well into the middle of the story. The story began with two children playing with one another. They ran, dodged and struggled over a piece of cucumber.
Then, they both fell unconscious and died. And suspicions took over with interviews of villagers. No scientific test has been undertaken on the remaining of the cucumbers in a farm in the village to prove with facts, whether the cucumbers have been contaminated or poisoned, as mentioned based on some villagers' suspicions.
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