Health officials in Zurich, Switzerland were forced to put the kibosh on a local eatery's specialty pizza dish when they learned the showcase ingredient: Poison.
Owner Ismail Ertekin recently invented the pizza, which featured a topping made from the poisonous venom of spiders, scorpions and snakes and had been sold at his restaurant, Avanti.
Ertekin, who allegedly got the poisons from homeopathic remedies, told Austrian Times that "Preservatives in foods are much more damaging than my poison pizzas."
"They were really popular, especially with people who have a phobia of spiders or snakes," he continued. "They used the pizza as a way to get over their fears."
Orange News reports that officials began an investigation soon after the pie was introduced. Environmental health officer Ferdinand Uehli told the publication that "Medicinal products are not food stuffs and are not allowed to be an ingredient in food. Therefore we had to ban the pizzas. The pizza in reality contained very little poison."
Ertekin had previously made waves with another show-stopping dish, pizza topped with edible 24 carat gold.
Swiss website Blick.ch has a piece about the gold pizza written in German, but we've translated a quote from Ertekin -- albeit a bit less than perfectly -- with the help of Google:
Pizzaiolo Ertekin, who himself also meditates believes in the efficacy of gold. "Gold is one of the oldest drugs in the history of mankind. In tiny doses, gold has a regulating effect on the human immune system. "
Apparently, this is a man who doesn't seem to turn to his pharmacy to sooth his aches and pains.
We'll leave the judgement to the health officials, but if you were ever curious about what snake venom does to blood, click here. Spoiler: it ain't pretty.