The world's deadliest meal ?

LONDON. March 1. KAZINFORM The symptoms begin after a few minutes. First comes a tingling in the lips and tongue, pronounced but nothing terrible. Soon afterwards there is nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhoea. Next the subject begins to experience a more serious numbness in their limbs, often while sweating and drooling uncontrollably. Weakness and shaking follow, then gradual paralysis of the diaphragm, a catastrophic drop in blood pressure, respiratory failure, blueness around the lips, fingers and toes, cardiac arrest and death.

The whole process, from the moment you eat a poisonous slice of pufferfish until your last breath, takes somewhere between 17 minutes and a few hours. You remain conscious throughout. There is no antidote

If you are reading this, however, I will have survived. In Japan, chefs are trained to prepare the fish, known there as fugu, by carefully removing the most toxic parts and serving just the filet, usually as sashimi, which should contain only minuscule quantities of tetrodotoxin (TTX). It is a serious business, as TTX - the same neurotoxin found in poison dart frogs and the blue ringed octopus - is roughly 1,000 times more powerful than cyanide. It is illegal to import fugu commercially into the UK, so the sashimi I am about to eat has been flown over in small quantities to be served as the first course in a free banquet of potentially lethal delicacies. The event has been organised by Remember a Charity , who hope to encourage people to think about their deaths, and leave money to good causes.

Some celebrities are in attendance when I arrive at the venue, a crypt in central London. On my table, we take comfort from thinking that no charity would want the blood of Christopher Biggins on its hands. One of the organisers is Gregg Wallace from MasterChef, who says he is "confident" that we will all live through this, which is also reassuring in a way, The Guardian reported.

Yet when the fugu arrives, we do go rather quiet before we tuck in. In fact, the translucent flesh has little taste beyond something faintly seasidey. More noticeable is how much you have to chew it, compared with most raw fish. "It's a texture, not a flavour, isn't it?" Wallace says when he passes by. Like eating sections of a condom, would be my description. "We could use some signs of how we'd die on the menu," says Stephanie, the young woman beside me.

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