Cancer Flavored Root Beer

Root beers around the world are made with varying roots and barks to give them their own particular flavor; wintergreen(probably on of the most common), birch, ginger, sarsaparilla (pronounced "sasperilla" with a twang) are 3 common variances of root beers. But the root we associate with the everyday named Root Beers is none other than sassafras. 

Now in our beloved drink's beginning, root beer's main ingredient, like most American beverages of its era, turned out to be something that can kill you. The oil in sassafras is made up largely of safrole, which just so happens to fit in a little category science calls...carcinogens.  Ah yes, those were the days of real carbonated drinks. If you weren't getting high on Coke, you could at least get a little cancer from root beer. What era of beverages could be more exciting than leading you into a battle with death while hallucinating Death's corporeal figure challenging you to a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors! for your soul?! 

Well, our wimpy age decided that we weren't extreme enough for those kinds of liquid challenges and used excuses like, "Maybe we don't want our children guzzling down cocaine" or perhaps, "Maybe general store drinks aren't supposed to give you cancer," and in agreement, the FDA has thought to make illegal anything and everything containing safrole. And cocaine too, of course. Now don't fret dear readers, even if we lost part of the original ingredients, we didn't lose the taste of good ole root beer. Sassafras producers, put in the precarious position of having their entire crop of choice becoming potentially unmarketable as a food product, decided to add a few extra steps in the harvesting process. Namely, extracting the oil from the sassafras. So lucky little us; we get to have our root beer and drink it too...and have it not give us cancer. Huzzah.

I'll be posting interesting (pending perspective) little tidbits of history and trivia every once in awhile, and if you're wondering where I get some of this stuff: the answer is an astoundingly obvious "The Internet." Though more specifically, there's this pretty neat site for the root beer fanatic, Root Beer World. Good source of root beer history and news, though I do humbly get a few details here and there from ye ol' wikipedia and the rest of the nooks and crannies of the interwebs. I dare not claim these discoveries as my own research results, but I will happily share this cool stuff in my own words with those who are interested or bored. Thanks for reading. May your mugs be frosty, frothy, and frequently filled! 

(That's definitely going to be my catch phrase unless I think of a better one. I'm a dork for alliteration.)