Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen confirmed that during her recent trip to China she ate magic mushrooms. According to the senior official during an interview with CNN, she went to a restaurant in Beijing where she was served a large plate of mushrooms. However, she never knew the hallucinogenic properties of what she was consuming:
Yellen got dosed in China:
"There was a delicious mushroom dish. I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties. I learned that later.” pic.twitter.com/GL7JGuULed
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) August 15, 2023
However, Yellen reassured, neither she nor the rest of the diners felt the "psychedelic" effects that occur after eating mushrooms with these properties. In fact, she explained, good cooking eliminates these properties: "I read that if the mushrooms are cooked properly, which I’m sure they were at this very good restaurant, that they have no impact."
A blogger, guilty of uncovering Janet Yellen's curious dinner
When the dinner took place, at the end of July, it went viral on social networks when a Chinese blogger discovered the Secretary of the Treasury sharing a table with a group of people at the Yi Zui Yi Wang restaurant in Beijing.
The information could not be verified until the establishment itself confirmed on the culinary recommendation website Weibo, that Janet Yellen was, indeed, one of the customers. There the secretary ordered a menu that included four dishes of mushrooms typical of the cuisine of Yunnan, a region located in southern China.
Yellen's visit came a month after U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken went to China with the intention of strengthening ties between the two countries. The secretary came right after with the same objective. During her stay in Beijing, Yellen claimed that economic competition between the United States and China should be done "under rules" that would allow both powers to benefit.
