Xu and Lassgard tuna dinner — did Xu eat the tuna?

Speculation 2049/10/03
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From the latest revision of Xu’s article:

To celebrate the partnership, Xu and Lassgard staged a shared dinner on January 18th 2039, amicably enjoying rare cuts of hoho-niku sushi made with Lassgard tuna.

Less than six months later:

On June 22nd 2039, Xu halted construction on the mariculture facilities in Shandong and cancelled Lassgard Bioteknik’s license to use Zōng in its East Asian marketing. This decision was linked to emerging allegations that Lassgard tuna was the cause of an unidentified foodborne illness first reported in January 2039.

And from Lassgard Bioteknik’s article, we know that Lassgard himself was assassinated less than six months after that, on October 29 2039.

  • Scenario 1: Both Xu and Lassgard were aware of the contamination, and staged the dinner as a photo op without actually eating it. But Xu was a smart man — he wouldn’t have pushed so hard for a Lassgard/Zhupao partnership if he had known about the enormous potential cost of a food-borne disease scandal. (Unless he had the foresight to connect it with the enormous potential profits of colloidal technology…)

  • Scenario 2: Both Xu and Lassgard were unaware of the contamination, and the dinner went as reported. This seems unlikely given Lassgard’s role as CEO and the fact that his successor “pled guilty to all counts of aggravated negligence and endangerment.”

  • Scenario 3: Only Lassgard was aware, and let Xu eat while not partaking himself. In the photo of the dinner Xu is clearly holding a piece of tuna, while Lassgard’s maki roll appears to be only rice.

If scenario 3 is the case, when did Xu become aware that Lassgard had effectively murdered him?

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These are definitely options worth pondering, but…

That’s going a bit too far, as not nearly everyone who has ever eaten Lassgard tuna got CMD from it. I mean at its best Lassgard produced about 80 % of the whole world’s edible tuna, while as of today there are 1 620 470 people with CMD diagnosis. Considering back in those days most people ate tuna at some point of their life, the number would be MUCH higher if the just consuming Lassgard tuna once was a straight-up death sentence.

(EDIT) I also checked Omnipedia’s article on CMD, and it states that the disease’s infectivity rate is just 817 per million population. So yeah, even though we are talking about a really serious disease here, actually getting it is fortunately quite rare (as far as we know right now).

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Something that nobody seems to be talking about is that the specific type of sushi Xu ate was hoho-niku sushi, a type of sushi made from the meat located at the cheek of the tuna, just beneath the eye.

CMD seems to be caused by prions found mostly in the brain. The area under the eye is probably much more likely to contain these prions than most other parts of the tuna. Your chances of getting CMD would probably increase if you ate that part.

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I’m late to this, but it is such a good point.

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