What a trip.
Magic mushrooms may have been to blame for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s mortifying bow before a Chinese official last week.
Yellen, 76, gobbled four portions of jian shou qing, a type of wild mushroom, when she dropped in at a casual Beijing restaurant soon after she arrived there on July 6, Chinese state media reported in an effusive story that took care to praise the secretary’s chopstick skills.
But the funky fungi are known in their native province of Yunnan for their unpredictable psychedelic effects, CNN reported.
“You thought you were walking straight but you just fell sideways,” one gourmand told the Xinhua state news agency in a report about the ‘shroom’s potent powers — published only after Yellen departed.
“I have a friend who mistakenly ate them and hallucinated for three days,” Dr. Peter Mortimer, a professor at Kunming Institute of Botany, told CNN.
Yellen’s stop at an outlet of the Yi Zuo Yi Wang restaurant chain — the name means “In and Out” in English — sparked a flurry of posts on the Chinese social media network Weibo and a deluge of reservations, staffers said.
“It was an extremely magical day,” the restaurant said of the secretary’s visit.
Yellen’s long, strange trip came just days after a bag of cocaine was discovered in the White House — and before the Secret Service revealed that two stashes of marijuana turned up in the executive mansion in 2022.
