Poppy seeds are a staple in culinary delights including noodles, bread, bagels, and pastries. These tiny seeds have been harvested from dried Papaver somniferum seed pods for millennia and remain popular today, especially in Central Europe. Poppyseed imparts a slightly nutty, toasty flavor when crushed before use and adds texture as well as color to food.
The familiar blue poppy seeds used to flavor noodles, bread, and bagels and to make poppy seed kolache (a Czech pastry) are produced by the same plant used to make opium. Poppy seeds contain only trace amounts of opium, not enough to get high, but enough to influence a drug test. Experienced testers can tell the difference between the use of heroin and consumption of poppy seeds by the presence of thebaine, a chemical only found when the person tested has been eating the seeds.