Gwyneth Paltrow recently told her staff she won't be eating octopus anymore. (Reuters)
The list of foods that Gwyneth Paltrow allows herself to eat continues to grow smaller.
According to a recent Slack conversation that was screen-captured and posted to Goop’s Instagram page, the actress and lifestyle mogul claims she can no longer eat octopus because “they’re too smart to be food.”
The conversation came about as Paltrow and her workers were discussing their favorite Los Angeles restaurants, and one staffer recommended she try “the BBQ octopus” at Cliff’s Edge, reports People.
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“Octopus (sic) are too smart to be food,” responded Paltrow. “They have more neurons in their brains than we do. I had to stop eating them because I was so freaked out by it. They can escape from sea world and s--- by unscrewing drains and going out to sea.”
One of few of Paltrow’s employees was in complete agreement and a few others seemed shocked-- even though Paltrow’s remarks aren’t entirely factual.
For starters, Scientific American reports that octopuses have around 500 million neurons, while humans possess closer to 100 billion.
The story Paltrow speaks of, involving an octopus that escaped “Sea World” by unscrewing a drain, didn’t exactly happen as she tells it, either — Paltrow is likely misremembering the story of Inky, a male New Zealand octopus who escaped from the New Zealand National Aquarium in 2016. He didn’t do so by unscrewing a drain, either: Inky slipped down a six-inch drainage pipe and into the Pacific Ocean.
That’s not to say octopuses aren’t extremely crafty sea creatures. They have relatively large brains for their size, and more than half of their neurons are located in their arms — meaning that those arms may have “something like minds of their own,” reports The Harvard Gazette.
It’s also true that octopuses have been observed unscrewing the lids from jars on occasion.
Regardless, the animals are too smart for Paltrow — and now perhaps some of her friends — to consume.
So has she stopped eating squid, too? “No,” Paltrow told her employees. “Squid is the dumb cousin, apparently.”