Everyone is going to have a different experience, tasting the same thing.
It's pretty well-known that some people have a gene to taste cilantro as 'soapy' or not. There are many other variants like that!
recently learned my coworker and one of my friends dont know what botulism is, and now im wondering if theyre outliers or if this is my Weird Kid showing through so
do you know what botulism is (Knowing What Botulism Is in this case is described as knowing the concept, how to identify and avoid it in a household context, not necessarily all the scientific parts of what it is and what it can do) and where did you learn about it?
please reblog if you can im sososososo curious
peeling those sour rainbow gummy strips into long thin strings and putting them into cheap energy drink to create something im calling battery acid spaghetti will update once ive finished it
dont do this
I really hope its not too bad bc i actually love both components.
it forms a dry skin at the top made of the sour pellets. not a great start.
tastes really good actually. i also feel like i am about to explode.
do not do this.
Unanimous consensus: Do not do this
Other people: Hold on I’m about to do this
I keep seeing this post going around so, for folks who want to know why not, here's a chemist's hypothesis:
-Human saliva has an average pH of ~6.7 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3800408/), which is pretty neutral.
-Monster energy has a pH of ~2.7 (https://patientconnect365.com/DentalHealthTopics/Article/Energy_Drinks_and_Your_Teeth_Should_You_Worry), which is quite acidic but not dangerous, except to your tooth enamel if consumed in large quantities.
-Rainbow sour belts contain malic acid (a common food additive as a potent acidifier and sour-flavor agent), citric acid (another common sour flavoring in pretty much everything) as well as ascorbic acid (aka vitamin C, used here mainly as a preservative). (https://candypros.com/products/sour-belts-bulk-rainbow)
-All of these acids when added to water would normally release their protons (H+ ions), thereby making the water solution more acidic. However, a chemical constant of these acids called the acid dissociation constant (pKa for short) indicates the pH of a solution at which acids are most likely to keep or release their protons. The pKa's* of these acids are higher (3.4, 3.1, and 4.2 for malic, citric, and ascorbic acids respectively) than the pH of the solution (2.7), which essentially means that the acids can't release their protons and all that acidic potential is trapped in the solid formulation of the candy.
-There's also some evidence that sugar decreases the solubility of acids in water solutions (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3411471/ only sorbic acid is discussed here but it's relatively structurally similar to the acids in discussion). The undoubtedly high sugar content of both the Monster and the candy therefore may contribute to the accounts of the sour crystals bubbling/floating on top of the solution instead of dissolving.
-Malic acid in particular is notorious for causing mouth irritation when eaten in high quantities.
-Thus, I can imagine that upon consuming the battery acid spaghetti, not only is the mix itself quite potently sweet/sour, but also the solid malic acid coming into direct contact with your mouth quickly becomes painful, and as the solution mixes with your (pH neutral) saliva the trapped acidity of the malic/citric/ascorbic acids is dumped into your mouth and esophagus, creating a sensation that I can only imagine is similar to consuming actual battery acid (pH = 0.8).
(*Each of these acids actually has multiple pKa's corresponding to number of protons they're able to donate, but really only the lowest pKa is useful here since once that one dissociates then all of the other ones are already dissociated too.)
thank you science side of tumblr
i'm gonna do it anyway
Please report back with your findings! For science!
Mr Sam, I've never thought about freezing dairy before. In particular I thought you COULDN'T freeze milk and yogurt. Could you talk about your freeze / defrost process and how the thawed product compares to original? This could change my shopping habits so thanks in advance.
In my experience, you can freeze almost any dairy product except sour cream, which for some reason does Not Cope Well with being frozen. Also some cheeses, but that varies. Full report below! :D
I have one question about scrambled eggs. If I beat a few eggs together than freeze, how do I thaw them? I know I could put them in the fridge the day before, but that requires advance planning (or a Tardis, but I hear the last one has been "borrowed"). Is there a way of making scrambled eggs out of frozen beaten eggs?
Not that I’m aware of, unfortunately -- you could maaaaybe try defrosting them in the microwave but I suspect they’d just cook in the container.
Your better bet is probably just to cook up a shitload of scrambled eggs beforehand and freeze those. If you, say, dollop them into lined muffin tins, or onto parchment, in meal-sized portions, then freeze, then later repackage into a tupperware or plastic bag, you can take chunks of scrambled egg out and reheat those -- I’d wrap in a wet paper towel and microwave, or wrap in foil to prevent browning and pop them in an oven (or, ideally, a toaster oven) to warm. But yeah, with frozen eggs you really do need to either give them time to thaw or cook ‘em before they go in.
everyone is overcomplicating things: the fact of the matter is that pluto is a planet culinarily, but not botanically
“but EVERYTHING is chemicals!!”
that’s not what it means and you fucking know it. stop putting weird shit in food.
Except it is, and believing you can tell the difference between “bad chemicals” and “good chemicals” from the label is exactly how marketers trick you into thinking something is healthier than it is just because they say “derived from natural sources” instead of the chemical name, which is not necessarily true.
Further, that “weird shit” serves a purpose. Potassium sorbate, also called E202, for instance, inhibits microbial growth in food and beauty products and stops unwanted additional fermentation in wine and cider. So unless you want sour wine, contaminated cosmetics, and things going mouldy in your cupboard in three days, it’s good for potassium sorbate to be in there. And if you were brewing your own beer/wine/cider at home, you would use it too. Various acids are used to lower pH in preserved fruits and vegetables in order to prevent botulism. Potassium metabisulphite/pyrosulphite is also used to prevent microbial growth in wine.
Some things are unhealthy, absolutely. Look at what happened with trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils, which serve no purpose except to cut costs. It’s good to know about those things. But I have also seen so many products intentionally marketing themselves to appeal to the “natural” consumer that are the same exact things as the “scary chemical” stuff they’re just called something different. Like I’ve seen a lot of soap labels where they call the ingredients “natural cold-pressed extract of Helianthus anuum” to make it sound healthier and less processed than if they’d said “triglycerides” or “sunflower oil,” which is what it is. It works the other way, too, where labels will intentionally play up scientific jargon the average consumer doesn’t know the meaning of so that their product sounds like it’s different and worth paying twice as much for, like, for instance, “micellar” soaps, which is just regular soap.
Other stuff serves an aesthetic purpose that does not have a negative health effect and is also not strictly necessary, but which if it was not there, people would think the product was worse, like the lecithin emulsifiers that keep your mayonnaise and yoghurt and peanut butter from separating unpleasantly, the sulphates added to shampoo to make it lather, or the carrageenan or alginate added to toothpaste and ice cream to make it smoother (lecithin and carrageenan both come from natural sources, actually — lecithin often comes from from soy, and carrageenan and alginate come from seaweed — but they aren’t always listed that way, so they sound like “scary chemicals” to skittish people). Alum is used in pickling to keep pickles crunchy; it’s not necessary, some people pickling at home prefer not to use it, but if you got a mushy pickle at the supermarket you’d be turned off by it. Sodium citrate is a salt of citric acid, which can be “natural” from citrus fruits or artificially-produced but which is identical in either case. It helps emulsify melting cheese to keep it from getting a gross oily layer separating out and to regulate pH in things like gelatine products, which would not hold their structure if the pH got outside of those bounds. These things are there for a reason.
As I said, not everything is benign or good for the customer, and that’s important to be aware of, but “ah this is a chemical I can’t pronounce so therefore it’s Unnatural and Bad” is NOT the same as being an informed consumer, and it actually makes you way easier to manipulate through marketing. Deciding that something is good or bad for you based on how it sounds when you don’t actually know what it is or why it’s there is not “doing your research” or whatever the granola hippies in the Facebook mommy group say.
I’ve been around long enough to expect that no one on this post will even read any of this, but in the interest of promoting actual consumer health literacy, I have to say it for those people who do.
The most buckwild thing to me, is seeing those typed of ‘I should be able to pronounce all the ingredients’ folks get very up-in-arms on the subject of food waste. I cannot imagine how many safe preservatives they can’t pronounce, but i DO know how much more food waste there would be if said ‘chemicals’ weren’t in use.
harvesting cinnamon
…How did it ever occur to someone that this was edible?…
I mean, I’m guessing some variation of “hey that tree I used as firewood sure had some good smelling smoke and made the food we cooked over it better, I wonder what else we could do with it … ”
Yea, that or
I mean. There’s foods out there that if you don’t cook them exactly right they will kill you. Humans have been trying absolutely everything to see what they can eat.
there is a shark. The greenland shark. It lives in the ocean where humans naturally die. At depths that would crush a human. In water so cold it would very quickly kill a person. It’s a big shark, 20ish feet. Several have been found with polar bear in their stomach. They live hundreds of years. To keep from freezing, their blood is full of anti-freeze chemicals that makes their meat poisonous to humans.
They are considered by humans living near them to be… a delicacy.
Of course you have to bury it for six months to let it ferment the poisons out.
i swear to gods, if it’s on this planet, we will find a way to eat it.
did you know, the first scientists to find a whole frozen mammoth out in the tundra … cooked some and ate it? Like, they found it and excavated it, and while still on site these 2 professionals with degrees said to each other, oh we gotta eat some of that. It was like 17 THOUSAND years old. They said it tasted bad. No shit. But that’s humans for you.
anyway, the cinnamon harvesting is awesome, never saw that before
Humans are one of the most accomplished omnivores on the planet.
Two things. The first is that huh, I guess you kinda coppice cinnamon, which makes a lot of sense now I think about it. The second is that we eat almonds and cassava, both of which are, in their wild state, hilariously toxic.
Both contain copious amounts of cyanide, or more accurately, compounds that release cyanide when you eat them. And yet? Cassava became a staple for people in the Amazon and beyond, because despite the fact that eating improperly prepared wild cassava will straight up kill you, people worked out that if you grind it up into a wet paste and leave it covered for several hours to offgas its cyanide. Though some domesticated varieties can be detoxified just through proper boiling and discarding of the water, a lot of domestic strains still require this whole involved process to not fatally poison you.
Meanwhile almonds, wild almonds, are also deadly poisonous. It takes about 50 to kill and adult but as few as 5 bitter almonds can be fatal to a child. Thing is, wild almonds occasionally produce plants that aren’t stuffed to the gills with cyanide. But still, it feels insane to me that people who lived off the land in the places where wild almonds grew found out that some of these plants wouldn’t kill you, because idk I feel like my instinct there would be to not even try And yet? Almonds are a thing. (almonds were a very early domesticated fruit tree and there’s some features of almond propagation that make this even more insane)
If something is potentially edible, and I really do mean capital-P-Potentially here, someone, somewhere figured out how to eat it, even if figuring that out involved a truly ludicrous string of steps and/or luck to not just fucking die from it.
@rubynye look at this cinnamon harvest omg
Something that I kept in the tags but maybe should be its own post:
A lot of people wonder why contaminated foods can’t simply be reheated/recooked in order to kill the microbial contamination, and then eaten.
The issue is that these microbes produce toxins which are largely what caused signs and symptoms of illness. These toxins remain in the food even after the microbe itself has been killed. So let’s say your rice has become contaminated. You hear your rice back up to steaming hot for a while. Hell, you bring it to a true boil because you’re gonna make rice pudding or something, right?
You may have killed all of the microbes, but the food can still make you very ill. This is why preventing contamination in the first place is so important. Proper washing, keeping things at safe temps, etc etc.
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
This guy is my new hero. I LOVE learning about native food plants that just grow everywhere without human help.
The database is a little clunky to use (especially on a phone), but still loads of excellent information.
Here’s their website - Food Plant Solutions - and they can use volunteers! And $ of course. What they really need help with is connecting with NGOs/groups on the ground already working in countries, to get them access to the database. They also need help from formally trained agronomists, people good with website stuff, and people good at marketing / getting the word out about their project.
the jaws that bite, the claws that… yeah okay, we’ll stop.
it’s late November and the time of feast is almost upon us! so now it’s time to…
…talk turkey.
*chorus of groans*
the Turkey is a bird most of us are familiar with (usually as a sandwich ingredient). they are native to North America, where they scrounge around in the brush for nuts, berries, and cigarette butts.
eh, it’s a living
they are most active in the spring, when the males attempt to court as many females and beat down as many humans as possible.
“hold up,” you say. “what was that last bit?”
“oh,” I reply kindly, a twinkle in my eye “yeah.”
for whatever reason, Turkeys will sometimes decide that a human is another, vastly inferior Turkey, who must be DESTROYED and sent to Turkey Hell
this creature understands neither pity nor remorse
see, Turkeys are social animals with a strictly defined pecking order. (hahaha get it? they peck each other in the face, that’s the joke) so if one decides that they are better than you, they may try to put you in your place. by sending you straight to Turkey Hell. do not let this happen.
TURKEY HELL! TURKEY HELL! TURKEY HELL!
however if a Turkey instead fluffs its butt feathers and struts around for you, it means he thinks that you are sexy sexy and he would like to get it on. he may also show off his snood.
don’t panic! it’s the wobbly bit on top, there
the males use these to attract mates (somehow). personally they kind of make me want to throw up. gaaaaaaaah.
luckily, Turkeys are not particularly dangerous, even if they will peck the hell out of your car (your car is where their evil twin, Exactly The Same But Backwards, lives. one day they will destroy him and end his mockery.)
ONE DAY, BROTHER
Turkeys were first domesticated by the Mayans, who tragically never also invented cranberry sauce. they are now raised almost worldwide, as other cultures have come to appreciate their impressive sandwich-filling abilities
so if you’re sitting down for a Turkey dinner this week, make sure you take a quiet moment to honor this noble creature…
…and then dig in. and send that bastard straight to Turkey Hell.
TURKEY HELL! TURKEY HELL! TURKEY HELL!
remember to check out the rest of the Weird Biology series this holiday season!
(Fig 1) These are some cacao pods. They have not been processed. (Though you might count removal from the tree as processing – we’re going to assume they fell off.)
(Fig 2) This is a cacao fruit. It has been processed a tiny bit (by cutting open the pod).
(Fig 3) These are some roasted cocoa seeds, and broken cocoa seed “nibs”. They have been processed a bit more.
(Fig 4) This is a chocolate bar. it has been processed quite a lot.
Moral:
What a lot of healthy-eating demagogues call “unnecessary processing” is just what it takes to get the initial piece of plant or animal into a shape where it is both safe and tasty to eat. “Processing” is not a bad word, any more than “cooking” is a bad word.
