25 Random Things

I joined Facebook about a month ago (if you are not yet on it beware; it is the biggest time sucker since computer solitaire). It’s been fun and weird to see what has become of all my old high school and college friends. Lately, there’s been this flurry of notes, kind of like a chain letter. A friend sends you (and 24 other friends) a list of 25 random things you might not know about them. You’re supposed to compose your own list and send it back to them (plus sending it to 24 more friends). They are mostly fun to read; finding out your hippie friend was once a cheerleader is always entertaining.
I’ve wanted to send out my own list but can’t think of enough interesting things about myself that I haven’t already revealed to anyone who’d listen. However, while trying to think of a topic for this week’s article, it hit me that I know at least 25 random and interesting things about food, so here’s my list:
1. The two most expensive spices come from flowers. Saffron is the stigma of a crocus and is by far the most expensive and labor-intensive spice out there. It takes 70,000 flowers to make 1 lb of the fine dried threads. They are used for both their flavor and color, both of which diminish in the presence of light and heat, so store them in an airtight container in the freezer. The second most expensive spice is vanilla, which is the dried fruit pod of an orchid. The orchids are hand pollinated and the pods go through a lengthy processing and cure for months before they taste anything like vanilla. It takes 5 lbs of green pods to make 1 lb of vanilla beans.
2. The reasons the edges of blueberries turn green in muffins is because there was too much baking soda added to the mix. The alkaline environment reacts with pigments in the skin turning them green.
3. Cream of tartar is “harvested” from the inside of wine vats, or at least the tartaric acid comes from there and is then mixed with potassium hydroxide to make this slightly acidic baking aid. Add it to egg whites to get better volume when whipping up some meringue or use it the next time you make candy for a creamier mouth feel.
4. Honey never goes bad. It might crystallize (which you can fix by warming it slightly until the crystals dissolve) but it will stay sweet and tasty as long as you live. Archeologists found edible honey in Tut’s tomb.
5. There are over 15,000 varieties of rice.
6. There are three plants referred to as Bergamot (mentha citrate, monarda didyma, Citrus aurantium ssp. Bergamia). All three are used in making tea but only the oil from the citrus fruit Bergamot Orange is used to flavor Earl Grey tea.
7. Caffeine can kill you. That is, if you drink 100 cups of coffee in less than 4 hours (I’m not sure I could get that much down between all those trips to the bathroom).
8. The grossest part of drinking milk from cows treated with the genetically engineered hormone rBST isn’t the fact that you’re consuming the hormone or extra antibiotics but the fact that treated cows are very prone to mastitis which results in lots of extra pus in the milk. Yuck. Drink and eat organic dairy products to avoid this.
9. Tomatoes got a rough start in the culinary world. Before humans started to cultivate them, they were small and bitter, not the juicy, red orbs we know and love today. When they were brought to Europe, tomatoes were considered poisonous and it took about 500 years for them to gain acceptance and only if they were boiled for hours. Luckily we came to our senses. In the US alone, we eat 22 pounds per person per year. Unfortunately, it’s mostly in the form of ketchup and tomato sauce, not fresh and warm from the garden.
10. The first soup was thought to be made 6000 years ago out of hippo bones
11. The best thing to put out the fire of hot chili peppers is milk or some kind of dairy product. Just make sure it’s organic (see #8). And it’s really only a temporary relief; you may just have to wait the fire out.
12. Hop plants are related to marijuana and hemp.
13. When eating spaghetti, if you wind the strands all the way onto your fork, you’re more likely to get sauce on your shirt. Sauce on the last four inches of the strand can accelerate up to 9ft/sec as those ends come out of the sauce and onto your fork.
14. Mussels can live to be 50 years old, but most of the ones we eat are much younger.
15. Eating cheese at the end of a meal may help prevent tooth decay. Plus it’s a delicious dessert.
16. Back in the days that soldiers carried shields, they used them as cooking implements when they weren’t being used to deflecting body blows. They would even bake flat bread in them.
17. Some psychologists believe we eat hot chilies not because we enjoy the burn but for the pleasure we get from chemicals our brain produces to relieve the pain.
18. It makes no sense to call food grown with the aid of manmade chemicals “conventional” food. Growing food with manmade pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer has certainly not been the convention for very long. It’s been less than 100 years that we’ve used chemicals to grow our food. Before that everything was “organic”. Why isn’t organic food the convention?
19. The botanical definition of fruits and vegetables is much different from the culinary definition. Not only are tomatoes considered a fruit in the botanical world but so are green beans, eggplant, cucumbers and corn. Botanists consider anything that develops from a flower’s ovaries and surrounds the plant’s seeds a fruit. The culinary definition is based on taste and when in the meal we eat them. If it’s sweet and we usually eat it for dessert, it’s a fruit. If it’s usually a side dish or main course, it’s a vegetable.
20. We use herbs and spices because 10,000 years ago we got really bored with our new agrarian diet. As hunter gatherers, we were used to keeping track of hundreds of different tastes and smells so we wouldn’t eat anything that might kill us. When we started living off of wheat, barley, rice and corn our taste buds and olfactory senses missed the diversity, so we started experimenting with herbs and spices to make food more interesting. We’re still at it.
21. The blue color of poppy seeds is an optical illusion. The seed casing is actually brown but there is a coating of tiny crystals of calcium oxalate over the casing that acts as prisms, reflecting blue wavelengths to our eye.
22. The word pumpernickel derives from two German dialect words meaning fart and devil. Not surprising. It is a high fiber bread after all.
23. Less than 4% of salt produced each year goes into food; hard to believe after eating a bowl of canned soup.
And for dessert:
24. Ice cream headaches are caused when a nerve center in the roof of your mouth overreacts to the cold of the ice cream and causes blood vessels to quickly dilate in your head in an effort to warm up your brain.
25. And lastly this bit of personal trivia: I eat at least a small bite of dark chocolate everyday. For health reasons, of course.