#Food Science

[fuckingrecipes]

Everyone's tongue is unique to them.

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!

Some people are VERY sensitive to bitterness, and when they eat bitter flavors, they perceive that bitterness as far more overwhelming than someone who isn't sensitive. Children in particular are well-known to be bitter-sensitive. Dark chocolate, coffee, some types of vegetables, and other bitter compounds are revolting.

On the same token, there are people whose sense of bitterness is 'delicious!', so they REALLY enjoy things like mushrooms, matcha, beets, and other earthy flavors.

Some people are VERY sensitive to sweetness. Actually, your tongue can be adapted to sweetness, and perceive it less over time. Many people report no longer being able to stomach candy and sodas after cutting added sugar from their diet - your tongue literally changes how it perceives flavors, based on what you eat frequently.

Some people cannot taste major flavor compounds found in avocados, pomegranate, and blueberries. They'll say 'it tastes sour/sweet but otherwise like green water' - But other folks know all three fruit have very distinct flavors of their own.

Some people have trouble tasting the flavors in meat - My wife, for example, claims there's little to no taste difference between beef, chicken, and pork - that the only difference is in texture. Meanwhile I'm over here slurping beef juices off the plate.

And there's many other like this!

With that in mind - that our tongues are literally having entirely different experiences when touching the same foods... and also changing as we age, and based on what we eat...

There is no perfect food that will be universally good to everyone.

It doesn't matter how meticulous you are about cooking your steak, or folding your batter, or hand-picking only the freshest leaves on a dewy morning.

There will always be someone whose tongue is simply built different than yours, who thinks your favorite food is unpleasant to eat.

And that's okay!

Sometimes experiences can be unique and personal. A food doesn't have to be universally enjoyed to still be exquisite to those whose tongues can perceive it.

------

This is also a love letter to Durian, you sweet, foul-smelling fruit. Your innards taste like sweet, creamy vanilla-almond custard, but the gods have cursed you with a wretched hot-rotting-garbage stench to hide the divine dessert within.

You are beloved, beloathed, and banned from several forms of public transit. <3

[mindblowingscience]

Spending time in space has all sorts of effects on astronauts. Some perils of spaceflight are serious, others are best described as weird, and some fall in between, like the fact that food tastes bland and unappealing in space. This curious phenomenon can be a serious enough problem that some astronauts struggle to receive sufficient nutrition, leading a team of food scientists from Australia and the Netherlands to look into potential causes. Their recently published new study suggests that the explanation may lie in astronauts being isolated and uncomfortable, rather than being in orbit.

Continue Reading.

[sunnysideupsciart]

Do you know that a 3000-year-old honey was still edible? Does honey ever spoil?

[furiosamaxxing]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

[neosartorya]

So i was thinking about the whole solarpunk chobani oatmilk ad (as depicted here) and a comment someone made in a different post (that I now can't find) where they said something along the lines of (paraphrasing) 'the marketing people at chobani being unable to imagine a future where their brand had ditched single-use containers in favor of a sustainable alternative'. And I started thinking how will food packaging look like in the solarpunk utopia?

Modern food packaging responds (mostly) to the needs of the globalized supply chain, where food products need to be moved great distances without being damaged and while taking up as little space and energy as possible. Packaging also needs to be made of the cheapest materials available, hence the preference for disposable containers made of light materials (cardboard, plastic, aluminium, paper, etc.). You don't want your package to be worth more than what it contains (although with some food products, that is close to being the case).

The comment I referenced earlier suggested using reusable glass containers as an example of a sustainable alternative to single-use containers. That makes sense, and there is historical (and current) precedent for such kinds of food containers. Just ask your parents (or grandparents, I guess) how milk used to be delivered to homes in the good ol' days.

In a more recent example, some places still use reusable (returnable) containers for products such as beer and (even!) Coca-cola, where you pay an initial fee for the container and get reimbursed once you return it, or you can exchange the empty container for a full one by paying the price of the product minus the container fee.

This solution, however, is still within the framework of the global supply chain of modern capitalism. In the solarpunk utopia, the goal would be to reduce (reuse, repair, recycle) the breadth of our current supply chain by prioritizing local consumption and disinsentivizing long-distance trade.

This train of thought led me to the question of wether processed, pre-packaged food would even be a thing in the solarpunk utopia. After all, if we are trying to consume only what is locally sourced, one of the main purposes of preserved (and thus packaged) food goes away. No need for bottled orange juice when you can just go to the commons bin and grab a kilo of fresh oranges to make your own.

Further, once there is no capitalism, the "convenience" angle of processed, packaged food also appears to go away. You don't have to work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week anymore. You have the time and resources necessary to make your own damn fresh orange juice, so why bother with the bottled stuff?

Well for one, not everything is as easy and convenient to do by yourself as orange juice. Fermented foods (cheese, wine, beer, soy sauce, even pickles and yogurt), bread and pastries and cakes, carbonated drinks, jams and marmalade, butter, mayonnaise, cured meats and fish, and (yes) almond milk are all tricky to make properly, take a long time to be made and/or are energy and resource intensive. The need for these kinds of foods will remain as long as we are human and find pleasure in eating and trying new things. Also, the need for mass-produced food does not go away with capitalism, after all we have a population of 10 billion humans with different dietary needs that need to be fed. Food safety standards must still be enforced and probably will be even more stringent when corporate profits are no longer standing in the way of progress.

To add to this, a localized supply chain will make food preservation even more important. After all, if you want your population to survive mostly on what can be produced in a 100 km radius, you will have to prepare for food scarcity. Droughts, floods, earthquakes, blizzards, accidents, and even just regular ol' winter (once we've rescued it from the clutches of climate change) don't care how solar your punk is. They will wreck your food supply and your utopia needs to be ready.

So the need for packaged food will remain. The need for food that can stay in a cupboard undisturbed for months (if not years) and remain edible (and reasonably palatable!) will continue to be there.

With all this in mind... what does food packaging look in our solarpunk utopia? Single-use plastics have gone the way of the dodo, as have single-use paper, cardboard, aluminium, glass, and steel. What has replaced them?

I have some ideas, but this post is already ridiculously long, so I'll save them for later. All I'll say for now is I think glass containers are not the way to go. Glass is heavy, fragile, a poor thermal conductor (so heating and cooling processes with glass containers are energy innefficient), and takes up a lot of space. It is also very resource and energy intensive to produce and recycle (so not the most environmentaly friendly in that regard either).

What does a reusable aluminium container look like? That'd be cool I think.

[blatentmisinformation]

Spiders taste remarkably like crabs, in fact they are the primary flavouring agent in artificial crab.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Edible electronics are being developed to assist rescue operations and go inside hospital patients

Professor Dario Floreano is a Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer engaged in a bold research venture: the creation of edible robots and digestible electronics. However counterintuitive it may seem, combining food science and robotic science could yield enormous benefits. These range from airlifts of food to advanced health monitoring. Boundary breaking "Our goal is to start replacing electronic parts by edible components," said Floreano, who is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Read more.

[lecaudal]

To find out how many chilli hot dogs Sonic needs to maintain his speed we first need to figure out the nutritional value of his main food source. With some very rudimentary math we can come up with this. I’m going to assume that since all animals are people on Mobius that the hot dogs are made of soy and the chilli is vegetarian. Here are the basic nutritional facts of Sonic’s chilli hot dogs:

Calories: 445 kcal

Total Fats: 11.1g

Carbohydrates: 70g

Sugar: 9.4g

Protein: 20.5g

Sodium: 1606mg

I’m doing the calculations for two different speeds, for his ‘canon’ speed and for an estimated actual speed. The speed of sound is 1,235 km/h, and for the other speed we’ll be looking at I’ll examine the Escape from the City scene in Sonic Adventure 2. There’s no way Sonic is moving that fast here because of the fact that a gigantic two-lane wide three story tall truck can keep up with him, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he’s running at 500 km/h here.

The base calorie per hour rate of a 16 year old child, which I’m assuming Sonic has a metabolism and digestive tract similar to because of his appearance, is 362 calories per hour, as calculated below.

Now we multiply the base rate by Sonic’s speed divided by the child’s speed, which is 10 km/h, to get the amount of calories burned per hour by Sonic at both speeds, calculated below.

Now we divide this number by the amount of calories per serving in one chilli hot dog, which is 445.

And there we have our final numbers! 41 chilli hot dogs per hour to maintain a speed of 500 kilometres per hour, and 101 chilli hot dogs per hour for a speed of 1235 km/h, or the speed of sound.

Something to note here is we rarely see Sonic run for extended amounts of time, usually just a few seconds to a few minutes. I don’t think he’s ever run for an hour straight at least on screen, so that means he probably wouldn’t need to eat 101 hot dogs in one sitting, but he still would need quite a lot, perhaps even that many or more, over the course of a day.

Some pros and cons of his diet is the protein would help slowly repair the muscle tearing that would occur from constant running, and the high carbohydrate content would be useful for quickly usable energy, all of which results in a balanced macronutrient profile. Some cons are that first of all, the sodium content is absolutely insane when scaled up to that amount. Sonic would have to drink lots of water to inhibit the dehydration that much sodium would create. Also, eating that much food would take a while to digest, but as we see Sonic down tens of them in seconds I can only assume his metabolism is just as fast as he is.

Also I'm not a biologist or a food scientist or anything like that so it's very likely the way I went about calculating this is completely wrong. I looked all these formulas up lol.

[kingdrawcse]

Non-enzymatic browning

Beyond enzymatic browning in food, there's another fascinating process – non-enzymatic browning. It has two main forms: Caramelization, where sugars heat above their melting point, creating delightful nutty flavors and that rich brown hue. Then there's the Maillard reaction, a complex dance between sugars and amino acids or proteins that results in those mouthwatering brown to near-black molecules. Let's talk about one delicious result of these reactions - Braised Pork Belly, where caramelization and the Maillard reaction come together to create a culinary masterpiece!

[notwiselybuttoowell]

In Europe, Pringles has 34 active flavours in seven can sizes (one of which is called “David” for reasons no one can explain). Not all of these flavours are available in every European country – prawn cocktail only really sells in the UK and Ireland, while bacon is found in most places except Belgium, the Netherlands and strongholds of vegetarianism Austria, Denmark and Sweden. Salt and vinegar has spread everywhere except Norway and Italy. “They don’t have the habit of doing vinegar on their crisps; they just eat them plain with salt,” says Julie Merzougui, lead food designer at Kellanova. If an employee in Italy wanted to explore bringing salt and vinegar to the market, they could – they’d simply have to ask. As of yet, they haven’t.

Multiple times a year, Pringles releases limited-edition flavours known internally as “insanely accurate analogues” – Merzougui and Peremans come up with these for Europe. “People think we have the dream job,” Merzougui says (she has dark hair, round glasses and an easy laugh, a personality akin to an experimental flavour – perhaps a chorizo Pringle). Peremans, who has worked at the company for 26 years, has a salt and pepper beard and a Salt & Shake personality. He speaks quietly and pragmatically, but has a subtle playful streak: “My young son, he wants to become my successor.”

Like Lay’s, Pringles starts with data – in Asia, the company uses a Tinder-like tool with 200 consumers at a time, asking them to swipe left or right on potential flavours. Lucia Sudjalim, a senior Pringles developer in Asia, says she does a lot of “social media listening”, observing trends among influencers and bloggers. Kellanova also uses AI, which Merzougui says can predict trends up to 10 years in advance. Things aren’t always this sophisticated though – both Lay’s and Pringles also look at what’s on the shelves in countries they want to break into, copying flavours and identifying gaps to fill.

Yet just because the world wants a flavour doesn’t mean it’s made. In December 2020, scotch egg sales soared in the UK after Conservative ministers ruled the snack a “substantial meal” (providing punters with an excuse to be in the pub under Covid-19 lockdown rules). Peremans was challenged to make scotch egg Pringles and pulled it off; Merzougui says they tasted “really authentic”. Ultimately, however, the potential order volume was not high enough to justify a production run. (This, incidentally, is why it’s hard to get Salt & Pepper Pringles in the UK, even though they’re delicious.)

Another unreleased flavour was part of a collaboration with Nando’s that petered out for reasons Peremans is unsure about. Sometimes, logistics get in the way: the perfectly blended seasoning might clog the machines or create too much dust, causing sneezing fits in the factory. Belgian legislation mandates that every seasoning has to be put through a dust explosion test – it is set alight in controlled conditions to ensure it won’t blow up.

Inside the plant, manager Van Batenburg shows me giant cube-shaped bags of seasonings that arrive ready to be cascaded on to the crisps. At the end of his video presentation, he made a passing comment that rocked my world. We were talking about other crisp companies, big name competitors. “In essence,” he said, “they’re using the same seasoning houses we do.”

I leave Belgium with the names of three seasoning houses Pringles work with. At home, I discover that their websites are obscure – they speak of flavours and trends, but don’t even mention Pringles. I haven’t so much stumbled upon a conspiracy as been invited into it, but I am still shocked. After two months’ cajoling by the Pringles team, two representatives from a seasoning house agree to speak – but only on the condition of total anonymity, in line with their contractual obligations.

“It’s quite secretive,” food scientist Reuben admits via Zoom, wearing a pink shirt and a thoughtful expression (the only crisp I can compare him to is a Quaver). “Everyone has their own crown jewels that they protect.”

As a marketer, Peggy has always found the company’s secrecy “strange”. She speaks clearly, in a way that is reminiscent of a teacher or a steadfast multigrain snack. “It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me … I was like, ‘Why aren’t we shouting about this?’ But I was told, ‘Oh, no, we have to keep it very quiet.’”

This is because – just as Van Batenburg hinted in Belgium – the seasoning house Reuben and Peggy work for provides flavours for Pringles and Lay’s, as well as other brands. When asked whether their clients know, Reuben says, “They do and they don’t.” “It’s just not really talked about,” Peggy adds. However, this doesn’t mean that a Salt & Vinegar Pringle is flavoured with the same seasoning as a Salt & Vinegar Lay’s. In fact, the seasoning house is strictly siloed to guarantee exclusivity. Reuben’s team work on the Pringles account; the team making flavours for PepsiCo is in an entirely different country. “So the recipe, if you will, of the Pringles salt and vinegar can’t be seen by the other team,” Reuben says.

[mindblowingscience]

Every time you peel a banana and dispose of the skin, you're throwing away a tasty, nutritious snack. A recent study has shown if banana peels are blanched, dried, and ground into a flour, they can be turned into baked goods that taste just as nice, if not better than wheat-based products. Unless you're a devoted reader of vegan cooking blogs or a Nigella Lawson fan, you've probably never considered cooking with a banana peel. But not only is it perfectly safe, scientists also demonstrated it really is good for you. When the experiment's products were taste-tested, consumers reported they were just as happy with the flavors as they were with peel-free sugar cookies.

Continue Reading.

[sunnysideupsciart]

Drinking water after eating spicy food might not be the best solution…🔥

[bigtreefest]

Biscoff Cookies and the Effects of Airplanes on Food Taste

Posting this bc I promised @krirebr I would. I hope y’all love your weekly dosage of science I’ve gathered in the tidbit below. I also just wanna say, one of my least favorite words is ‘umami.’ It’s been used increasingly in recent decades to describe a certain savory flavor profile amongst scientists and culinarians alike, and tbh, I just don’t like it. Be that as it may, its use is essential for this mini informative post, but I just want you guys to know the inner turmoil I faced every time I had to use that word. 🙄

Ok, so we’re answering three questions here:

1. Why does stuff on planes taste so bad? 2. Why do they serve Biscoff on planes? 3. What is my opinion on biscoff?

Let’s get it:

1. Why does stuff on planes taste so bad?

Well, does it taste bad, or just different? Airplane food is universally known as the butt of the jokes of bad comedians, whether or not they’re telling the truth. Let’s start with the explanation of what happens to our perceptions of food when we get into the air. The higher you climb in elevation, the lower the air pressure. To explain it simply, it’s because there are less molecules on top of you, pushing down, and therefore less pressure. The same effect is seen in how deeper waters have higher pressure, because the weight of the water molecules above adds up the deeper you go. Although most flights reach above 30,000 ft (~10,000m) in elevation, air plane cabins (where you sit) are pressurized to somewhere around the density of air at ~5,000ft (~1,600m). Even at this change in pressure/elevation, there are many changes the body goes through (I went to science camp for 2 weeks to study some of these effects. Ask me about that some other time.). You breathe faster since oxygen does not reach your lungs as easily from the decreased pressure. Essentially, the molecules are not being shoved as forcefully into your body, so they don’t attach and aren’t sensed as readily. The same thing happens with your senses of smell and taste (which are associated). Most of the taste profiles, including spicy, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, are decreased by the increase in elevation and decrease in air pressure. In contrast, the one flavor profile that is increased is umami/savory. HOWEVER, this can sometimes be difficult to sense if there is a lack of salt (seasoning things with salt makes them taste more like themselves. That’s food science, baby). These considerations go into the preparation of food for planes, where extra spices and salt are added in their preparation so they taste more similar to something you would experience on the ground. A normal meal would lose a lot of flavor, and I’m sure airplane-intended food tastes much better on the ground. But also, at the end of a day, it’s a prepared meal, served in a mobile metal tube, designed to be reheated, so it’s not going to be really phenomenal anyway.

2. Why do they serve Biscoff on planes?

Now, if you ask Kris, she’ll say ‘captive audience’ (and my college roommate agrees), but there could be a few other factors to it. Biscoff has been branded as a staple for several airlines, especially Delta. They come in small packages, which is ideal for serving many passengers while dealing with very little space in the plane refreshment areas. They can be eaten easily out of small packages and easily cleaned up (unless they crumble everywhere, which I have to say, they have a pension for. That’s something I don’t like.). They also have an incredibly long shelf life (likely due to their dryness, along with other ingredients), making them ideal for something on-the-go and to ward off health code violations. And also also, if you think about it, the cookies are highly spiced in cinnamon, allowing their flavor to come through in the higher elevations, which may be pleasant for many. They’ve also been dubbed as the snack equivalent of drinking ginger ale on planes, which is hilariously common. What does surprise me, though, is that to me, they seem like a bit of a luxury snack cookie, so I’m sure they get a great bulk deal from the company with humble family beginnings.

3. What is my opinion on Biscoff?

Yeah, I think they’re pretty good. My first experience eating them was loopy off knee surgery (ask me about that later, too, if you want) and I remember asking for more because I thought they were so good. I’ve been given them a handful of times on planes, but I commonly don’t eat them. They just get shoved in my backpack and never touched because I have to be in the right mood to eat them. I think they’re alright, but they’re far from a first choice. Their grandma-like nature makes me feel like they’re healthier? Yes, the cookies are dry, but they’re not drying to my mouth. Plus I love the spice of the cinnamon. Something about the paste they form in my mouth, too, is nice. Comforting, somewhat. Would enjoy with a glass of tea, but I can see how others wouldn’t like them. Plus, I feel like when they’re put into cookie butter or something, they lose a little character. 5.5/10. But I’ve already spoken about how Ransom doesn’t have the greatest taste. Plus, I’m sure he was eating them because they were what was around. Like I said, grandma food.

I think that’s all I have to say. I will be taking questions. It was nice to research something fun for a change.

References (links bc I know you guys def don’t want APA citation format):

Why does food taste bland on planes? (WONG Tak-kan, 2018)

The reasons airplane food tastes so different than on the ground (Jade Tungul, 2021)

Why does food taste different on planes? (Katie Moskvitch, 2015)

Why Are Biscoff Cookies Such A Popular Inflight Snack? (Matthew Austin Ryan, 2023)

How Biscoff Became the Cookie of the Skies (Lillian Stone, 2022)

How Biscoff Cookies Became the Snack We Crave on Planes (Kaitlin Menza, 2020)

[ahhvernin]

In the quest of becoming more healthy and consuming less processed foods...I've noticed that within the realm of certain fad diets in which the participants, who don't medically need the diet, love to tout the healthiness and the simplicity of their diet by fear mongering us by showing us long lists of ingredients of "un- pronounceable" words from processed foods.

But have you actually stopped to look at how complex some of these keto, paleo, gluten free, dairy free etc ingredient lists and recipes are?! Some of them are longer with twice the amount of ingredients than the traditional method and require more time to process or prep or more gas mileage to find an ingredient that most people still can't pronounce or are very unfamiliar and there for uncomfortable with trying. Not to mention the scientific name of certain plants and herbs are used instead of their common name!

So in the end: Long lists and ingredients- you- can't - pronounce" is not the problem and should NOT be the an indicator if a food item is healthy or not. What needs to happen are for people to expand their knowledge of food, and their ingredients, enzymes and reagents and their purpose in the production of their food as well as alternative names.

Because the ingredients "Sodium Chloride" or species  "Capsicum annuum" and "ascorbic acid" should not scare a person into thinking this food as poison and bad for them. These are just the scientific names for "salt" , "chili pepper" and "vitamin C aka the sour stuff on sour candy". These three could easily be part of a fajita seasoning mix, organic or not.

Stop fear mongering people.

Long ingredient lists and hard to pronounce ingredients DO NOT mean they are unhealthy.

Have you ever seen the list for something like curry or mole? Its long, its got words I cannot pronounce and I have to Google but it does not mean its poison or unhealthy. Its culture, heritage, passed down recipes.

There are already so many eating disorders and food avoidance that are affecting people and their health. Folks don't need more reasons to eliminate the food they have left.

Yeah sometimes there are some ingredients that don't sound like they serve a purpose but that's for you to decide if you want a short or longer shelf life or taste or texture consistency of a food item. Because remember...lots of food don't taste good if you let it sit. Things start to loss texture, flavor, it might spoil within 2 days....preservatives have been used for centuries. Some more traditional than others. But if your beef is with these preservatives like sulfites...then talk about the preservatives and leave things like "protein enzymes" and "tannins" out of it. Because those ingredients could very well be the thing that makes your food item that food. Milk doesn't turn into yogurt/cheese without help or grape juice into wine. They need bacteria and enzymes to exist.