Good morning Phoenix! It’s Trivia Tuesday! Today’s trivia is
all about Savannah’s love of cooking.
Here’s some fun food facts for the foodies in all of you:
• Carrots used to be purple before the 17th century. The
modern day orange carrot wasn’t cultivated until Dutch growers in the late 16th
century took mutant strains of the purple carrot, including yellow and white
carrots, and gradually developed them into the sweet, plump, orange variety we
have today. Before this, pretty much all carrots were purple with mutated
versions occasionally popping up including the yellow and white carrots, among
others. These however were rarely cultivated due to typically being very thin
and not very good tasting.
• Why Rice Krispies snap, crackle, and pop: Rice Krispies,
also known as Rice Bubbles in some countries, are created by preparing rice in
such a way that it will “pop” like popcorn during the cooking process, albeit
much less dramatically. This popping puffs up the kernels. When the rice is
finished cooking, most of the Rice Krispies will have thin, solid walls with
hollow sealed areas inside where air pockets have formed. When cold milk is
added, the sudden temperature shift causes the walls of these air pocket
regions of the Rice Krispies to fracture suddenly, making a snap, crackle, pop
type noise.
• The color of the twist tie on bread packaging means
something. The color signifies what day of the week the bread was baked on. The
practice of using these color odes is not meant necessarily to be used by the
customer, but actually is to aid the person stocking the shelves with bread in
determining what bread is old and needs to be removed. This way, they don’t
have to actually look closely at the tabs (which usually also show a “sell by”
date); they can simply look for ones of a specific color and remove those. Each
manufacturer maintains their own color code scheme, but this is usually easily
discoverable on the web, by asking a bread stocker at the store, or by simply
emailing the manufacturer of your favorite bread.
• Why Carbonated Beverages are Called “Soft Drinks”: “Soft
Drink” classically referred to nearly all beverages that did not contain
significant amounts of alcohol (hard drinks). The term “soft drink” is now
typically used nearly exclusively for flavored carbonated beverages thanks to
advertising. Flavored carbonated beverage makers were having a hard time
creating national ads due to the fact that what one calls their product varies
from region to region (soda, pop, coke, fizzy drinks, etc). In order to get
around this problem, for national or international ad campaigns, these
manufacturers agreed to using the term “soft drink”.
• Twinkies actually expire fairly quickly. When Twinkies
were originally introduced, the shelf life was only 2 days, thanks to the dairy
products they contained. By substituting various chemicals for the dairy
ingredients and by putting the Twinkie in an air tight plastic wrap to keep the
cake from going stale, they managed to push the shelf life up to 25 days, which
is what it is to this day. Hostess now churns out more than 1000 Twinkies per
minute, or a little over 500 million per year. The cakes are each baked for 12
minutes; injected with cream; flipped over so the round bottom is now the top;
then packaged for shipping.
• Why a Baker’s Dozen is 13 instead of 12: This has its
origins in the fact that many societies throughout history have had extremely
strict laws concerning baker’s wares. For example, in Ancient Egypt, should a
baker be found to cheat someone, they would have their ear nailed to the door
of the bakery. In Babylon, if a baker was found to have sold a “light loaf” to
someone, the baker would have his hand chopped off. As it wasn’t that hard to
accidentally cheat a customer, bakers began giving more than what the law
outlined to make sure they went over and never under. In England, after the
Bread and Ale Statute was enacted in the 13th century, it became common
practice that the baker would give 13 loaves for every dozen a vendor ordered.
This made sure that the baker would never accidentally break the law and be
subject to severe punishments.
• Why Garlic Makes Your Breath Smell Bad: Most of the bad
breath comes directly from the sulfuric compounds introduced into your mouth.
Garlic actually promotes the growth of some of the microbes in your mouth that
already cause bad breath. Some of these compounds gets metabolized, eventually
making their way into your blood stream. They eventually get exuded through
your pores and passed into the air that fills your lungs, making your breath
stink even if you cleaned your mouth.
• Why asparagus makes your pee smell: It’s based on the way
certain chemical compounds in asparagus break down inside people’s bodies,
which is why it doesn’t smell bad when you’re preparing it. Research done in
1975 concluded that it was from the s-methyl thioesters: s-methyl thioacrylate
and s-methyl thiopropionate. They are mainly sulfur based, being formed from
sulfur bonding with an acyl group. So, essentially, as with the garlic, a type
of sulfuric compound is the culprit.
• The word for dinner used to mean breakfast. The English
word “dinner” comes from the French word “disnar”, which means “breakfast”.
Traditionally, dinner was the first meal of the day, eaten around noon. It was
also the biggest meal of the day, with a lighter meal coming later known as
supper. Eventually, more meals started being added to the day with people
eating meals before the large noon meal of dinner. Rather than calling the
earlier meals that broke the fast by the word that means breakfast (dinner),
the name dinner now stuck as meaning the largest meal of the day. As time
passed, the largest meal of the day gradually got moved later and later in the
day until its meal time was around the time we used to have supper (which used
to be a light meal).
Have a fangtastic day! Enjoy Lara's newest novella everyone!
<3 Brock V"""V
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