Grab a bottle of ketchup from the fridge today, and it’s hard to think of it as anything but a burger topping. But in the 1830s, Americans weren’t squeezing ketchup onto fries — they were swallowing it in pill form, on a doctor’s advice, to cure everything from indigestion to Read more
Everyone knows carrots are orange — but they weren’t always. For most of their cultivated history, carrots were purple, yellow, and white. The Dutch bred the orange variety we know today, and legend says it was a tribute to William of Orange. The truth, it turns out, is far less romantic — and far more interesting.
Walk into any kitchen and ask someone whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, and you’ll probably get a confident, immediate answer. The trouble is, depending on who’s answering, you’ll get two completely different — and equally “correct” — responses. A botanist will tell you, without hesitation, that Read more
That chalky white film on a chocolate bar usually means bloom, not spoilage. The short version is that chocolate can turn white in two different ways: fat bloom, when cocoa butter moves and recrystallizes, or sugar bloom, when moisture dissolves surface sugar and it dries back into crystals. If you Read more
Raw sauerkraut is refrigerated because it still contains live lactic acid bacteria, while shelf-stable sauerkraut has usually been pasteurized hot enough to stop fermentation and kill those microbes. In plain English, both jars may have started as fermented cabbage, but only one is still biologically alive when you pick it Read more
Kefir and yogurt both ferment milk with lactic acid bacteria, but kefir’s grain-based culture of 30-plus bacterial and yeast strains creates a fizzier, thinner, more microbially diverse drink than yogurt’s two-strain fermentation.
Only fermented foods that are both unpasteurized and still biologically active when you eat them can deliver live microbes to the intestine. In plain English, fermentation alone is not enough. A food can be fermented in its history and completely microbe-dead on the spoon, which is why refrigerated live-culture yogurt, Read more
Double-blind studies have failed to reproducibly link MSG to headaches. That is the short answer. Monosodium glutamate is simply the sodium salt of glutamic acid, an amino acid already present in foods like tomatoes, mushrooms, and parmesan, and the famous fear around it grew far faster than the evidence ever Read more
Prebiotic is not a wellness magic word. A food really qualifies when it contains a carbohydrate that your small intestine does not fully digest, but your gut microbes can ferment lower down in the colon. In plain English, prebiotics are food for microbes, not microbes themselves. That is why yogurt Read more
Capsaicin makes food feel hot because it binds to TRPV1 receptors on your tongue, the same heat-sensitive nerve receptors that normally respond to actual high temperatures. In plain English, your brain is being tricked into reading chemistry as heat. Your mouth feels on fire even when the pepper is not Read more