Attention, Trivia Nerds! It’s A Food Science Fact Feast

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today on the show, food science trivia.

EMILY: Please let it be Pop Rocks.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Oh.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Today in the show, we are going to do something a little different. We’re going to play a game, and maybe you can play along. We know that, after years of getting your emails and phone calls, that SciFri fans are in the 99th percentile when it comes to nerdy knowledge. So we figured, let’s test your fact retention skills and play some trivia.

We’re calling the game SFSETBO. SFSETBO, Superfood Science Excellence Trivia Blowout. And we teamed up with my friend and trivia kingpin Mangesh Hattikudur, co-host of the podcast Part-time Genius, which scours the globe in search of obscure facts, hidden histories, and strange science stories. Hi, Mangesh.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Hey how’s it going, Flora?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I know you have a zest for trivia.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: [LAUGHS]. I mean, I think trivia is the easiest way to deflect when you don’t know about things.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really? I feel the exact opposite, as someone who’s terrible at trivia.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: I mean, I don’t really remember that much trivia, even though I love it. But I feel like when someone’s talking about birdwatching, I can always drop in a fact about flamingos that I learned from you and how they can drink boiling water, which I think is just so amazing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s the only fact I have retained in all my years of doing this. It’s burned into my brain, into my bird brain. OK, so let’s get started. We reached out to Science Friday listeners. Many of you threw your name in the ring, and we have a very special contestant today to play the game with us. Emily is a medical student based in Indianapolis. We have her on the line. Hey, Emily.

EMILY: Hi.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Emily, are you a trivia game veteran?

EMILY: Oh, 100%. I have to reach kind of far back to establish cred, but I talked to my twin sister last night. She reminded me that she and I were both not only state trivia champions in high school, but also in middle school. So from age 10 to 18, we ran the state of Indiana.

[LAUGHTER]

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: That’s incredible.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’re going to crush today.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Today’s theme is food science. And I don’t think your medical training is going to help here, but we do have some pretty fun prizes. Emily, are you ready?

EMILY: I’m so ready. Hit me with your food questions.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: So, number one, pandas are unable to detect which basic taste? Is it A, sweet, B, sour, C, bitter, or D, umami?

EMILY: Hmm. Well, all I can picture is pandas eating green leaves, so they must not care a lot about sugar. I’m going to guess sweet. Oh,

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Sweet is very, very close. But–

[LAUGHTER]

But it is actually umami. Panda ancestors were carnivores, and now, after millions of years on a bamboo-based diet, the panda’s taste receptors can no longer recognize umami, the savory flavor associated with proteins like meat.

EMILY: Ugh. All right, so starting strong here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: While we’re here, can I hit you all with an additional panda fun food fact?

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Yes!

FLORA LICHTMAN: I did not know this, but pandas spend up to 12 hours a day eating bamboo, which is like me with seaweed snacks. But 12 hours a day of bamboo, we are talking, like, 80 to 100 pounds of bamboo a day, according to the National Zoo.

EMILY: Yeah, but when you think of caloric density and how much food they actually have to get in their body, if you’re only eating bamboo, I’d have to eat for 12 hours a day also.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s exactly it. I love having a medical professional on the line, because they only– yeah, they only digest a fraction of it, like 17% or something like that.

EMILY: Mm-hm.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: I know. I feel like you came up with the rationale for that very, very quickly, which is brilliant. I’m so glad you’re on. [LAUGHS]. So why don’t we continue? Number 2, what happens when a food experiences a Maillard reaction?

EMILY: I know this.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Does it A, go bad, B, turn brown, C, it loses half its nutritional value, or D, it gets really, really into John Mayer?

EMILY: [LAUGHS]. I hope it’s not D. It’s B. It becomes brown and delicious.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: That is incredible! Yay!

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yay!

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: [LAUGHS]. Yeah, absolutely. It turns brown. It is named for the French chemist who first described it. And this chemical reaction is responsible for the brown color and the complex flavor of everything from baked bread, cooked meat, and even dark roast coffee.

EMILY: My favorite.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You know, we talked about this on Science Friday with a food scientist, Arielle Johnson. And apparently, if you want to kick the Maillard reaction up a notch, she gave us some tips. So here she is.

ARIELLE JOHNSON: So if you want more browning, you can think about adding more sugar. But if you can increase the amount of protein and amino acids you have, you’ll get much more browning. It’s also very sensitive to pH, to acidity and alkalinity. You get more browning under alkaline conditions and less browning under acidic conditions.

So if it’s going to brown, you can add some acid. If you want as much brown as possible, you can add, for example, a little baking soda. And that has to do with, actually, whether the amino end of the amino acid is protonated.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Emily, are you like, yeah, duh, pronation, duh?

EMILY: No, I was imagining the structure of an amino acid in my head. And I was like, all the words she’s saying separately make sense. But together, I’m just going to go with I like brown food. That sounds great.

[LAUGHTER]

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: So we’re going to progress to number 3. I have a feeling you’re going to get this one too. So which American pharmacist developed a scale to measure the pungency or spiciness of chili peppers– Wilbur Scoville, Norville Rogers, John Pemberton, or Dr. Pepper?

EMILY: Mmm. Scoville. It’s the Scoville heat index, right?

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Yeah, absolutely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You got it!

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Yeah, his scale measures the amount of dilution required before the burn of a chili can no longer be felt.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are you a chili person– a chili pepper person, Emily?

EMILY: I’m not. My kid is. I have an eight-year-old who loves spicy foods. He ate wasabi when he was like two years old.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, this is a fun fact just for your kid. When you all think about the source of heat in chili peppers, where do you think the heat is in the pepper?

EMILY: I feel like I read recently that we all think it’s the seeds, but it’s actually somewhere else.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Emily, you know too much. Of course, when you have a state champion trivia person, you already the thing I’m going to tell you. That is exactly right. Here’s Paul Bosland, Director of the Chile Pepper Institute and a professor at New Mexico State University.

PAUL BOSLAND: It is the veins. It’s the cross wall of the chili that has the heat. The seeds have no heat. But being very close to those cross walls in the veins, one would associate that with the heat. But the walls of a chili are not hot. And we always have a little joke here. We take someone to our teaching garden, where we have 150 different varieties of chilis, and I’ll take a jalapeño and eat a piece of the wall and then give somebody the piece of the vein. Their mouth will get on fire. And I’ll look like, oh, not bothering me a bit. But it’s just a little breeder’s joke, we say.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: And a breeder’s joke is this.

[LAUGHTER]

EMILY: That sounds diabolical. That’s not fair.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Well, here’s question number 4. Which of the following foods is so rich in carbon that it can be made into a diamond? Is it A, beef, B, peanut butter, C, green peppers, or D, Pop Rocks?

EMILY: Oh, man. I’m going to go with the carbohydrate-based food and say it’s Pop Rocks. Please let it be Pop Rocks.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Also, you have a scientific rationale, which I really love. I want it to be Pop Rocks too.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Unfortunately, it is peanut butter. During an experiment to reproduce the pressure conditions of Earth’s lower mantle, the British scientist Daniel Frost successfully forged carbon-rich peanut butter into microscopic diamonds. So I guess, in this economy, we should be stocking up on peanut butter.

EMILY: It’s a good investment.

[LAUGHTER]

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Awesome. OK, so this is the final question. I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure on you, Emily. This is for all the marbles. The unique properties of honey make it one of the few foods that can never do. what? Is it A, expire, B, freeze, C, evaporate, or D, disappoint?

EMILY: [LAUGHS]. Go with expire and disappoint, because honey’s delightful.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m on disappoint. Never can disappoint.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: (LAUGHING) Yes. You are right on both counts. So you get a bonus point. But the answer we had here is expire. So due to its low moisture content, natural acidity, and the presence of hydrogen peroxide, honey doesn’t foster the growth of spoilage organisms such as bacteria, and that is how archeologists have been able to find 3,000-year-old pots of honey that are still perfectly edible.

EMILY: Would you try that?

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: I think I would, if someone told me it was safe. So, Flora, you want to tell Emily what she’s won?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I would love to. Emily, you have won an amazing assortment of Science Friday and Part-time Genius merch.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: And as always, we’re going to throw in an atomic fireball, which is the official science-y candy of Part-time Genius.

EMILY: Amazing! Thank you so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But that’s not all.

EMILY: What?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because you did so well, we’re also going to send you a bottle of Linne Webers Hot Honey, which won, just like you, the grand prize in this year’s Scoville Awards and is made in your home state of Indiana.

EMILY: All right, Indiana. Thanks, guys.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you. Thank you for playing, Emily.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: We are so thrilled to crown you with the first Superfood Science Excellence Trivia Blowout crown, as well. So congrats on that.

[LAUGHTER]

EMILY: It’s been delightful. Have a happy Science Friday.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for doing this with us.

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: Oh my gosh, Flora, it was so fun, and I really hope it’s not the last time we do it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Me too. Let’s do it again. SFSETBO 2 coming soon.

[LAUGHTER]

MANGESH HATTIKUDUR: I’m ready.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: If you like the show, rate and review us wherever you listen. Or just go straight to guerilla marketing. Take a friend’s phone and subscribe them to this podcast. Please help us get the word out about Science Friday. Today’s episode was produced by Shoshannah Buxbaum. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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