5 Food Mysteries Solved by Science

For most of us, food is a fairly straight-forward affair that satisfies our stomach pains when it starts growling like next door’s Jack Russel terrier. For others, it’s a handy distraction from wondering why that son of a bitch dumped you for that secretary, who like, doesn’t even do her nails or nothing.

That bitch.

However, as much as we love eating, there are certain things about particular foods which we just take for granted. Things that nobody could explain, either because we never really noticed or because “fuck answers, I’m eating”.

In fact, fuck everything.

And nobody could really blame you. After all, what do you care? You’re too busy watching Desperate Housewives, Real Housewives and… Real Desperate Housewives?

It’s only the next logical step.

That’s where science comes in. It’s not having any of that shit. Science is hungry too. For answers.

5. Why do beans give you gas?

Ah yes, the musical fruit. Only it’s not musical, and it’s not a fruit – proving that smartass 7-year olds are fucking stupid (and smell horrible). We all take for granted that eating beans seems to give way to a chemical cacophony of assaulting aroma, but why?

You know how people who are lactose intolerant put out enough gas to fill a blimp when they eat a grilled cheese sandwich? Well it turns out that we’re all pretty much bean-intolerant­. At least mildly.
You see, beans contain types of sugars called oligosaccharides, which our bodies are unable to break down like regular food by using enzymes. Eventually, the bean sugars reach our large intestine.

No, bean sugars, not sugar beans.

Once they reach the large intestine, specialized bacteria that live there break down this sugar for us (hey, they have to pay their rent somehow). This results in fermentation, which is awesome when you think about it, because your body is actually creating alcohol… Only it literally turns to shit. Fermentation causes bubbles of gas as a by-product, and when this gas builds pressure, it causes flatulence, or if you're male and between the ages of 2 - 55, hilarity.


4. Why do my Cheerios clump together around the bowl?

If you regularly have cereal for breakfast (or dessert apparently?), you would have casually realized at one point that all the individual grains or flakes tend to do one of two things: Either clump together in the middle of the bowl - or stick together around the edge, holding hands in a ring of solidarity, possibly in an attempt of non-violent protest against the groggy, hungover beast devouring their brothers and sisters with a giant spoon.

Lest we forget.

Scientists have been scratching their heads at this phenomenon for a while, since there’s no obvious reason why cereal should act this way. They’ve even got a name for it; The Cheerios Effect. Researchers at the “Center for Finding out Useless Shit” (I assume) have only recently discovered what causes this to happen.

If you pour a fluid into a container like a bowl or cup, the surface will curve up slightly around the edges. This is called a meniscus. Once a bit of cereal reaches the edge, it gets stuck to this curve and can’t escape, legally making it your prison bitch.

Pictured: A cereal offender.

At the microscopic level, the surfaces of all liquids tend to behave like elastic. This is called surface tension. When an object floats on milk for instance, it creates a little dent in the surface. Think of a bowling ball on trampoline the size of a football field.

Now what if you added a dozen or so bowling balls? Well eventually, as they pass one another, they’ll fall into each other’s dips in the surface. As more bowling balls join together, their combined weight on the surface causes a bigger dip, which attracts more balls.

Speaking of balls…

3. Why do airline meals suck balls?

Apart from the confounding packaging of airline peanuts, airline meals are a staple topic of conversation for 90s comedians. Everyone knows that it’s shitty, only now that it’s the… Teens? That’s what we’re calling this decade, right? Anywho, whatever the hell this decade is, everyone knows it’s shitty and nobody finds it funny anymore, unless somebody mentions it on a popular meme.

It had to happen.

Why not just conclude that the airlines are being tightasses and dressing rat meat up as beef? After all, that seems to be the obvious explanation. Well, because when these meals are eaten on the ground, they actually taste pretty good (and as far as anyone can tell, are 99% rat free). So what the hell is going on here? Why does food magically taste like shit when we’re in the air?

Well a lot of it has to do with odour. You know how you can’t taste things as well when you have a cold? That’s because the senses of smell and taste are linked together. If you can’t smell that well, then you can’t taste that well either.

"Extra salt please."

In fact, you can try this yourself by getting a friend to close their eyes and pinch their nose shut and feed them a raw onion, but tell them it's an apple. Guess what? They'll totally believe you, until they open their eyes and nose and immediately punch you in the face for force-feeding them a fucking onion.

So what does this have to do with planes? Well, when you’re at 35,000 feet, the cabin pressure impairs your ability to detect smells (up to 30% less). In fact, it makes odours themselves less potent. Apparently, evolution didn’t foresee that we’d need to be able to smell and taste things whilst flying 30,000 feet in the sky.

2. What makes well-cooked meat fall off the bone?

Either you love a good rack of ribs, or you’re dead wrong (sorry vegetarians). One thing every rib connoisseur knows is that if the meat doesn’t fall off the bone effortlessly and cleanly, then you have good reason to be pissed off and walk out of there without paying the bill like a douche.

Well according to science, it’s all got to do with collagen. Nope, not the injections given to southern Californian girls for their sweet sixteen, but specifically the kind that connects muscle tissue to the bone for support. Since meat is muscle, this is what stands in our way to enjoying a perfect rack of ribs.

Three things are needed to cause collagen to dissolve: Heat, moisture and time. If you need a pair of pliers to pry the meat off the bone, then chances are the chef at the grill has missed one of these three.

Asshole.

1. Why do supermarket tomatoes taste like ketchup-flavoured piss-water?

Nobody can deny the dramatic difference in flavour between supermarket-bought tomatoes and home-grown varieties. But haven’t we figured this out already? It’s those damn pesticides those prick farmers use, right? Or maybe they’re all pumped with a mind-controlling chemical that makes us actually take FOX news seriously without erupting in a fit of violent laughter?

OMGPROOF!

The real answer however, is something that science has only figured out in June 2012, and in the best possible way: Totally by accident. The key to understanding this is the red colour of the tomato.

Us humans ‘eat with our eyes’ more than you think. Our primate brains are wired to recognize ripe, tasty fruit as brightly coloured. Therefore, more colour means more taste, right? Well according to science, primates are idiots.

Tomatoes weren’t always evenly red all over. Roughly 100 years ago, all tomatoes used to have these green patches near the stem (called ‘green shoulders’). Every now and then, a mutation occurred in a tomato that made it a consistent red colour all over and ripened much quicker than other tomatoes. So farmers, being an opportunistic bunch, decided to grow more of these particular varieties and cross-bred them with other varieties which grew quicker and lasted longer, making them easier to package and distribute. these became the generic 'tomato' that we all know today.

Because apparently, the sheer variety of tomatoes out there confuses the living shit out of the average customer.

However, it turns out that the green shoulders were the very things that were responsible for the tomato’s rich taste. In plants, green pigment is full of chlorophyll, which absorbs sunlight and converts it to plant food. If a tomato gets completely red, then this means less chlorophyll, which means fewer nutrients given to the tomato, which means less taste.

Fortunately, now that science has figured this shit out, it may mean that future generations of tomato will be given back the gene that is responsible for all the flavour whilst retaining the farming advantages of the ‘completely red’ supermarket tomato.