There's so much to say about the dyes that are used in our food from whether artificial or natural dyes are better, why certain red dyes aren't vegan friendly, whether some dyes can cause or affect ADHD, why we need to dye our food at all, why Aldi isn't using artificial dyes in any of their products, and much more.
This video is a bit long at twenty minutes, but it covers a whole lot of ground.
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| Source - xkcd |
There's a whole lot of jokes there - my favorite of which is the "You Are Here" triangle.
Enough jokes, in fact, that I'm going to let explainxkcd explain why it's funny.
This video is, admittedly, from 2011, so the "just published" article (read it for free here or here or a summary here) that's mentioned in the beginning is well past its newness by now.
At some point the periodic law isn't nearly as neat and clean as I teach my students, and I kind of love that fact. The fact that the edge cases of superheavy elements start to stress our understanding of the quantum mechanical model is fascinating and to me shows that there are more things in Heaven and Earth...
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| Source - wikipedia |
That just doesn't seem right.
I get that esters like methyl anthranilate are pretty typical in the artificial flavor and smell world. In fact, when I was a high school student, we made a banana ester (isoamyl acetate - hmm, I wonder if I could bring that back for my chemistry classes next year.)
But the soaking of an apple in something that's used as a bird repellant to make a grape-flavored apple (check the Grāpple website via the internet archive) seems...problematic.
I was cleaning up my bookmarks this summer and found that I have a whole bunch of backed up videos and articles for my two blogs.
My first step was to post ahead one video or article per week until the end of the calendar year 2024. Now that I've gone ahead and done that and still have a ridiculous number of saved bookmarks.
The next step was to ready a second post per week (Fridays this time to balance the already-ready Mondays), and this is the first of those Friday posts.
There won't be any particularly difference focus of the Friday posts, but you'll just get twice the content from me.
This video explores why most people think that radioactive materials give off a green glow (they don't) through the history of radioactivity's discovery including the radium girls' sad story.
Thankfully the video closes by pointing out that there is actual Cherenkov radiation that causes a light blue glow from radioactive materials in water.
American cheese is sort of cheese.
Well, it's cheese with some sodium citrate added to it, anyway, stabilizing the emulsion of fat and water that normally breaks when any aged cheese is heated and melted.
And it's tasty and heck, so shut up.
(I'm tempted to buy that sweatshirt that Dan's wearing - but more likely in maroon than in yellow.)
Ah, NileRed eating and 'cooking' in lab again...
American cheese cannot legally be called cheese. Cheese is legally defined as...
The fresh or matured product obtained by draining after coagulation of milk, cream, skimmed, or partly skimmed milk or a combination of some or all of these products and including any cheese that conforms to the requirements of the Food and Drug Administration for cheeses and related cheese products
...and American cheese contains ingredients added to that to encourage emulsification of the fat and water so that the cheese won't break when it melts, meaning the fat and the water won't separate and create the oily puddles that you get from melting cheese.
So American cheese is technically a processed cheese product.
...which NileRed explains and demonstrates in today's video.
