What vegetables came from the New World? There are many, but potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili, cacao, peppers, and vanilla are good examples. The foods that came from the New World into Europe ended up changing world cuisine in surprising ways. In the end of the 15th century, Spaniards and other Europeans first reached […]
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Why are emulsifiers used in processed food? They help different compounds to combine, and they make foods less sticky and easier to eat. What are emulsifiers? Their basic job is to combine two compounds that wouldn’t normally be able to hold together. An obvious example is oil and water. If you tip olive oil into
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Why do many Americans drink coffee and many British people drink tea? Because Americans boycotted tea before, during, and after the War of Independence and because the British government gained more money from taxing tea. The two countries both started as polar opposites and have ended up as polar opposites. Tea was more popular than
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Why are bees transported across countries by truck? Bees are the largest pollinator of many of the foods we eat and they have to be transported to where the foods are grown. Bees are the most common pollinator but not by any means the only. Bees travel from their hive to find flowers. When they
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What are food additives? They are things that are added to food to preserve the flavor, or improve the taste, appearance, or other qualities. There are a huge number of food additives and some of them are completely natural. Salt and sugar are both food additives. Humans have been using food additives ever since we
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How does cacao become chocolate? Through fermentation, drying, roasting, grinding, and adding milk and sugar. Cacao beans grow on a cacao tree, which is native to the Amazon basin in South America. The tree is called “Theobroma cacao.” “Theobroma” means “food of the gods” in Greek and “cacao” is the Spanish form of “kakaw” and
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Why does bread need yeast? Bread doesn’t have to have yeast and there are many breads made without it. However, if you want the bread to rise, then it needs yeast. Yeast is a single-celled organism called Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It is a fungus, which means they make their energy by decomposing other things. There are
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When did people start eating chickens? People have eaten chickens for thousands of years, but it only became cheap after World War 2. Chickens were domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago in southeast Asia. The wild chicken that people domesticated was the Southeast Asian Red Junglefowl. They were probably domesticated because of the eggs
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Why does beer have alcohol? Because the yeast cells in the beer feed on sugar and produce ethanol. Yeast is an egg-shaped single-celled fungus. There are 1,500 different species of yeast. 1% of all fungal species are yeast. Humans use yeast for several things, but the most common are bread and alcoholic drinks. When yeast
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What is high fructose corn syrup? It is a sweetener made from cornstarch. There is a lot of debate over whether high fructose corn syrup is bad for you or not. The American Food and Drug Administration says there is no evidence to show that high fructose corn syrup is any worse for you than
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