Complex Numbers

Harder to Swallow

Especially for everyone who has "eat less food" on their resolutions scroll, here's a food article.

    15 Foods That Weren't Designed For What We Use Them For  

Oddly, the URL for the site shows "Foods we don't use as intended," while the headline is basically the reverse. I wonder why that is. On the surface, the two phrases are semantically equivalent, but I wonder if there's some dark psychology at work there, because I'm paranoid. Like, maybe one of those phrases produces an emotional reaction more desirable to the website's advertisers (who I can't see because I'm running an ad-blocker—unless the listed products are actually paid ads, which I wouldn't put past them).

Perhaps the URL version seems too judgemental compared to the headline. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I think it's important to notice word and phrasing choices.

Anyway, thus ends the "writing" and "media analysis" portion of today's blog entry; let's move on to the article.

As soon as a thing is born into the world, it begins to mutate, changing at a sometimes exponential pace, to the point where it might turn into something else entirely.

This is especially apparent with human larvae.

Take the supposedly innocent graham cracker, for instance.

I think it's pretty widely known, now, that the graham cracker vomited forth from stultifying American Puritanism, intended to help people minimize pleasure and stimulation. Fortunately, now, it's just another cookie. They reiterate this in the list itself; I'm only highlighting select items here.

1. Corn Flakes

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who invented Corn Flakes with his brother William, did not care for sin, excess, or meat.

So, the same perverted mindset that produced the graham cracker.

2. Dr Pepper

Interestingly, Dr Pepper was not initially envisioned as a carbonated beverage but rather as a syrup to be mixed with carbonated water at the soda fountain.

That's not really an "unintended use." The company itself switched to bottling.

6. Saccharin

Saccharin, an artificial sweetener discovered in 1879 by Constantine Fahlberg, a chemist working at Johns Hopkins University, evolved from a laboratory discovery to a widely used sugar substitute.

Okay, fine, sure, discovered by accident, like many things. But once discovered, it became a sweetening agent, and a sweetening agent it doth remain. Again, not an unintended use. I'm starting to think I'm not seeing any ads because this whole page is an ad.

8. Popsicles

As the story goes, on a very cold day in 1905, little Frank Epperson was mixing soda powder with water out on his porch when he was suddenly called to dinner by his mother. Or perhaps it was bed. The point is, he forgot his concoction outside overnight only to find it frozen solid the next morning. Luckily, the stick he'd been using to stir it was still stuck in the ice, and when he pulled it out, the popsicle came with it, revealing a glorious new invention.

That origin story is faker and less believable than Spider-Man's.

9. Worcestershire sauce

This tasty condiment with a complex flavor profile owes its origin to a fortuitous experiment carried out in the early 19th century by chemists John Lea and William Perrins of Worcester, England.

Leading to generations of Americans being utterly unable to pronounce the stuff.

12. Baking soda

Before there was baking soda, or baking powder for that matter, bread and cake makers had to resort to the use of yeast to make their creations rise.

Ooookaaaay, now I'm sure this is one big ad. Church and Dwight (the makers of Arm&Hammer) have been pushing alternative uses for baking soda on us for decades. Some of them even work.

But baking soda soon went above and beyond its application as a leavening agent. It found use as a household cleaner owing to its abrasive nature and deodorizing properties.

The fridge-deodorant thing, however, probably does not.

15. Aspartame

This artificial sweetener emerged from the laboratory of one James M. Schlatter in 1965. Schlatter accidentally discovered its sweet taste while working on an anti-ulcer drug. A compound he was synthesizing got on his fingers and he tasted it, as you do in a lab full of potentially toxic and definitely mysterious substances.

So... same origin story as saccharin.

Aspartame has now found its way into a myriad of products, including diet sodas, sugar-free desserts, and chewing gum, offering consumers a guilt-free way to enjoy sweetness — aside from that possible cancer risk.

At this point, if they can't replicate studies showing it can cause cancer, despite really desperately trying (studies often conducted and/or paid for by those with a vested interest in the matter, like, say, sugar companies), the only reasonable conclusion is that its cancer risk is no higher than baseline. And even if there were a small risk, you'd have to weigh that (pun intended) against the health problems associated with too much sugar/HFCS/whatever.

Or you could just eat nothing but unsweetened graham crackers, I suppose. Can't call that living, though.