Vegan Turkey?

Here's a turkey TPP had never seen the likes of before.  The image that came to mind was the Far Side cartoon showing lions that had brought down a tofudabeast and discovering it wasn't quite the same as other prey.  This turkey may well be vegan, but it wasn't actually intended to substitute for the real thing, probably, although some of the younger dinner guests would have preferred it.  This turkey did have a certain eye appear for some.  Mostly TPP's teeth started to hurt just thinking about eating it.  For many readers this is probably a familiar confection although not usually so fowlly molded.  For those of you from other cultures the primary material is a breakfast cereal called Rice Crispies (Rice Bubbles down under) glued together largely with sugar, and of course the stuffing consisted of M&Ms (chocolate in a sugar shell that melts in your mouth not in your hand), and peanut butter cups in the foil wrappers because they will melt in your hand (chocolate covered peanut butter is a strangely appealing combination).  At any rate it was quite a creative visual spectacle if not a culinary treat. Oh, those vegans, so healthy.

Sweet!

Today's class combined a lecture on sugars followed by a laboratory.  There were cane sugars, date sugars, palm sugars, agave sugars, maple tree sugars, beet sugar, sorghum sugars, malted cereal sugars, refined sugars, unrefined sugars, sugars from India, China, Thailand, Columbia, Mexico, and other places, bee sugars from flower sugars, and not really sugars (Stevia rebaudiana).  The most surprising one was a sugary woody root named appropriately enough Glycyrrhiza glabra, literally sugar root.  Most of my students could not get the flavor even though they all know it.  Liquorice.  Short lengths of these woody roots were the original liquorice sticks and they were chewed to extract the sweet liquorice flavor.  Today's liquorice fans have it all too easy eating those gummy ones.

Hostess memories

Hostess is going out of business.  Wow!  That evokes some strong childhood memories.  There was a Hostess factory near where my Father worked, and they had a day-old shop where all the Hostess products that came back on the delivery trucks were sold greatly discounted; in those days packages of Twinkies and Cupcakes were 20 for a dollar, and worth every cent.  As a result of the economics, my parents bought these quantity and froze them.  Literally every day a Twinkie, a Cupcake, or a Snowball, a hemispherical cupcake with an elastic, spongy, coconut covered overcoat sometimes in pink(!), would show up in my lunch, sometimes with the luscious cream filling still frozen by lunch time so you could easily eat around it saving it for last.  My Mother was an excellent baker, but for 2.5 cents a day, it was hard to argue for homemade, and duh, we were kids.  However my adult reaction beyond the childhood nostalgia is to say, "So what?"  TPP hasn't purchased a Hostess product in at least 30 years having probably consumed a life time of sugar by the end of grade school.  My last recollection of buying a Hostess product was a big box of HoHos that were taken as a "Hostess gift" to a "Bad Taste" theme party (a twofer of bad taste).  The news reports that Hostess blames their workers' union, a corporate meme so popular of late, but did it ever occur to them that the world was changing and their gag-worthy, overly-sugared confections and squeezably soft and mushy bread were no longer very popular in a more health and sugar-conscious consumer world?  What?  Could it be our crummy product?  No, the corporation can never take the blame.  So long Hostess.  Yes, there are some fond memories, but not a tear will be shed.  

Does anyone else see something wrong here

Our faculty were just notified that our pre-dental student association will be holding a fund raiser over the next couple of days.  They'll be selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts (Yes, yes, Ks not Cs; it's a British spelling actually.), and for those of you who do not know, these are great big nuclear sugar bombs.  Now this just seems fundamentally wrong.  It's like an oncologist handing out cigarettes.  Make some money, and give your chosen profession a boost in patients at the same time!  Wonder if they thought this through thoroughly?  If so, maybe at least one of their members could have a career in Rove-style politics.

World Food Day

Today, October 16th, is World Food Day, and TPP has a spectacularly inappropriate lecture and lab today: sugar.  Sugar is not actually food.  Sugar is not needed for a healthy diet, although some sugar-containing foods (fruits), some roots, are parts of healthy enough diets.  And yet we like sugar.  Here's several things to think about.  That sugar in your sugar bowl is 99.99% pure sucrose, probably the chemically most pure substance in your house, and what it actually represents is solar light energy stored in the form of chemical bonds.  No wonder a bit of candy can brighten your day.  Our instinctual like for sugar is perhaps linked to choosing ripe fruit as a good candidate for being safe and nutritious food.  Other than honey, glucose secondarily from plant nectar, sugar is pretty hard to find in nature.  If remembered correctly dates have the highest sugar content of all fruits, basically a self-preserving fruit.  Did you ever wonder how the sense of taste works?  Sugar sensors on your tongue detect certain soluble carbohydrates when the molecule fits into a receptor site somewhere on your taste buds and a signel is sent to your brain identifying a molecule with a particular shape as "sweet".  Sweetness is a molecular shape.  Even some sugars, e.g., lactose, barely trigger you sweet sensors, so that sugar isn't sweet.  And sucrose tastes sweeter than maltose, and fructose tastes sweeter than sucrose, so supposedly the better the molecular fit the sweeter the taste.  Artificial sweeteners work because part of their molecular structure mimics the shape of sugar and triggers the taste sensors.  A few plants use non-sugar sweeteners to make their fruit taste sweet even though no sugar is present.  The sweet taste of Stevia leaves is produced by a protein. This is sort of fun to know: the word sugar is derived from an ancient word in Sanskrit for sand, "sakkara", and even more fun, candy comes from another word in the same language for pebbles, "khandra".  No question about it, raw, "brown" sugar looks like sand and pebbles.  And lastly way too much of our food has sugar added even if we don't think of it as sweet.  Of course there is the wretched excess of breakfast cereal that isn't just sugared, they have become predominately sugar, but even things like pasta sauce often have sugar added.  TPP seeks out the brands that don't add sugar because you don't need sugar.  Pasta sauce tastes better without it, so don't train your taste buds, or particularly those of your kids, to expect sugar in everything.  Remember, sugar isn't food. 

Sweet! What a sensation!

Not all sugars are sweet, and everything that’s sweet aren’t sugars. The sensation of sweet is the interaction between your taste sensors and a particular molecular shape. So generally that sweet sensation in your brain means a particular kind of soluble carbohydrate is in your mouth, and our instincts have been shaped to “like” this taste, a nice genetic inheritance from ancient arboreal primate ancestors. But because of their shapes, not all sugars have the same sweetness; fructose is very sweet, lactose barely sweet at all. Artificial sweeteners and other non-sugar but natural sweet molecules mimic the shape of sugar molecules, thus tasting sweet.
Thus the glycoside in Stevia rebaudiana tastes really, really sweet because of its shape, but since the carbs we associate with sweetness aren’t there, you get a low-calorie sweet treat.
Enter the “miracle fruit” (Richadella dulcifica, sometimes called Synsepalum dulcificum, a taxonomic synonym, Sapotaceae) (This is sort of good to know because actually there are 3 unrelated species with this common name.). You eat this fruit and everything you eat afterwards tastes remarkably sweet. This happens because a protein not only mimics sugars’ shape, but it continues to stimulate your sweet sensors as you eat new foods. It’s effectiveness is pH mediated, so stronger when interacting with sour tastes, but at higher pH (near neutral) the protein changes shape and just blocks your sweet sensors without stimulating them so even naturally sweet foods taste bland. Weird. You can read the whole study here.
So why does a fruit have such a protein? Fleshy fruits are most often a reward for seed dispersers, and the amount of reward is judged in part by size and in part by taste, so a really sweet fruit says it’s packed with sugar. But in this case by making a sweet-tasting protein, the cost of lots of sugar is avoided by fooling the disperser by making only a little protein that tastes like lots of sugar. Bad plant! It’s not nice to fool your seed dispersers! Other sweet tasting proteins are also known, like talin. But since proteins denature in heat sweet-tasting proteins have limited application as sugar substitutes in anything cooked.