SciShow Tangents - Trick or Treat Month: Preserved Foods with Bill Oakley!

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Tangents annual descent into horror returns with Trick or Treat Month! And this time, we brought some fiendish friends along! Join us for a whole month of spooky themes and special guest stars!And to kick off Trick or Treat Month, we've summoned Simpsons writer, author and food reviewer extraordinaire Bill Oakley to talk about preserved food! How is preserved food spooky? I guess you'll just have to listen to find out! Want more Bill Oakley? You're in luck! You can follow him on Twitter or Instagram to check out his food reviews, get his audiobook, Space: 1969, here, and join his Patreon, The Steamed Hams Society, here! Become a Bill Oakley Superfan... today!Get your extra-scary SciShow Tangents Halloween Decal here! Tell 'em Spooky Sam sent you!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Are You Gonna Eat That?]Old TwinkieSource:https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/twinkie-maine-40-years/story?id=40076223https://www.thespruceeats.com/the-twinkie-myth-1328772Old Hamhttps://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28299440Old Fruit Cakehttps://www.worldrecordacademy.org/world-records/food/oldest-fruitcake-143-year-old-fruitcake-sets-world-record-312432Old Picklehttps://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2020/05/20/springfield-pokin-around-man-pickle-family-heirloom-175-years/5212382002/Old WInehttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/worlds-oldest-wine-speyer-bottle[Ask the Science Couch]Chip bag slack fill & nitrogen gas as a preservativehttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51993/why-are-potato-chip-bags-always-half-emptyhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pts.2770070205 

Hello, and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the frightly Science Knowledge Screamcase! I'm your ghost, Hank Gangrene, and joining me this week as always is mad scientist, Scary Riley! Boo! And our resident everywolf man, Sam Skulls! A-ooh! The old calendar on the wall says it's time for Halloween once more. And as you know, we here at scishow tangents love to get into the spooky spirit and this year is no different october will be trick or treat month and sam and sari have invited some ghoulish guests over to tangents manor

to join us this week and the rest of the weeks i think in fact i think i can hear one of them approaching the door now trick or treat why it's former simpsons writer and showrunner and current internet food reviewer at large author of space 1969 bill oakley hi bill thank you for joining us yeah how did you how did we get you and your and your hamper uh full of Doritos. Wow. You guys, somebody mentioned me on Twitter like a month ago from this podcast. Okay. And there was, I believe one of you guys selected me as your preferred mystery guest.

You're my dream guest. Somebody tagged me in this and I was like, sure, I'd love to be on the show. And then, you know, the rest is history. Sam is living his dream life right now. He never smiles this much. Your reviews just make me laugh so hard. I was re-watching the Velveeta martini last night, just cracking up and also wishing I could have one. Those were good, man. You're probably going to have to go to a lot of trouble to make your own

from scratch, but you know, it might be worth it if you want to spend $75 to make a cheese martini. Yeah, they're cheese martinis with cheese on the rim and then macaroni and cheese stuffed olives. Yep, yep. And they were good. Actually, shockingly good.

Look, I think that there are not enough things to spend $75 on that is gone immediately. Like all the things I spend $75 on, I have to like look at them forever. It's still in the house. Yeah. Yeah. May I direct you to Las Vegas in that case? Not only can you immediately lose $75 in a thousand different ways, but you could easily spend $75 getting a milkshake with like a piece of cake

jammed into the top of it and it will be gone in a short period of time. That's a great point. Wow, a milkshake with a cake jammed into it does sound like right up my alley. Every week here on Tangents,

we get together to try to unnerve, disgust, and horrify each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for gory and for candy, and we will be awarding those as we play. And at the end of the episode,

one of us will be crowned the king of Halloween. And if the guest is the treat of Trick or Treat Month, here is the trick. Our regular panel will take turns presenting games this month, and I will actually get to play along. But as always, to introduce this week's topic, we're going to have a traditional science poem this week from our special guest, Bill Oakley. You know, normally I get paid a lot of money to write this stuff, but I did this for free for you guys. So that's why it's not an example of my best work, but it's pretty good.

Don't worry, we all suck too. It's going to be better than ours and we're going to have to step up the bar, I feel like. All right. Well, at least it rhymes. Okay, here we go. A refrigerator was installed in the school cafeteria after kids got sick from a harmful bacteria. Because foul bugs grow on many comestibles, turning them fast to indigestibles. grow on many comestibles, turning them fast to indigestibles.

If serious care with foods not taken, once cheese or fish or fruit or bacon without freezing, curing, or refrigeration shall fast result in hospitalization. So pasteurize or please ferment such foods and you'll prevent acute digestive ruination by using the underappreciated science of food preservation. Oh, no, that was the best one ever. Such long rhymes. I go to one syllable rhymes.

No multiple syllable rhymes. On topic, hard words as well. A bunch of multi-syllable words. We don't even venture into that world. So the topic for this week is preserved foods. And thank goodness we have them. Without them, we would all be very hungry. And not just recently.

Food preservation has been going on for a very long time. So, Sari, can you tell me a little bit about what preserved foods are? Food preservation is basically what Bill's poem said. If you leave food out for too long, food is just made of chemicals, like everything around us. And sometimes those chemicals are good and nutritious for us.

And sometimes bacteria or fungi or other microorganisms decide to munch on the food before we get it in our tummies and produce... Yeah, because it's food. Yeah. That's one of the problems with food is that it's food. Everybody likes food. Everybody likes it.

The only thing that doesn't like it is plants. They're like, eh, why'd you put that on me? I'm trying to see the sun. Except for some plants. Except for some plants, yeah. There are some plants. Well, actually, the carnivorous pitcher plant eats bat guano. But, yes.

So, yeah. So, sometimes things eat it and then produce things that make our tummies upset when we eat the food after them. Sometimes the compounds in the food just break down in a way. So like oils, when they're exposed to oxygen, those big, long, fatty molecules get oxidized and break down into shorter chain fatty molecules like aldehydes, which are stinky. And so food preservation is anything to stop all that from happening, to keep our food just for us and not for other organisms or to introduce organisms that we can eat safely. And also food preservation, often you get it to a point where there's so much of the byproduct that it's not like safe in there for the microbes anymore. So you have all this vinegar or acetic acid it's too acidic for

anything to survive including sometimes the original microbes though not always um so they basically like poison themselves just like we're doing with our own with our atmosphere but we've got time to figure it out i think i have a question about brewing. So people did that to make water that was potable. Is that, is this accurate? Is this a, were people always drunk a little bit back in the day? I'll jump in here because this was covered in a lot of colonial histories in America because yeah, brewing in one of the side, one of the side effects of brewing is it makes the water potable. And so that's why people even kids would be drinking beer or whatever for lunch but like the beer was much weaker

apparently it was like two percent or less alcohol so it's unlikely and that's fine to get have a good old time people if you know people who want to get drunk drink spirits back then okay yeah and and that's like one of the reasons why like apples were very important because you could make some like a weak alcoholic thing from them and then you'd have this safe thing to drink good thing people were just leaving stuff out all the time back then it seems like old milk old water oh my i dropped my wheat in the water uh-ohed out it was great. Yeah.

You're making a soup. You're making a wheat soup first, and then magic happens. Some kind of alchemy. Dionysus comes down and just touches it with a stick, and you get to have a party. So, Sari, do we know where the word preserve comes from? Yes. It seems like there'd be a good something there. Uh-huh.

comes from yes it seems like we'd have a good there'd be a good something there uh-huh it's pretty uh pretty solid in that it is from the late 14th century um from the word preserving to keep safe or free from harm or to make sure that something doesn't occur but what was interesting is that when it comes to biological things as far as i can tell i might be reading too much into this the the noun preservative came into use more commonly and more frequently um in the 15th century for a substance that pervert preserves corpses uh so anything like we were more interested in preserving corpses first about like, okay, how do you make the dead people stop decaying? And then the sense of a chemical that we add to food to keep them from rotting is from 1875. And so preservative for a long time was like medical.

We got it. Ooh, Halloween. Something's dead and we want it to stop being gross so let's preserve it as long as possible and then we're like i guess that's kind of what we're doing with food we pick it from the tree and then it's dead and then we want to keep it good as long as possible i would not have thought that preservative would reach that far back and that's the only thing that makes sense as to why because we were obsessed with that stuff so like most a lot of what we knew about like alchemy and chemistry came from people being paid lots of money to to have dead people not rot in the spirit of of

halloween is a is a dead human corpse you can cut this out of it's too grim is a dead human corpse a preserved food would it would it belong i mean i suppose it could be like a preserved food? Would it belong in the jerky aisle? Like a salami? Yeah, is it like a salami? No, no. How far is mummy and salami or jerky, like reindeer jerky? People weren't eating mummies, correct? People were eating mummies?

Yeah, people used to eat mummies. People were sniffing the mummies, the ground-up mummies, too. Definitely sniffing. Crazy. I heard about that. Yeah. There were so many spare mummies back in the day that you could just use anything. Too many mummies now.

Kindling. It's just that's crazy. Can you imagine having such a surplus of mummies and they're easily accessible? Yeah. You could just use them for anything you wanted. It's crazy. Sari, I'm going to venture that the ways that we preserved mummies probably made them inedible. Yeah, I would think so too.

What chemicals did they use in mummies? I don't know. Oh no. I don't know. Otherwise they would just be like beef jerky. I mean, maybe they were like, well. Just dry it out with salt on it. Yeah, dried and cured meat is one of the key ways to preserving meat.

And that could be the mummies just for that really, essentially. I mean, that's why you can eat beef jerky. That's years and years old. They did use a naturally occurring salt containing sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate. You can eat that.

You can definitely. Yeah. Sodium chloride, just a salt salt. Sodium sulfate is the one I'm. That doesn't sound as good. That sounds like a. Sulfur compounds. At least stink. What's that? of salt. Sodium sulfate is the one I'm iffy about. That doesn't sound as good. That sounds like a little iffy. Let me look up the MSDS for sodium

sulfate. May cause gastrointestinal irritation with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. May be harmful if swallowed. Maybe, though. Might be. Might not be, is what I'm hearing. We can't not eat a mummy. I just found the phrase. It's a little upset stomach

to get a mummy flavor. All right, everybody. Now it's time to move on to the, wait, what is it? The quiz portion of our show, which I will be kicking off Trick or Treat Month with a

So humans have developed many creative approaches to preserving food, but we are not the only ones with concerns about the freshness of what we eat. Animals also have to worry about this, especially if they are stashing food for a rainy day, leading to different types of behaviors called caching that help animals keep their food safe

from rot and from thieves. The following are three stories of animals and their ingenious strategies for making sure their food lasts, but only one of them is true. So don't think all three of these are true, but you have to pick out which one is actually not a lie. Story number one, American pikas store their favorite grass meals for winter in piles. But first, these high-altitude mammals pack their cheeks full of grass so that it can mix with antimicrobial compounds in their saliva, which keeps the grass from rotting after they spit it out into these grass piles. Or it might not be that one. It might be this one.

Short-tailed shrews inject their insect larvae prey with venom that does not kill the meal. It just paralyzes it. Then they stash their paralyzed prey in their nests so that it's fresh for when they finally want to eat it because it's still alive. Or it could be... Shrew venom, huh? Shrew venom. Yeah, we're going to revisit that.

Or it could be... Story number three. Western scrub jays hide stashes of seeds by hiding them in the ground. To make sure that their stores can last for as long as possible, the birds often pick locations filled with a specific fungus

that prevents the seeds from germinating. Which one do you think it is? Is it story number one, picas stuff their cheeks full of grass and antimicrobial saliva to create their winter stores? Story number two, shrews paralyze their future snacks to preserve that freshly killed flavor?

Or story number three, western scrub jays keep their seeds fresh with anti-germination fungus true venom does it can a mammal have venom yes yes platypuses have oh fine foot spurs that are venomous that they can like jab into each other when they're mating but i don't know about shrews i've never heard of a shrew with venom besides like taming of the shrew. I mean, that's not the fact.

So I will go ahead and tell you that yes, shrews do have venom. Oh. It's a real thing. I still don't believe it. That's the lie of truth or fail. I got confirmation bias. So their spit would have something with the beak of cheeks

that would keep it. Yeah. So they just hold it there? Yes. It just gets gooey? They hold it there, get it all gooped up, and then they spit it in the pile. Here's what I think about the scrub jay. I think they want their thing to sprout.

Isn't there something that wants their thing to sprout? So I'm going to go with that one's wrong because I feel like they'd be like, I'm planting this seed for my own future benefit. i just don't know if they're smart enough planting seeds it feels like it's always incidental with animals like oh i'm accidentally planting seeds i'm gonna go i'm gonna guess the shrew i think i i i feel like it's so weird that shrews have venom and i didn't know that that they might as well also be like little spiders storing their prey. Well, what would their venom be for otherwise? I think it's a shrew as well.

That's why they even have venom in the first place. He came around. They aren't going to fight anything bigger than them. They're only going to be going after little guys and making them sick. Bill? I think it's the pika. I think the other two sound like they're made up, even if they're not. They sound made up.

The other one, the first one, the PICA one, is so mild that I don't believe somebody would have gone to the trouble of making it up. That's what they get you sometimes, though. This also happens when I listen to that show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, where they make up these fake things. And I'm like, wait, nobody would have ever written that. to that show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, where they make up these fate things and I'm like, wait, nobody would have ever written that. But in this case, if you did write the Pika one, my hat's off to you because

it's so mild. I feel that way about the scrub jade too. But here's the situation with Pika. They don't hibernate, so they do have to create caches of grass. It's a process that they call haying. They will venture into the grassy areas around.

They'll pick out specific plants. They'll bring them back to their homes, gather all that into little piles. And while rotting is a potential challenge, picas will forage for plants that have compounds in them that slow down bacterial growth, which could help keep the hay piles fresher for longer. But they do not use antimic Duh. Well, hats off. That's a good one. But short-tailed trues do have a gland that is filled with venom, and when they bite into their prey, that venom mixes with their saliva

and paralyzes the prey that allows the shrew to stash it in their nest. And if the prey wakes up before the shrew is hungry, the shrew just bites it again. Ugh, that's horrible. Back into paralytic preservation mode. Researchers have studied the venom to see if they can identify some of the proteins involved. And one research group has found a small protein called soracidin in the venom, which they found can keep a mealworm paralyzed and alive for up to 15 days.

Another research group found a glycoprotein called blorinatoxin in the venom and while those molecules are wielded by shrews as a weapon, they're interesting to scientists because they might be a way to treat different medical issues like migraines or diseases related to blood circulation. Scrub jays do bury seeds and

unlike what Sari was saying about squirrels, they actually kind of keep track of all of their caches and if they see other birds around, they will move them. They'll be like, no, you can't have those. So they're quite clever, but they do not use a fungus to keep their seeds from germinating. The best part of having a guest on SciShow Tangents is when they just lose. They get blasted out of the house so hard by our expert guests that they never want to come back ever again. You guys, I'm not going to be scared away by defeat.

That's right. Now, we're all familiar with failure here on SciShow Tangents. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then Sam has another devious game for us. Hello, welcome back, everybody. Sam has won. Sari has won. Bill has none. And I got one, I guess, because I fooled somebody.

Oh, yeah. That's how this game works. I forgot. Yes. All right. Excellent. Look at me. Sam, yeah. That's how this game works. I forgot. Yes. All right. Excellent. Look at me. Sam, you have a game now. I do have a game.

What are we about to do? My game is a new game, and it's called You Gonna Eat That? So humans have been preserving food for a long, long time. And occasionally, that preserved food can get stashed away in a tomb, a cupboard, or just like roll under the couch and just sit there for decades and decades. And because we are human, when we re-find this ancient preserved food, the first question that might pop into our heads is,

hmm, can I still eat that? Which brings me to my game. Oh, I love it! This is a great game. This is informative. So phase one. Oh, it's a multi-part game as well. Phase one. Oh, phase one i will tell you about an ancient preserved food and you will all tell me how old you think it is the closest gets a point and because i guess somehow i need to make points as well uh phase two is you will tell me if you

think anyone ate or drank this old food after discovering it if you're right you get a bonus point if not i get a point does this appointment system make any sense at all i have no idea i'm not will shorts puzzle master of the new york times but i'm doing my best question one twinkies were invented in 1930 and are widely rumored to be perfectly shelf stable and last forever so how old is the oldest known twinkie sari you go like still around uh that's still around yeah from 1930 to now anywhere i'm gonna guess 50 years see i was also gonna say 50 years but now i don't know this is one of those prices right situations where if I say 49 years, I will be. Yeah, we could box her in and I could go.

You could go 49 and I could go 51. Oh, that's fun. That's fun. Real mean. Yeah. I'm going to say 45 years. I'm going to say 65 years. That's an old Twinkie.

Here's the answer. The oldest Twinkie. The one that seemingly set off the whole twinkies will be edible long after humanity dies off legend is or was displayed at george stephens academy in blue hill maine for 46 years oh you're like exactly right bill wow this is your comeback off there with the 40 with the with the 45 cut it so you never you would have won otherwise but yeah i mean like the thing about twinkies everybody needs to say that they don't they're not edible forever they're edible edible for about a month

but they still look the same like mcdonald's burgers same thing you can there's mcdonald's burgers around for 50 that have been sitting around for 50 years in fact somebody found them in a wall remember that did you see you see that on the internet a month ago? I did not. There was food in there still? I thought there was food in there. Wasn't there in that bag? It looked like a burger still. I mean, it doesn't decay in the way that you would expect

it to decay. But it's not going to taste good. It's like leather. Well. Like a burger made of wood second part of this question regardless of whether or not it tastes good or should have been eaten knowing the age of the twinkie did anyone eat this twinkie sarah you get to guess first just a simple yes or no did someone eat this i'll go all at once yeah oh okay three two one no you're all saying no oh no yeah you kind Okay, three, two, one. No. You're all saying no.

All no. Yeah, you kind of gave us a hint. I feel like once you discover the oldest Twinkie, you want to keep it around, see how long it lasts. There's a real hazard of death from such a thing. I really think you could die from eating something, a cream, cream filling that's been sitting around for 45 years. No? Okay. I dig it. it i jump it though this twinkie began the immortal twinkie urban legend it also disproves it twinkies have an

official shelf life of 25 days impressive for any baked good but twinkies do indeed die as do we all uh this twinkie looks like shit and is presumably rock hard so between that and the fact that this twinkie is famous no one's it, and it's still at the school in a box on the principal's desk, I think. Someday future people will find it and they'll grind it into a powder to sniff it to improve their virility. That's very likely.

And then some chuckle fucks will talk about it on a podcast. Exactly. Even farther in the future than that. Yeah. Question two, curing meat is a method of food preservation that predates history the oldest cured ham ever however is a little younger than that how old

is the oldest known cured ham specifically ham that's a ham that's sitting around yes and this time bill goes first bill goes first this time. The oldest cured ham. This is a tough one, and I could be way off the mark here, but I'm going to say 2,700 years. Hank, give it a shot. I'm going to go deeper,

and I'm going to say 3,500. Sorry. I'm going to go right in the middle of this. Because I. Yeah. 3,200. Okay. So though I imagine.

Like you guys are intimated. There's got to be a tomb somewhere with an older ham. When you search the oldest ham. The oldest cured ham. What you find is that. It was cured in a butcher shop in Smithfield, Virginia in 1902, then put in the back of a closet and forgotten about for 120 years. Well, maybe they're just like, maybe hams are new. Maybe hams are pretty new. That can't be true.

They got to be at least 500 years old. When was the ham invented? When was ham invented? Okay. can't be true they got to be at least 500 years old when was the ham yeah okay well while you look that up ponder this question knowing the age of the ham is 120 years did anyone eat this ham three two one yes yes oh you all think they ate the ham according to ham experts the meat is still most likely edible but wouldn't taste taste like much rancid fat. That being said, no one ate the ham. I didn't eat the ham.

Come on. It can still be eaten, right? It exists. We can- Did they just put it back in the counter? They put it in a freaking museum. They didn't even try one little bite of it. Ham was invented 7,000 years ago.

There's an older ham out there. Yeah. If you know of an older ham, let me know, and's an older ham out there. If you know of an older ham, let me know, and then we'll revisit the scores. Question three. Fruitcake, like Twinkies, have a reputation for lasting forever, and thanks to the presence of rum and candied fruit in your average fruitcake, they are indeed more shelf-stable

than your average baked good. So how old is the oldest known fruitcake? Hank goes first this time. Okay, I'm going to say 60 years. Sari? So how old is the oldest known fruitcake? Hank goes first this time. Okay. I'm going to say 60 years. Sari. 250 years. Older than the ham.

Old cake. Older than the ham. Nothing's older than the ham. So that's older than America. So that would have been in from the 1770s or whatever. I think it's more likely from the Victorian era. You know, there's probably some. If my guess would be, it would be one of those ones from like harrods or some british department store that's still around martin spencer's right yeah right so that's i'm going

to say it's from about 1882 so what is that 140 years 140 years i like the idea that you could just like be on a riverbank uh and he's like looking at the rocks and then it turns out one of them is a fruitcake. It's just like been weathered into a small stone. You never know. That's why you have to bite every rock. Way back in the late 1800s, a woman named Fidelia Ford had a holiday tradition. I can't believe this. Make a fruitcake, then put it away and let it age for a year before serving it to her family the next year.

Unfortunately, as was bound to happen, she died in 1878 and the cake she had been aging was never served. So do you say 1878? And Bill said 1880. Yeah, I said 1882. He said, yeah. So the cake is 144 years old. It's been passing from generation to generation. It's currently with with fidelia's

great great granddaughter they didn't serve the cake which i think is hilarious they were like well no we know this cake is here but we are not eating another one of these year-old cakes please so so they knew it yeah they were like we love her too much to eat her last cake that's why sure so knowing the age of the cake did anyone ever end up eating this cake it doesn't have to be the whole cake just did anyone eat the cake three two one no yes i think that somebody did now wait until you hear this in december 2003 a previous holder of fidelia's fruitcake made an appearance on The Tonight Show, during which host Jay Leno took a bite of the cake and said it needs more aging. So Jay Leno ate the cake.

Jay Leno ate the ancient cake! What a horrible cake for someone to eat the cake! And that's how he became what he is today! That's his super villain origin story! He was already that in 2003. Yeah. is today that's his his super villain origin story he was already that in 2003 yeah you think he started wearing all that denim after he ate that cake come on okay question four pickling is thought to have originated in mesopotamia in 2400 bc which doesn't help you narrow it down much as you tell me how old the oldest pickled cucumber is. Sari's first. Ancient Mesopotamia.

I feel like we've lost things from then, so slightly more recent. 2,500 years ago. That's an old pickle. You pickled it, you buried it in the ground, forgot about it, and then in some ruins, we're like, oh man, is this a pickle? Bill, oldest pickle. Most pickles are kept in airtight jars, you know?

And I feel like if you didn't have an airtight jar, the pickle would disintegrate over a period of a thousand years or so. So I don't believe that pickles are lying around in tombs like beef jerky might be or, you know, things like that. So I think it'll probably be as far more recent. Like it'd have to be in glass. It would have to be in a jar making it, I don't know, I would say maybe 170 years old. I didn't think about the glass element of it. You seem so, so both confident and like you have great, and I just desperately want you to be so wrong. I probably will be so wrong, but I'm just, you know, my reasoning is sound, but I could be incredibly wrong.

I don't know, but I am totally on your side. And I, in fact, I'm going to say that pickles are so delicious that everyone gets eaten within six months. The oldest pickle is six months old. Hank, that's a joke answer. Yeah, that's an absolutely embarrassing answer. Somewhere between 140 and six months. So maybe there is a pickle in a jar sitting on a shelf somewhere in former Mesopotamia that's older. But now that Bill says all that, I don't know. The oldest pickle is or was thought to reside in Springfield, Missouri, in the home of Tom Baker, who thinks his grandparents jarred the pickle.

This is a little bit fucked up what I'm about to say. In 1845, which is 177 years ago. Bill, how do you know exactly when every pickle is from? You don't have to be ashamed. I'm a food professional. That's true. Yes, I'm a food professional. I was chilling down my spine when you said.

I appear on the Food That Built America talking about the history of food. But honestly, these are all just guesses. They're educated guesses. It's like guessing jelly beans in a jar. Your estimation skills are so good for this one bizarre thing. This one specific thing. How old is a pickle? Oh, man.

This was a wild guess. Knowing the pickle is 177 years old. It was not a wild guess. You had evidence to back it up and everything. Glass jars. It was an educated guess. Did anyone eat this pickle? Three, two, one. Yes. it was a family heirloom no one's eating the pickle they're passed it down from generation to generation that pickle accepted

don't put it yes don't get it in front of jay if you get that pickle anywhere near jimmy kimmel he will absolutely eat it. Any of the Jimmys. Like a feral animal, they'll be going for that pickle. I gotta eat the whole food. This is gonna go huge on TikTok. Okay, I'm gonna go real fast. Canning was invented in 1809 by a French inventor who won a prize for helping Napoleon figure out how to transport lots of food to feed his army. But was the oldest discovered canned food from Napoleon's time?

Hmm, you tell me uh bill i would say uh yes it was i don't think that i mean it was invented this is the whole by the way this is a tangent here that whole thing i don't if you guys saw that tv series about that british ship that came to explore america in 1840s that whole thing was and everybody died in a creepy, mysterious way. They believe it was due to the canning because this was one of the earliest times that a ship had had loaded up with canned food. And there was some kind of poisoning in the solder of the canned food that they all had to survive on.

They all made them, made this whole thing crazy. Anyway, to say that I believe canning was invented around that time. And there's no earlier canning ever. I think. I mean, it's, that seems all very right i'm gonna go with 150 just to just to allow for some cans getting just a lot of them getting lost sorry 180 right in the middle in 1856 a steamboat named arabia was tooting cargo around kansas when it hit a branch and sunk to the bottom of the missouri river everybody on board got out but the boat sank to the bottom and was promptly forgotten.

Silt built up. Not all the cans. Silt built up the river. They did not. Somebody think of the cans. The river shifted. Flash forward to 1988 when the Arabia was excavated half a mile from the river's current location under 45 feet of dirt in a farmer's field.

Inside the rotten hull of the boat, a lot of the cargo sat in completely pristine condition including clothes fine china and canned food that is currently 166 years old oh my god and is the oldest known canned food uh and they built a whole museum around all this stuff that they found that you can go to in kansas city but that anybody while they were excavating or otherwise, pop a can open and have a century-old snack. Three, two, one. No. Simply put, yes. During excavation.

What? The person died? It is said that one of the workers ate a pickle just slightly younger than the pickle we just talked about. They didn't die, I guess. Oh, my God. You know, I believe that that pickle was actually older than this guy who said that his grandparents pickled a pickle in 1870 or whatever. It's just like that guy just said that. I mean, given the fact that people died all the time from poorly canned food back then, that was a risky, risky move that guy made.

It was a super risky move. Yeah, people didn't know that. I bet in 1988. 1988, they didn't know that. He didn't have the internet. He didn't have the internet. People's lives didn't have value back then. They did. He just didn't know that. He didn't have the internet. He didn't have the internet. People's lives didn't have value back then. They did.

He just didn't know. Life was cheap. Somebody else ate apples, it said, and they were fine as well. And finally, wine is the poster child of It Gets Better With Age. The earliest evidence of winemaking dates back 8,000 years. Between then and when was the oldest known bottle of still liquid wine bottled? I am going to say that that wine was

350 years old. Okay. 200 years. I could have sworn I've seen a bottle of wine from Roman times in the Smithsonian that still had wine in it. So I'm going to say 2,300 years old. Found in the smithsonian that still had wine in it so i'm going to say uh 2 300 years old found in the

tomb of a roman nobleman in modern day germany the spire wine bottle steamboat one it's 1697 years old so a generous layer of olive oil was poured on top of the wine and the whole thing was sealed with wax explaining why it never evaporated past a cork because there wasn't a cork. However, the olive oil had the unfortunate side effect of slowly sinking down into the wine, making for some very cloudy, lumpy looking content that only the bravest of connoisseurs could love. So tell me, was anyone brave enough to try this very, very old wine? Three, two, one. No. Yes.

No. The museum it's housed in, they won't even let it be open for scientific study let alone so some snooty rich person can pay a few million dollars to take a single rancid sip of it yeah i feel i feel like snooty rich people are so powerful that it would have happened but i guess uh museums are like Yeah. Well, the final scores are Sari with four, me with four, Bill with eight, and Sam with eleven, but only because

Sam designed the game. I cede my victory. I cede my victory. Yeah, freaking be a good trick-or-treater and give some candy to Bill so he can win after that stellar performance. After that amazing performance. He seems to have traveled back in time to the advent of every creation of every food.

So congratulations, Bill. You actually win. I cheated. Well, thank you then. I'm glad. It makes up for my incorrect answers about the shrew and the pika. You know about human foods more than you do about eating.

Animal food. Yeah, eating grass and stuff. yeah all right now it's time to ask the science couch we've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds at daniel bacchio asks do chip bags really need all that air in them i think that it's helpful because you don't want all your chips to be chip dust and so you need a little bit of space in there right Right? Is that the thing? It feels like that's the thing. You got a layer of the box. You got the box on the outside and then you want there to be a lot of insulation on the inside so that stuff can not get squished as it transits the country. I feel like

there, I don't know, I guess we're not really guessing. I think it is necessary. I think it is necessary. I think there's some science to it, but that's your purview. Tell us about the science. Right. Well, this is the thing. You do exactly what I do, which is I talk out of the side of my mouth, and then Sarah tells us the actual. I did the research.

So, yes. It's called Slackfill. It's what? In the biz. In the chip biz, when the snack makers make it, that's what you add to the chip bag to add a little cushion. So yes, in some way it is a physical cushion, but it is also a chemical cushion for the chips. So the Earth's atmosphere is around 70% nitrogen and 21 gas and then one percent other stuff and like we mentioned at the beginning of the show oxygen can react it can oxidate uh the fats so chips like potato chips are oily and fatty and so there was this nervousness around the food industry that the chips would turn rancid or stale.

And when you leave chips out in air, normal air, breathable air. That does happen. They stale right up. And so to prevent the chips from going stale or going rancid, then they flush the chip bags with nitrogen gas, which is a non-reactive gas. And so when you have a sealed chip bag, it's actually closer to 100% nitrogen instead of the 78% nitrogen that's in the atmosphere around us to keep the chips from going bad. Is there something about the nitrogen that – is it nitrogen or any gas that expands at higher altitudes? Because I've heard people tell me about their gas, that, you know, people who've gone mountain climbing,

bags of potato chips, the bags have burst. And people mail me chips from all over the world, and about 10% of them have burst as well. And I wonder if they were on planes or something. That is an any gas thing. So you can sort of picture the inside of the chip bag having a certain number of molecules in it and it's if it's the same as the outside then like outside molecules are pushing and inside molecules are pushing and it's equal

but then as you go higher up there's fewer outside molecules inside molecules are pushing just as much and so it gets bigger and bigger it's like if you took it to space it would be a like a big, big balloon. But Pringles, that wouldn't happen with Pringles, presumably, right? Because of the tube. Tube is sturdy. Yeah, big thing like a little bubble on top. Okay, that's why we can only eat Pringles up here in Montana.

I love a Pringle. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, because that was fascinating and I did not know about it, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Adam Foote, Micah R.Y., and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. Thank you to Bill for coming on our podcast.

What are you up to where we can find more of your things? I have two things to plug. Okay, first of all, as mentioned in my intro, Space 1969 is on Audible. It is an audiobook or a podcast, really more of a radio play that I wrote by myself, five and a half hours long. It stars Natasha Lyonne.

It takes place in 1969 in a slightly alternate universe where JFK survived the assassination and decided to get rid of Vietnam and expand the U.S. into space as quickly as possible. And therefore, when the show begins, we have an orbiting space station and we're opening a colony on the moon. Natasha Lyonne stars as a nurse on the space station who was caught up in a hilarious conspiracy that sort of takes over everything. And this is, it's a comedy show. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Check it out. Secondly, even more important. I, if you have, if you have an interest in food and perhaps listening to this thing, you do, I have an online Patreon organization called the steamed hams society.

Those familiar with the Simpsons know that I wrote this sketch that is colloquial called Steamed Hams. So the Steamed Hams Society is for food enthusiasts from all over the world. We have hundreds of people, including people who are like Instagram food types, chefs, people who are home cooks, who like to talk about food. We have newsletter, we have a live stream, we have all that stuff. And there's a special new level for Simpsons fans that we're going to have live streams with old, you know, writers and producers,

animators from the Simpsons, as well as a special Discord channel just for Simpsons chat. So if you have an interest in either of those topics, go to steamedhamssociety.com and sign up and you will see me

on the Discord every day. I think the Vinda, like all of humanity is interested in at least one of those things. So everybody in the whole world should be signed up. Well, thank you so much, Bill, for coming on our podcast and being one of our spooky guests.

It was totally my pleasure. And I'm glad that we got to do this topic that is somewhat in my wheelhouse. Clearly. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and helps us know what you like about the show.

And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. And I was Bill Oakley. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us

and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glixman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hostmeister and me, Hank Green.

And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But, one more thing. But one more thing. The cartoonist Scott Adams, who created Dilbert, worked with food scientists in 1999 to create some microwavable vegetarian burritos with non-meat protein, plus some extra mineral and vitamin fortification to hit 100% of your recommended daily amount. So it was kind of like Soylent, but in the frozen food section and called the dill burrito yes the dill burrito this preserved food this preserved food

the dill burrito tanked by 2003 partially because and this is a direct quote from mr adams the mineral fortification was hard to disguise and because of the veggie and legume content three bites of the dough burrito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail. The end. Chilling sentence. Really, a picturesque,

more picturesque speech there from Mr. Adams really describes that in a nauseating way.