How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? (4 page)

Why was green chosen? Marks has his ideas:

Donald Buckley, executive director of the National Ice Cream Retailers Association, echoed Marks’s sentiments and added that the color green had relatively little competition in early ice cream fountains. Yellow was already “taken” by vanilla. The average person probably associates the color green most closely with mint, not then popular as an ice cream flavor. (Now, green is a popular color in mint chocolate chip ice cream.)

Kathie Bellamy, of Baskin-Robbins, indicated that consumers are very conscious of whether the color of an ice cream simulates the “public perception of pistachio.” Note that most commercial pistachio ice creams, including Baskin-Robbins’, are invariably a pale green, and that considerable research is conducted on “color appeal.” After all, with inexpensive food colorings, pistachio could just as easily be colored chartreuse, if the public would buy it.

Why
Are Graves Six Feet Deep and Who Determined They Should Be That Deep?

Graves haven’t always been that deep. Richard Santore, executive director of the Associated Funeral Directors International, told
Imponderables
that during the time of the Black Plague in Europe, bodies were not buried properly or as deep as they are today. These slovenly practices resulted in rather unpleasant side effects. As soil around the bodies eroded, body parts became exposed, which explains the origins of the slang term “bone yard” for a cemetery. Beside the grossness content, decomposing flesh on the surface of the earth did nothing to help the continent’s health problems.

England, according to Santore, was the first to mandate the six-foot-under rule, with the idea that husband and wife could be buried atop each other, leaving a safe cushion of two feet of soil above the buried body, “the assumption being that if each casket was two feet high, you would allow two feet for the husband, two feet for the wife, and two feet of soil above the last burial.” At last, there were no bones in the bone yard to be found.

The six-foot rule also puts coffins out of reach of most predators and the frost line. Of course, caskets could be buried even deeper, but that would be unlikely to be popular with gravediggers, as Dan Flory, president of the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science, explains:

Why
Doesn’t Ham Change Color When Cooked, Like Other Meats?

Let’s answer your Imponderable with a question. Why isn’t ham the same color as a pork chop, a rather pallid gray?

The answer, of course, is that ham is cured and sometimes smoked. The curing (and the smoking, when used) changes the color of the meat. You don’t cook a ham; you reheat it. According to Anne Tantum, of the American Association of Meat Processors, without curing, ham would look much like a pork chop, with perhaps a slightly pinker hue.

Curing was used originally to preserve meat before the days of refrigerators and freezers. The earliest curing was probably done with only salt. But salt-curing alone yields a dry, hard product, with an excessively salty taste.

Today, several other ingredients are added in the curing process, with two being significant. Sugar or other sweeteners are added primarily for flavor but also to retain some of the moisture of the meat that salt would otherwise absorb. Sugar also plays a minor role in fighting bacteria.

For our purposes, the more important second ingredient is nitrites and/or nitrates. Sodium nitrate is commonly injected into the ham, where it turns into nitrite. Nitrite is important in fighting botulism and other microorganisms that spoil meat or render it rancid. Nitrites also lend the dominant taste we associate with cured meat (bacon wouldn’t taste like bacon without nitrites).

Unfortunately, for all the good nitrite does in keeping ham and other meats from spoiling, a controversy has arisen about its possible dark side. When nitrites break down, nitrous acid forms. Combined with secondary amines (an ammonia derivative combining hydrogen and carbon atoms), nitrous acid creates nitrosamines, known carcinogens. The debate about whether nitrosamines develop normally during the curing process is still swirling.

But nitrite was used to cure pork even before these health benefits and dangers were known, because it has always been valued as an effective way to color the meat. Nitrites stabilize the color of the muscle tissues that contain the pink pigment we associate with ham, as do some of the other salts (sodium erythorbate and/or sodium ascorbate) that help hasten the curing process.

Most curing today is done by a machine, which automatically injects a pickle cure of (in descending order of weight) water, salt, sweetener, phosphate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrate, and sodium nitrite. Usually, multiple needles are stuck in the ham; the more sophisticated machines can inject even bone-in hams. After this injection hams are placed in a cover pickle, where they sit for anywhere between a few days and a week. Hams that sit in cover pickle sport rosier hues than those that are sent directly to be cooked.

Hams are smoked at very low temperatures, under 200 degrees Fahrenheit, usually for five to six hours. Some cooked hams (“boiled ham” is a misnomer, as few hams are ever placed in water hotter than 170 degrees Fahrenheit) are cooked unsmoked in tanks of water and tend to be duller in color. These hams are usually sold as sandwich meat.

One of the reasons why hams are beloved by amateur cooks is that, like (cured) hot dogs, they are near impossible to undercook or overcook. More than a few Thanksgiving turkeys have turned into turkey jerky because cooks didn’t know when to take the bird out of the oven. Luckily, hams are precooked for us. We might have to pay for the privilege, but it is hard for even noncooks to ruin their texture or tarnish their pinkish color.

Why
Does Warm Milk Serve as an Effective Sleep-Inducer for Many People?

Scientists haven’t been able to verify it, but there is some evidence to support the idea that milk actually might induce sleep. Milk contains tryptophan, an amino acid, which is the precursor of a brain transmitter, serotonin, which we know has sedative qualities.

Recently, L-tryptophan supplements, which had gained popularity as a sleeping aid, were banned by the Food and Drug Administration because they caused severe reactions in some users, including eosinophilia, an increase in the number of white blood cells. Earlier research confirmed that L-tryptophan did help many people get to sleep faster than a placebo.

But does cow’s milk contain enough tryptophan to induce sleepiness? This has yet to be proven. Representatives of the dairy industry, who might be the first to claim such a benefit for milk, are reluctant to do so and are openly skeptical about its sleep-inducing qualities. Jean Naras, a media relations specialist at the American Dairy Association, although dubious about the sedative effects of milk, cited research that indicated it might take a dose as high as a half-gallon to provide any sleep benefits. And with this quantity of milk intake, your bladder might argue with your brain about whether you really want to sleep through the night.

And does warm milk promote sleep any better than cold milk? It does if you believe it does, but none of the experts we consulted could provide a single logical reason why it should.

Why
Doesn’t Glue Get Stuck in the Bottle?

There are two basic reasons:

Even when the cap is left off, and the glue does lose water, the adhesion is still spotty. We can see this effect with the cap of many glue bottles. In most cases, dried glue can and does cake onto the tip after repeated uses. But Anderson points out that the adhesion is “tenuous,” and one can easily clean the top while still wet and remove the glue completely. Likewise, if you poured Elmer’s on a drinking glass, it might adhere a little, but you could easily wipe it off with a cloth or paper towel, because the glue cannot easily penetrate the “gluee.”

Why
Don’t People in Old Photographs Ever Seem to Smile?

Sometimes, the more you delve into an Imponderable, the murkier it becomes. We asked about twenty experts in photography and photographic history, and the early responses were fairly consistent: The subjects in old photographs weren’t all depressed; the slowness of the exposure time was the culprit. In some cases, the exposure time in early daguerreotypes was up to ten minutes. Typical was the answer of Frank Calandra, secretary/treasurer of the Photographic Historical Society:

It that’s so, Frank, we’ll look jittery, anytime.