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Speaker 1: Happy Thanksgiving friends, or happy Thanksgiving to our US based

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Speaker 1: friends at least, and happy November twenty eighth to the

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Speaker 1: rest of you.

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Speaker 2: On today's episode, we're going to give you.

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Speaker 1: Some things to gobble about at the Thanksgiving dinner table

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Speaker 1: other than politics.

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Speaker 3: You're welcome.

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Speaker 1: First up, we have an expert on to talk about

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Speaker 1: whether or not the trip to fan in Turkey actually

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Speaker 1: makes you.

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Speaker 2: Sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner.

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Speaker 1: Then we're moving on to talking about a vegetable that

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Speaker 1: comes in a variety of forms, all of which are

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Speaker 1: improved by lots and lots of cheese. And finally we're

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Speaker 1: talking about why it takes so stink and long to

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Speaker 1: cook a turkey and some probably bad ideas for how

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Speaker 1: you could speed this process up. Welcome to Daniel and

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Speaker 1: Kelly's Extraordinary universe.

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Speaker 4: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and Thanksgiving is

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Speaker 4: my favorite holiday.

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Speaker 1: Ooh. I'm Kelly Weener Smith. I'm a parasitologist and I

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Speaker 1: really like Thanksgiving. I don't know if it's my favorite holiday,

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Speaker 1: but I do love the food.

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Speaker 4: It's food, it's family, and crucially for me, it's not commercialized.

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Speaker 4: It's not all about shopping and expensive presence. It's really

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Speaker 4: just about spending time with your family eating good food,

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Speaker 4: and like, hey, what's better than that?

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Speaker 2: Right, that's pure, that is that's beautiful. I love that.

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Speaker 1: So has the commercialization of Halloween ruined Halloween for you?

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Speaker 2: Because that's a top contender for rey.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, it's crazy. We all just go out and buy

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Speaker 4: a bunch of candy and give it to each other.

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Speaker 4: It's hilarious. Although I do like the community aspect that

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Speaker 4: everybody comes out. My neighborhood goes crazy for Halloween. We

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Speaker 4: get hundreds and hundreds of trigger treaters. We give away

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Speaker 4: like a full garbage can full of candy. It's incredible.

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Speaker 2: Wow, that is incredible.

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Speaker 4: This Halloween, we ran out of candy. We started giving

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Speaker 4: away stuff from our pantry and people were excited. They

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Speaker 4: were like, ooh, canned corn, sweet potatoes, Are you serious? Yeah? Absolutely.

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Speaker 4: We gave away dried beans, we gave away summer sausage.

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Speaker 4: People were very excited to get anything but candy. Actually,

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Speaker 4: maybe next year we're just going to give away sweet potatoes.

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Speaker 2: That's amazing. I love that.

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Speaker 1: I remember there were, like, you know, some neighbors who

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Speaker 1: would do the king size candy bars. And some would

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Speaker 1: give you a dollar, and then we had a neighbor

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Speaker 1: who gave a penny and we were all like, what, No,

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Speaker 1: it's not okay, you fail.

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Speaker 4: My Thanksgiving questions for you are what are your most

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Speaker 4: and least favorite items on the Thanksgiving table?

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Speaker 2: Oh man?

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Speaker 1: So you know, I often have Thanksgiving up my parents' house,

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Speaker 1: and like, literally everything my father makes is amazing. Everything

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Speaker 1: is like my favorite thing. And every year he tries

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Speaker 1: a new pie or cake, which is incredible. He makes

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Speaker 1: these fantastic like almond cookies for me every year and

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Speaker 1: then sends me home with so many that I I

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Speaker 1: put on like fifty pounds. So I have no least favorite.

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Speaker 1: Anything with mushrooms I don't really like. And sometimes when

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Speaker 1: I don't have Thanksgiving with my dad, mushrooms sneak into

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Speaker 1: the meal and that's disappointing.

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Speaker 2: But all right, so what about you?

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Speaker 4: My favorite thing on the table is probably turkey wings.

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Speaker 4: Not a big fan of turkey, but the wings. Love

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Speaker 4: the wings, so crunchy, so good. Though I gross out

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Speaker 4: my daughter by like audibly crunching them at the table,

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Speaker 4: and she's a vegetarian, so that's not so funny for her.

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Speaker 4: And my least favorite are people who put marshmallows on

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Speaker 4: sweet potatoes. I just don't get it. Like, to me,

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Speaker 4: that combination makes no sense. It's like snickers bars on

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Speaker 4: a hamburger or something like, what is going on here?

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Speaker 1: Not sure I have a problem with snickers bar on

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Speaker 1: hamburger either, but that would be a little weird. I

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Speaker 1: can't say I'm bothered by the marshmallows on the sweet potatoes,

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Speaker 1: but it's not one of the first things I go to.

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Speaker 1: But I think I'm with your daughter. I'd probably sit

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Speaker 1: on the other side of the table. I'm not a

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Speaker 1: big fan of the sounds of crunching on bones.

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Speaker 4: Personally audible carnivores.

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Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like if I were a better person,

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Speaker 1: I would be more at peace with what it takes

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Speaker 1: to put the food on my table. But I like

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Speaker 1: to bury my head a little bit when I can.

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Speaker 4: But you live on a farm, right, You're very connected

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Speaker 4: to where your food comes from.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but they're all friends on my farm. They don't

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Speaker 1: end up on the table. Their eggs do.

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Speaker 4: But not them.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 4: Just their children, well.

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Speaker 1: They're not children, yeah, just their proto children. I mean,

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Speaker 1: even our nasty roosters didn't end up on the table,

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Speaker 1: even though that was at tempting.

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Speaker 4: Sometimes. All right, well, we're not just here to debate

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Speaker 4: when life begins for chickens. We're here to talk about

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Speaker 4: the science of Thanksgiving, what it means, how it works.

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Speaker 4: As you all sit there and enjoy your Thanksgiving meal,

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Speaker 4: we want to inject a little bit of science into

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Speaker 4: your sleepy afternoon.

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Speaker 2: We do.

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Speaker 1: And one of the scientific factoids that I feel like

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Speaker 1: I hear every year is that trip to a fan

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Speaker 1: in the Turkey makes you sleepy. And I believe the

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Speaker 1: history of the word factoid is that it used to

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Speaker 1: be a little piece of information that's wrong.

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Speaker 4: It's an anti fact I see exactly.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, these days it means a tiny fact, but I

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Speaker 1: think it used to mean this is not correct. And

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Speaker 1: that is the story with tript to fan making you sleepy.

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Speaker 1: And we got lucky because your wife knew an expert

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Speaker 1: that we could talk to about this topic.

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Speaker 4: Katrina knows a lot of fun, smart people, so I

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Speaker 4: often ask her for help in finding an expert. So

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Speaker 4: we were very lucky to get to talk to doctor

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Speaker 4: Mark Mapstone here at UC Irvine. But whether or not

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Speaker 4: trypto fan actually makes you sleepy or if it's all

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Speaker 4: just a huge nation wide placebo effect.

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Speaker 1: And he was a fun guy to talk to, so

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Speaker 1: none of us are going to have trouble staying awake,

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Speaker 1: even if we ate a lot of turkey.

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Speaker 4: Here's our chat with Mark.

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Speaker 1: Okay, So the first topic we're tackling for the Thanksgiving

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Speaker 1: episode is whether or not the trip to Fan in

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Speaker 1: Turkey actually makes you sleepy. And we have an expert

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Speaker 1: on the show today to help us with that. We

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Speaker 1: invited doctor Mark Mapstone's chief of the Neuropsychology Division in

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Speaker 1: the Department of Neurology at UC Irvine.

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Speaker 3: Welcome to the show, Mark, Thank you for having me.

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Speaker 3: It's great to be here.

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Speaker 1: We're excited to have you to debunk this. So when

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Speaker 1: I was an undergrad, I remember sitting in an anatomy

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Speaker 1: and physiology class and having my professor say, Okay, Thanksgiving

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Speaker 1: is coming, You're gonna eat turkey, You're gonna be tired,

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Speaker 1: and that's because of the trip to Fan.

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Speaker 2: Is that true? Is that how it works?

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Speaker 4: Well?

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Speaker 3: Probably not.

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Speaker 5: This is a myth that's been going around for decades,

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Speaker 5: if not centuries, This idea that this essential amino acid

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Speaker 5: called trip to fan that's present in Turkey, which it

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Speaker 5: is causing you to become sleepy, and there's a.

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Speaker 3: Background for that. There's a nugget of truth.

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Speaker 5: Specifically, tryp to fan is an amino acid that we need.

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Speaker 5: It's an essential amino acid that we need for protein

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Speaker 5: construction in our bodies, and we don't get it. We

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Speaker 5: can't make it ourselves. We can't make all that we

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Speaker 5: need by ourselves, so we have to get it from

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Speaker 5: our diets. And there are nine essential amino acids that

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Speaker 5: we get from our diet, and.

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Speaker 3: The trip to fan is one of them.

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Speaker 5: However, it turns out that Turkey isn't the only place

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Speaker 5: you can find trip to fan, and as a matter

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Speaker 5: of fact, Turkey isn't the highest density of trip to

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Speaker 5: fan as far as other foods as well, So it's

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Speaker 5: found in dairy eggs, other poultry, meat, even beef. There's

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Speaker 5: nothing special about the amount of trip to fan in Turkey. However,

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Speaker 5: trip to fan is very important in the synthesis of

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Speaker 5: a number of other chemicals that affect the brain and

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Speaker 5: behavior which might lead you to feel sleepy, and those

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Speaker 5: chemicals are serotonin and melatonin. So there's a nugget of truth.

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Speaker 5: But probably you have to eat like ten pounds of

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Speaker 5: turkey to get enough trip to fan to really make

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Speaker 5: that direct effect to make you sleepy.

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Speaker 2: I'm up for that challenge getting but I've done it before.

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Speaker 4: Anything for the science.

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Speaker 1: Exactly, I have a lot of friends and kids who

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Speaker 1: take melotone into sleep. How good is the science showing

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Speaker 1: that orally consuming melatonin actually results in better sleep or

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Speaker 1: more sleep?

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Speaker 3: Probably not so strong.

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Speaker 5: A lot of it is metabolized in the gut before

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Speaker 5: it even gets out to get to the brain. So

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Speaker 5: it turns out that most of the serotonin that's produced

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Speaker 5: in our bodies is produced in the gut. The epithelial

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Speaker 5: lining of the gut produces the serotonin, probably ninety percent.

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Speaker 5: Although serotonin is widely used throughout the body, we think

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Speaker 5: of it mostly in the brain. And serotonin is the

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Speaker 5: feel good drug. It's the chemical that, similar to dopamine,

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Speaker 5: kind of can make you feel It's a mood altering

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Speaker 5: or mood regulating neurochemical that our bodies produce in states

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Speaker 5: that we require for making our mood good. So serotonin

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Speaker 5: is produced in the gut and it's also produced in

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Speaker 5: the brain. So most of the brain relevant serotonin is

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Speaker 5: produced in the raphae nucleus. So this is a chemical

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Speaker 5: that's produced within the brain, but it's also very important

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Speaker 5: and produced largely in the gut.

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Speaker 3: Ninety percent of it comes from the gut.

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Speaker 4: Can I step in with totally naive skepticism about how

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Speaker 4: much we understand any of this stuff? I mean, can

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Speaker 4: we identify an individual chemical and said, this one makes

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Speaker 4: you feel good, this one makes you feel X like.

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Speaker 4: Isn't it a whole symphony of complex chemistry that few

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Speaker 4: people understand maybe a little bit.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, No, you're You're absolutely right. When people start saying

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Speaker 5: this particular neurochemical does this, you have to realize that

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Speaker 5: all of this is happening in this complex miilu. You know,

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Speaker 5: the brain is more than just a big bag of chemicals.

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Speaker 5: There are specificity for certain networks and certain areas of

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Speaker 5: the brain for each of these chemicals. They don't just

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Speaker 5: all float around. But you're absolutely right. You can't really

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Speaker 5: just take one neurochemical in isolation and say this gives

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Speaker 5: you this. It's really a combination of many things.

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Speaker 4: And do we understand the sort of microphysical process like

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Speaker 4: this chemical least to this, which does this? Or is

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Speaker 4: it all just sort of like correlational studies, where like, hey,

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Speaker 4: we gave rats a bunch of serotonin and they looked happy.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you know, that's kind of how science go.

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Speaker 5: We can only start with reductionists sort of questions, and

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Speaker 5: we can test those, and then we have to extrapolate

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Speaker 5: to bigger issues and bigger concepts and make bigger inferences.

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Speaker 5: So we do have to start with very tightly controlled

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Speaker 5: sorts of things like that, Like you move one neurochemical

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Speaker 5: a little bit, you feed them some trip to fan

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Speaker 5: and they get sleepy. Although Givens isn't really strong for that,

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Speaker 5: there's lots of foods that do that. There's probably bigger

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Speaker 5: contributions to feeling sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner than trip to fan,

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Speaker 5: and we can review those if you'd like, But let's

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Speaker 5: review those.

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Speaker 1: So I think a lot of people out there are

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Speaker 1: probably thinking, but after I eat turkey dinner.

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Speaker 2: I do feel sleepy. So what is happening there?

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Speaker 3: So you're also doing a lot of other things.

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Speaker 5: So Thanksgiving dinner traditionally, at least at my house, I mean,

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Speaker 5: we've got mashed potatoes, you've got stuffing, you've got pumpkin pie.

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Speaker 5: I mean all of the carbs that you're eating is

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Speaker 5: going to make you feel sleepy to begin with this

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Speaker 5: post prandial effect. And we know this every day after

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Speaker 5: you eat lunch, righted an hour to an hour a

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Speaker 5: half after you eat lunch, you tend to get sleepy.

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Speaker 5: It's that why you need that cup of coffee in

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Speaker 5: the early afternoon. The same thing happens at Thanksgiving, but

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Speaker 5: we tend to do it like crazy ten times even

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Speaker 5: more than the eating. So we do tend to overindulge

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Speaker 5: in Thanksgiving dinner and it's usually on carbs that are

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Speaker 5: going to make you very sleepy. These are things that

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Speaker 5: divert your blood flow from brain from muscles to the

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Speaker 5: guts so that you can deal with all of the

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Speaker 5: stuff that you just smacked in your gob So it's

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Speaker 5: all part of like overeating. It's what you're overeating. It's

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Speaker 5: carbs and sugars and things like this. Maybe very minor

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Speaker 5: effects of the trip to fan in the turkeys is

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Speaker 5: probably what's going on. And you're probably having a glass

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Speaker 5: of wine with that or more who knows or even

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Speaker 5: you know, while you're watching the football game before Thanksgiving dinner.

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Speaker 5: So there's the potential effects of alcohol, which of course

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Speaker 5: is a depressant in the CNS, it tends to make

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Speaker 5: you sleepy, It tends to make you groggy and dope e.

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Speaker 5: So alcohol carbs overeating. So I think if you put

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Speaker 5: all those in a line, trip to fan is like

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Speaker 5: all way down at the.

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Speaker 4: Bottom relatives football, political conversations, politics.

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Speaker 3: I mean that could make you want to go take a.

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Speaker 2: Nap, right amen?

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Speaker 1: Absolutely So when we were talking about trip to fan,

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Speaker 1: you mentioned that it comes from turkey and chicken and eggs,

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Speaker 1: and it all sounded like it came from meat products.

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Speaker 1: Do vegans never get sleepy? Does it also come from plants?

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Speaker 5: So we have what we call protein dens, are perfect

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Speaker 5: foods that have all nine essential amino acids, and those

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Speaker 5: tend to be meats. So I think the protein dense foods, vegetables, beans,

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Speaker 5: that sort of thing does not contain all nine Many

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Speaker 5: of them do contain trip to fans. So do vegans

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Speaker 5: get post Thanksgiving sleepiness?

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Speaker 3: That sounds like a study right there. You should be

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Speaker 3: doing that work.

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Speaker 2: We need money first.

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Speaker 4: Cacina tells me about the three sisters, Like if you

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Speaker 4: have squash and beans and maybe a corn together, then

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Speaker 4: you get all the amino acids.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, there are combinations obviously of the vegetables that you

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Speaker 5: can pull together to make sure you get all nine.

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Speaker 5: And then obviously there's supplements which are not as good,

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Speaker 5: but I mean you'd rather get them directly through the

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Speaker 5: diet rather than take supplements. But people supplement with these

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Speaker 5: as well.

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Speaker 4: Right, But we don't want people to get the impression

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Speaker 4: that you can't get a complete diet as.

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Speaker 5: A vegan, right, right, right? Oh, yeah, I didn't mean

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Speaker 5: to say that at all. You can definitely take vegetarianism

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Speaker 5: and veganism very seriously and get everything you need.

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Speaker 1: So you had said that this idea that trip to

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Speaker 1: fan is what makes us sleepy after Thanksgiving meal has

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Speaker 1: been around for maybe centuries.

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Speaker 2: Do you happen to know.

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Speaker 1: What's the earliest evidence we have of this sort of

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Speaker 1: meme taking flight?

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Speaker 4: Oh?

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Speaker 3: Good question. I wish I had a source for you.

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Speaker 5: It may be when I was in elementary school or

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Speaker 5: high school biology or something, and I first heard this.

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Speaker 4: Myth was that centuries ago, centuries ago.

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Speaker 3: Getting up there, we can talk decades.

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Speaker 5: I may be attributing this to my high school biology

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Speaker 5: teacher who gave that evidence but did not quote a source,

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Speaker 5: so don't quote.

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Speaker 4: Me on that.

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Speaker 2: Okay, got it.

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Speaker 4: How much do we understand about what makes you feel sleepy?

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Speaker 4: I mean, I know neurobiology is really complicated, but this

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Speaker 4: is a very subjective thing, like to feel sleepy. Do

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Speaker 4: we understand the mechanism for that at all? I mean,

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Speaker 4: do you feel sleepy because you need sleep? Is it

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Speaker 4: really just diverting the blood from the brain to the gut.

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Speaker 5: We know that there are certain processes that are involved

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Speaker 5: in regulation of sleep and wake. We refer to these

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Speaker 5: as circadian rhythms, and these are ways that organisms kind

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Speaker 5: of move through the sleep and wake estates and then

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Speaker 5: they're in between states as well. Sleep plays a really

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Speaker 5: important role. We need to sleep. I mean, it's very

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Speaker 5: clear that if you deprive animals or humans of sleep,

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Speaker 5: things go wrong really quickly. You can go for a

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Speaker 5: couple of days, perhaps at the most, without sleep, but

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Speaker 5: you start getting beyond that and you start having derangement

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Speaker 5: of thinking and eventually it can be fatal. This is

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Speaker 5: something that's really critical and for the brain processes sleep.

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Speaker 5: It turns out there's been a new system described as

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Speaker 5: called the glymphatic system, and this is a network that

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Speaker 5: allows for the metabolic and cellular detritis that's produced during

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Speaker 5: waking hours to be removed from the brain. You kind

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Speaker 5: of want the garbage trucks to come around and clean

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Speaker 5: up after you've had a hard day working as a

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Speaker 5: brain cell. So we do this as sleep, and it's

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Speaker 5: really critical to get good sleep because it allows for

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Speaker 5: these clearance mechanisms to proceed and your brain is able

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Speaker 5: to clean up after itself and it kind of shuts

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Speaker 5: down a little bit and allows for these things to happen.

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Speaker 5: So sleep is really important, and we've got to do

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Speaker 5: this in a cyclical way. We go through sleep and

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Speaker 5: wake cycles. And one of the main neurochemicals or neuro

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Speaker 5: hormones frankly as melatonin, which is produced by the pineal

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Speaker 5: gland in the brain, and this is a hormone that

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Speaker 5: regulates the movement between wake and sleep. So this is

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Speaker 5: a very complex system and most organisms, you know, from

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Speaker 5: multicellular organisms to humans, have to go through these cycles

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Speaker 5: to produce meaningful activity, to feed, to reproduce, to do

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Speaker 5: the things that an organism needs.

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Speaker 3: And then you need the downtime.

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Speaker 4: Why do you need to be asleep for the garbage

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Speaker 4: trucks to come in and clean up the mess. What

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Speaker 4: is it that they're doing that you can't be awake for.

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Speaker 5: Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure that I

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Speaker 5: know the answer to that. I can say that the

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Speaker 5: brain goes into a state, an electrical state where there's

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Speaker 5: oscillations that promote the movement, and that's not compatible with

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Speaker 5: being awake. So it kind of means that when your

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Speaker 5: brain is in this state, it's drowsy, and that allows

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Speaker 5: for these metabolic byproducts to be taken away as garbage.

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Speaker 4: On the topic of understanding sleep, what do you think

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Speaker 4: are things we will understand about sleep in the next

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Speaker 4: ten or fifty or one hundred years that we don't

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Speaker 4: understand today.

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Speaker 5: One thing that I'd love to have us get to

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Speaker 5: the point of is really understanding how these clearance mechanisms work,

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Speaker 5: because there are a number of diseases and disorders of

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Speaker 5: particularly older adulthood, that are probably strongly related to failure

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Speaker 5: of clearance of this cellular stuff. And I'm speaking specifically

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Speaker 5: of Alzheimer's disease, where the build up of proteins in

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Speaker 5: the brain that are normal, they should be there, but

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Speaker 5: they're allowed to build up to a much higher level

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Speaker 5: in people who eventually develop Alzheimer's disease, and the current

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Speaker 5: thinking is that this may be a failure of clearance

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Speaker 5: in the sense that if you're not getting good sleep,

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Speaker 5: then your brain is not taking out the garbage, and

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Speaker 5: it's allowed to build up in a bad way. So

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Speaker 5: a normal, healthy brain and aging brain would allow for

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Speaker 5: that to get out, the garbage to be taken out,

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Speaker 5: but in an Alzheimer's brain, it's not being allowed to

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Speaker 5: We don't clearly understand the mechanisms behind that, but certainly

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Speaker 5: sleep is playing a role. There's a strong correlation between

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Speaker 5: impaired sleep and risk for Alzheimer's disease as we get older,

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Speaker 5: and unfortunately that's probably starting in midlife, probably in our

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Speaker 5: fifties and sixties, when we start having problems with sleep,

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Speaker 5: that's when this is probably happening. So I'd love for

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Speaker 5: us as a scientific field to be able to understand

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Speaker 5: more about that so that we can promote good sleep

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Speaker 5: and promote clearance of these abnormal proteins.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping at night, I panic

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Speaker 1: because I feel like I should be sleeping more, and

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Speaker 1: that keeps me up more and I feel like you've

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Speaker 1: just exacerbated that problem for me.

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Speaker 2: Now I'm going to be like, oh, here comes Alzheimer's.

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Speaker 4: Well, you know a lot of people listen to the

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Speaker 4: podcast to fall asleep. So would you say, Mark, as

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Speaker 4: a medical doctor, that you're prescribing listening to the podcast,

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Speaker 4: this podcast is actually good for your body?

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Speaker 3: It could be. However, I am not a physician.

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Speaker 5: I'm a PhD Clinical psychologist, so I can't write scripts anyways,

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Speaker 5: I give recommendations and yeah, this.

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Speaker 3: Sounds like a great thing to fall asleep too.

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Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to go ahead and prescribe our podcast

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Speaker 1: to our listeners. I medically shouldn't do that either, but

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Speaker 1: I'm doing it all right.

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Speaker 2: Thanks so much Mark for being on the show.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, you're welcome, Thanks for having.

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Speaker 1: Me, and we're back and we're ready to tackle topic

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Speaker 1: number two. All right, So let's move on to another

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Speaker 1: staple of the Thanksgiving dinner table, which are veggies. And

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Speaker 1: for Daniel's sake, we're not going to put any marshmallows

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Speaker 1: on them.

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Speaker 4: Thank you. I know veggies don't need marshmallows. They're delicious

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Speaker 4: by themselves.

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Speaker 2: I think they could use cheese most of the time.

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Speaker 2: But we can agree to disagree there.

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Speaker 1: So a few years ago I was surprised to learn

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Speaker 1: that a bunch of the veggies that I smother with

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Speaker 1: cheese are all from exactly the same species of plant.

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Speaker 1: What Yeah, So, just like dogs, whose scientific name is

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Speaker 1: Canus lupus familiaris, we've used artificial selection to sort of

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Speaker 1: change the way that they look so that they can

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Speaker 1: have different traits that we appreciate for different reasons.

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Speaker 2: So we have everything from tiny.

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Speaker 1: Little chihuahuas that you could fit in your bag and

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Speaker 1: they're super cute all the way up to great Danes,

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Speaker 1: which my husband is afraid of.

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Speaker 4: But you don't have dogs in your Thanksgiving table. That's

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Speaker 4: not where this is going.

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Speaker 2: Where this is going. No, no, no no.

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Speaker 1: But another species that we have artificially selected to produce

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Speaker 1: very varied forms that humans like for different reasons is

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Speaker 1: a plant called Brassica olerasia. And this is the plant

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Speaker 1: that produces kale, coole, robbie cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts.

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Speaker 4: Brussels sprouts too. This is like a monopoly on the

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Speaker 4: Thanksgiving table.

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Speaker 1: I know they're all the same species, and that kind

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Speaker 1: of blew my mind.

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Speaker 2: They look really different.

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Speaker 4: So you're saying Brussels sprouts are to cauliflower like chihuahuas

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Speaker 4: are to cocker spaniels exactly.

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Speaker 1: And I think that if podcasting doesn't work out for us,

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Speaker 1: you have a future writing SAT questions, which I hated

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Speaker 1: taking when I was younger.

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Speaker 4: Then I'm not taking that as a compliment, Kelly, that

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Speaker 4: was a backhanded insu.

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Speaker 2: Okay, it wasn't meant to be.

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Speaker 1: I would have enjoyed taking the SAT much more if

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Speaker 1: you had written questions, Oh.

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Speaker 4: Nice, save, nice, save, all right, I am smooth. Well,

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Speaker 4: I'm a fan of all those vegetables you suggested, but

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Speaker 4: they all seem so different. I mean there's a green

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Speaker 4: sort of leafiness, like a crunchiness to them all. But

442
00:21:13,600 --> 00:21:16,400
Speaker 4: you know, like cabbage you can eat totally raw, and

443
00:21:16,600 --> 00:21:19,399
Speaker 4: kale you definitely shouldn't. How can all these really be

444
00:21:19,560 --> 00:21:20,920
Speaker 4: the same kind of vegetable?

445
00:21:21,080 --> 00:21:24,240
Speaker 1: Okay, So there was this wild plant that we think

446
00:21:24,400 --> 00:21:27,639
Speaker 1: came from the Mediterranean, and it was domesticated, and this

447
00:21:27,680 --> 00:21:30,160
Speaker 1: happened a really long time ago, right, So a lot

448
00:21:30,200 --> 00:21:32,359
Speaker 1: of this information has been lost to history, but here's

449
00:21:32,359 --> 00:21:36,919
Speaker 1: what we think happened. So initially, people found versions of

450
00:21:36,920 --> 00:21:38,560
Speaker 1: this plant that looked different, and some of them had

451
00:21:38,600 --> 00:21:42,240
Speaker 1: bigger leaves, and so we like preferentially planted the ones

452
00:21:42,240 --> 00:21:44,359
Speaker 1: that had bigger leaves, and over time, by picking the

453
00:21:44,359 --> 00:21:46,560
Speaker 1: ones that have the biggest leaves and then helping those

454
00:21:46,680 --> 00:21:49,760
Speaker 1: have plant babies over and over again, we ended up

455
00:21:49,760 --> 00:21:52,639
Speaker 1: getting big leafed plants like kale.

456
00:21:53,240 --> 00:21:55,120
Speaker 2: So that's where kale came from. That's when you get

457
00:21:55,160 --> 00:21:55,800
Speaker 2: a lot of leaves.

458
00:21:56,280 --> 00:21:58,879
Speaker 4: So this is just artificial selection. It's like greeting your

459
00:21:58,880 --> 00:22:01,600
Speaker 4: donks to have certain traits by setting up the matches, yes,

460
00:22:01,760 --> 00:22:03,800
Speaker 4: or the way that we like took korn from having

461
00:22:03,840 --> 00:22:08,440
Speaker 4: these tiny little kernels to this enormous, monstrous deliciousness. It's

462
00:22:08,440 --> 00:22:10,800
Speaker 4: the same sort of effect, but it takes a long time, right,

463
00:22:10,840 --> 00:22:12,720
Speaker 4: This is not something you can do in a lab

464
00:22:12,800 --> 00:22:15,280
Speaker 4: in ten years. It's like hundreds of years or thousands

465
00:22:15,320 --> 00:22:16,000
Speaker 4: of years of work.

466
00:22:16,320 --> 00:22:18,159
Speaker 1: So a lot of the answers to this stuff have

467
00:22:18,200 --> 00:22:20,480
Speaker 1: been lost to history. So, like we know there were

468
00:22:20,520 --> 00:22:26,160
Speaker 1: Greeks around three hundred years BCE who would write about

469
00:22:26,800 --> 00:22:30,040
Speaker 1: kley kinds of plants, and so we think that, you know,

470
00:22:30,119 --> 00:22:32,399
Speaker 1: thousands of years ago this was like starting to happen.

471
00:22:32,920 --> 00:22:35,879
Speaker 1: But you know, over time, like when someone uses whatever

472
00:22:35,920 --> 00:22:38,680
Speaker 1: the Greek word was for, like cabbage or kale, It's

473
00:22:38,720 --> 00:22:41,239
Speaker 1: possible they were referring to a different plant, but we

474
00:22:41,280 --> 00:22:43,720
Speaker 1: think they were referring to this one. And so we

475
00:22:43,720 --> 00:22:46,480
Speaker 1: don't know exactly when all of these different forms popped out,

476
00:22:47,000 --> 00:22:49,480
Speaker 1: but we think that we started with big leafy things

477
00:22:49,480 --> 00:22:52,400
Speaker 1: like kale, and that was maybe a few thousand years ago.

478
00:22:52,680 --> 00:22:55,520
Speaker 4: Incredible that we don't know the history of our own foods.

479
00:22:55,560 --> 00:22:58,280
Speaker 4: It's fascinating, I know. You know, whenever there's a gap

480
00:22:58,320 --> 00:23:00,359
Speaker 4: in our knowledge, you always find some core order the

481
00:23:00,400 --> 00:23:03,280
Speaker 4: Internet where there's conspiracy theories about it, you know, like

482
00:23:03,520 --> 00:23:05,680
Speaker 4: how did the Egyptians build the Pyramids? So I wonder

483
00:23:05,720 --> 00:23:07,480
Speaker 4: if there's some corner of the Internet where people like

484
00:23:07,520 --> 00:23:10,359
Speaker 4: have some conspiracy about how, like Cole Robbie is actually

485
00:23:10,359 --> 00:23:13,080
Speaker 4: an alien plant that came on an asteroid or something.

486
00:23:13,280 --> 00:23:14,560
Speaker 2: I mean, that would be really fun.

487
00:23:16,600 --> 00:23:17,720
Speaker 4: Let's start it. Let's start it.

488
00:23:18,480 --> 00:23:23,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Robbie was brought to us by the Enceladusians,

489
00:23:23,800 --> 00:23:27,119
Speaker 1: and we should thank them every Thanksgiving for this contribution.

490
00:23:27,560 --> 00:23:29,240
Speaker 4: No, no, no, We're not going to join the ranks of

491
00:23:29,280 --> 00:23:33,000
Speaker 4: other quote unquote natural science podcasts that just deal in

492
00:23:33,080 --> 00:23:35,960
Speaker 4: speculation and nonsense. We are hard hitting science here, so no,

493
00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:38,840
Speaker 4: this is fascinating, actual science. So you're telling us that

494
00:23:38,920 --> 00:23:41,159
Speaker 4: all of these things have what the same common ancestor,

495
00:23:41,359 --> 00:23:44,239
Speaker 4: or there's still technically the same species, Like I know

496
00:23:44,280 --> 00:23:47,359
Speaker 4: that great Dane and the chihuahua can mix. I know,

497
00:23:47,400 --> 00:23:49,760
Speaker 4: for example, because my dog is a mixture of German

498
00:23:49,800 --> 00:23:53,879
Speaker 4: shepherd in chihuahua, which is a fascinating combination. Could you

499
00:23:53,960 --> 00:23:57,320
Speaker 4: today take like Brussels sprouse and mate them with cole robbie?

500
00:23:57,520 --> 00:23:59,000
Speaker 2: Yes, what I think?

501
00:23:59,119 --> 00:24:00,840
Speaker 4: I was sure you were going to say, you can.

502
00:24:00,720 --> 00:24:04,000
Speaker 2: Get like broccolini, which is a mix between.

503
00:24:03,600 --> 00:24:06,720
Speaker 1: Broccoli and Chinese broccoli, and it's just like it's a

504
00:24:06,800 --> 00:24:10,399
Speaker 1: leafier sort of thing. And so yes, you can cross

505
00:24:10,480 --> 00:24:14,280
Speaker 1: these different brasca Oleracea species. They still are fertile together,

506
00:24:14,720 --> 00:24:16,560
Speaker 1: so they are still the same species. And there's some

507
00:24:16,640 --> 00:24:20,360
Speaker 1: closely related species that also make some other foody things

508
00:24:20,400 --> 00:24:23,080
Speaker 1: that we eat. So this is like a genus of

509
00:24:23,119 --> 00:24:26,639
Speaker 1: plants that were you know, really happy about. I guess,

510
00:24:26,640 --> 00:24:29,480
Speaker 1: depending on how much you like your vegetables. A difficult

511
00:24:29,600 --> 00:24:32,240
Speaker 1: question that scientists were trying to answer is like where

512
00:24:33,119 --> 00:24:36,639
Speaker 1: did this originally come from? And it was more difficult

513
00:24:36,640 --> 00:24:38,600
Speaker 1: to solve than you might expect. So, like, if you

514
00:24:38,680 --> 00:24:41,879
Speaker 1: go to lots of different places like the UK, you

515
00:24:42,040 --> 00:24:45,399
Speaker 1: find what looks like the original version of this plant,

516
00:24:45,800 --> 00:24:47,800
Speaker 1: so like, you know, it doesn't look like a cabbage,

517
00:24:47,920 --> 00:24:50,199
Speaker 1: It like looks like the original wild version that we

518
00:24:50,240 --> 00:24:51,679
Speaker 1: then did all this selection on.

519
00:24:52,200 --> 00:24:53,480
Speaker 2: And what they think happened was.

520
00:24:53,480 --> 00:24:57,600
Speaker 1: That actually it started from the Mediterranean and then we

521
00:24:57,760 --> 00:25:01,280
Speaker 1: domesticated it, and then we had it in gardens like

522
00:25:01,680 --> 00:25:04,560
Speaker 1: throughout the world, and then it escaped from our gardens.

523
00:25:04,640 --> 00:25:06,760
Speaker 1: And so there's a bunch of lineages that they say

524
00:25:07,200 --> 00:25:10,600
Speaker 1: went feral, which was like a thing I only thought

525
00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:13,680
Speaker 1: happened to animals, but apparently plants can also go feral.

526
00:25:14,160 --> 00:25:17,080
Speaker 1: And when you're not regularly doing this selection and trying

527
00:25:17,080 --> 00:25:19,160
Speaker 1: to pick the ones that make the best cabbages every

528
00:25:19,200 --> 00:25:21,720
Speaker 1: single time, I guess over time it goes back to

529
00:25:21,760 --> 00:25:24,240
Speaker 1: looking like the wild version did.

530
00:25:24,160 --> 00:25:27,080
Speaker 4: Because now natural selection is applying its own influence. Yeah.

531
00:25:27,119 --> 00:25:30,320
Speaker 1: Fascinating, Yeah exactly, and so it goes back to looking

532
00:25:30,640 --> 00:25:33,000
Speaker 1: like the wild version. And so through like a number

533
00:25:33,040 --> 00:25:35,800
Speaker 1: of different genetic things, and also by trying to look

534
00:25:35,840 --> 00:25:38,800
Speaker 1: at like historical records for when we were first talking

535
00:25:38,840 --> 00:25:42,040
Speaker 1: about things that were called cabbages. The current theory is

536
00:25:42,040 --> 00:25:44,399
Speaker 1: that it's probably from the Mediterranean initially and then it

537
00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:45,600
Speaker 1: went feral everywhere else.

538
00:25:45,880 --> 00:25:48,840
Speaker 4: Do we have examples of that in animals where we

539
00:25:48,920 --> 00:25:51,520
Speaker 4: domesticated them and then they went feral again and sort

540
00:25:51,520 --> 00:25:54,200
Speaker 4: of returned to their natural shape. I always wonder that

541
00:25:54,240 --> 00:25:58,000
Speaker 4: about like coyotes. You know, our coyotes like domesticated dogs

542
00:25:58,000 --> 00:25:59,560
Speaker 4: that escaped and became wild again.

543
00:26:00,000 --> 00:26:00,600
Speaker 2: A good question.

544
00:26:00,720 --> 00:26:04,359
Speaker 1: I don't think coyotes are domesticated dogs that went wild again.

545
00:26:04,840 --> 00:26:10,560
Speaker 1: Pigeons were really popular animals for artificial selection for a

546
00:26:10,600 --> 00:26:13,280
Speaker 1: really long time. They were like all these fancy pigeons,

547
00:26:13,760 --> 00:26:16,520
Speaker 1: And anyone who's interested in that should read Rosemary Moscow's

548
00:26:16,520 --> 00:26:19,480
Speaker 1: book about pigeons because she's amazing book. Maybe we should

549
00:26:19,480 --> 00:26:20,919
Speaker 1: have her on the show to talk about pigeons at

550
00:26:20,920 --> 00:26:23,359
Speaker 1: some point, definitely should. It wouldn't surprise me if a

551
00:26:23,359 --> 00:26:28,359
Speaker 1: lot of pigeons that were domesticated went feral subsequently.

552
00:26:29,080 --> 00:26:30,400
Speaker 2: Oh what about bores?

553
00:26:30,480 --> 00:26:33,560
Speaker 1: Aren't there like pigs that were domesticated and then got

554
00:26:33,560 --> 00:26:36,320
Speaker 1: released and now they're like in Texas.

555
00:26:36,320 --> 00:26:39,520
Speaker 4: This like thirty to fifty wild hogs rampaging around Texas somewhere.

556
00:26:39,720 --> 00:26:42,760
Speaker 1: I think that actually bores that were domesticated and then

557
00:26:42,760 --> 00:26:44,560
Speaker 1: got out are a problem in some areas.

558
00:26:44,560 --> 00:26:45,720
Speaker 2: I could be wrong about that.

559
00:26:45,680 --> 00:26:47,560
Speaker 4: You know, and I think it's dingoes. I think it

560
00:26:47,640 --> 00:26:50,080
Speaker 4: was not coyotes, but I think dingos in Australia might

561
00:26:50,119 --> 00:26:52,760
Speaker 4: have once been domesticated. Really, we'll dig into that and

562
00:26:52,760 --> 00:26:54,560
Speaker 4: look into it. But back to the topic of the

563
00:26:54,560 --> 00:26:58,280
Speaker 4: Thanksgiving table. Were these things selected to be eaten with

564
00:26:58,440 --> 00:27:01,840
Speaker 4: cheese or were people in doing these things even pre cheese.

565
00:27:01,960 --> 00:27:04,400
Speaker 4: I mean, cheese is pretty ancient as well, right, Matt.

566
00:27:04,359 --> 00:27:07,200
Speaker 1: You are asking all the questions I didn't prepare for.

567
00:27:08,359 --> 00:27:10,600
Speaker 1: So you said that your family is all about fermenting

568
00:27:10,640 --> 00:27:13,359
Speaker 1: and stuff, So maybe you know when was the first

569
00:27:13,440 --> 00:27:15,960
Speaker 1: instance of cheese coming on a scene for humanity?

570
00:27:16,080 --> 00:27:18,919
Speaker 4: I think they have records of cheese from like Mesopotamia.

571
00:27:19,040 --> 00:27:23,040
Speaker 4: You know, people have been eating cheese basically since cattle

572
00:27:23,080 --> 00:27:25,760
Speaker 4: have been domesticated, because you know, you take that milk

573
00:27:25,760 --> 00:27:27,439
Speaker 4: and you've got to make it last a little longer.

574
00:27:28,000 --> 00:27:30,320
Speaker 4: So yeah, cheese has been with us for a long

575
00:27:30,359 --> 00:27:33,520
Speaker 4: long time. I think maybe ten thousand years. But tell

576
00:27:33,600 --> 00:27:35,040
Speaker 4: us a little bit more about how you take this

577
00:27:35,080 --> 00:27:38,000
Speaker 4: plant and make the different varieties, like how do you

578
00:27:38,040 --> 00:27:42,119
Speaker 4: take this crazy chewy kale like small leaf thing and

579
00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:43,200
Speaker 4: make cabbage?

580
00:27:43,520 --> 00:27:46,679
Speaker 1: So I was interested in this question, and to be honest,

581
00:27:46,720 --> 00:27:49,760
Speaker 1: plant parts, I kind of fell asleep during a lot

582
00:27:49,800 --> 00:27:52,560
Speaker 1: of the plant physiology stuff. And I've got some plant

583
00:27:52,600 --> 00:27:55,800
Speaker 1: friends who are just like, we're taking your ecologist card away,

584
00:27:56,160 --> 00:27:57,360
Speaker 1: and that's totally reasonable.

585
00:27:57,440 --> 00:27:59,359
Speaker 4: I just remember stamen and that's the only thing I

586
00:27:59,400 --> 00:28:01,200
Speaker 4: learned in ninth grade biology, and that was the last

587
00:28:01,200 --> 00:28:02,240
Speaker 4: biology class I took.

588
00:28:02,440 --> 00:28:06,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's also pistols and that's exciting. But I found

589
00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:09,320
Speaker 1: this website called Botanist in the Kitchen and it's botanists

590
00:28:09,320 --> 00:28:11,560
Speaker 1: who are also interested about like telling you about how

591
00:28:11,600 --> 00:28:14,040
Speaker 1: to cook all these cool plants. And so they were

592
00:28:14,080 --> 00:28:16,480
Speaker 1: saying that the way you get from kale to cabbage,

593
00:28:16,880 --> 00:28:20,000
Speaker 1: so kale is like leafy, and so if you take

594
00:28:20,040 --> 00:28:22,359
Speaker 1: the leaves that are like growing along the stem and

595
00:28:22,440 --> 00:28:25,120
Speaker 1: you lessen the distance between them, so now you've got

596
00:28:25,160 --> 00:28:27,080
Speaker 1: lots of leaves that are very close to each other,

597
00:28:27,520 --> 00:28:30,320
Speaker 1: and you start getting like the stem a little bit thicker,

598
00:28:30,640 --> 00:28:32,360
Speaker 1: and what's called like the marra stem at the top

599
00:28:32,359 --> 00:28:33,639
Speaker 1: also gets a little bit thicker.

600
00:28:33,920 --> 00:28:35,960
Speaker 2: Then now you've got something that looks like cabbage.

601
00:28:36,000 --> 00:28:37,879
Speaker 1: So now you've got those leaves, you got more of them,

602
00:28:37,960 --> 00:28:40,680
Speaker 1: the closer together in a bigger stem, and now you've

603
00:28:40,720 --> 00:28:41,880
Speaker 1: got cabbage.

604
00:28:42,080 --> 00:28:44,400
Speaker 4: That's fascinating because the way you describe it, you sort

605
00:28:44,400 --> 00:28:47,160
Speaker 4: of have to have cabbage in your mind to understand

606
00:28:47,200 --> 00:28:49,760
Speaker 4: where you're going. It's like this is somebody's target, but

607
00:28:49,880 --> 00:28:51,960
Speaker 4: with somebody, just like I wonder what happens if you

608
00:28:52,040 --> 00:28:54,719
Speaker 4: do this to this plant, Like this is just random

609
00:28:54,760 --> 00:28:57,640
Speaker 4: exploration of like changing this plant and other stuff and

610
00:28:57,680 --> 00:29:00,000
Speaker 4: seeing if it gets crunchy and delicious. That's incredible.

611
00:29:00,240 --> 00:29:00,920
Speaker 2: I don't think we know.

612
00:29:01,160 --> 00:29:03,720
Speaker 1: I can imagine someone being like, oh man, this one

613
00:29:03,920 --> 00:29:06,600
Speaker 1: has a lot more stems with leaves on it that

614
00:29:06,640 --> 00:29:07,120
Speaker 1: I can eat.

615
00:29:07,160 --> 00:29:07,640
Speaker 2: That's great.

616
00:29:07,680 --> 00:29:10,000
Speaker 1: And they just happened to be like shorter distances between

617
00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:12,760
Speaker 1: the stems. I don't know that the goal was we

618
00:29:12,800 --> 00:29:14,880
Speaker 1: want cabbage. I think the goal was just like more

619
00:29:14,960 --> 00:29:17,080
Speaker 1: leaves closer together. That's great, and then it kind of

620
00:29:17,080 --> 00:29:17,960
Speaker 1: became cabbage.

621
00:29:18,160 --> 00:29:20,200
Speaker 4: Or maybe some of these things were accidental, right, You

622
00:29:20,200 --> 00:29:23,600
Speaker 4: had a weird mutation and weird mixture of two things

623
00:29:23,680 --> 00:29:26,800
Speaker 4: accidentally and created something like ooh, this is good. Looks

624
00:29:26,840 --> 00:29:30,280
Speaker 4: called cabbage, yeah, could be, Yeah, fascinating.

625
00:29:30,400 --> 00:29:33,760
Speaker 1: So broccoli and cauliflower are about sort of modifying what's

626
00:29:33,800 --> 00:29:37,160
Speaker 1: happening with the inflorescences, which are flowers that grow together.

627
00:29:37,760 --> 00:29:40,280
Speaker 1: And so if you've ever left broccoli or cauliflower in

628
00:29:40,320 --> 00:29:42,440
Speaker 1: your refrigerator for too long, you might see these like

629
00:29:42,520 --> 00:29:46,000
Speaker 1: yellow flowers opening up. So what you try to do is,

630
00:29:46,040 --> 00:29:47,840
Speaker 1: like you get a lot of these flowering parts, you

631
00:29:47,880 --> 00:29:50,240
Speaker 1: get them to grow really close together, and then you

632
00:29:50,840 --> 00:29:54,160
Speaker 1: cut it before it starts to actually flower. And that's

633
00:29:54,720 --> 00:29:57,600
Speaker 1: broccoli and cauliflower as far as I know, this one,

634
00:29:57,640 --> 00:30:01,640
Speaker 1: I think started in Italy around the sixteenth century. It's

635
00:30:01,760 --> 00:30:05,640
Speaker 1: like a little bit newer, and it required some complicated

636
00:30:05,640 --> 00:30:07,560
Speaker 1: genetic mutations. Maybe we have a little bit of a

637
00:30:07,560 --> 00:30:10,400
Speaker 1: better handle on what happened here with broccoli. But I

638
00:30:10,400 --> 00:30:14,440
Speaker 1: think broccoli is probably my favorite of all of these.

639
00:30:15,920 --> 00:30:17,440
Speaker 1: I just feel like that's an important thing to mention.

640
00:30:17,520 --> 00:30:21,040
Speaker 4: What about you, how much cheese does it take before

641
00:30:21,040 --> 00:30:24,320
Speaker 4: you enjoy broccoli? Will you eat broccoli pure without cheese?

642
00:30:24,880 --> 00:30:29,240
Speaker 1: I will eat broccoli with some soy sauce and without cheese,

643
00:30:29,640 --> 00:30:34,040
Speaker 1: And the same for Brussels sprouts with some spices. But

644
00:30:34,120 --> 00:30:36,200
Speaker 1: you know, everything is better with cheese. Let's be honest.

645
00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:37,960
Speaker 1: What about you, what's your favorite of these?

646
00:30:38,160 --> 00:30:41,520
Speaker 4: I will eat broccoli raw. You know, chopped broccoli is

647
00:30:41,560 --> 00:30:44,280
Speaker 4: delicious and a salad. It's crunchy, it's got a little

648
00:30:44,280 --> 00:30:45,560
Speaker 4: bit of a bite to it, as long as the

649
00:30:45,640 --> 00:30:49,160
Speaker 4: chunks aren't too big. It's really fantastic. Raw kale. I'm

650
00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:51,400
Speaker 4: still learning to love, you know. My wife's a big

651
00:30:51,480 --> 00:30:53,000
Speaker 4: fan of kale. I know kale is supposed to be

652
00:30:53,040 --> 00:30:55,320
Speaker 4: really good for you, but there's just no way in

653
00:30:55,320 --> 00:30:57,720
Speaker 4: which kale becomes delicious. Actually, no, I take that back.

654
00:30:57,800 --> 00:31:00,640
Speaker 4: Somebody once made kale chips. Put them in the oven,

655
00:31:00,720 --> 00:31:03,479
Speaker 4: roast them at high temperature. They get really crunchy, but

656
00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:06,200
Speaker 4: not very oily. Kale chips are good. But I'm a

657
00:31:06,240 --> 00:31:08,239
Speaker 4: fan of all these things. Brussels sprouts, I think are

658
00:31:08,240 --> 00:31:11,360
Speaker 4: probably my favorite, which is funny because I remember my

659
00:31:11,520 --> 00:31:14,080
Speaker 4: dad cooking Brussels sprouts when I was a kid, and

660
00:31:14,400 --> 00:31:17,480
Speaker 4: my memory is that it was the most disgusting aroma

661
00:31:17,560 --> 00:31:20,120
Speaker 4: I could imagine, Like when he cooked Brussels sprouts, I

662
00:31:20,120 --> 00:31:23,400
Speaker 4: had to leave the house. It was revolting. And now

663
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:26,440
Speaker 4: I totally love them. And so it's bizarre how you

664
00:31:26,480 --> 00:31:28,800
Speaker 4: developed these tastes, like why did it take decades to

665
00:31:28,880 --> 00:31:30,400
Speaker 4: learn to love Brussels sprouse?

666
00:31:30,440 --> 00:31:32,440
Speaker 1: Actually I was talking to Zach about this this morning,

667
00:31:32,480 --> 00:31:34,480
Speaker 1: and I didn't go and verify this by finding a

668
00:31:34,520 --> 00:31:37,120
Speaker 1: scientific paper, but he was saying that part of why

669
00:31:37,440 --> 00:31:39,680
Speaker 1: people our age like Brussels sprouts now but we hated

670
00:31:39,720 --> 00:31:41,800
Speaker 1: it when we're kids, is that actually there has been

671
00:31:41,840 --> 00:31:45,680
Speaker 1: some artificial selection for flavor, and it has gotten less

672
00:31:45,720 --> 00:31:47,959
Speaker 1: bitter and stuff over time, and so part of it

673
00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:49,960
Speaker 1: maybe is that where adults are, we're cooking it better

674
00:31:50,120 --> 00:31:52,520
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, but it might actually just taste better,

675
00:31:52,560 --> 00:31:55,120
Speaker 1: which I feel like also happened to apples in our lifetime.

676
00:31:56,440 --> 00:31:59,920
Speaker 4: But that's terrible because I've been congratulating myself for learning

677
00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:02,160
Speaker 4: to love my dad's Brussels sprouts for a long time,

678
00:32:02,200 --> 00:32:04,280
Speaker 4: and now you're saying I haven't even accomplished that. I'm

679
00:32:04,320 --> 00:32:07,840
Speaker 4: just eating like baby version of Brussels sprouts, like candy version.

680
00:32:08,080 --> 00:32:10,000
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I took that away from you, but you know,

681
00:32:10,040 --> 00:32:11,720
Speaker 1: I feel like, in general, you know, maybe you should

682
00:32:11,720 --> 00:32:13,600
Speaker 1: give your dad some more credit, like call him and

683
00:32:13,640 --> 00:32:16,000
Speaker 1: be like, I'm sorry, your Brussels sprouts were probably as

684
00:32:16,000 --> 00:32:16,880
Speaker 1: good as they could have been.

685
00:32:17,080 --> 00:32:19,680
Speaker 4: No, actually, he's British and he cooked them the British

686
00:32:19,680 --> 00:32:22,200
Speaker 4: way of like boiling them to death, and so that

687
00:32:22,280 --> 00:32:24,280
Speaker 4: probably also contributed to their disgustingness.

688
00:32:24,560 --> 00:32:27,760
Speaker 1: No, no, yeah, you should have emancipated yourself at age seventeen.

689
00:32:28,040 --> 00:32:29,400
Speaker 2: That's unacceptable.

690
00:32:30,880 --> 00:32:33,160
Speaker 4: But I agree almost all of these are better with cheese.

691
00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:38,320
Speaker 4: Cauliflower incredible with cheese, absolutely broccoli. It's all the dishes.

692
00:32:38,320 --> 00:32:40,880
Speaker 4: And I hope everybody out there had a really good

693
00:32:40,920 --> 00:32:44,240
Speaker 4: helping of healthy vegetables to go along with all their pie.

694
00:32:44,720 --> 00:32:46,120
Speaker 2: I think that's important.

695
00:32:46,360 --> 00:32:50,440
Speaker 1: And now I think we should return to Turkey, but

696
00:32:50,520 --> 00:32:53,880
Speaker 1: now take a physics turn on things, and so we're

697
00:32:53,920 --> 00:32:56,239
Speaker 1: going to take a break, and then I'm kicking the

698
00:32:56,240 --> 00:32:58,200
Speaker 1: control of the conversation over to you.

699
00:32:58,240 --> 00:33:17,320
Speaker 4: All right, all right, we are back, and I hope

700
00:33:17,400 --> 00:33:20,320
Speaker 4: you've had a good full meal. You're done crunching on

701
00:33:20,360 --> 00:33:24,600
Speaker 4: your turkey wings and slathering your broccoli with geese, because

702
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:27,320
Speaker 4: we're going to take this conversation away from the biology

703
00:33:27,360 --> 00:33:30,440
Speaker 4: of Thanksgiving and talk about the physics of turkey.

704
00:33:30,600 --> 00:33:32,200
Speaker 2: Hope you haven't had too much trip to fan.

705
00:33:35,840 --> 00:33:38,840
Speaker 4: A big part of the Thanksgiving experience is cooking a turkey,

706
00:33:38,880 --> 00:33:42,040
Speaker 4: and most people don't cook turkeys throughout the year, and

707
00:33:42,120 --> 00:33:44,360
Speaker 4: so when Thanksgiving comes along, you look up that turkey

708
00:33:44,400 --> 00:33:47,520
Speaker 4: recipe and you invariably do it around two in the afternoon.

709
00:33:47,560 --> 00:33:48,840
Speaker 4: You're like, Okay, what do I need to do to

710
00:33:48,880 --> 00:33:51,000
Speaker 4: this turkey? And then you look at the recipe and

711
00:33:51,040 --> 00:33:54,160
Speaker 4: it says cook for six hours and you're like, oh, no,

712
00:33:54,800 --> 00:33:57,680
Speaker 4: I've started too late, or my turkey is still frozen.

713
00:33:57,960 --> 00:33:59,840
Speaker 1: I think I've had three or four instances in my

714
00:33:59,880 --> 00:34:01,680
Speaker 1: life where the plan was to eat it for and

715
00:34:01,720 --> 00:34:03,360
Speaker 1: then we ate it like nine because it was like

716
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:07,360
Speaker 1: the turkey the center was still frozen exactly.

717
00:34:07,480 --> 00:34:09,360
Speaker 4: And you can blame that on people's planning skills, but

718
00:34:09,400 --> 00:34:13,600
Speaker 4: really the problem is physics. Physics is the reason that

719
00:34:13,680 --> 00:34:15,760
Speaker 4: turkeys take so long to cook.

720
00:34:16,000 --> 00:34:17,480
Speaker 2: What are the electrons doing wrong?

721
00:34:18,960 --> 00:34:22,799
Speaker 4: Blame the electrons, they're so negative they are, so to

722
00:34:22,880 --> 00:34:25,319
Speaker 4: think about cooking a turkey from a physics point of view,

723
00:34:25,360 --> 00:34:27,680
Speaker 4: of course, first thing we do is we assume the

724
00:34:27,719 --> 00:34:31,760
Speaker 4: turkey is just a sphere. Right to naturally simplify the problem,

725
00:34:32,040 --> 00:34:33,360
Speaker 4: assume a spherical turkey.

726
00:34:33,560 --> 00:34:35,880
Speaker 1: This is the go to joke with ecologists was that

727
00:34:35,920 --> 00:34:39,120
Speaker 1: physicals will like assume a spherical cat anyway, So all right,

728
00:34:39,120 --> 00:34:40,480
Speaker 1: we're spherical turkey.

729
00:34:40,640 --> 00:34:42,959
Speaker 4: But here it's actually useful because you can't think about

730
00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:45,480
Speaker 4: all the wiggles and weird shapes of a turkey because

731
00:34:45,480 --> 00:34:47,600
Speaker 4: the crucial thing to think about when you're thinking about

732
00:34:47,600 --> 00:34:50,080
Speaker 4: the physics of cooking a turkey is how to get

733
00:34:50,120 --> 00:34:53,279
Speaker 4: the core of the turkey above a certain temperature, because

734
00:34:53,280 --> 00:34:55,640
Speaker 4: that's what cook means. Like, you don't want to eat

735
00:34:55,680 --> 00:34:58,239
Speaker 4: the turkey when the core temperature is below about one

736
00:34:58,320 --> 00:35:01,120
Speaker 4: hundred and sixty five fahrenheit because and this is a

737
00:35:01,120 --> 00:35:03,480
Speaker 4: little bit of biology, what happens when you cook is

738
00:35:03,480 --> 00:35:06,520
Speaker 4: you're raising the temperature, you're denaturing the proteins. You're also

739
00:35:06,680 --> 00:35:09,759
Speaker 4: killing all the microbes, etc. But really what's happening is

740
00:35:09,800 --> 00:35:12,040
Speaker 4: the transformation of those proteins. That's why it goes from

741
00:35:12,040 --> 00:35:15,839
Speaker 4: like gouy and translucent to like white and opaque, because

742
00:35:15,880 --> 00:35:19,239
Speaker 4: you've transformed these molecules, have broken them down. Did I

743
00:35:19,239 --> 00:35:20,479
Speaker 4: get the biology right there, Kelly?

744
00:35:20,640 --> 00:35:23,160
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds good and delicious and delicious.

745
00:35:23,400 --> 00:35:26,240
Speaker 4: So you have this object. The whole thing is cold.

746
00:35:26,280 --> 00:35:29,040
Speaker 4: It starts at like fifty degrees fahrenheit or whatever. The

747
00:35:29,040 --> 00:35:31,200
Speaker 4: temperature is of your fridge, and you have to raise

748
00:35:31,239 --> 00:35:33,120
Speaker 4: the whole thing up to one hundred and sixty five

749
00:35:33,160 --> 00:35:36,800
Speaker 4: degrees fahrenheit. But the problem is you can't inject heat

750
00:35:36,880 --> 00:35:38,880
Speaker 4: into the center of it. I mean, you could microwave

751
00:35:38,920 --> 00:35:41,280
Speaker 4: your turkey, but I don't recommend it. If you're roasting

752
00:35:41,400 --> 00:35:44,440
Speaker 4: in an oven, you apply heat only to the outside. Right,

753
00:35:44,440 --> 00:35:46,479
Speaker 4: Your oven is like a big bath of hot air.

754
00:35:46,960 --> 00:35:49,280
Speaker 4: You put the turkey in the oven, The oven heats

755
00:35:49,320 --> 00:35:52,120
Speaker 4: the outside of the turkey. It doesn't directly heat the

756
00:35:52,160 --> 00:35:55,640
Speaker 4: inside of the turkey. So from a physics point of view,

757
00:35:55,840 --> 00:35:58,000
Speaker 4: the reason that it takes so long to cook your

758
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:00,480
Speaker 4: turkey is that it takes a while for the heat

759
00:36:00,640 --> 00:36:03,040
Speaker 4: to propagate from the outside of the turkey to the

760
00:36:03,080 --> 00:36:04,000
Speaker 4: center of the turkey.

761
00:36:04,120 --> 00:36:06,440
Speaker 1: So this is where we reveal to our listeners that

762
00:36:06,480 --> 00:36:09,080
Speaker 1: I don't go in the kitchen excepting eat the food

763
00:36:09,080 --> 00:36:11,360
Speaker 1: that Zack has been cooking. And you can't speed that

764
00:36:11,440 --> 00:36:13,359
Speaker 1: process up by turning the heat up too much, because

765
00:36:13,360 --> 00:36:14,600
Speaker 1: then you're going to burn the outside.

766
00:36:14,640 --> 00:36:15,120
Speaker 2: Is that right?

767
00:36:15,200 --> 00:36:17,359
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right. What you want is an evenly cooked turkey.

768
00:36:17,400 --> 00:36:18,840
Speaker 4: You want the center to be one sixty five, You

769
00:36:18,840 --> 00:36:20,880
Speaker 4: want the outside to be one sixty five. Now, the

770
00:36:20,880 --> 00:36:23,640
Speaker 4: oven temperature is like three P fifty or so, and

771
00:36:23,719 --> 00:36:26,840
Speaker 4: so when the core is one sixty five, the surface

772
00:36:26,960 --> 00:36:28,960
Speaker 4: is going to be hotter. And so if you make

773
00:36:29,040 --> 00:36:32,880
Speaker 4: the temperature of the oven hotter nine hundred degrees or whatever,

774
00:36:33,400 --> 00:36:35,640
Speaker 4: then you're going to cook the outside faster. The inside

775
00:36:35,680 --> 00:36:37,960
Speaker 4: will get to one sixty five and it will get

776
00:36:38,000 --> 00:36:40,440
Speaker 4: there faster. But when it does, the outside is going

777
00:36:40,480 --> 00:36:42,920
Speaker 4: to be even hotter. It's going to be totally burned.

778
00:36:43,480 --> 00:36:45,240
Speaker 4: And so the best way to cook a turkey slowly.

779
00:36:45,280 --> 00:36:47,640
Speaker 4: This is why, like a souved, you put the thing

780
00:36:47,840 --> 00:36:51,400
Speaker 4: in a water bath like whatever the target temperature is,

781
00:36:51,480 --> 00:36:55,040
Speaker 4: and you just wait forever until the whole thing comes

782
00:36:55,080 --> 00:36:58,080
Speaker 4: up to that temperature. And so what's happening here is

783
00:36:58,160 --> 00:37:02,120
Speaker 4: diffusion of heat. The energy is spreading out from the

784
00:37:02,160 --> 00:37:04,360
Speaker 4: oven to the turkey, or from the water bath in

785
00:37:04,400 --> 00:37:08,040
Speaker 4: the case of a souved into the object. And that's physics.

786
00:37:08,280 --> 00:37:11,240
Speaker 4: It's really basic, simple core physics that we see actually

787
00:37:11,320 --> 00:37:13,320
Speaker 4: in lots of places in the universe.

788
00:37:13,800 --> 00:37:17,520
Speaker 1: So does a tur ducan take longer to cook because

789
00:37:17,560 --> 00:37:20,239
Speaker 1: it's more packed in the center and there's more you

790
00:37:20,320 --> 00:37:21,160
Speaker 1: need to heat through.

791
00:37:21,600 --> 00:37:25,719
Speaker 4: Yes, you're violating my spherical turkey assumption here, Kelly. But yes,

792
00:37:25,719 --> 00:37:28,480
Speaker 4: it's helpful when you cook a turkey not to stuff

793
00:37:28,520 --> 00:37:31,719
Speaker 4: it either with stuffing or other birds, or even cauliflower

794
00:37:31,840 --> 00:37:34,800
Speaker 4: or cheese, because you're creating more mass that needs to

795
00:37:34,840 --> 00:37:37,319
Speaker 4: cook and you're making it more of a sphere. If

796
00:37:37,320 --> 00:37:40,440
Speaker 4: the air can get into the inside, into the chest cavity,

797
00:37:40,560 --> 00:37:42,840
Speaker 4: that they can directly heat the inside of the turkey

798
00:37:42,880 --> 00:37:43,720
Speaker 4: and it goes faster.

799
00:37:43,920 --> 00:37:46,239
Speaker 1: Okay, So if you've got that like chest cavity, that's

800
00:37:46,239 --> 00:37:48,279
Speaker 1: how the air gets in, you can start heating from

801
00:37:48,280 --> 00:37:52,120
Speaker 1: the inside. Could you make the chest cavity even bigger

802
00:37:52,440 --> 00:37:54,760
Speaker 1: or like cut the turkey in half?

803
00:37:55,239 --> 00:37:56,600
Speaker 2: Why do I have to wait so long?

804
00:37:58,280 --> 00:38:00,840
Speaker 4: Exactly? So if we understand the details the physics here,

805
00:38:01,000 --> 00:38:03,200
Speaker 4: that will help us think about how to organize our

806
00:38:03,200 --> 00:38:05,520
Speaker 4: turkey to make it cook faster. And so the way

807
00:38:05,560 --> 00:38:07,920
Speaker 4: I think about the physics is you have this layer

808
00:38:07,920 --> 00:38:11,000
Speaker 4: of hot air that's touching the surface of the turkey,

809
00:38:11,480 --> 00:38:15,480
Speaker 4: and microscopically, what's happening is that the air particles are

810
00:38:15,560 --> 00:38:18,440
Speaker 4: hitting the turkey. Right, the air particles are moving fast.

811
00:38:18,440 --> 00:38:20,439
Speaker 4: That's what it means for air to be hot, right,

812
00:38:20,520 --> 00:38:23,080
Speaker 4: those particles have a lot of energy. They bounce off

813
00:38:23,120 --> 00:38:25,480
Speaker 4: the turkey, and they deposit some of that energy. They

814
00:38:25,520 --> 00:38:27,319
Speaker 4: hit the turkey at high speed, they come off with

815
00:38:27,440 --> 00:38:29,840
Speaker 4: less speed, and that speed has now gone to like

816
00:38:29,880 --> 00:38:33,319
Speaker 4: the vibration energy of the molecules of turkey. So you

817
00:38:33,360 --> 00:38:35,960
Speaker 4: have this layer of hot air that's heating the outside

818
00:38:36,040 --> 00:38:38,440
Speaker 4: layer of the turkey. So then how does the inside

819
00:38:38,480 --> 00:38:41,200
Speaker 4: of the turkey get hot? Well, that now hot layer

820
00:38:41,239 --> 00:38:43,680
Speaker 4: the outside of the turkey is heating up the next layer,

821
00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:46,279
Speaker 4: and that warms up and that layer heats up the

822
00:38:46,320 --> 00:38:49,720
Speaker 4: next layer. So the air actually only cooks the most

823
00:38:49,760 --> 00:38:52,240
Speaker 4: outside layer of the turkey. The rest of the turkey

824
00:38:52,320 --> 00:38:54,680
Speaker 4: is cooked by the rest of the turkey. So you

825
00:38:54,680 --> 00:38:57,719
Speaker 4: have like layer N is cooked by layer N minus one.

826
00:38:58,239 --> 00:39:01,120
Speaker 4: Like imagine your turkey is a series of layers. Each

827
00:39:01,239 --> 00:39:03,960
Speaker 4: layer is heated up by the layer outside of it

828
00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:04,799
Speaker 4: that's a little bit.

829
00:39:04,719 --> 00:39:08,440
Speaker 1: Hotter than it unless you have nothing in the center

830
00:39:08,520 --> 00:39:10,520
Speaker 1: of the turkey, and then you're getting a little heating

831
00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:13,160
Speaker 1: from the inside going out.

832
00:39:13,320 --> 00:39:15,160
Speaker 4: That's right. And in the case of a spherical turkey,

833
00:39:15,160 --> 00:39:17,239
Speaker 4: it's simplest because all these layers are just spheres, and

834
00:39:17,239 --> 00:39:19,160
Speaker 4: you're only cooked by the one outside of it. But

835
00:39:19,200 --> 00:39:21,840
Speaker 4: even in a non spherical turkey, still you have a

836
00:39:21,920 --> 00:39:24,120
Speaker 4: layer of the turkey and the outside that's touching the air,

837
00:39:24,360 --> 00:39:26,680
Speaker 4: and then an inner layer, and another layer and another layers,

838
00:39:26,760 --> 00:39:28,800
Speaker 4: just that each of these layers is no longer a sphere,

839
00:39:29,440 --> 00:39:33,200
Speaker 4: and that takes time, Like you can't instantly take energy

840
00:39:33,239 --> 00:39:35,279
Speaker 4: from the air and put it into your turkey or

841
00:39:35,320 --> 00:39:37,960
Speaker 4: from the turkey into the next layer of turkey. There's

842
00:39:37,960 --> 00:39:41,560
Speaker 4: a mathematical equation that describes this. It's called the heat equation,

843
00:39:42,320 --> 00:39:46,400
Speaker 4: and it's fascinating because you see this equation everywhere in physics.

844
00:39:46,600 --> 00:39:48,200
Speaker 4: This is one of the things I love about physics

845
00:39:48,239 --> 00:39:50,480
Speaker 4: is that there are only a few equations and they

846
00:39:50,480 --> 00:39:53,480
Speaker 4: describe so many different things. We talk in this podcast

847
00:39:53,520 --> 00:39:56,160
Speaker 4: a lot about waves, how waves describe the motion of

848
00:39:56,200 --> 00:40:00,239
Speaker 4: the ocean and ripples in the electromagnetic field and ont

849
00:40:00,239 --> 00:40:03,320
Speaker 4: and field theory, like wave equation is everywhere. That's because

850
00:40:03,360 --> 00:40:07,000
Speaker 4: it's very mathematically simple. It's a second time derivative related

851
00:40:07,040 --> 00:40:09,840
Speaker 4: to a second spatial derivative, and that's it. Any condition

852
00:40:09,960 --> 00:40:12,439
Speaker 4: you have where those two things are coupled, the time

853
00:40:12,480 --> 00:40:15,279
Speaker 4: derivative and the spatial derivative, meaning how fast things are

854
00:40:15,360 --> 00:40:18,760
Speaker 4: changing over time and how fast things are changing over space,

855
00:40:19,040 --> 00:40:20,759
Speaker 4: then you're going to get a wave equation, and you're

856
00:40:20,760 --> 00:40:24,080
Speaker 4: going to wave like behavior. The heat equation is very

857
00:40:24,120 --> 00:40:26,760
Speaker 4: similar to the wave equation. It's just a different derivative.

858
00:40:26,800 --> 00:40:29,920
Speaker 4: It's one time derivative instead of two, and so you

859
00:40:29,960 --> 00:40:33,240
Speaker 4: see this everywhere. The heat equation describes how heat flows

860
00:40:33,280 --> 00:40:36,560
Speaker 4: through a turkey. It also describes how water will soak

861
00:40:36,640 --> 00:40:40,480
Speaker 4: through cloth, or any time you have diffusion or osmosis.

862
00:40:40,480 --> 00:40:43,680
Speaker 4: It describes like how salt will spread through something, or

863
00:40:43,680 --> 00:40:46,200
Speaker 4: how your cream will spread through your coffee. The heat

864
00:40:46,239 --> 00:40:51,040
Speaker 4: equation describes anytime something is spreading through something else. The

865
00:40:51,040 --> 00:40:54,239
Speaker 4: physics of turkeys is actually like the physics of the universe.

866
00:40:54,600 --> 00:40:56,440
Speaker 4: It's really kind of incredible, and.

867
00:40:56,440 --> 00:40:59,600
Speaker 1: I think that you should definitely push the conversation at

868
00:40:59,600 --> 00:41:03,120
Speaker 1: the family dinner table away from politics and towards more

869
00:41:03,440 --> 00:41:04,840
Speaker 1: philosophical topics like this.

870
00:41:05,160 --> 00:41:07,520
Speaker 4: And so the reason a turkey takes so much longer

871
00:41:07,520 --> 00:41:10,640
Speaker 4: to cook than a chicken, sort of surprisingly longer, is

872
00:41:10,680 --> 00:41:14,440
Speaker 4: also because of the dimensionality of space itself, right, Like,

873
00:41:14,719 --> 00:41:17,719
Speaker 4: we live in three dimensional space, and that means that

874
00:41:17,880 --> 00:41:21,320
Speaker 4: as your turkey or your bird gets larger, the volume

875
00:41:21,320 --> 00:41:24,600
Speaker 4: of the bird goes up by the radius cubed Right,

876
00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:27,400
Speaker 4: the area for the volume of a sphere hasn't R

877
00:41:27,520 --> 00:41:30,160
Speaker 4: cubed in it, but the surface area, the way you

878
00:41:30,200 --> 00:41:32,600
Speaker 4: get heat into it, only goes up by R squared.

879
00:41:33,360 --> 00:41:36,280
Speaker 4: So as your turkey gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

880
00:41:36,560 --> 00:41:40,440
Speaker 4: the ratio of surface area to volume gets smaller, and

881
00:41:40,520 --> 00:41:43,359
Speaker 4: so it's harder to heat that turkey. This is why,

882
00:41:43,400 --> 00:41:46,759
Speaker 4: for example, elephants get so hot because they're huge, have

883
00:41:46,760 --> 00:41:49,560
Speaker 4: a lot of volume in a relatively little surface area.

884
00:41:49,760 --> 00:41:51,560
Speaker 4: And I don't know if it's a myth or a factoid,

885
00:41:51,760 --> 00:41:54,000
Speaker 4: and that's why elephants have such big ears to increase

886
00:41:54,040 --> 00:41:56,520
Speaker 4: their surface area. I have to dig into that. But

887
00:41:56,560 --> 00:42:00,400
Speaker 4: it's definitely true that as something gets larger, it's volume

888
00:42:00,400 --> 00:42:03,360
Speaker 4: increases faster than its surface area, and so it's harder

889
00:42:03,400 --> 00:42:06,319
Speaker 4: to cool or harder to heat. That's core physics.

890
00:42:06,600 --> 00:42:08,480
Speaker 1: So if you have a bigger family, you've got to

891
00:42:08,480 --> 00:42:10,440
Speaker 1: get up earlier in the day to start.

892
00:42:10,239 --> 00:42:13,440
Speaker 4: Your turkey exactly, And that's why a turkey takes much

893
00:42:13,480 --> 00:42:16,120
Speaker 4: longer to cook than like the equivalent mass of chickens.

894
00:42:16,480 --> 00:42:18,440
Speaker 4: If you took like five chickens and you cook them,

895
00:42:18,480 --> 00:42:20,400
Speaker 4: you could cook them a lot faster because there's a

896
00:42:20,400 --> 00:42:23,000
Speaker 4: lot more surface area for the same amount of meat.

897
00:42:23,520 --> 00:42:27,000
Speaker 4: And that's why people invented techniques like spatchcocking your turkey.

898
00:42:27,040 --> 00:42:29,479
Speaker 4: This is where you basically break your turkey in half

899
00:42:29,480 --> 00:42:32,239
Speaker 4: and flatten it. You remove the backbone and you break

900
00:42:32,280 --> 00:42:35,480
Speaker 4: the chest cavity because this just allows the air more access.

901
00:42:35,480 --> 00:42:38,920
Speaker 4: It increases the surface area of your turkey, which cooks

902
00:42:38,920 --> 00:42:39,400
Speaker 4: it faster.

903
00:42:39,800 --> 00:42:42,400
Speaker 1: So why doesn't everybody do that? Is it because it

904
00:42:42,440 --> 00:42:43,880
Speaker 1: doesn't look as nice in the pictures.

905
00:42:44,960 --> 00:42:47,239
Speaker 4: It doesn't look as nice. Yeah, okay when it comes out,

906
00:42:47,280 --> 00:42:50,360
Speaker 4: it doesn't have that like holiday turkey kind of sheen

907
00:42:50,520 --> 00:42:53,000
Speaker 4: to it. I think it's much tastier. It cooks faster,

908
00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:55,279
Speaker 4: and it keeps the breast to thine, the ring all

909
00:42:55,320 --> 00:42:57,799
Speaker 4: at good temperature. So I'm a big fan of spatchcocking.

910
00:42:57,840 --> 00:42:58,600
Speaker 4: We do it every year.

911
00:42:58,719 --> 00:43:01,200
Speaker 1: I think every family needs eye they're a sower or

912
00:43:01,239 --> 00:43:03,680
Speaker 1: a surgeon, so that after you spatchcock it, you can

913
00:43:03,719 --> 00:43:06,359
Speaker 1: like stitch it back together for the photos and then

914
00:43:06,360 --> 00:43:07,840
Speaker 1: it's faster and it looks nice.

915
00:43:08,040 --> 00:43:11,120
Speaker 4: Well, plastic turkey surgery, huh, you think we would do

916
00:43:11,120 --> 00:43:13,080
Speaker 4: that in Orange County. We're big fans of a parents

917
00:43:13,120 --> 00:43:13,600
Speaker 4: down here.

918
00:43:13,760 --> 00:43:15,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, well maybe that's where it'll start.

919
00:43:15,600 --> 00:43:21,640
Speaker 1: So sometimes people put turkeys in oil, and that is

920
00:43:21,680 --> 00:43:24,680
Speaker 1: a big cause of fires around Thanksgiving, I believe, so

921
00:43:24,760 --> 00:43:27,960
Speaker 1: do that carefully, very dangerous, and that makes it faster.

922
00:43:28,080 --> 00:43:29,400
Speaker 2: Right, Why is that faster?

923
00:43:29,600 --> 00:43:32,600
Speaker 4: That's right? If you deep fry your turkey, it takes

924
00:43:32,640 --> 00:43:35,680
Speaker 4: like five minutes per pound as opposed to like fifteen

925
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:39,320
Speaker 4: minutes per pound. And the reason is just that oil

926
00:43:39,320 --> 00:43:43,520
Speaker 4: transmits heat better than air, and so heat flows faster

927
00:43:43,680 --> 00:43:45,520
Speaker 4: into the turkey and the oil gets in all the

928
00:43:45,560 --> 00:43:46,879
Speaker 4: crevices and stuff like that.

929
00:43:47,040 --> 00:43:50,640
Speaker 1: Ooh, and so as an efficient person, I should start

930
00:43:50,680 --> 00:43:52,000
Speaker 1: deep frying everything.

931
00:43:52,880 --> 00:43:55,640
Speaker 4: Yeah, I suppose. So if you really want to gain

932
00:43:55,719 --> 00:43:57,800
Speaker 4: some weight on Thanksgiving and you want to do it fast,

933
00:43:57,920 --> 00:43:58,759
Speaker 4: that's a way to do it.

934
00:43:58,880 --> 00:44:01,000
Speaker 2: Yes, all right, maybe we'll spashcock instead.

935
00:44:01,200 --> 00:44:04,080
Speaker 4: But to double down on the physics of Thanksgiving, I

936
00:44:04,120 --> 00:44:06,919
Speaker 4: was thinking about whether there is a nuclear connection here.

937
00:44:08,040 --> 00:44:10,560
Speaker 4: Nuclear power is physics, and you know, we use a

938
00:44:10,600 --> 00:44:12,839
Speaker 4: lot of energy on Thanksgiving. We're cooking our turkey, it's

939
00:44:12,880 --> 00:44:15,160
Speaker 4: in the oven for hours. I was thinking about, like,

940
00:44:15,400 --> 00:44:17,400
Speaker 4: where does that energy come from? And what is the

941
00:44:17,400 --> 00:44:20,240
Speaker 4: physics that provides the energy we use to cook our turkey?

942
00:44:21,000 --> 00:44:21,319
Speaker 2: All right?

943
00:44:21,360 --> 00:44:24,160
Speaker 1: So usually when you get excited about an idea, it

944
00:44:24,280 --> 00:44:26,600
Speaker 1: means my kids are probably in some sort of trouble.

945
00:44:26,960 --> 00:44:29,040
Speaker 2: How are you going to be cooking the turkey this time?

946
00:44:29,840 --> 00:44:32,240
Speaker 4: So I wanted to start from a fairly safe direction,

947
00:44:32,360 --> 00:44:35,160
Speaker 4: which is nuclear reactors. And I was thinking how many

948
00:44:35,239 --> 00:44:37,640
Speaker 4: turkeys could you cook with a nuclear reactor? So I

949
00:44:37,640 --> 00:44:41,360
Speaker 4: did a little calculation here, and your oven it's on

950
00:44:41,480 --> 00:44:44,080
Speaker 4: for like three and a half hours, but your oven

951
00:44:44,120 --> 00:44:46,799
Speaker 4: pretty much uses around two hundred and forty watts. That's

952
00:44:46,800 --> 00:44:49,319
Speaker 4: like how much energy it takes to heat of that

953
00:44:49,400 --> 00:44:52,160
Speaker 4: air to keep it hot. And that doesn't actually depend

954
00:44:52,239 --> 00:44:54,120
Speaker 4: on like what you put in it. You just turn

955
00:44:54,160 --> 00:44:56,120
Speaker 4: your oven on, it's going to use around two hundred

956
00:44:56,120 --> 00:44:58,040
Speaker 4: and forty watts. I mean, you put like an ice

957
00:44:58,040 --> 00:44:59,719
Speaker 4: sculpture in there, it's going to take a little bit

958
00:44:59,760 --> 00:45:02,560
Speaker 4: more energy, but in general, you just have it on.

959
00:45:02,800 --> 00:45:05,239
Speaker 4: That's how much energy it costs. So then you can

960
00:45:05,239 --> 00:45:10,520
Speaker 4: think about how many ovens a nuclear reactor could run simultaneously. Okay,

961
00:45:10,600 --> 00:45:14,319
Speaker 4: and a modern nuclear reactor runs at about a gigawatt,

962
00:45:14,680 --> 00:45:17,680
Speaker 4: so a billion watts. A wat is jeweles per second.

963
00:45:17,680 --> 00:45:20,359
Speaker 4: So this is a rate of energy, which means that

964
00:45:20,400 --> 00:45:23,200
Speaker 4: you can calculate fairly easily that a single nuclear power

965
00:45:23,280 --> 00:45:28,840
Speaker 4: plant can run around four hundred and twenty thousand ovens simultaneously. Wow.

966
00:45:28,920 --> 00:45:31,040
Speaker 4: So if you took a nuclear power plant and you

967
00:45:31,120 --> 00:45:34,120
Speaker 4: wired it directly to people's ovens, that's all you did

968
00:45:34,120 --> 00:45:37,319
Speaker 4: with it for three and a half hours on Thanksgiving afternoon,

969
00:45:37,719 --> 00:45:40,239
Speaker 4: you could cook almost a half million turkeys with a

970
00:45:40,280 --> 00:45:42,640
Speaker 4: single power plant, which is kind of incredible.

971
00:45:42,719 --> 00:45:46,759
Speaker 2: Sorry, turkey population, that's true.

972
00:45:47,160 --> 00:45:49,960
Speaker 4: Really turning off our turkey listeners. Huh yeah, but you

973
00:45:49,960 --> 00:45:52,680
Speaker 4: know we're sacrificing some turkeys. But you know, one turkey

974
00:45:52,800 --> 00:45:56,279
Speaker 4: feeds like twelve people or so overall, this is like

975
00:45:56,480 --> 00:45:59,840
Speaker 4: five million people can have turkey cooked by a single

976
00:46:00,080 --> 00:46:03,200
Speaker 4: nuclear power plant. It's incredible how productive these plants are.

977
00:46:03,320 --> 00:46:06,200
Speaker 1: All Right, I am pro nuclear power, and so I'm

978
00:46:06,200 --> 00:46:09,000
Speaker 1: feeling good about this. Are you going to amp things

979
00:46:09,080 --> 00:46:11,320
Speaker 1: up to something I'm less excited about?

980
00:46:11,480 --> 00:46:13,799
Speaker 4: Well, then I was thinking nuclear power plants. Okay, that's

981
00:46:13,840 --> 00:46:16,319
Speaker 4: kind of vanilla. What if we try to cook our

982
00:46:16,480 --> 00:46:18,960
Speaker 4: turkeys with nuclear bombs instead?

983
00:46:19,200 --> 00:46:21,359
Speaker 2: There you go, uh huh, and This.

984
00:46:21,400 --> 00:46:23,799
Speaker 4: Is actually a homework problem I assigned in one of

985
00:46:23,800 --> 00:46:26,440
Speaker 4: my thermal physics class to think about like the energy

986
00:46:26,440 --> 00:46:28,960
Speaker 4: required to cook a turkey and the energy released by

987
00:46:28,960 --> 00:46:32,160
Speaker 4: a nuclear mom So I did another calculation which was

988
00:46:32,200 --> 00:46:34,280
Speaker 4: to think not just how much energy does it require

989
00:46:34,320 --> 00:46:36,720
Speaker 4: to run an oven, but what about the actual energy

990
00:46:36,760 --> 00:46:40,160
Speaker 4: it takes to raise the temperature of the turkey. So

991
00:46:40,280 --> 00:46:42,359
Speaker 4: you can think about the turkey as a combination of

992
00:46:42,600 --> 00:46:45,600
Speaker 4: water and protein. And I found some measurements online that

993
00:46:45,680 --> 00:46:48,160
Speaker 4: said that the specific heat of a turkey, that's how

994
00:46:48,239 --> 00:46:51,320
Speaker 4: much energy it takes to raise a gram of turkey

995
00:46:51,360 --> 00:46:55,600
Speaker 4: by one degree, is about two point eight jewels per

996
00:46:55,640 --> 00:46:59,040
Speaker 4: gram centigrade. And so from that you can calculate like

997
00:46:59,160 --> 00:47:02,120
Speaker 4: how much energy it takes to take a whole turkey

998
00:47:02,239 --> 00:47:04,560
Speaker 4: and raise it about one hundred degrees And that's like

999
00:47:04,680 --> 00:47:07,759
Speaker 4: one point six gigajewels. So if you could take that

1000
00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:10,319
Speaker 4: energy and just sort of like inject it into your

1001
00:47:10,320 --> 00:47:13,320
Speaker 4: turkey somehow, you would raise it up about one hundred degrees,

1002
00:47:13,480 --> 00:47:14,799
Speaker 4: which is what you need to do to cook it.

1003
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:16,080
Speaker 2: How big is this turkey?

1004
00:47:16,760 --> 00:47:19,120
Speaker 4: This is a fifteen pounder, So yeah, you're making a

1005
00:47:19,160 --> 00:47:20,080
Speaker 4: meal for the neighborhood.

1006
00:47:20,200 --> 00:47:22,719
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, well it depends on your family. I

1007
00:47:22,760 --> 00:47:24,960
Speaker 1: think my daughter and I could put down a fifteen pounder.

1008
00:47:25,040 --> 00:47:27,440
Speaker 1: My husband's a vegetarian. My son doesn't eat meat.

1009
00:47:27,719 --> 00:47:29,880
Speaker 4: Wait, so Zack's a vegetarian, but he makes the turkey

1010
00:47:29,880 --> 00:47:30,480
Speaker 4: on Thanksgiving.

1011
00:47:30,520 --> 00:47:33,000
Speaker 1: Oh heck no, no, no, no no. He cooked meat once

1012
00:47:33,239 --> 00:47:36,040
Speaker 1: and turned green. This is when I was pregnant and.

1013
00:47:36,000 --> 00:47:38,160
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, can you please make me a euro?

1014
00:47:38,560 --> 00:47:40,920
Speaker 1: And I've never asked him since in are like almost

1015
00:47:40,960 --> 00:47:43,040
Speaker 1: twenty years together now. But no, my sister in law

1016
00:47:43,160 --> 00:47:45,359
Speaker 1: is amazing and makes the turkey, or my dad.

1017
00:47:45,760 --> 00:47:48,000
Speaker 4: So one point six giga jewels, it's not like a

1018
00:47:48,120 --> 00:47:50,200
Speaker 4: number we think about a lot, so I tried to

1019
00:47:50,239 --> 00:47:53,319
Speaker 4: translate it into something more practical. If you had like

1020
00:47:53,320 --> 00:47:57,279
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty D cell batteries and you ran

1021
00:47:57,360 --> 00:48:00,000
Speaker 4: them for an hour, that's about one point six giga jewels,

1022
00:48:00,480 --> 00:48:02,600
Speaker 4: So you could like cook a turkey with about one

1023
00:48:02,680 --> 00:48:05,400
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty d segn matteries, which I don't know.

1024
00:48:05,440 --> 00:48:07,680
Speaker 4: Maybe that'd be useful information for somebody in the end

1025
00:48:07,719 --> 00:48:10,759
Speaker 4: times when they're trying to have a Thanksgiving of yesteryear.

1026
00:48:10,960 --> 00:48:13,319
Speaker 1: If you raid the Amazon warehouse and find a big

1027
00:48:13,360 --> 00:48:16,080
Speaker 1: store of D batteries like we're on for Thanksgiving.

1028
00:48:18,480 --> 00:48:20,480
Speaker 4: Yeah, you made your turkey like a resistor in some

1029
00:48:20,520 --> 00:48:23,560
Speaker 4: crazy circuit or whatever. But the other alternative if you're

1030
00:48:23,560 --> 00:48:25,719
Speaker 4: in the end times and there are nuclear bombs going off,

1031
00:48:25,760 --> 00:48:27,719
Speaker 4: is you could try to use the energy released by

1032
00:48:27,719 --> 00:48:30,560
Speaker 4: those nuclear bomb drops to cook your turkey. And so

1033
00:48:30,680 --> 00:48:35,960
Speaker 4: a nuclear blast has a few million gigajewels of energy released. Wow,

1034
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:39,200
Speaker 4: So that means that there's enough energy in one nuclear

1035
00:48:39,239 --> 00:48:41,640
Speaker 4: bomb dropping to cook about a million turkeys.

1036
00:48:41,960 --> 00:48:45,080
Speaker 1: That would feed millions of people, right, so that you

1037
00:48:45,160 --> 00:48:48,200
Speaker 1: could be like president of like a community with all

1038
00:48:48,200 --> 00:48:49,919
Speaker 1: of these turkeys that you're passing out.

1039
00:48:50,280 --> 00:48:52,120
Speaker 2: You can be the queen of the end times or

1040
00:48:52,120 --> 00:48:53,320
Speaker 2: the king of the end times.

1041
00:48:54,080 --> 00:48:56,360
Speaker 4: That's right now. One thing we have in factored in

1042
00:48:56,400 --> 00:48:58,040
Speaker 4: here is like how you get the energy from the

1043
00:48:58,120 --> 00:49:00,640
Speaker 4: nuclear blast into your turkey. We talked year about like

1044
00:49:00,960 --> 00:49:03,680
Speaker 4: slowly cooking your turkey. You know, put your turkey on

1045
00:49:03,719 --> 00:49:05,960
Speaker 4: a stick and hold it up to the nuclear bomb drop,

1046
00:49:06,239 --> 00:49:09,320
Speaker 4: and it's gonna get fried, like it's going to get blasted.

1047
00:49:09,360 --> 00:49:11,200
Speaker 4: Probably you're gonna end up with like a cold core

1048
00:49:11,680 --> 00:49:14,719
Speaker 4: and a totally crisp outside, so there's a challenge there

1049
00:49:14,760 --> 00:49:17,399
Speaker 4: and finding the right distance, and you know, to really

1050
00:49:17,400 --> 00:49:20,280
Speaker 4: be efficient and to cook like all those millions of turkeys,

1051
00:49:20,520 --> 00:49:23,400
Speaker 4: you really need to like build a spherical shell of

1052
00:49:23,440 --> 00:49:26,520
Speaker 4: turkeys that's around the bomb blast so they all capture

1053
00:49:26,560 --> 00:49:29,120
Speaker 4: that energy. Imagine like a dice and sphere around the sun,

1054
00:49:29,360 --> 00:49:31,360
Speaker 4: but now you have like a turkey sphere around the

1055
00:49:31,400 --> 00:49:32,320
Speaker 4: nuclear bombing.

1056
00:49:32,920 --> 00:49:35,360
Speaker 1: I'm starting to feel like maybe even during the apocalypse,

1057
00:49:35,400 --> 00:49:37,600
Speaker 1: there's better things you could do with your time. Also,

1058
00:49:37,640 --> 00:49:39,640
Speaker 1: i feel like you're a strategy of holding it on

1059
00:49:39,680 --> 00:49:43,040
Speaker 1: a stick and it fries the front but doesn't cook.

1060
00:49:43,120 --> 00:49:45,560
Speaker 1: That's probably not good for the people either. I think

1061
00:49:45,600 --> 00:49:47,719
Speaker 1: maybe you shouldn't be king in the end times.

1062
00:49:48,400 --> 00:49:50,480
Speaker 4: I've never claimed to have any useful skills for the

1063
00:49:50,600 --> 00:49:52,920
Speaker 4: end times. You know, particle physicists. They're the kind of

1064
00:49:52,960 --> 00:49:55,440
Speaker 4: thing you see in society when times are good, you know,

1065
00:49:55,800 --> 00:49:57,959
Speaker 4: not in the lean times. So we don't spend energy

1066
00:49:58,040 --> 00:50:02,359
Speaker 4: on particle physics in a lean time. So I'm hoping

1067
00:50:02,400 --> 00:50:06,200
Speaker 4: the civilization crashes after I pass off from this mortal coil.

1068
00:50:06,440 --> 00:50:08,560
Speaker 1: And I'm hoping none of your kids decide to take

1069
00:50:08,560 --> 00:50:11,400
Speaker 1: on the family profession. And because if they're microbiologists, they

1070
00:50:11,440 --> 00:50:12,040
Speaker 1: might be okay.

1071
00:50:12,080 --> 00:50:14,959
Speaker 4: But well, you know, when my dad retired from the lab,

1072
00:50:15,080 --> 00:50:18,440
Speaker 4: he took up blacksmithing, came Annville and a forge and

1073
00:50:18,520 --> 00:50:21,040
Speaker 4: in the garage and he like made his own tools

1074
00:50:21,080 --> 00:50:24,000
Speaker 4: and weapons, and so he would definitely be a useful

1075
00:50:24,040 --> 00:50:26,120
Speaker 4: guy to know in the end times. But not me.

1076
00:50:26,360 --> 00:50:28,719
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, maybe when you retire he can teach

1077
00:50:28,760 --> 00:50:29,600
Speaker 1: you some of that stuff.

1078
00:50:31,280 --> 00:50:31,960
Speaker 2: That would be good.

1079
00:50:32,080 --> 00:50:34,240
Speaker 4: He probably forced me to choke down. He's discussing Brussels

1080
00:50:34,280 --> 00:50:34,880
Speaker 4: sprouts first.

1081
00:50:34,920 --> 00:50:37,960
Speaker 2: Oh yep, no, no, good, forget it. It's not worth it.

1082
00:50:37,960 --> 00:50:39,600
Speaker 2: It's not worth it.

1083
00:50:39,680 --> 00:50:43,200
Speaker 4: Just call it quick, no amount of cheese.

1084
00:50:43,800 --> 00:50:44,160
Speaker 2: All right.

1085
00:50:44,239 --> 00:50:47,840
Speaker 1: Well, we have conveyed lots of not useful information today

1086
00:50:47,960 --> 00:50:49,799
Speaker 1: that will hopefully be fun to talk about.

1087
00:50:50,080 --> 00:50:52,520
Speaker 4: But there's science everywhere, and science in everyday life. There's

1088
00:50:52,520 --> 00:50:56,120
Speaker 4: even science in Thanksgiving. So thanks very much everybody for

1089
00:50:56,160 --> 00:50:57,640
Speaker 4: sharing your Thanksgiving with.

1090
00:50:57,600 --> 00:51:01,120
Speaker 1: Us, and we appreciate you, and weppreciate the questions and

1091
00:51:01,160 --> 00:51:03,200
Speaker 1: the input that we get from all of you, So

1092
00:51:03,239 --> 00:51:05,880
Speaker 1: please feel free to reach out to us at questions

1093
00:51:05,920 --> 00:51:07,680
Speaker 1: at Daniel and Kelly dot org.

1094
00:51:08,000 --> 00:51:09,600
Speaker 2: We are very thankful for all of you.

1095
00:51:09,880 --> 00:51:14,320
Speaker 4: I have agree. Thanksgiving everyone.

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00:51:18,560 --> 00:51:22,120
Speaker 1: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.

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00:51:22,320 --> 00:51:24,880
Speaker 2: We would love to hear from you, We really would.

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00:51:25,040 --> 00:51:27,759
Speaker 4: We want to know what questions you have about this

1099
00:51:27,960 --> 00:51:29,640
Speaker 4: Extraordinary Universe.

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00:51:29,760 --> 00:51:32,719
Speaker 1: We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions

1101
00:51:32,719 --> 00:51:33,720
Speaker 1: for future shows.

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00:51:33,840 --> 00:51:36,200
Speaker 2: If you contact us, we will get back to you.

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00:51:36,400 --> 00:51:39,880
Speaker 4: We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us

1104
00:51:39,960 --> 00:51:42,680
Speaker 4: at Questions at danieland Kelly dot.

1105
00:51:42,600 --> 00:51:44,280
Speaker 2: Org, or you can find us on social media.

1106
00:51:44,360 --> 00:51:48,160
Speaker 1: We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on

1107
00:51:48,239 --> 00:51:49,200
Speaker 1: all of those platforms.

1108
00:51:49,200 --> 00:51:52,160
Speaker 2: You can find us at d and Kuniverse.

1109
00:51:52,280 --> 00:51:53,799
Speaker 4: Don't be shy write to us