Drop the Food Facts

One of my favorite facts that I learned from cooking on Thanksgiving is that vanilla extract is made from the sweat glands of a beaver.

You know that creamy ranch and coffee creamer you love to have before work? The same ingredients can be found in your sunscreen, plastic, the paint you used to remodel your house, or the detergent you use to wash your clothes. That ingredient is called titanium dioxide. It is used to make things appear whiter.

The burger you like to eat at your favorite fast food joint isn’t just a cow as we thought. It’s hundreds of cows in one bite.

White chocolate isn’t actually chocolate. I actually ate one the other day and wondered how it was chocolate, but didn’t contain that brown cocoa? Well, it’s not chocolate it’s made of sugar, milk, cocoa butter, and lecithin. If there’s not cocoa, it’s not chocolate. No wonder my gastritis didn’t act up when I ate a creamy chocolate truffle.

That jar of JIF in your kitchen cabinet? Don’t throw it away yet. It has been said that scientists can turn diamonds into peanut butter due to it being rich in carbon.

Those gummy bears that you like to flyyyy into your mouth and reenact the commercial where adults are speaking in children’s voices? The same type of wax coated on that gummy is the same as you guess it, vroom vroom, your four wheeler.

You know when people say, “You are what you eat”? Well in this case, have you ever wondered what keeps our food from separating? It’s called Xanthan Gum. Like our bones, Xanthan Gum is used as an additive to thicken and stabilize our food, so that the ingredients don’t separate.

Well for humans, the thing that keeps us from turning into slippery blobs is our bones! That is why our parents always told us to drink milk so that we’d have enough calcium for strong bones.

Have you ever wondered what the tasty part of a snickers was? That white thing that sits beneath the peanuts? It’s called Nougat. Nougat is found in most candy bars. It’s made from sugar, honey, nuts, egg whites, and occasionally candied fruit. Yum! It’s a pretty chewy ingredient. Nougat can be found in Snickers, Baby Ruth, or a Payday. I’ve never had a payday before, but I've been dying to try one.

Did you know that not every junk food is junk? What about our campfire favorite Smores? Marshmallows are actually fat free. The Graham crackers? One hundred percent whole grain.

Are the pickles in your burger a fruit, vegetable, or some food with no category. Ding ding ding! It’s a vegetable that has been dipped in brine, vinegar, and other ingredients left to ferment.

Same as raisins, most people dislike raisins when they are in fact the fruit that they love to pop on their tongues. They are grapes that are just dried up. Raisins can be found in baking, brewing, or eating raw. As a raisin lover, I love eating raw raisins and cinnamon bread raisins.

Grapes don’t stop there. Have you ever been to a vineyard or seen one on television? A vineyard is a grape plantation. Those grapes that grow on vines (hence the vine-yard) are use to make wine. The pulp is used and during this process, the grape skins began fermenting. Other wines are made by pressing the grapes for juice.

Love that yummy farfalle in the blue box from the grocery store? Well that pasta was made with dough made from flour, water, eggs, formed into different shapes and boiled.

Another thing, people in Italy didn’t really consider pasta as a dish. More like an appetizer.

That fancy way of twirling our fettuccine in your mouth? People in Italy don’t actually do that.

That bowl of cereal you’re eating actually contains wood pulp. The lasagna you popped in the oven with extra cheese? The cheese contains wood pulp.

In the 1800s, people used to think that ketchup was a medicine that could cure certain digestive issues.