Reminded me of this... https://twitter.com/alanna/status/979778055232278530?lang=en Read more

Strawberries don’t ripen, so the sugar content stays the same. But you’re right that they do soften... you might just be picking up different flavors (e.g. perceiving it to be more sweet) as the texture changes. Some other types of berries (blueberries, I think) don’t produce their own ethylene for ripening, but they… Read more

For butter, the 11 quarts of milk aren’t necessarily wasted... a lot of that becomes skim milk, then after the cream is churned, you’re left with some additional buttermilk. (Homogenized milk — like 2% — is what you get when you reincorporate some of the cream back into the skim.) In the 1800s when margarine first… Read more

Something like this was mentioned on the other article too... I never realized that a whole generation called margarine “oleo”. That’s great! Read more

Yeah, MmmCandyCorn is right... being chemically “close” doesn’t mean much. Hydrogen peroxide and water differ by only one atom, but react very differently if almost every way. Whether something is “good” or “bad” for you depends on a lot of things, so chemical formula alone isn’t a good indicator. Read more

If it doesn’t specify... then it could be either. If it says “trans fat free” or “0 grams of trans fat” that actually means “less than 0.5 g per serving”. Those litle bits can add up if you’re having several servings. Read more

Notice also that nowhere in the commercial do they ever use the dirty “m”-word... Read more

You beat me to the response... which is probably a good thing since this was a fantastically clear answer! I even learned a bit, too! (The part about rogue double-bond breakage leading to unsaturated fat going rancid.) Read more

Yes! While the laws that dairy pushed for in some states made it illegal for manufacturers to dye the margarine themselves, they skirted the issue by doing just as your mother said — packaging yellow dye alongside. Some packs were even built so that you could squeeze and break the capsule to knead the dye in *before*… Read more

Yeah... it’s partly been motivated by outbreaks (including a big one in Japan, which is why that country is one of the few besides the US to do all this washing). But you hit on the other biggie, too... stuffing a lot of chickens in a small space means that if one bird gets a disease, it’s much more likely to spread… Read more