Preserved Food with Bill Oakley - Trick or Treat Month | SciShow Tangents Podcast

Tangents annual descent into horror returns with Trick or Treat Month! And this time, we brought some fiendish friends along! Join us for a whole month of spooky themes and special guest stars!
And to kick off Trick or Treat Month, we've summoned Simpsons writer, author and food reviewer extraordinaire Bill Oakley to talk about preserved food! How is preserved food spooky? I guess you'll just have to listen to find out!
Want more Bill Oakley? You're in luck! You can follow him on Twitter or Instagram at @thatbilloakley to check out his food reviews, get his audiobook, Space: 1969, here: www.audible.co..., and join his Patreon, The Steamed Hams Society, here: / steamedhamssociety
Want more SciShow Tangents? Check out hundreds more episodes of our podcast here: scishow-tangen..., or wherever you get your podcasts!
Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!
And go to store.dftba.co... to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!
A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!
Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!
While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen
Sources:
[Are You Gonna Eat That?]
Old Twinkie
Source:
abcnews.go.com...
www.thesprucee...
Old Ham
www.bbc.com/ne...
Old Fruit Cake
www.worldrecor...
Old Pickle
www.news-leade...
Old WIne
www.atlasobscu...
[Ask the Science Couch]
Chip bag slack fill & nitrogen gas as a preservative
www.mentalflos...
onlinelibrary....
#scishow #podcast #comedy #science #education #scishowtangents

[@SciShowTangents]

Want more Bill Oakley? You're in luck! You can follow him on Twitter or Instagram at @thatbilloakley to check out his food reviews, get his audiobook, Space: 1969, here: www.audible.com/pd/Space-1969-Audiobook/B0B1RQWWBK, and join his Patreon, The Steamed Hams Society, here: www.patreon.com/steamedhamssociety

[@ashleelarsen2233]

Dude got lucky with his guessing; I can't afford anymore podcasts so don't sign me up for anything Mahalo

[@suzannest.pierre9215]

I would like to share that I made fruitcakes for years for my family members, generously and thoroughly soaked in Courvoisier vsop, buried in powdered sugar, tightly wrapped and aged 4 months. One saved the life (surely!) of my cousin, who, when driving home from festivities, became stuck on the highway in a blizzard. In Massachusetts, Route 95 was like a parking lot, and people were rescued from their vehicles on snowmobiles. My cousin, trapped for hours, survived (and then some) on my cognac soaked cake. She enjoyed the ride to safety a great deal.

[@llsilvertail561]

Congrats to Sam on getting his dream guest star!!! Now we're just waiting for the people Hank and Ceri wanted on (I don't remember who they were tho lmao)

[@KelMindelan]

Wasn't Hank's Alf? But yeah, congrats to Sam!

[@cbw900]

I laughed out loud at 13:52; Ceri's joke wasn't missed 😆

[@anjaliramanathan8489]

i came to the comments just to check if anyone else lol'd thank u

[@ceriley]

Thank you for appreciating my literary humor that these hooligans talked over!!!

[@victornoname7269]

I know this wasn't the point of the episode, but I have to chime in about shrews for a moment! They're, in my opinion, one of the biggest overlooked badasses of the animal kingdom. Or terrifying monsters, depending on how you look at it. They definitely deserve to have a SciShow episode made about them. Or maybe even a Bizarre Beasts episode. First of all some shrew species are venomous, as mentioned in the episode. Which is pretty uncommon for a mammal. Shrews are also absolutely voracious predators. They have super high metabolisms and can only go a few hours at a time without food. Kind of like hummingbirds, only with less flowers and more murder. They can sometimes consume two to three times their own body weight in a single day! One subfamily of shrews has red tipped teeth! This is because they have iron present in their tooth enamel (which is also true of rodents, actually). Some shrews use echolocation! They're one of the few terrestrial mammals to do so. Pretty badass for tiny mammals that just look like mice at first glance. If you want to look into specific species that have all these wild traits, then look at the northern short-tailed shrew or the eurasian common shrew. Eurasian shrews have an additional wild adaptation in how they survive winter. To cope with the lesser prey availability during the cold months their skulls and organs shrink in size. Their brains get as much as 30% smaller. If you want a more scientific crazy fact about shrews, look at their chromosomes. Not only do the number of chromosomes they have vary wildly between species, but some species have different numbers of chromosomes within different groups of the same species! Eurasian common shrews shine again here. They have over 60 different "chromosome races." Also males and females have different number of chromosomes. Females have two sex chromosomes and males have three sex chromosomes. Alright, that's all my shrew facts. But seriously, we need to be blowing more people's minds by telling them about shrews!

[@darcieclements4880]

Love it. The chromosome research is new to me, thanks for sharing. I'm guessing you already know about other weird mammal chromosome species, so I ll offer up a little more shrew. The reason they have venom is because of that extreme metabolism you mentioned. They die real fast if trapped. So their greatest weakness led them to becoming bad asses.

[@JuuB406]

"Mmm, I'd love a Pringle." - Hank

[@KY_CPA]

What a delight! Don't get to see superhumans in action every day

[@Templar462]

This has probably already come up in the comments, but the ship(s) Bill is talking about at 30:39, are the Erebus and the Terror under Captain Sir John Franklin and were lost in the Arctic when they were trying to find a way through the Northwest Passage. Aside from the fact that a couple of years ago we discovered the final location of both ships, which are amazingly well preserved... the lead poisoning idea from the canning has been debunked. In the remains of three bodies found on Beechey Island, they did find that they had ridiculously high amounts of lead, but it was systemic and their remains showed they had lived with low level lead poisoning most of their lives. Poisoning from the canned food stores would have been far more recent, and would not have been present in their bones. The industrial revolution was a rough time. (edited for clarity and punctuation typos)

[@muhmuhmonahan4919]

Yay! Four person format AND spooky time!?!? I'm so so happy. ☺️

[@bazgriffith8117]

I too love the four person format, I think it's a lot more fun tbh

[@notpocky9806]

I root for Sam every episode, but I love Hank and Ceri too. Having a guest was a fun twist and worked out really well! Do more like this please!

[@buckdharma9844]

35:30 MatPat made a whole Food Theory episode specifically about this question. Turns out the random packing efficiency of unbroken chips doesn't allow for any greater percentage of the bag's volume to be occupied by more chips. The bag only looks like it's half empty because any chips that have broken in the steps taken to get from the manufacturer to your pantry can settle into a more dense packing efficiency

[@disky01]

This came up on autoplay while I was asleep and I started dreaming about venomous shrews. Thanks SciShow! (I did go back and watch the whole thing. This was a super fun episode!)

[@kingsrook9866]

regarding Bill Oakley's comments about the Royal Navy ship: that's the Franklin Expedition to explore the Arctic, and recent forensic hair analysis and bone analysis has measured the lead levels in the Franklin crew and their lead levels were consistent with the levels of lead of other Royal Navy sailors, who were not showing any symptoms of lead poisoning. Yes, their lead levels were higher than the average person, but not enough to have symptoms, let alone the massive cognitive problems they are ascribed in the myth of the Franklin Expedition

[@Templar462]

I knew it! You beat my comment by just three hours! lol

[@kingsrook9866]

@@Templar462 only because I decided to skip the order I usually watch videos in and watch the podcast early in the day :P

[@HaarmannE]

I found out the hard way about twinkies. the guys who restock the vending machines at the university I went to left a bunch of twinkies for us because they were expired. They handed them out at the cafeteria during lunch and like 4 people gave me theirs. I ate like 2 and when I was almost done with the second I noticed it was covered in mold, same with the ones I hadn't eaten yet. I haven't eaten a twinkie since :(

[@T-Bone907AK]

The new sound design for the month of October is awesome!

[@preston0]

Bill's poem had such a Dr. Seuss sound to it

[@slagathor91]

I CANNOT BELIEVE that of all the things to come up today was Steamboat Arabia. I have been to that museum like 5 times. It was the dreaded boring field trip that kids my age around here went to for school. I vaguely recall something about a donkey being the lone casualty of the incident. I'll have to double check cause I haven't been in years. I should go back now as an adult who isn't walking around daydreaming about the other field trips I could be on.

[@SciShowTangents]

I had just heard about it and thought it was amazing!

[@dustybowlz8166]

This episode is one of the best ever! I miss the dynamic with four people and Hank playing. I think it's time to switch it up again.

[@gentrymiller3170]

I was laughing when ceri said scrub jays don’t seem smart enough because we just used that exact paper that discussed them moving their caches if birds they don’t trust are nearby in one of my classes

[@edb7121]

That Pika pic was adorable

[@auroralupton]

This was a really fun episode, Bill was a great guest.

[@Fooma777]

Man, the Halloween theme goes so hard😂

[@LawTaranis]

What a fuckin legend. Bill is a great guest.

[@theinternaut1991]

It's so cool shrews have venom, also I love you guys and I love this show!

[@Gherontius]

love this format, 4 people, interesting guest, hank gets to play

[@mayaenglish5424]

I mean, all that wine is definitely extra funky vinegar by now lol.

[@rummskullvonchang]

Or.. or.. since they added olive oil, it's the most amazing salad dressing.

[@dstinnettmusic]

I want to add, people knew clean from unclean water. Natural springs are safe to drink from, as were wells. I think I recall reading that towns and cities were more reliant on Ale and Beer, but I think they just liked drinking. Ben Franklin famously chose water and bread to save money in his youth, in contrast to his coworkers who had beer fur breakfast and lunch. Now that I type that about, along with liking beer and ale, it was basically an instant breakfast because beer is SUPER calorie dense.

[@darcieclements4880]

Uhhh, natural springs are not safe to drink from unless capped and no cracks contaminate, same for wells. They are "safer" than surface water, but not safe. Not safe by a long shot. The USA was unusual early on in that water was dramatically safer than the old world, but it didn't take too long for the water to be contaminated here too as the pathogens came over with the people and livestock.

[@WhiteSpatula]

So.. if a bag of chips gets puffy at higher altitudes, does it wrinkle like a big plastic raisin if you take it to the beach or to Death Valley? And do we technically shrink, even by just an umptillionth of a millimeter, when we hang out below sea level? And just for deviance, how long would a human body last in Death Valley before becoming a full-on meat raisin?

[@alycsandrianah]

They should let someone pay millions for a snooty sip of that chunky wine just to finally use it for science!!!

[@jimcappa6815]

I was sure the can would be from Napoleon. They invented the can, but had neglected to invent an effective can opener until later.

[@alycsandrianah]

Use the shrew venom and send ppl further in space ! I wonder if it would slow aging

[@DasDuken]

Oh no... Someday you're going to have to have a historian on to well ackshually all the history factoids. Like the beer/cider vs water thing

[@JHaven-lg7lj]

I went about 50 comments down and didn’t see this - one of the main things that ancient Egyptians used to preserve corpses was natron, which is more or less the same as the nitrates we use to preserve meats today. I don’t remember hearing of anybody eating mummies as a food source, but there were apparently plenty of medications with ground-up mummy in them in the Victorian era. And not consumed (much, probably) was mummy brown paint *Should have waited another 30 seconds for Ceri’s list of ingredients, oops!

[@jess53nz]

That quiz was so much fun!

[@darcieclements4880]

I rather suspect that wine is vinegar now. Pretty sure you have to do a lot of special care to keep wine as wine.

[@leoso6861]

It was boiling of the mash that made it sanitary not the low alc.

[@santoast24]

HANK I cant wait to see you (if at least, from a distance) on the 12th WOO (but Sam's still my favorite)

[@jebus456]

Does Sam look like he's in his basement?

[@willcrago4463]

I hope they do another video with Jack Horner. He’s always so entertaining

[@poozlius]

. . . formed a tail!

[@davidfoss4808]

Once again food theory already covered the slack fill question LOL

[@dstinnettmusic]

Hank should ask Bill Nye and NDT to be guests. I assume all the internet science people have eachother’s phone numbers

[@wokeexecutive8288]

Mellified man: honey-mummy candy/medicine; is it a myth?

[@markedis5902]

Rock on Sam!!!

[@ScMaHi]

If poison expires, is it more poisonous or no longer poisonous??

[@darcieclements4880]

Both depending on what it actually is.

[@FSMface]

Not a very "spooky" episode, but super fun anyway!

[@charlottedean2205]

Was it a surplus of mummies, or a lot of thieved culture and dead?

[@SciShowTangents]

Being mummified was, as I understand it, really common for everyone in ancient Egypt, so there were a LOT of mummies. However, they were indeed being stolen from their graves.

[@mackea1]

This is really good. But that Bill guy is way too good at guessing the correct dates. I am joking but... Was he cheating? Did he have someone off screen quickly typing into Google and giving the answer that's close to right We will never know. Lol

[@laanaalove]

Was thinking the same thing.... I'm surprised there's not many mentions of how "uncanny" his "guesses" were in the comments 😂

[@laanaalove]

Considering scishow tangents loved this comment speaks volumes

[@lightspeedtractor]

\o/

[@darcieclements4880]

This episode really highlights the pop culture bias about what the term venom means. I see so many videos about explaining what venom is that just repeat misconceptions or leave out the most important points that I shouldn't be surprised that no one knew about shrew venom... But I am still surprised. I've just come to accept that people will always misuse the term and manipulate it to create whatever narrative they want, often to justify the destruction of harmless species and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Still, it makes me sad. Venom is a toxin that a life form uses to kill or subdue predators or prey or rivals that only works when injected. How it is used is the most important part that makes it stand out, being injected to work alone is meaningless because most biological fluids are dangerous when injected. It's the behavior that matters. There, I've said my piece, may some day this be better known.