The Preposterous History of Artificial Flavors, Part One: The Vanilla Problem

Ridiculous History

iHeartPodcasts

History, Society & Culture

4.3 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

For most of human history, people were locked in a continual struggle to find food and avoid starvation. Eating for pleasure wasn't really a thing the common person could do. However, as time went on and technology improved, eating became as much a recreation as a hobby -- and this led civilization to the fascinating, ridiculous world of artificial flavors. In the first part of this week's special two-part episode, Ben, Noel and Max explore the science of flavor, and use the story of vanilla as a way to understand the problems that led to synthetic flavoring in the first place.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Ridiculous history is a production of I Heart Radio. The Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as always so much for
0:31.2	tuning in. That's our super producer, the willy wonka of ridiculous history.
0:37.0	Mr. Max Williams.
0:39.0	The snowsberries taste like snowsberries and the Max Williams Perrys tastes like
0:45.4	Max Williamsberries. That's Noel Brown. I am Ben Boland and Noel today we are
0:52.2	pursuing one of our favorite things.
0:56.3	Behind the curtain, folks, this is something
0:58.9	that we talked about with our friends,
1:01.5	Lauren Vogelbaum and Annie Reese of Saver, constantly. It's food history.
1:07.5	What's your favorite flavor? Do you have like a favorite flavor?
1:11.2	I really like pistachio, a lot. I like the nut. I like the ice cream. I like the macaron. I like it artificial. I like it freaking all natural. It's just a damn fine flavor you know what I mean yeah yeah agreed
1:26.5	I'm partial to pineapple but also I eat pretty much everything except for so far human flesh.
1:36.0	Well, you know, hopefully they're working on it.
1:38.0	Actually, it turned out to not be true.
1:40.0	Lab grown human flesh.
1:42.0	But why the hell not?
1:43.4	If it's not hurting anybody, I guess it does become an ethical quandary at that point,
1:48.4	like is it okay to eat human flesh
1:50.8	just on a basic level if you're not having to murder the human or is there
1:54.8	something abhorrent and against God about all that?
1:57.8	Just inherently.
1:58.8	Yeah, exactly.
	...

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