Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (10 page)

Q:
Do fish sleep?

A:
Hard to tell if they sleep in the same sense we do. They never
look
like they’re sleeping, because they don’t have eyelids. “But they do seem to have regular rest periods….Some fish just stay more or less motionless in the water, while others rest directly on the bottom, even turning over on their side. Some species…dig or burrow into bottom sediment to make a sort of ‘bed.’ Some fish even…prefer privacy when they rest; their schools disperse at night to rest and then reassemble in the morning.” (From
Science Trivia,
by Charles Cazeau)

PICK A BALL OF COTTON

Q:
Should you toss out the cotton after opening a bottle of pills?

A:
Yep. “The cotton keeps the pills from breaking in transit, but once you open the bottle, it can attract moisture and thus damage the pills or become contaminated.” (From
Davies Gazette,
a newsletter from Davies Medical Center in San Francisco)

SLIPPERY QUESTION

Q:
A few years ago, we started seeing foods containing “canola oil.” What is it?

A:
A variety of rapeseed—which, until recently, was only grown for industrial oils. “Scientists in Canada were able to breed new varieties of rapeseed that were suitable for cooking. They named their creation
canola
to honor Canada. Canola seed contains 40% to 45% oil, of which 6% is saturated fatty acids. Canola oil contains less fat than any other oil: 50% less than corn oil and olive oil, 60% less than soybean oil.” (From
Why Does Popcorn Pop
, by Don Voorhees)

These were the most popular programs of TV’s early years. Most weren’t filmed, so unless you remember them, they’re gone forever.

1949–1950

(1) Texaco Star Theater

(2) Toast of the Town (Ed Sullivan)

(3) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts

(4) Fireball Fun for All

(5) Philco Television Playhouse

(6) Fireside Theatre

(7) The Goldbergs

(8) Suspense

(9) Ford Theater

(10) Cavalcade of Stars

1950–1951

(1) Texaco Star Theater

(2) Fireside Theatre

(3) Your Show of Shows

(4) Philco Television Playhouse

(5) The Colgate Comedy Hour

(6) Gillette Cavalcade of Sports

(7) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts

(8) Mama

(9) Robert Montgomery Presents

(10) Martin Kane, Private Eye

1951–1952

(1) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts

(2) Texaco Star Theater

(3) I Love Lucy

(4) The Red Skelton Show

(5) The Colgate Comedy Hour

(6) Fireside Theatre

(7) The Jack Benny Program

(8) Your Show of Shows

(9) You Bet Your Life

(10) Arthur Godfrey and His Friends

1952–1953

(1) I Love Lucy

(2) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts

(3) Arthur Godfrey and His Friends

(4) Dragnet

(5) Texaco Star Theater

(6) The Buick Circus Hour

(7) The Colgate Comedy Hour

(8) Gangbusters

(9) You Bet Your Life

(10) Fireside Theatre

1953–1954

(1) I Love Lucy

(2) Dragnet

(3) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts

(4) You Bet Your Life

(5) The Bob Hope Show

(6) The Buick-Berle Show

(7) Arthur Godfrey and His Friends

(8) Ford Theater

(9) The Jackie Gleason Show

(10) Fireside Theatre

1954–1955

(1) I Love Lucy

(2) The Jackie Gleason Show

(3) Dragnet

(4) You Bet Your Life

(5) Toast of the Town (Ed Sullivan)

(6) Disneyland

(7) The Bob Hope Show

(8) The Jack Benny Program

(9) The Martha Raye Show

(10) The George Gobel Show

Uncle John was drinking some freeze-dried coffee when he suddenly got up and started asking everyone in the office what “freeze-drying” is.
No
one could tell him. So we did some research and wrote this article. We figured if we didn’t know, you might not either.

F
REEZER BURN

If you’ve ever had a freezer, you’ve probably seen “freezer burn”—the discolored, dried-out crust that forms on food when it’s been in the freezer too long or isn’t wrapped correctly.

What causes it?

Evaporation. Even when something is frozen solid, the water molecules are still moving. And some of them move fast enough to fly right off the surface of the food. Then one of three things happens:

         
1. They get pulled back by the food’s gravitational field.

         
2. They slam into air molecules and bounce back onto the food.

         
3. They fly off into space.

Over time, so many water molecules will fly off into space that the surface of the food actually becomes dehydrated. That’s freezer burn. It’s also known as
sublimation
, the process by which ice evaporates without first turning into water.

That’s what freeze-drying is—drying something out while it’s still frozen.

FREEZER SCIENCE

In the 19th century, scientists studying sublimation discovered that the process happened faster in a jar when the air was pumped out. (The jars are called
vacuum chambers
.) This is because when you remove air, you’re removing the air
molecules.
The fewer air molecules there are to bump into, the greater the chance that the water molecules will escape into space—which speeds the drying.

But the freeze-drying process still took too long. So over the next half-century, scientists tried to find ways to speed it up. They succeeded…and then began freeze-drying anything and everything to see what would happen. The first practical applications they found were in the medical field: many microscopic organisms—including bacteria, viruses, vaccines, yeasts, and algae—could actually survive the process; so could blood plasma.

By World War II, freeze-dried blood plasma and penicillin (which could be reconstituted with sterile water) accompanied soldiers onto the battlefield. And by the end of the war, freeze-dried instant coffee tablets were included in U.S. troops’ K rations.

FREEZE-DRIED FOODS

After the war, food companies poured money into making freeze-dried food palatable. It took 10 years, but they finally figured out that when food is “flash frozen” (i.e., frozen as quickly as possible), followed by freeze-drying, much of the flavor is preserved.

The prospects for freeze-dried food seemed limitless: In 1962
The Reader’s Digest
hailed it as “the greatest breakthrough in food preservation since the tin can,” and food technologists predicted that sales of freeze-dried food products would rival sales of frozen foods by 1970. Hundreds of food companies rushed new products to the markets. A few, like freeze-dried coffee, were successes. But most wound up in the “fabulous flop” category. For example:

•
Corn flakes with freeze-dried fruit.
As we told you in the first
Bathroom Reader
, in 1964 Post introduced Cornflakes with Strawberries and Kellogg’s introduced Cornflakes with Instant Bananas. Both predicted that sales would hit $600 million in a few years. Both were wrong. It turned out that freeze-dried fruit gets soft on the outside when soaked in milk, but stays crunchy on the inside. And by the time the fruit is soft enough to eat, the cereal is soggy. Millions of families bought the cereals once, but never came back for a second helping.

•
Kellogg’s Kream Krunch.
Cereal with chunks of freeze-dried ice cream. Different product, same problem: the cereal turned soggy before the ice cream reconstituted.

•
Freeze-dried steak.
“It looks like a brownish sponge,”
Business Week
wrote in 1963, “but plop it into hot water and in a few minutes the ‘sponge’ blossoms into a sirloin steak that tastes almost as good as one from the butcher’s.” Wishful thinking. It cost as much as a good T-bone, but tasted like a beef sponge.

•
Freeze-dried scrambled eggs.
“Can be prepared by simply cooking with water,”
Consumer Reports
wrote in 1962. But that was the only good news. Their tasting panel “came up with a luke warm ‘neither like nor dislike’…and at current egg prices, two dozen fresh eggs cost the same as two freeze-dried servings.”

Other Freeze-Dried Flops

• Freeze-dried mushrooms in a box, from Armour foods

• Freeze-dried cottage cheese (“with cultured sour cream dressing”), from Holland Dairies

• Freeze-dried milkshake mix, from Borden

PET PROJECTS

• The process of freeze-drying is now widely used in taxidermy (stuffing and mounting dead animals). In the late 1950s, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution discovered that by freeze-drying animals instead of skinning and stuffing them, they could produce more lifelike specimens while reducing labor costs by as much as 80%. Today more than a third of all museums in the United States have freeze-dryers, and some companies will even freeze-dry pets.

• The process is the same as with freeze-drying food, with one exception: the animals are bent into lifelike poses, such as “dining on prey,” “fetching a stick,” or “resting by fire,” before they are frozen.

• Since the internal organs remain in place, animals retain virtually the same shape and dimensions when they’re freeze-dried. The only difference is their weight—a freeze-dried animal has roughly the same consistency as styrofoam.

• The process is effective, but is impractical with large animals. Animals weighing as little as 65 pounds can take as long as a year to lose all of their moisture, so most large animals are still skinned and stuffed the old-fashioned way.

NEWS FLASH

“Mrs. Oramae Lewis of Bedford, Ohio, had her cat Felix freeze-dried by a local veterinarian after it was run down by an 18-wheel tractor trailer. The veterinarian used a freeze-drying machine once used by a coffee company. ‘Now I can have Felix just like I did when he was alive,’ she said. ‘He’s just like he was in real life, only flatter.’”

—The
Washington Post,
June 27, 1983

No one else in the history of American literature has combined sardonic wit, warmth, and intelligence as successfully as Mark Twain.

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence and then success is sure.”

“What a talker he is—he could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him.”

“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to stick to possibilities.”

“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”

“But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner who needed it most?”

“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can afford to and when he can’t.” “Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered—either by themselves, or by others.”

“We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.”

“Envy….the only thing which men will sell both body and soul to get.”

“If we had less statesmanship, we would get along with fewer battleships.”

“If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not go there.”

“It takes me a long time to lose my temper but once lost, I could not find it with a dog.”

“Virtue has never been as respectable as money.”

“I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap-bubble if there was only one in the world.”