SciShow Tangents - Cheese

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

It's the long-awaited cheese-stravaganza! And it's every bit as melty, crumbly, stretchy, and stinky as hoped for. We dip into some fetamology, we stretch our nokkeledge of cheese applications, and we unwrap the shocking tartrutho about a cheese we thought we knew!**The real cheese names I butchered into puns: feta, nokkelost, tartuffo. All delicious, go try some!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! 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! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!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[The Scientific Definition]Cornish Yarg’s rindPule animal milkEmmental cheese surroundings[Trivia Question]One of the oldest unopened cans of Cougar Gold cheesehttps://archive.news.wsu.edu/news/2010/08/14/oldest-cougar-gold-cracked-open-still-tasty/https://creamery.wsu.edu/about-us/history/[Fact Off]Using cheese to study the neuroscience of disgust because it’s not dangerous/unethicalhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5065955/https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/disgusthttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4687907/Environmental remediation in Emeryville, CA using cottage cheese whey[Ask the Science Couch]“Addictive” qualities of cheese (contextualizing casomorphin and the endogenous opioid system)https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117959https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/b/bovine-beta-casomorphin-7.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8345738/https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa.2009.231rhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10486734/[Butt One More Thing]Cheese mites are pests but also delicacies in Mimolette and Milbenkäsehttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030210003644https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10493-016-0040-7https://microbialfoods.org/microbe-guide-cheese-mites/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert in Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Riley. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi. I have a question for you guys. Okay. Tell me the name of your pet and then the name that you ended up calling your pet.

Oh, Leeloo and Leeloo. I don't mess around with those alternate names. You don't have like a Lulilow or anything? Nope. You don't call her Leeloo Dallas Multipass? We used to call her that more often than we do now. She's just Leeloo now. She's transcended that reference. And it's really just Leeloo.

But I understand the compulsion. My brother's name is Will and we call him wilbur and sometimes we call him bird man because it's wilbur turned into bird turned into bird man okay so you you don't have a story for your pet but you do for your brother more accurate yeah our cat's name is inky which is also something that you just say. And it has the same cadence as Leeloo. But we call her so many different things. Stinko, Bug, Bean. We have a subset of nicknames when she's being a gremlin in particular ways.

Sometimes we call her Grim for gremlin for short. Sometimes we call her Dennis when she's being a menace. Sometimes we call her Marvinis when she's being a menace sometimes we call her marvin when she's starving and so she's got so many names but they change depending on her behavior she earns a title almost she's a different almost a different animal yeah at all moments of the day whether we when she's doing being great oh inky you're being so cute when she's being great, oh, Inky, you're being so cute. When she's being a grim, Stinko. Stinko Menace. Yeah.

Stinko the Grim. Over there. Yeah. I have two cats. I have, we have our new cat, Chester, who already, he's gone from Chester to Chester Cheese to just Cheese. I think maybe it was Chester Cheetah first. It was Chester to Chester Cheetah to Chester Cheese. And now just Cheese.

Mostly we call him Cheese. Not really a cat name. And then we have Gummy Bear, who we went from Gummy. We call him Gum and Gummy and Gumball and Gums. And when one day we came home from something and my son opened the door because gummy bear is always there when you open the door when you're coming home just sitting there and oran said the expected gums and so we call him the expected that's really good the expected gums and cheese sounds like the best like buddy cartoon characters yeah Catherine also walked by

Gummy Bear this morning and he was like hanging his arm off the cat tower like cats do and Catherine looked at Gummy Bear and said

piggy dipping ham hock ding dong which are all things that we say when he does that we call it piggy dipping

which is a reference to an online video and then ham hock came from us and then ding dong was our old cat when she would hang her tail off the tower we'd pull on and go ding dong until we just had to say ding dong and she would lift her tail up she didn't want it to happen and i was like did you say you just say piggy dip and a ham hock ding dong? She's like, I didn't think you were there. We call that chicken wing behavior.

Cats are so good. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, the currency in this podcast, which I have not mentioned outside of this intro for at least over a year, according to Eve. Hank Bucks. It has become quite abstract, I think. We'll be awarded as we play it at the end of the episode. One of them will be crowned the winner. So as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Sarah. Usually foods are pretty cut and dry. A potato's a potato, a fry's a fry, and you get kind of weird in the noodle zone, or a chocolate versus a blueberry scone. But usually

you sort of know what you're eating, except for cheese, which can be quite deceiving. You might get a gooey processed square that melts on toasty bread, or a hard grainy slice from a big old wheel that weighs seven times your head, a soft stringy lump that's stretched from curds, or a pillowy thickened whey, or a funky cube that reeks of feet or has

ribbons of blue-gray. Then there's sprays and cans or shredded blends or neon dust to try, and lest we forget, the cheese in quotes with nary a dairy inside but it behoove us all to learn a few names of the hundreds or thousands vying for fame to help us with confidence say yes please when presented with a board of mystery cheese cheese is the topic of the day like my cat and. And you've already let slip that it's not easy to define what a cheese is. I thought you were going to tell us that a lot of those things weren't technically cheeses,

but they are all indeed cheeses. It's not actually that hard to name what a cheese is. Is easy cheese cheese? I think it's a cheese product. Cheez Whiz has dairy in it? I think usually, I think a lot of the processed cheeses, so spreadable cheese, Cheez Whiz, whatnot. What we used to call in college regular cheese, which was Kraft American Singles. Yeah.

Usually there's some sort of, well, I guess it depends. There's some sort of cheese percentage of it just less than buying a hunk of cheese so it's like it takes you take some cheddar and then you add a bunch of additives to make it more spreadable sprayable dustable or floppable i mean calling it american cheese is the greatest insult our nation has ever received. Also, all of the other nations, too. Like, we call it American cheese. That means South America- They have to own it as well.

To some extent must feel responsible, which they definitely are not. They didn't have anything to do with it. That's United States cheese. Or was it invented, huh? It was definitely invented in America. It was invented in a laboratory at Kraft headquarters. James L. Kraft patented the method.

It was probably some guy, and then he was like, I invented this. Yeah, this is really the cheese that built a billion-dollar corporation right here. He was Canadian. Canadian. Canadian cheese! Canadian cheese. This is the biggest news that has ever been discovered on SciShow Tangent. Is he Canadian?

Canada is North America. That's true. But we all know what they mean. Yeah, but that's not what you mean. We all know what they mean. Yeah. Yeah, he immigrated to Buffalo, New York in 1902 from Ontario, Canada. Famous American-Canadian Kraft cheese man.

His actually first name is Kraft, his last name is Cheeseman. Anyway, Sari, what's cheese? You know, the thing is... Weird milk. Weird milk. Basically, a cheese describes the process of making cheese. And so you take a milk product, milk, cream, skim milk, buttermilk, some combination. Coagulate it with some sort of coagulating agent.

In some cases, that is an acid. So like paneer cheese is by adding an acid to milk a lot of times it is enzymes that we add to it some of the original cheese is made using rennet which is a substance within the stomachs of ruminant babies so like baby cows baby sheep, baby goats. Are they okay when we get it from them? I think they're probably not. Oh, no. Okay. We eat their meat and then we use their stomachs.

But the reason they have it is because milk usually goes through your system pretty quick. But they have natural coagulants so that when they drink milk from their parents and get it in their tummies it coagulates so it lasts longer and they can extract more nutrients from it because that's like the whole thing that ruminants do is have stuff hang around in their stomachs for a while and so at some point humans probably stored milk in a stomach as a sack because it's also in like nature's uh handbag is a stomach when it's outside the body. And then it started coagulating. And then if you remove the liquid or you can remove some portion of the liquid and compress the solid stuff, then the solid stuff is technically cheese. At that point, that's cheese. At that point, it's cheese.

Even if there's some whey mixed in, like cottage cheese is a mixture of curds and whey. Cottage cheese. some way mixed in like cottage cheese is a mixture of curds and whey cottage cheese if you if you glopped a gloop of cottage cheese and i didn't know what that was and i ate it i would not say that's cheese yeah you might be in the looking in the yogurt family maybe yeah i mean i get i can see it like it tastes cheesy but i like i don't know I feel like a cheese needs to hold its shape. And that's why cheese is so tricky to pin down. It's like they're soft, soft cheeses,

hard cheeses, bready cheeses, stinky cheeses, sweet cheeses. I feel like that's actually kind of a pretty specific definition. As long as you will take out the things that have quotation marks around it, then cheese, cheese products have cheese in them.

And cheese is a thing that is like the solids left over after coagulation or whatever you called it. Yeah. Coagulation, yes. But then, I don't know. See, now I'm poking holes in my own. I fell down such a rabbit hole trying to define cheese. Is tofu cheese? Because it's made from soy milk, coagulated, and then pressed.

Oh, that's not milk. We know what we mean when we say milk. That's milk with quotation marks around it. I think I agree with Hank, though, in that this is not a complicated or tricky definition at all. It just comes in different flavors. I think Sarah's very brave for having brought is tofu cheese into the conversation.

Yeah, it's not. There's a whole section at the grocery store where all the cheese goes. That makes it pretty easy to figure it out. Well, that actually, because I am going to completely make the case that Kraft Canadian cheese is not cheese. Well, it's got, hmm. It's not made in the way that Sarah said, huh? It's got cheese in it, just like my sandwich does.

Like pizza isn't cheese. And so Kraft Canadian cheese is not cheese. This is right. You're right. I'm so mad about it being Canadian. It just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like he earned it. It doesn't feel like we earned it.

It just feels bad. It's misattribution. And I think if it was called Canadian cheese, everybody would treat it nicer and be more respectful of it, in my opinion. Maybe it would treat us nicer and be more respectful of us. And that, too. It would be the most polite cheese. In our tummies. Be a little bit kinder as it goes down with the grilled cheese.

You know, I bet it probably has less lactose than most cheese. So maybe it is a little bit of a kinder cheese. Kinder in the old belly. So where did the word cheese come from? So the word cheese comes from the Latin word caseus, which is where the word casein comes from. And not queso. Oh yeah, and queso and all these words. Like casein is the proteins that are found in mammalian milk that is like about 80 percent

of the proteins in cow's milk so etymologically makes sense but it also gave rise to the words cheese i think they were basically pronounced the same way in old english but before the latin the linguists are duking it out with each other some Some of them think that it comes from a Proto-Indo-European root of quat, to ferment or to become sour. And another person is like, there's no way Latin has Q sounds in it, so there's no way

we could have dropped the quat to turn it into cheese from there. So, I don't know. I'm not painting it very dramatically, but in the article you built it up a lot more than it turned out to be for sure yeah and he i guess in linguist terms this is pretty much of a dig of no etymology can be found which does not require some poorly founded assumptions which i think was the the person who thinks it's unknown making a dig at the fermentation. Brutal.

Fatality. That is the trick with all these words that we made up. We stinky cheese people or not stinky cheese people? What are we thinking? I'm not a stinky cheese person, though. I am not a stinky cheese man. I am a mild lad. I don't like spice.

I don't like flavor. I'm a big time stinky cheese man i've realized recently that my favorite cuisine is like what wario or the grinch would eat where it's like very garlic heavy very tangy vinegar that kind of just nasty flavors i love it so much i think that growing up to be i mean gargamel is a very unhappy man i think you could grow up to be a happy gargamel you know he doesn't want to think you could grow up to be a happy Gargamel you know? He doesn't want to kill Smurfs for a living. Well yeah why can't I just be

Wario or the Grinch? They both are happy. I don't know if Wario is happy. I think he's very happy he seems happy he's always smiling. He seems happy but like angry about it. Yeah You could be happy and angry happy isn't the opposite of angry. Yep that's right.

Yeah, he's like a gleeful, gleeful. He's a gleeful Gargamel. Anyway, that's not the thing that we're going to do for our game show today. Instead of that, we're going to be playing the secret ingredient. Of course we are. It's cheese day. One of the incredible things about cheese is how many variations we have come upon with the same basic premise. Over time, that ingenuity means that seemingly unusual ingredients like fungi, mites, and maggots have become part of long-standing traditions in the world of cheese. So today, we're going to be highlighting some of the strange ingredients of cheese in a game of Secret Ingredient.

I will describe a type of cheese to you, but I will leave out one of the ingredients that makes the cheese what it is. And I'll give you three options for what the secret ingredient is, and it's up to you to figure out which one it is. Makes sense to me. So you actually get multiple choice this secret ingredient, which is gonna make it less difficult. Are you ready? Yes.

Our first cheese on the menu is Cornish Yarg, a cheese based on a 17th century recipe. That's real. I didn't make it up. That was rediscovered and adapted by a group of cheesemakers in Cornwall. This semi-hard cheese is made from cow's milk and has a distinct mushroom flavor. a very local ingredient that is used to make its rind, which not only acts as the rind itself, but also provides the mushroom flavor

and enzymes needed to mature the cheese. What is the secret ingredient? Is it A. Lichen that grows on the Cornish cliffside, B. Stinging nettles from the Cornish countryside, or C. Sand taken from Cornish beaches? Lichen seems

the most mushroomy, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, lichen's got fungi in it. So this is like in the rind, or the whole rind is made out of this, or you don't know? I think that the rind is made out of this. Okay, okay. And sand.

I'm just gonna go with sand, because that sounds like a cool story that I'd like to hear. I don't know why that would taste like mushrooms. I would avoid the rind of a cheese that was rinded in sand, that's for sure. That's true. And yeah, sometimes you sample the rind and that would be a big mistake. I would be mad if I didn't go with the obvious one. I think it's lichen.

I think you can pat that into a basket-ish shape and pour in cheese. Well, Cornish Yarg is named for Alan Gray. Do you know why or how? You just said a lot of words. I'll get to the answer, but first, it's named for Alan Gray. How is Cornish Yarg named for Alan Gray? Backwards Yarg is backwards of Gray. Backwards Yarg.

So he found an old book called english the english housewife and it can contain instructions on various tasks including how to make a number of cheeses one of the recipes included a cheese matured on a bed of stinging nettles though there weren't a lot of specifics on how to make this cheese and gray started testing out different versions of the recipe and created cornish yard eventually selling his recipe to another farmer that further tinkered with the recipe. Because, of course, we've got to give everybody credit for the invention of this cheese. The nettles ended up being an important part of the recipe, and cheesemakers who've worked on it have tested out different aspects of the nettles,

like how much should be used and how to wrap the mold and not the fungus mold, but the mold that is molded inside of. The nettles keep the cheese protected in a breathable coating that allows for specific molds to get attracted into the cheese. And the nettles are also gathered from the Cornwall countryside in the summer and then cleaned and frozen so that they can be used throughout the year. And the cheese is in the nettles for about five weeks while it matures. I think my problem there was that I had no idea what stinging nettles were.

I was picturing like burrs, you know, like, no, like, like, like the things that get stuck on your shirt, like when you walk past a specific plant, you know, it's just like, yeah, it's a leafy plant, but they do. It is very stingy. I hate them. They make you real puffy looking, it looks like. In 2022, the BBC reported that the most expensive cheese in the world is Puel, a Siberian cheese. It sounds like I'm making it up.

Named after Pierre Illoup. No, it's a Siberian cheese that became famous when the tennis player Novak Djokovic reportedly bought the entire stock from the one farm that produces it. The color was yellowish, and the BBC reporter sent to try it so that it tasted sweet, clean, and mild. According to Cheese.com, Puel sells for about $576 per pound, a heavy price that results from the fact that the source of milk is not particularly bountiful. What animal produces milk for Puel? Is it yak, donkey, or deer?

Oh, well, deer are always running all over the place around. You can't pin them down to milk them. So I think there wouldn't be a lot of deer milk, and that's my all over the place around. You can't pin them down to milk them. So I think there wouldn't be a lot of deer milk, and that's my guess. Is a deer. I think a yak would just stand there and let you milk it. I'm going to guess donkey because it kind of sounds like mule.

That's a luxury item. You say this is made of the finest deer milk. You know a rich person is going to be like, don't mind if I do. Donkey milk? Shrek really skyrocketed donkey fame, though feel like for the rich and famous yeah he's a tastemaker which donkey is this from precisely the one that made babies with a dragon or a regular donkey very luxurious only one rare dragon donkey. Yeah. Expensive cheese. Actual answer. Dragon. No donkey.

You're correct. The recipe is a secret, but one of the few things we know about it is that it's made using the milk from Balkan donkeys, which is a tough ingredient because while it takes about 25 liters of their milk to make one kilogram of the cheese, a female donkily, a female donkily will only make around 300 milliliters of milk per day.

On top of the low milk yield that comes from working with donkeys, donkey's milk is tough to use for cheese because it has a low amount of casein. So to use their milk for the cheese, it needs to be mixed with goat's milk. Cheese is 60% donkey milk and 40% goat's milk's milk ah this cheese doesn't sound very exciting to me it seems like it's only expensive because that one guy bought it all well here's what it makes me think i want to eat like every cheese i want to eat cheese made from every mammal's milk except people all right once you get done with all the rest of them don't you think you'll be like i guess i have to right i guess it's time working on my blog and it's just like i don't have anything

else to post i guess last one all right so someone has a point now and that person is sari next question emmental that's a normal cheese i've heard of, is a popular Swiss cheese made from cow's milk that's often found in fondue and cheese plates. There are different varieties of Emmental, and the flavor itself can change based on how long you age it. And sometimes what matters is not just what you put in the cheese or how long it's aged, but what the cheese is surrounded by. is surrounded by. In 2018, a Swiss cheesemaker wanted to test a theory he had about Emmental aging, so he collaborated

with the University of the Arts in Bern on his theory. What did they do to the cheese's surroundings as the cheese matured? A, they kept the cheese in rooms, painted different colors. B, they aged the cheese in containers

with different fabric interiors. Or C, they played different genres of music to the cheese. Well, I feel like the colors would do absolutely nothing. Light on the cheese. Unless there's like something that was really photosensitive in it. Fabric, you're touching the cheese. So any sort of stuff could get in there that seems too obvious kind of though oh yeah because you're just like dunking it like maybe a cheese recipe would

already say gotta use this fabric and everybody would just be like whatever makes sense to me speaking of fabric and food did you know that the this is becoming a widely known fact now which is amazing first pink lemonade was made pink by putting into the lemonade a circus performer's tights oh is that true i feel like i read it somewhere in like one of those hundred fact books that i now know not to bring up oh yeah yeah trivia knowledge from that one turns out to have been accurate. The person who made Pink Lemonade, not to be trusted. I'm going to go with the music one.

I think I got it. Music. I feel compelled. I think I'm also going to go with the music. It feels like an art student thing to do. Well, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler, his name is Beat Wampfler, and his collaborators at the university ran their experiment using nine 22-pound wheels of cheese, which were kept for six months in their own wooden crates in a cheese cellar. And each cheese was hooked up to a mini transducer, which sends sound waves directly into the cheese.

From there, the cheese was stuck listening to a 24 hour loop of one song. The group tried out music from different genres. They had the Magic Flute from Mozart. They had Stairway to Heaven from Led Zeppelin. They had Monolith from Yellow. I don't know what that is. They got

jazz. They played some hip hop. They played a tribe called Quest. And they played Techno by Vril, which I'm sure is an jazz they played some hip-hop they played a tribe called quest and they played techno by real which i'm sure is an artist of electronic music as controls there was a cheese left to listen to silence which i now feel bad for for some reason and three cheeses that were stuck listening to a tone that was either high medium or low frequency the idea idea is that the sound waves traveled through the cheese bodies, and the only test that this experiment really focused on were taste tests. They gave it to food technologists and a panel of culinary experts to judge in a blind taste test, and

in general, the hip-hop's cheese seemed to have the strongest flavors. Wow. That's a perfect name for a guy who's playing music to cheese, specifically. Because his first name is Beat, right? His first name is Beat. His last name is Wamfer,

which sounds like the noise that comes out of the speaker when you're listening to Vril. Through a bunch of cheese. Yeah. Yeah. I'd try some out,

but I don't think that it would be worth it. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then the fact off. All right, everybody, welcome back. Sari's in the lead with two to Sam's one.

Now it's time for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award my Hank books. Anywhere I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The Washington State University Creamery produces a canned white cheddar cheese called Cougar Gold, which has been around since the 1940s. I love cheese dames. Every one of them sounds made up.

It was produced to send troops overseas. Creating a canned cheese was a challenge because the bacteria inside cheese produced carbon dioxide, which would explode the cans. So the inventors of Cougar Gold were able to assemble a new bacteria culture that produced less CO2. The result is a cheese that can be stored for quite a while. In 2010, the parents of a former Washington State University alumna called the creamery to let them know that they were driving through with a can of Cougar Gold that might have been one of the oldest unopened cans at the time. How old was that can of cheese? Uh, 55 years? So he's going with 55, 55 years old. What's the maximum amount?

Like, so like 70, just as old. It was the first can that rolled off the canning thing. Well, you know, it's going to sound less impressive now that I've set it all up. But 22, 23 years. 23-year-old can of cheese. If they called me, I'd say throw it away. I don't want to see it. I don't need that.

That cheese is from the 90s or something. Is that right? Yeah. No, it's from the 2000s. It's from the 2000s. I don't care about this cheese. It was in 2010. That's the year I was born. So I'd say bring me the cheese actually this is exciting cheese do you guys know about cup

of cheese no where you fart in your hand and then you put it on someone's face and you say i didn't like that don't say stuff like that the first time i ever saw someone do cup of cheese in real life i was like that's the best thing i've ever seen that's disgusting and i was a grown man i was like 30 years old if you ever do that to me i'm never talking to you again oh i would never do it to a person but i did watch lee newton do it to joe beretta and i it was very i was very happy so yeah uh the cheese was stamped uh october 9 1987. And the can of cheese had been given to the couple by their daughter. And they had just kept it around thinking that they would one day have that cheese. We all have that can of cheese.

Absolutely. Well, you don't see us calling the factory and saying, I got such old beans. Yeah. The cheese was opened, which seems like a bad decision. And it was a little more dry than it usually would be. But overall, it still tasted pretty good, according to the people who put it in their literal human mouths. How weird, eh? All right, that means that Sarah gets to go first.

That was a long question. So humans experience a whole range of emotions, and one of the trickier parts of being a neuroscientist or psychologist is studying the bad feeling ones like pain or anger or disgust. You want to make sure people consent to being made uncomfortable, and some of these sensations can veer on being dangerous. Our understanding of disgust, for example, is that it's a distancing response where you feel nauseated or your body might be trying to protect itself from a toxin or potential infection or something you're allergic to. So it's not the most ideal or ethical research methodology to study disgust by exposing subjects to like moldy Tupperware or sewage. And it's hard to find something that's both easy to access and universally disgusting because people have all different cultural contexts. But there is a food that is both polarizing

and completely safe as long as you're not eating a 23-year-old can of it, which is cheese. And part of that is because cheese comes in so many different varieties, including ones with really strong odors and funky flavors that people either love or love to hate. So there was a study published in October 2016 called the Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese, an fMRI study, where researchers conducted several different experiments on cheese and disgust. Their main one was comparing the brains of people who liked cheese and people who didn't, and who were disgusted by it, as they smelled it and looked at pictures of cheese. So they got 15 participants who liked cheese, didn't have to love it, just like it. 15 participants who didn't like cheese or were disgusted by it and made sure that their

noses were working and they weren't sick at the time of their study. It does not seem like they asked whether any of these participants were lactose intolerant or not, at least that I could find in their methodology. Would have been a question that I might have asked, but maybe they did. They just didn't write about it or I missed it. that I might have asked, but maybe they did. They just didn't write about it or I missed it. And while their brains were getting scanned using fMRI, which is functional magnetic residence imaging, which basically measures how blood is moving in your brain. And it's a pretty standard technique to estimate which regions are active at a certain time. They had people smell 12

different things, six different cheeses. So blue cheese, cheddar cheese, goat cheese, gruyere, parmesan, and tomé, tomé, that's the only one I haven't heard of, and six non-cheese foods, cucumber, fennel, mushroom, pâté, peanut, and pizza. Seems like a very broad cross-section of non-cheese foods. Yeah, peanut. And what they found is that what they called the anti-cheese people had stronger activation in some parts of the basal ganglia region of the brain than the pro-cheese people. Specifically, these regions called the globulus pallidus and the substantia nigra. And these regions are usually associated with reward pathways. And so what's weird is they seem like they're also involved in these anti-reward

disgust behaviors as well. So the same regions that are saying, yes, you want this are also saying even more strongly, no, you don't want this. And then plus the ventral paludum, which is a brain region that helps us process and move forward with behaviors that we're motivated to do was significantly less active in the people who were disgusted by cheese than those who liked it so the desire to want or eat or act was somehow suppressed in their brains when they smelled or looked at a picture of cheese they were like oh so there aren't any like sweeping conclusions here because it's a small study but i like this idea that uh like it's hard to ethically study disgust and so how do you do it

cheese cheese stink them up with some cheese brain studies are always so weird because it's like can't i tell you why i don't want the cheese like no you can't you have no idea we need to we need to put you in a very expensive machine and figure out where the blood is in your brain while you're smelling cheese. And then those regions are only, we only know what they do because of other studies where they had people look at other things that they liked or didn't like. And so we're all just guessing. All just probably. Yeah. So there's definitely, there is plenty of insight to be gleaned by being the actual thing experiencing the sensation.

Because I think that when I smell a cheese that I don't like the smell of, it's because it smells like things I wouldn't want to put in my mouth. Like feet. Sometimes it smells like feet. That's okay. Sometimes it's, yeah. But that is true. Sometimes it smells like feet and I'm like, that smells like feet, but that's okay. And then sometimes it smells like feet and I'm like, that smells like feet, but that's okay. And then sometimes it smells like feet, and I'm like, that smells like feet, but too much.

Wrong kind of feet. Too stinky of feet. That's true. Every cheese has a little bit of funk. Except for Kraft Canadian cheese. Yes. It just has that glossy texture of silly buddy. Sam,

what do you got for me? Emeryville, California, home to companies such as Pixar, Clif Bar, and Pete's Coffee. This booming city nestled in California's

Silicon Valley is a modern economic powerhouse. But this isn't the first time that Emeryville's been a modern, booming economic powerhouse.

Being situated on San Francisco Bay and filled with train yards, Emeryville became a manufacturing center, like starting from when it first was founded. Paint, car, and train parts, rubber, canning, it was all in Emeryville, baby. But being a manufacturing center comes with some ugly side effects, chief among them being industrial waste.

Corporations tend not to be the best stewards of the land, especially in the early 20th century when most of this manufacturing was happening, so that waste would end up dumped in the ocean or on the ground, either accidentally, intentionally, or maybe a little bit of both. So by the 70s, manufacturing was moving out of the U.S., and mostly all that was left in Emeryville was empty buildings and various toxic wastes that manufacturing left behind, So much so that a Slate article I read while researching this said that green goo would sometimes seep out of the ground when people were building stuff in Emery spending money to clean stuff up, either through Superfund sites or grants to smaller programs. And one of those smaller programs is where cheese enters the picture. But first I got to talk about chrome plating, which is a process that I don't entirely understand.

Where a metal object is placed in a solution of chromium, which is a hard, rust-proof, shiny element, to plate that object in chromium, thus making the object hard, shiny, and rust-proof. The type of chromium used in electroplating is called hexavalent chromium, which is really water-soluble, but it's also a dangerous carcinogen and really good at seeping into groundwater, which makes it a high-priority chemical for the EPA when it comes to cleaning stuff up. And in Emeryville, there's a parcel of land that used to be home to a chrome plating factory. And even though there weren't any major reported spills of hexavalent chromium from the factory, the soil was still rotten with the stuff and it was seeping into the groundwater, which is not good. In 2004, a project was funded to clean the land and three solutions

were proposed the first was to wait for the chromium to break down which would take like forever i think the second was to dig up and incinerate all of the contaminated dirt which was crazy expensive and the third was to pump 15 000 gallons of cheese way into the ground and the cheese was the answer so while hexavalent chromium is super soluble trivalent chromium is not because of electrons i think or something yeah so the more electrons that are available to chromium the more likely it is to take its trivalent form which are more stable and less toxic and soluble than hexavalent And something with a whole lot of electrons to give, apparently, is organic soil matter created by the life processes of soil-dwelling bacteria.

So, just like probiotic yogurt helps the bacteria in your belly, the cheese whey, which was pumped into the ground via several wells, helped bacteria in this contaminated soil flourish, poop, and breathe and do all that stuff to make organic compounds that expedited the trivalentization of the chromium and really i think they could have pumped any pumpable food into the ground probably like yogurt or whatever like you know like your belly but cheeseway was picked because it was really cheap and there was a place really close that was making lots of cheeseway so they said why not however much to my extreme frustration i couldn't actually find like a newer article than 2004

basically about this and how it worked out but this is a process that's used in other soil remediation efforts where it's reduced hazardous chemicals by up to 90 in three months but if you pumped if you are somebody who pumped cheese into the ground in emeryville california in 2004 please contact us and tell us if it worked i love that i don't how do they get the cheese in the ground just they just had a big tank and they drilled a bunch of holes and they put hoses in it and they pumped it into the ground and i want to see it so bad i was gonna say you said that it was because of electrons. And I was going to say, well, you could say that for everything.

But Ceres kind of like, I was like, you probably said that for Ceres fact. But then I was like, not really. Like, MRIs are one of the few things that's actually about protons. Oh. Gorgeous. Like, electrons aren't that involved in MRIris which is wild very unusual but ultimately if i'm gonna choose and i have to i gotta go with the just pumping a bunch of cheese into the ground hank will you send me around to super fun sites all over the world or all over the country oh

that would be an amazing show. I could be Super Fun Sam. I could say, wow. Super Fun Sam. Yeah. Did you say Super Fun? No, I didn't say Super Fun. Unfortunately, really not. All right.

Well, I'm going to give Sam, I'll say five Hank bucks for that and Sari, I'll give three. Are we tied? I think you win, Sam. Oh, you're right. I had one from the first game. Yeah.

Yes. And that means that it's time to ask the science couch where we ask a listener question to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. RedLocker on Discord asked, What makes cheese addictive to humans? Is it some part of the cheese itself or my own developing sense of self-control? I mean, I think that the thing that makes cheese addictive is the fact that it's got sugar and fat and salt.

And that's what we want. We want sugar and fat and salt. But is there something special about cheese that this question is referring to? Or is that just anything that's like that? I don't know. There's ongoing conversation about addictiveness and food. But you probably shouldn't be talking about food as addictive but certainly you can uh that you can develop uh a thing where you are have an unhealthy relationship and also there is a thing where there are certain foods that we eat more than we otherwise would because of their like their flavor mostly like because of the

things that they're made up of and you can sort of design a food to be the right mix of salty, fat, and sweet. And you're like, I ate a bag of Doritos just now, and I loved it. So I think the root of this question or the root of a lot of the is cheese addictive phrasing, there was a bunch of popular science articles that came out around the year 2015 because there was a study published called which foods may be addictive the roles of processing fat content and glycemic load and so the study came in two two parts one where they surveyed 120 undergraduates at the university of michigan and two they found 398 participants on mechanical turk which is the amazon product where you can get paid like 50 cents five cents whatever for answering the question they basically gave these people

surveys about what foods made them feel like they couldn't stop eating or like they regretted it afterwards and they mapped those feelings onto like food, quote unquote, food addiction. Like Hank was saying, that's not really the most accurate way to describe it. Like addiction is a very specific set of criteria when it comes to certain drugs or toxins like alcohol or things like that, that psychologically you become dependent on. Food, you need it to survive. Like you need to eat. Yeah. And so you can get cravings for things. And maybe there's like complicated emotions around certain foods. This is why I think we talk about it as addiction because you have the same,

a lot of the same pathways in the brain, like the reward pathways. But I think that it's mostly like we need to like, we, you don't want to talk about food addiction because food is necessary and is like, and is a normal part of life, unlike cigarettes or alcohol or gambling or something. And the findings from the study, as they hypothesized, such as highly processed foods with added fat, refined carbohydrates, and additional salt appeared to be most associated with these behavioral indicators. So the top-ranked foods, one through nine, were chocolate, ice cream, French fries,

pizza, cookie, singular chips, floral cake, popcorn, buttered cheeseburger. And that was like, Ooh,

great. Great foods. Um, and so all, a lot of like articles were like, Oh, cheese, like cheese is Canadian cheese.

Singles are all these things are like these highly processed foods and so like you're you're addicted to cheese um but that's like not what the study was saying and it's kind of a classic case of especially in the nutrition space i think people like to make sweeping conclusions about what other people should or shouldn't eat like a subset of this the rabbit hole that I fell down is this idea that casein, that milk protein that is like 80% of the proteins in cow's milk, when you metabolize casein, and there's several different types of casein, but specifically like one of them that's found in cow's milk turns into a compound called casomorphin. And casomorphins are a class of compound that fall into the category

of opioids and because it's an opioid then of course people make that connection almost immediately of opioid addiction the problem is is like the opioid system in your body exists as it is like neurotransmitters your brain naturally makes are opioids that enable communication between your neurons, help your body communicate things like pain or pleasure or memory or like the movements of your digestive system, contractions and like constipation or diarrhea, like all of those are opioids. And so it makes sense that a digested compound from milk, which is also something that's in the human body would then interact with the opioid system because you have to digest the food and there's a wave of

people who are in like the nutrition space who are like we're going to try and link casomorphins or there's evidence that casomorphins are linked to diabetes and heart attacks and like too much eating cheese or dairy products in general. Whereas the reviews I found one from 2009 from the European Food Safety Authority and one from 2023 from like a Sao Paulo, New Zealand team where they're just like, we don't know. Like we haven't studied case ofomorphin in humans enough and like sure if you isolate a bunch of it and inject it into animals then it will you might see signs of addictive behaviors or like weird biological effects but that's because it's such a wildly high concentration and injected directly into the bloodstream but we don't know how it interacts in humans and also the people who are having digestive problems because of it or health problems because of it might just be like lactose intolerant. Like let's consider

that maybe. One thing I have learned about human bodies doing research on cancer is that we are really good, really good at processing chemicals in our bodies and like dealing with them way better than I think most people assume even like obvious carcinogens, like uranium in the air, like our bodies are fairly good at dealing with. And I'm like, if I, if we can do that,

not that there's a lot of uranium in the air. I mean, people who are like downwind of accidents and disasters. Super fun. Sam, inhaling all that uranium. like downwind of accidents and disasters. What? Superfund Sam. Inhaling all that uranium. I'll be okay when I'm out there on the job site. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, follow us on Twitter and on threads at SciShow Tangents,

where we will be sending out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Sid, just a guy on Discord, at SolokHolmes on YouTube, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that.

First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents to become a patron and get access to things like our Discord bonus episodes and maybe our Minions commentary, which might be being released quite soon. If it hasn't even already, I don't know when this episode's coming. Possible.

Also, shout out to patron Les Ager for their support. Second, you can lose a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert. Tell people about us. producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And we couldn't make any of this, of course, without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. All around us, there are tiny, sometimes microscopic arachnids called mites, and certain species munch on the moldy rinds of aged wheels of cheese, like parmesan or the fungal veins in blue cheese. And you know you have an infestation of mites when you find dust around your cheese with the buildup of their exoskeletons, dead bodies, and of course, poop. So in many cases, cheesemakers try to protect their food from these pests.

But at least two types of cheese are actually intentionally aged with a colony of mites, the French cheese Mimolette and the German cheese Mittelbittenkasse, which translates to mite cheese. That's the German way of naming stuff. These cheeses have a characteristic lemon-like flavor, and that comes from a compound that is secreted

by the mites from their abdominal glands. At least the flavor isn't from their poop. But realistically, you're probably going to be eating some of that too. Yeah, you're probably always eating. I'm probably eating that right now. Yeah, it's not true that you eat a bunch of spiders every year, but it is true that you eat a bunch of mites every year.

It just seems like they're going to get in there. Spiders George is actually eating mites. He's actually beennids this whole time it turns out yeah spiders spiders georg eats a lot of mites but so do you he just eats a normal amount