SciShow Tangents - Meat

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Meat... seems pretty simple on the surface, but what do we really know about it? Like.. are living things made of meat? Or is meat only meat once it's being eaten? What was the first meat? What was the first thing to eat the first meat? Is eating prehistoric meat a good idea? Do we find the answer to any of these questions in this episode? I can't remember, frankly, but probably a few.  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: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links: [Truth or Fail] Foal https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-extracted-liquid-blood-42000-year-old-foal-found-siberian-permafrost-180971979/ Bison https://www.uaf.edu/museum/press/spotlight/blue-babe/ https://historythings.com/aged-beef-delicacy-eating-meat-36000-year-old-bison/ https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-bison-stew-blue-babe-alaska Crocodile https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-egyptians-hunted-then-mummified-crocodiles-180973197/ [Fact Off] Carnivorous Herbivores https://bioone.org/journals/Northwestern-Naturalist/volume-99/issue-3/NWN18-05.1/Scavenging-By-Snowshoe-Hares-iLepus-americanusi-In-Yukon-Canada/10.1898/NWN18-05.1.short https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-herbivores-arent-poor-chicken-got-eaten-cow-180951115/ https://bioone.org/journals/Northwestern-Naturalist/volume-99/issue-3/NWN18-05.1/Scavenging-By-Snowshoe-Hares-iLepus-americanusi-In-Yukon-Canada/10.1898/NWN18-05.1.short https://www.outdoornews.com/2015/03/19/who-knew-tape-shows-deer-raiding-birds-nests/ Dyeing Salmon https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=738 https://nextnature.net/2012/06/dyeing-salmon-pink-for-farms-and-profit https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/The-salmon-struggle-A-fish-by-any-other-color-is-1115339.php [Ask the Science Couch] Gamey meat https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309174015301376 https://extension.umn.edu/preserving-and-preparing/cooking-venison-flavor-and-safety https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6154429/ https://bastyr.edu/news/general-news-health-tips-spotlight-1/2015/08/why-choose-grass-fed-meat http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.361.2312&rep=rep1&type=pdf [Butt One More Thing] Pork butt https://www.southernliving.com/bbq/why-is-it-called-boston-butt https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/22382/how-9-cuts-meat-got-their-names

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Today as always, I am joined by Stefan Chayden. Yo. What's your tagline? Some hot sauces are too damn hot. I agree. Sam Schultz is also here.

Hey. Sam, what's your tagline? Skeleton bones. That's a little redundant. I guess not. Like, a bone can be, if you just, like, took my leg, it's bones. I don't make value judgments on any of your catchphrases. Sorry.

Sari Riley is here as well. Sari, what's your tagline? Wet egg bad. I actually think a wet egg's fine. Depends. Wow, now you guys are judging Sari's tagline. A dry egg sounds horrible. I got mayo on a sandwich when I asked for no mayo.

That's like the specific wet egg that I don't like. Everybody likes mayo, though. Yeah. No, lots of people don specific way that I don't like. Everybody likes mayo though. Yeah. No, lots of people don't and I don't get it. It's so weird. It's just like, like if mayo has a seasoning in it, then it's fine. But if it's just like. If it's an aioli.

Yeah. If it's an aioli, it's cross the line to fine. But if it's just mayo, then it's goopy. It's taking up space on my sandwich. It makes it taste slimy and bad. Agree to disagree. And I'm Hank Green. My tagline is Motion Picture Association of America.

Wow. This podcast is very PG-13. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We play for glory. We also keep score with sandbox. We do everything we can to stay on topic. Keep score with Sambucks. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but if you go on a tangent, which you probably will,

we can deem whether it is worthy or not and dock you a Sambuck if it's not. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. From a tender age, I loved a tender, that warm and crispy crunchy treat of fast food splendor. That bite-sized chicken meat, no matter the vendor, whether round or long or dinosaur, I thought it was going to be, each nugget I eat, I dream of meat. If that's the topic of today's episode. That would have been good. That would have been better. That would have been better. You're right. Yeah. God, good. That would have been better. That would have been better. Rewrite it.

Yeah. God, I do love a chicken nugget or a chicken tender or any fried chicken. Do you feel silly when you order chicken strips at a restaurant? Hell no. You know, sometimes if it's a place that's like, here's the menu and here's the kids section chicken tenders. And I'm like, but if you got them for the kids, you got them for the grownups. It's my constitutional right.

Sari, what's meat? It's flesh. Yeah. But for eating. Yeah. No, it's edible.

For eating. For eating. Well, is it still meat when it's on my bone and I'm alive and I'm moving? You're in, you're alive. Yeah. Like, do you look out at a pasture of

cows and be like ah meat not not really and when i google bodybuilding photos i i might say he looks meaty but i don't think of his you know what a big beefy boy and this you're like well-developed calves look very steak like but i still like I don't think of it as meat. No, I don't think of it as meat, but that doesn't mean it's not meat. So what's meat? That's what I'm saying. It's just like edible flesh. But also, within the umbrella of meat, there's dark meat and light meat, which are different kinds of muscle.

There are variety meats or offal, which are different kinds of muscle. There are variety meats or offal, which are the entrails and internal organs. There's lab-grown meat, which is muscle tissue that people just grow in petri dishes. You could eat something that is still alive when you eat it, too. Yeah, you could. So is it meat the minute what? The minute it rips? Yeah, I think that's it. Do bugs have meat? Yeah, they got meat. think that's it. Do bugs have meat?

Yeah, they got meat. A bug's meat? A bug's meat? A bug's meat. You can tell with words like meat and flesh that they're just sort of of an era. Flesh is definitely, I looked it up, it's very German. But it sounds very German. Flesh. but it sounds very german flesh meat is also european-ish but middle english meta dutch

meaning food nourishment sustenance but it also in middle english meant any sort of food so like vegetables were called green meat and white meat was a dairy food or product so like everything was meat that's basically that's basically arby's do you want some white meat on your meat with some bread meat you can have some clear meat that's water so meat is defined purely basically by the fact that it is food there is no other non-colloquial way to talk about meat. I don't think so. I think it's because it is defined by its relationship to and usefulness to humans.

Right. Apologies to the vegetarians today. We might be reinforcing that they want to be vegetarians too. Right. And maybe convincing some other people. Because meat's pretty gross. It's super gross. You think about it objectively and it's like we need to stop this it's bad in all kinds of different ways take up space treat animals horribly right what was the

first meat a fish right is that right though yeah i think so like the first what does that mean like the thing first thing and a person ate but if an animal eats another animal, they're eating meat, right? Yeah, that's true. So I guess what was the first thing that ate? Where does that line get crossed? You have to have bones for there to be meat? Yeah, might as well have some bacteria. Is that meat?

Bacteria is not an animal, is it? I mean. So I guess it was the first, whatever the first multicellular organism was. Was the first meat. No, because it's probably a plant. Ugh. My bad. Write to us on Twitter. What do you think the first meat was? Was the first meat. No, because it's probably a plant. Ugh. My bad. Write to us on Twitter.

What do you think the first meat was? And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but two of those facts are big old stinking fakes. The other panelists have to figure out which is the true fact,

and if we do, we get a Sam Buck. If not, then Sam gets the Sam Buck because it's Sam this week. Tell me your facts. First, a little story. Okay. First, tell me a little story. The New York-based scientific society, the Explorers Club, held a dinner in 1951 during which mammoth meat was allegedly served. A member who couldn't attend the dinner had a friend steal a chunk of the meat

so it could be displayed in a museum. In 2006, a couple of Yale students tested the DNA of that meat and found that it was actually green sea turtle meat and that the guy who provided the mammoth meat in 1951 was lying about it being mammoth meat. So that is true. Yes, that is true.

There has been, however, at least one example of scientists eating an ancient preserved animal. So which one of these is it? Oh my God, scientists, stop. Everyone's reputation is on the line. A 36,000-year-old frozen bison cooked into a bison stew. A 42,000-year-old frozen fo frozen full its shank braised and seasoned with wild herbs our number three a 2 000 year old mummified crocodile its salt preserved meat

eaten like jerky they didn't preserve it it was preserved 2 000 years found mummified preserved still yes and they were just like let's taste this not? We got too many of these crocodiles. Let's crack one open. One of these was an actual meat eaten by scientists. A 36,000-year-old frozen bison in a stew, a 42,000-year-old frozen foal braised with wild herbs, or a 2,000-year-old mummified crocodile that was salt-preserved so it was just eaten the way that it was. They didn't have to prepare it at all. They were just like brush off the dirt. Still good. Jerky. I like this wild herbs thing

because this feels like what they'd do. They'd be like, how would you cook a foal if you were a 42,000 year old bog man? That is how scientists talk. I hope they don't listen. Same with the stew, where it's just like, I don't know, boil it. If you're going to cook old-ass meat, stew is the way to do it.

That's right. But braising something is a form of boiling it, also, in a way. Is braising boiling? You simmer it in a sauce. Did they have sauce 30-whatever thousand years ago? Yeah, sauce is a natural byproduct. Yeah, sauce happens. You will heat meat up.

Sauce happens? There's nothing to go on here. It feels like all these are equally possible. They found honey that's lasted 2,000 years. I don't know if jerky. I mean, I think it could. Like, if you are making something unpalatable to microorganisms that is one way of it not degrading but if it's over that time palatable to microorganisms all kinds of things are unpalatable to microorganisms pickles you can't

eat a mummy can you eat a mummy somebody ate a mummy a mummy? Somebody ate a mummy, right? Oh, I don't know. Mummy eating was a thing in the Victorian era. Yeah, you're right. It was like a medicine. Right, they grind it up and put it on their plank steaks. I said plank steaks, but I just want to say I don't know that that's a thing. A plank steak. It is a plank steak.

The plank steaks are just the wood that they ate back in the Victorian age. Yeah, we have plank steaks because we were really hungry. Yeah, we're too poor for plank steaks. Tree meat. I'm going to guess the jerky one because one of my favorite things is bog butter, which is like butter that they would bury in bogs and lasted for hundreds of years because it's wet and cold. I would not eat it.

Well, no, I like butter. I don't like mayonnaise. Yeah, but blog butter is not butter. It's not the butter that you know and love. It's rancid. Yeah. It's been through a process. I'm going to go.

So these two first ones are frozen. And I just don't know that there would be a frozen horse 42,000 years ago. I know that there were horses back then, and I know they probably lived in places that froze, but not like for a long time. I feel like bison have a better chance of being frozen for a long time. So I'm going to say bison. I'm just going with my gut, my first instinct. Stew's the way to do. My answer is number one.

Okay, so we've got two bison and one crocodile. It was the bison. Yes! Oh, God. I was nervous making. Blue Babe was the name of the bison. You didn't have to name the bison that you ate. Blue Babe was a step bison discovered in Alaska in 1979.

He had been killed quickly by a lion and insta-frozen, is what they think had happened somehow. While he was buried, his skin was covered with blue vivianite crystals. So that's why they called him Blue Babe, because he was blue. And in 1984, as the team of scientists that were prepping him for display at the University of Alaska were finishing up, they noticed that they had some chunks of meat left that they were still frozen after they found it. And so the last night that they were working on him, they had a party where they made step bison stew with vegetables in it. And it reportedly tasted okay, but a lot like dirt. So they didn't finish the pot of stew.

You didn't finish the stew? Come on. The foal, they did find a frozen foal in 2019. He was preserved so well that they could extract liquid blood and urine from it. It was 42,000 years old, the oldest liquid blood sample ever. And they found it in Siberia, and they're trying to clone it, but they're not doing a good job. And they're not eating it. They didn't eat it. Yeah, as far as we know. Well, maybe they did. They might find some chunks

left over afterward. Or make blood pudding or whatever. Meringue. That's true. Blood aioli. And then the alligator thing. Ancient Egyptians mummified all kinds of stuff, including alligators. And some of the alligator mummies have their last meals in their belly that nobody's ever eaten one of them though but

they found 2 000 year old beef jerky in china in 2012 but it was really nasty and they didn't try to eat it well how did they know it was nasty if they didn't that's true i don't know well how do you tell if something is not like have you ever ever opened the fridge and been like, this was a bad, this isn't food anymore. Well, that's my facts. That was very good, Sam. Thank you. Old meat. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then the fact off. Welcome back, everybody.

Sandbook Totals is very easy to report that we are all tied with exactly one. That's nice. But Stefan and I have a chance to rack some points up. Oh, God. Okay. That was like a vocal dab. Sometimes mispronouncing words is funny and sometimes it's a vocal dab.

You're 40. So get ready now for the fact off. Two panelists have brought in science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. And you, presentees, each have a sandbuck to award to the fact that you like the most and it is me versus stefan we're going to decide who goes first with the following question according to the food and agriculture organization of the united nations which is the most widely eaten meat in the world accounting for 36% of world meat intake.

We want to go on three? Okay. One, two, three. Cows. You're both wrong. Chickens. Sheep. Fish.

Lobster. There's another animal you're missing. There's another animal? Pigs. Yeah. Like there are no more animals. It's all of them. Human flesh.

Oh, pigs. Well, good for them. Human flesh. Oh, pigs. Well, good for them. I guess not, actually. They would disagree, yeah. Definitely bad for them. So, I guess I will just go ahead and go second. Okay, you go. Okay.

So, my fact today is about animals that eat meat. You might know what they're called. Herbivores. What? So apparently classifications of animals mean absolutely nothing. I mean, they do mean something. So herbivores generally are animals that have physical adaptations that allow them to eat and digest plant matter.

So specialized teeth or specialized stomachs, those kinds of things. But while they primarily eat plant matter, that doesn't mean that they only eat plants. We've observed a number of species eating meat or other animal products. And there are a bunch of videos that have made the rounds online of like a deer eating a baby bird or a cow just like straight up nomming on a baby chicken. So it's kind of disturbing. I laughed. You saw these videos?

No, but just like the idea of them. Yeah, it is hilarious to think of a cow just being like, well. Like eating grass and it just doesn't stop. Yeah. But there's also been some research into this. So one team had cameras set up in Canada, I think for a different reason, but they had observed snowshoe hares scavenging meat. And so they intentionally, quote, deployed carcasses. So they put 161 carcasses around Canada.

Deploy the carcass. And they found that the hares had scavenged about 12.4% of them from a variety of different species, including other hares. So they were not above eating their own species. Yeah, sure. And they ate lynx meat, which is their main predator. And they were also seen eating grouse feathers, I assume, like, intentionally,

not just, like, as a byproduct of sticking your head inside the carcasses of a grouse. And they think that maybe they were just trying to get protein from that, but I don't know. And another study in North Dakota

had cameras set up watching bird nests and had seen a bunch of different predators stealing eggs and whatnot from the nests. But they said that white-tailed deer put some other predators to shame with how much they were raiding these nests for eggs

and grabbing baby birds right out of the nests. No! Put your nests higher up. Deer can't climb trees. Yeah, use your wings, birds. Come on. So scientists think this might just be happening because of how hard it is to find food in the winters, like just wings, birds. Come on. So scientists think this might just be happening because of how hard it is to find food in the winters,

like just general food scarcity. Or in the deer's case, they might be looking for specific nutrients to help grow their antlers. I guess they've also seen like a lot of deer gnawing on different bones. But it seems to happen pretty frequently. And it could just be a thing

that many herbivores occasionally do because there's an opportunity to do it. And why not get some extra calories? It's much easier to get calories from meat than from grass. Like grass, you need special adaptations. Like a lion can't get or a human can't get energy from grass. But like proteins are part of what you're digesting when you're digesting plant matter. And they're not that different in meat than they are in plants.

It's just that they're a little bit cuter. They did point out that deer, because of the teeth adapted for eating plants, they can't get through skin very well. So that's like... Gotta go through the defenseless things. Yeah, or just scavenging corpses or stuff. Maybe if deer had some teeth, they be attacking that could be fun um well that's i'm sure that's what how how carnivores happened there were some deer and then there was one that was like my teeth are pretty sharp i should go ahead and eat jeff

do they know anything about like the gut bacteria? Because I imagine that eating corpses is not the most pleasant thing for the tum. I don't know. It was mostly the hairs that I saw that were eating that were scavenging from the corpses and all the other things that I saw were about

like various things eating live small birds mostly. Yeah. So it was like very fresh rabbits are not rodents right they're lagomorphs okay which is close to it because they like eat their babies too sometimes don't they yeah that's true i mean a lot of rodents do that where it's like well but i guess a lot of rodents are also like not necessarily just vegetarian or whatever correct yeah do we just classify rabbits? Is that too quick, you think?

It just seems like almost any herbivore will be a carnivore. Will like eat meat sometimes when given the opportunity. It's just hard to get meat usually. But like you said, it seems like, Sari said it seems like they would maybe suffer the same fate that we do when we eat raw meat. Like there would just be something wrong in there. Well, but not if you have it real fresh.

Yeah, I guess you're right. What's that? Tartare or something like that? Yeah. Okay, everybody. So, salmon. What's... It's a fish.

It's a fish, but it's also a color. Oh. Pink. And salmon is so connected with the color pink that if salmon is not pink or pink enough,

people will be less interested in purchasing it. Now, it turns out that salmon become pink because of their diet of krill and shrimp. So these krill and shrimp have pigments called carotenoids, which carrots also have, which is why they're called carotenoids, particularly the red-orange pigment astaxanthin. But most of our salmon now, if you go to the store, comes from farms. It's not wild caught. And those do not eat krill. They eat kibble that's made of mashed up fish and chicken

fat and a bunch of other stuff that they put into pellets and then they put it in there. And that's what they eat. And if they just ate the kibble without anything in there, the meat would be white-ish, a little bit pink because they're like a big strong fish, but definitely not like the pink of salmon. And what they find is that people do not like to shop for white salmon. So as much as 15 to 20 percent of a salmon farmer's food budget goes to astaxanthin that is added to their food. So that astaxanthin supplement can come from two places. It can come from ground-up shrimp, or it can be synthesized. So you take petrochemicals and you do science to it, and you make astaxanthin, and then you put that into the salmon feed. The people who make

astaxanthin have of course done a bunch of studies to figure out how much a variety of pinkness is worth to the average consumer and so they actually have a tool called the salmo fan that's like uh it's like the you know like the color swatches that you get when you're painting your room yeah and you hold it up it's like a fan and you fan it out and you hold it up to the salmon and you can see where on the pinkness scale this salmon falls. And if it's below a 26,

people will not buy it at any price. Okay. But it is functionally tastes exactly... It's the same. Now, there might be some health benefits to astaxanthin, but it's very minimal. And it doesn't change the taste at all. It is just about the color. And even when told that it's just about the color, people will not

buy salmon that is not pink, except that there is a species of salmon, the king salmon, that occasionally has a mutation and it makes it a white king. So 5% of wild Alaskan king salmon aren't able to process the pigments and that makes them white. And so these were popular with natives because they were rare and they were like, this is like a cool, like we caught a special one. But for a long time, they were sold for a lot less because people, there was this like pink thing. long time they were sold for a lot less because people there was this like pink thing but now people have like caught on that they're special so wild white salmon are worth more now whereas farmed white salmon are unmentionably bad to the point where they spend tons of money basically dying the salmon pink from the inside humans are so dumb humans are so dumb

like i i think i would do i would be more inclined to buy pink salmon i don't give a shit about salmon who why who has conditioned me to care so much about this i don't it's just what salmon is like salmon is pink that's there's a color in the crayola crayon box called salmon i did know about the color thing, that they added color to farm-raised salmon because I used to, once upon a time, worked in a meat department. Oh, yeah. Right, right, right. That was a fact that came up. You should have told us

what meat was at the beginning. Yeah. No, so you have meat expertise. Meat and music. Those are the things you know. These are the two things I thought. I had a false sense of security going into research for this episode because I was like, I worked in a meat department. I thought I had a false sense of security going into research for this episode because I was like, I worked in a meat department. I know something about meat. This is going to be easy. And I had

such a hard time finding things. Caitlin called it classic meat department swagger. Can I write a little bit about the same thing happening just with regular cuts of meat? Like they put a chemical into, is this true? They put a chemical in with the, when they air seal the meat to keep it

pink longer, even though it doesn't matter if it's not pink, like but people won't buy it once it's even a little bit not pink. You can treat kind of sad looking meat with carbon monoxide and then it freshens it right up That sounded not true to me because I can't picture a grocery store having a bunch of carbon monoxide

It wouldn't happen in the store. That's probably for the best. Yeah. So we've got herbivores that are eating meat and we've got dying fish pink from the inside. Are you guys ready to cast your votes? Three, two, one. Pink. Hey, I'm coming back, boys.

Sorry, Stefan. That's Stefan. I knew about the deers already, though. I hadn't yet pictured a cow grazing along and hitting a chick and just being like, yes, thank you. There was one report of a cow in India that ate like 48 chicks that someone

had observed. It just kept going. Farm animals need to all be friends with each other. Yeah. Have you read Animal Farm? Yeah. It's a bad book. And now it's time to ask the science couch.

We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at Tim Robinson 21 who asks, why do wild animals taste gamey while farm animals do not? I have no idea what gamey even means. I've eaten plenty of wild harvested animals, but they've all tasted good to me. But they taste different than farm animals, do they? Yeah, but so do like different animals. Like cow tastes different from a pig, tastes from a chicken frogs taste different from gators

when i was in florida i had the option to have like gator strips or something but they were more expensive than chicken strips and did not sound appetizing yeah Yeah, they're worse. Anyway, gamey, I haven't tasted it either, but it's described as more metallic or livery. There's like a qualitative taste difference between wild animals, which is like bitter or sour or like not bland. And then bland farm animals. You saying that those animals all taste differently, there is a quality of any wild meat that I've eaten that is not something I've ever tasted in any kind of farmed meat, which is just like metallic flavor. But like if you had, because normally it's like you're looking at like an animal that we don't have domestic versions of, right? Like are there comparisons between like a wild cow and a domestic cow? Right.

Are there comparisons between a wild cow and a domestic cow? Yes, because there's grass-fed beef versus grain-fed beef, and there are qualitative differences between those meat according to people who taste meat and have those refined tastes. So is it about their diet? Because we just feed boring sugar to all of these animals that we farm? So the real reason, as with any sort of smell or taste, is chemicals. So part of that is from what they eat because what they eat goes into the fatty acids. And like the fat is the specific flavor compound of the flesh.

So more grain fed cows have oleic, linoleic and omega-6 fatty acids. So those are fatty acids that are polyunsaturated, so they have double bonds with them. And then specifically, there is a double bond six atoms away from the methyl group. This is interesting to chemists only. I thought this was wild.

We were like, omega-3 means something besides just like mystic fish oil. It actually means you have information about the chemical structure. But then in grass-fed beef or other gamey meats, there is specifically higher alpha-linolenic acid, which across lots of studies like of African animals that have been eaten and cows and other things contributes to a gamey or fishy or grassy, that sort of like weird flavor. Flavor, yeah. Which is mostly just perceived as weird because we're used to so many farmed animals. So it's partially diet.

It's partially just like the amount of exercise they get. So like dark meat is described as more gamey than light meat. And so wild animals are more gamey than light meat and so wild animals are more gamey than domestic animals just because they move around more and so they have more myoglobin yeah and i imagine the muscles are more vasculated yeah and they have less intramuscular fat so in grain-fed beef and domesticated animals there's more fat throughout their body, which makes it more tender. And then there's less in wild animals, which makes it a little bit tougher to eat. And then there's some evidence that like the stress can affect it as well.

So in cows, I think they've noticed dark cutting meat, which are like darker than dark meat, which changes the flavor to be more sour and bitter so they live stressful lives yeah or like if you stress them out before they die like if they're like living their life grazing in pastures and then you like shove them into a dark space or like scare them i don't know how you scare a cow well i mean you probably shouldn't imagine going into a slaughterhouse yeah yeah pretty Yeah, pretty scary. Meat literature. Very few and far between. There's a niche? Yeah, it's a niche.

Yeah, because that was all about taste, and a lot of it is really subjective. In a couple review articles I read, no literature is available on volatile aroma compounds. So, like, smell of gamey. We don't know why some meat smells gamey and why some chemicals but like which ones just put it through the gcms spec yeah come on no one's easy no one's doing it we need to know about meat smells we need to do some science it feels like it would be pretty easy to do here montana where there's meat all over probably a lot of scientists who hunt yeah like i read blogs of hunters to do research it it. It was very weird. It was like an alternate universe of people who do things to meat that...

That you haven't done. That I haven't done, yes. Because I consume largely farm animal meat and I'm trying to consume less meat. This is where I found the most anecdotal evidence and the least scientific papers, which makes sense, I think, but maybe Montana scientists can do it. Like the preparation of the meat has a lot to do with its gaminess. And from what I could tell is that there's something that you're supposed to do when you hunt to like put the corpse immediately like on cold stuff, like to immediately cool it down or

immediately treat it in some way right field dressing is what i saw it called yeah and depending on how well you do that and like what you do can influence the gaminess of the meat and so like before we had good mass refrigeration techniques and things like that, or even if you just don't do this, gaminess is associated with spoiling. So some lipid oxidation happens during cooking, but some happens when it's just like sitting there and it can make a sour or like more tender, but more sour meat. If you want to ask the Science Couch, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to

NewsWithPew, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. That's a good name. Same book, final scores. Sari, Sam, and Stefan are tied with one. I have three. Which is good, because I was...

You were tied with me. I'm tied with you. No, you're not anymore. If you like this show and you want to help us out, you can do that in a bunch of ways. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. Also, it's good for those iTunes charts, I think, maybe. I think it's the only thing that's good for them.

Review, please. And you can also leave your topic ideas for future episodes there. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode or tell us what was the first meet. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sarah Riley. I've been Stephen Sheen. And I've been Sam Schultz.

SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this

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. The cut of meat called pork butt or Boston butt is not actually butt. It's shoulder. Come on.

Why do we name it that? Old meat department over here. We don't really know. The name is kind of a mystery. Mental Floss says butchers used to cut off shoulders, which were less prized cuts, pack them into barrels called butts, which is how they got their name. But it could also just be using butt more generically as a big chunk of something. It's like a bit, but with a U. Like a bit is a little bit.

A butt is a lot. It's like a roundish protrusion. Yeah. Well, the shoulder is kind of the butt of the arms. Don't start this kind of thing.