Stuff You Should Know - How Ketchup Works

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

Little-known fact: Ketchup, possibly the most all-American of condiments, evolved from fermented fish sauce people in Southeast Asia have been making for more than a thousand years. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer, Noel. This is Stuff You Should Know. I hate ketchup. Do you really? Yeah. Really?

Yeah. Do you like tomato sauce? Like pasta? Sure. Love it. Do you like tomato soup? Don't love it. I'll choke it down, though.

So I'm starting to see a spectrum emerge here. Oh, yeah, I don't go for raw tomato much. Well. Love cooked pasta sauce. Yeah. But I'm a mayonnaise guy at heart, so if we're talking condiments. You know, one thing about the Dorito effect

that it kind of ruined me a little bit on food, like I'll be like, oh, this is a good tomato. And then some part of my brain's like, yeah, well, it's not a 1940s tomato. You don't know what a good tomato is. Oh. What do you mean, like a Jersey tomato versus just some other stupid tomato?

No, supposedly, just the agricultural production in the US is so homogenized now that we've lost all these great heirloom varieties of especially tomato and the stuff that most people get that are tomatoes are just no good compared to how they used to be. Oh, you hit up a farmer's market. Sure, but even still. Grow that junk yourself.

Right, there you go. Or build a time machine, take the way back machine and get some tomatoes. Yeah, we got that at our disposal, what's your problem? I'm just cheap, I don't like to spend it on that. Oh, the gas, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's funny, Chuck, that you like mayonnaise

because did you know, did you know before this, I should say, that the number one condiment for sales-wise in the United States is mayonnaise? I did not know that. And when I saw that, that surprised me, A, and it surprised me, B, that it was that much more than ketchup. I figured ketchup would be far and away the winner because I always feel like the ultimate weirdo

for not liking ketchup. So what is it about ketchup you don't like? The taste. Oh, OK. That's a pretty good reason not to like it. I'm not wild about vinegar-based things. Oh, yeah. I do like balsamic vinegar, but a lot

of the other vinegars I'm not crazy about. That's one of the reasons I don't like pickled things. Right. But it's a vinegar-based things. It's really sweet. Then I don't love a sweet condiments. Have you ever had curry ketchup? No, I don't eat ketchup.

Oh, I see. And then when I was a kid, I can't lie. It probably grossed me out a little bit because I cut your mom bathing in it. Yeah, I was. Oh, my God. Oh, that's disturbing. The blood thing, I probably thought it grossed me out

because we would use it as blood for play acting and things. So yeah, just not into it. Those are some solid reasons to not like ketchup. Plus, I don't know if people would probably argue that ketchup and mayonnaise are great together. But once you're on the mayo train to mix up another condiment with it just doesn't make sense to me. I don't discriminate.

I like most, if not all, condiments. So ketchup, mayo, and mustard on a burger is good to you? Yes. Really? I can't. It's not like I can't eat it without it. I've actually found I can eat burgers without ketchup now. So I'm a grown up.

But I do like a little bit of ketchup on there, a little bit of mustard, and then yes, definitely mayo. Well, Emily loves ketchup so much that she calls French fries a ketchup delivery system. Yeah, that makes sense. They're a vehicle for it. Yeah. Tell her to try curry ketchup.

It'll knock her socks off. I totally will. I like curry. Yeah, but you don't like ketchup, so you wouldn't like this. But if she likes ketchup, even if she doesn't like curry, she may still like curry ketchup. No, she likes curry. Well, then she's going to love curry ketchup.

Yeah. So mayonnaise is the number one condiment in the United States. It's a big surprise, which must mean ketchup is number two. Yeah, which, oh, by the way, I'd mentioned how much more. I think it was about $2 billion to $800,000, almost like $800 million, which is more than double. That kind of surprised me. Yeah, it is very surprising.

And what's even more surprising is I was being facetious because ketchup isn't even the number two condiment in the United States, salsa is. That's right. Salsa had a big surge in the like 80s and 90s. That's because people like to say salsa. Now there's a handheld reference. Ketchup is number three, right?

Yeah. At least it's got mustard beet for Pete's sake. What is this? The EU, you know? Yet 97% of American households have a bottle of ketchup in there. Well, it says kitchens, but we'll get to the fridge, non-fridge thing later.

Sure. So yes, everybody loves ketchup, especially in America, because it's obviously an American invention. Everybody knows that John Wayne's grandfather invented ketchup while he was sailing his Ford truck down the Mississippi River. And one day, a magical bottle of Budweiser came and whispered the recipe in his ear.

And they commemorated the event by shooting off fireworks. I love it. And that's how ketchup was born. Everybody knows it, right? And fireworks. Right. Pretty neat. No, that's not true.

Although I take a little bit of issue with this, because ketchup was first created in Asia and China in about 544 CE. I should say I saw they think maybe the Chinese got it from the Vietnamese. Yeah, I saw that too. OK. But as you will see, these recipes that were originally

for preserving fish, they didn't have tomatoes at all. That came in America much later. But it's so not like ketchup. To me, you can't even trace it back and say, yep, that's ketchup. But it's the point in even linking these things. Because you can link them. That's the fascinating thing to me about it. It's like American ketchup.

What we think of as ketchup here in the States, like Heinz 57 stuff, right? It's a species that evolved, not Heinz 57 sauce, but Heinz ketchup. Oh, OK. What everybody thinks of as ketchup, right? It's a species that evolved from an ancestor that it can directly trace its lineage right back

to this ketchup in Asia. So much so that the word ketchup is an anglicization of either a melee word that was borrowed from the Cantonese or a Hokkien South China Fujian province word. Either way, it was something like katsu and it meant a fermented fish paste. It's like when you go to the store today

and you buy fish sauce. Yeah, I love it. That's the progenitor of ketchup. That's where ketchup came from. Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense. It's just, to me, it's changed so much. It's almost like you should just draw a line. And I guess that line would be pre-tomato and post-tomato.

I think, yeah. I think that's pretty fair to say, yeah, pre-tomato and post-tomato. You can definitely draw a line because if you look at Heinz ketchup bottles, it says clearly tomato ketchup. And there's this really great, I think it was a fast code design article by a guy named John Brownlee who points out, like, why would they even bother putting tomato on the label?

Of course, it's tomato ketchup, you idiot. And the reason is because that's a throwback to a time when ketchup didn't have tomato. And it had things like sardines and anchovies. Yeah. Well, not sardines, but anchovies. I thought there were sardines. You name it, and it was probably in ketchup at some point.

Right. So Asia, maybe Southeast Asia, maybe China, the Brits encountered this on some of their wild trips abroad. And as many things brought it home said, we love this stuff. Let's try and replicate it. And then in 1732 was one of the first published recipes in the UK ketchup in paste by Richard Bradley. Right, Rick Bradley.

Yeah, Ricky Bradley. And he did reference the East Indies as its origin. Yeah. But this is still pre-tomato. Sure, yeah, it was a very, pretty faithful recreation of the fish sauce that they found. And the Ketzi, I'm pretty sure that's how you say it. I'd be very interested to know how to pronounce it correctly.

But it was a faithful recreation of it, which was basically like preserved fish and a sort of brine with some spices thrown in. Maybe a little mace, some salt, some pepper, maybe something like lemon peel. And then left over. That sounds good to me. Yeah.

If you like fish sauce, you would love the original ketchup because it's basically the same thing, right? Well, I do like fish sauce, but you got to use it liberally, and it's only for certain things. Yeah. You know? Sure. You don't want to just go throwing fish sauce on everything.

I don't know, man. If you love fish sauce, it's like with ketchup. People will put ketchup on just about anything. Well, we'll get to that. So at first, the Brits are like, blimey. This is really good stuff. Boy, that's a good accent. But I'm not that big on anchovies.

What else can we replace it with? So they started making their own kind of offshoots of ketchup where they replace the anchovies with other stuff. Yeah. I mean, mushrooms, walnuts. What else? Elderberry? Yeah.

Oysters? Yeah. And what they were going for was that umami flavor. They didn't know it at the time because umami wasn't discovered until what, the 60s, I think? I think it was the 60s. We did a show on that. Yeah.

Everybody kind of knew that it was a thing, but no one had actually like sussed out or named it. Right. That's what they were going for was that savory, meaty flavor that you would get from something like fermented anchovies. And they were trying to recreate it. And they did. I mean, apparently, mushroom ketchup

tasted a lot like Worcestershire sauce. Yeah. And then, yeah, walnut ketchup. Apparently, Jane Austen was a big fan of that. And if you're sitting there thinking of putting this on like your hot dog, the hot dogs weren't invented yet. That's not what people were using it for. They were using it as like a base for stews.

Yeah. Or like meat pies, things like that. It was like a sauce. It was a base. It was something that you were taking bland food and making it savory with this bottle of this stuff that was made from fermented something or other. Well, and they would base it on, they would use it

like we can use barbecue sauce. They would base it on things while they're cooking. Sure. Which I just can't imagine that. Like basting tomato base. Well, this is before us tomato, I guess, but. Right. This is when it was mushroom based.

Yeah. But you mentioned Umami and your buddy Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker and kind of throwing out the question like, why are there so many kinds of mustard? Yet ketchup is kind of ketchup. And his answer was because it satisfies all the fundamental tastes, all five.

Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and Umami. Another answer is that there actually are a ton of different kinds of ketchup. Well, yeah. I wouldn't mention that. Just as many as there are mustard is. So America is who first, because tomatoes are native to North America.

And this is where people first started using tomato as the base. Yeah, but Chuck, it took a really long, circuitous route to get to that point. And the reason why is in America, people were making ketchup, but they were still doing things like using walnuts and using mushrooms and oysters as the base of it, right?

Yeah. They still weren't using tomatoes, even though tomatoes were everywhere. And that was because the Europeans and American colonists or European colonists considered tomatoes poisonous. Yeah. So they didn't eat tomatoes. I think they used them as ornamental plants

or something like that. Finally, some people started to try them and tried to convince other people. And then they went through a little period where they were considered medicine. And then finally, somebody started adding them to ketchup. And the first tomato ketchup recipe appears in an American cookbook, depending on who you ask either

in 1812 or 1801. Yeah, the 1812 one, well, yeah. That's the one I found was 1812. But it still didn't really, really take off until post-Civil War. Right. And this is 1871 when a man named Henry Hines, he got together with a doctor.

Isn't that right? Yes. That guy, Dr. Wiley, I can't remember his first name. But he shows up in our FDA. Does the FDA protect Americans? Remember that guy who put together that group of people who would eat preservatives until they were poisoned to find out whether something was poisonous or not?

Yes. That was the guy who set up that squad. Yeah, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley. Yeah. So his whole deal was, for a while, their ketchup had some really nasty chemicals in it. Some of them had, and these were all preservatives, some of it was coal tar, that gave it the red color.

And then sodium benzoate. Benzoate? And that helped to retard spoilage. So it was really nasty stuff. And he kind of first championed that this stuff is harmful to your health. So he got together with Henry J. Hines, who was producing ketchup in 1876.

And they were like, you know what? If you use really good, because at the time, the ketchup they were making was from scraps of tomatoes that were kind of like junk tomatoes. And they said, you know what? If you use good, ripe, red tomatoes as your base, it has a natural preservative in it called pectin. And it really, we got to ramp up the vinegar,

because that'll help out with the spoilage. And all of a sudden, we don't need to use chemicals anymore. Right, which was a huge breakthrough. And the reason why there are so many preservatives in ketchup was because tomatoes have a pretty short growing season. It's like mid-August and mid-October. And so the only time during the year you could make fresh ketchup was those two months.

And you couldn't make a year's worth of ketchup. Like by this time, people were buying millions of bottles of ketchup in America alone a year, right? So you couldn't make all that in two months. So you had to preserve the pulp. But they took terrible standards and practices to preserving. So when you opened up that tub of pulp, you know,

come July to make some new ketchup, it was totally spoiled, ridden with bacteria. It was very dangerous stuff to begin with. And that was the basis that they used to start with. So it was really bad stuff. And when Heinz created this preservative-free version of ketchup, it was a huge, huge breakthrough. Yeah, and way back in 1890, he even

created that iconic octagonal ketchup bottle that you cannot buy in stores anymore, as far as I know. But you can still get in restaurants. You can take them from restaurants. Just leave an extra good tip. All right, so let's take a break here, and we'll get back and talk about this foul condiment right after this.

All right, so today ketchup is basically tomatoes, salt, vinegar, onion powder, some spice, some kind of sweetener, either a lot of sugar or a lot of corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, I think high fructose corn syrup is the standard. And I think it was Huntz that first came out with a brand that didn't have high fructose corn syrup. And they touted it all up and down the avenue.

And Heinz is far and away. Since I don't do ketchup, I made the bad mistake of buying the wrong ketchup one time for Emily. What kind did you get? I think it was Huntz. And she was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, don't bring any Huntz. And God forbid any Del Monte ketchup that's outsold.

It's Heinz, Heinz, Heinz in my house. And it is far and away the leader. I think they have what, like 60% or so percent of the market share? That's in the US. They have about 30% of the global market. So like Heinz is synonymous literally with ketchup around the world.

Everybody knows Heinz ketchup, right? We should have gotten them as a sponsor. Yeah, we should have. But then we wouldn't have been able to do a show about ketchup. We're giving this away for free. Because we have values. Yeah, we do.

We really do, Chuck. Congratulations to you on your values. And you as well. So ketchup's much more standardized. Depending on who you ask, it's either incredibly toxic or actually has some health benefits. Could be both, right? There's a, I said, I think I already said that

there was a period where tomatoes were seen as medicine back in the day. Yeah, they had tomato pills. Yeah, they had tomato pills. And actually they had ketchup pills too. There was a doctor in Ohio who stole the ideas of another doctor in Michigan and went to a guy who was selling patent medicine and said,

hey, man, tomatoes are super healthy. And so by extension, ketchup should be super healthy. And I believe that they do things like treat indigestion by removing bile from the body. Yeah, you got some diarrhea, eat some ketchup. Got jaundice, ketchup pills, right? How about rheumatism or headaches? Well, so this is where it starts to get a little wacky, right?

They started selling Dr. Mills compound extract of tomato and they were successful. This was back in 1835 and they were successful and a bunch of imitators came on the market and all of a sudden it was not so great any longer. Well, no, cause a lot of them didn't even have tomatoes in them, they were fraudulent ketchup pills. Or they were laxatives.

Acting as laxatives. And so that calls the great tomato pill market crash of 1840. But today we're much smarter and rather than ketchup pills, we take tomato pills also known as lycopene supplements. Yeah, cause lycopene is, that's the good stuff that you're looking for that has been shown to help cancer patients specifically.

I think the one that they've actually proven is prostate cancer, right? So they haven't proven it, but that one's shown. There's been the most like positive studies, but even still the jury's still out on that one. But yes, prostate cancer is the one that they roundly point to and say, lycopene really helps with this.

At least some studies have shown that lycopene somehow disrupts communication between cancer cells and it retards the growth of blood vessels to the cancer cells. So they can't grow as well. And apparently the body produces lycopene naturally, but also readily absorbs and uses it too. And one of the great sources of lycopene is tomatoes.

Lycopene gives tomatoes among other things, it's red color. But the amazing thing about it is if you eat a raw tomato right now, you're not going to absorb as much lycopene as if you ate some ketchup right now. Yeah, it's gotta be cooked. Yeah, it releases the lycopene

or it makes it more readily available to the human body, we should say. Yeah, but they also say even if it does help, it's like a little ketchup on a hamburger is not nearly enough to really do you a lot of good. No, it's something like 2.5 milligrams of lycopene in a tablespoon of ketchup. You say, well, I'll just eat a bunch of ketchup.

The problem is, is if you eat say like a half a cup, about seven tablespoons of ketchup, but you just have to be a weirdo anyway to do that, you're getting about three quarters of your daily sodium intake and four teaspoons of added sugar as well, where you just better off like eating some tomato sauce instead. But the point is, is if lycopene helps humans,

which the jury's still out, but it looks like it's possible, then ketchup actually can help humans by giving a little extra lycopene. That's right. Just put some ketchup on your tomato sauce. Yeah, and all these things can add up over time. Sure.

So ketchup was selling well in America post-Civil War. You got the tomato going now, everyone loves it, but there was a problem early on with ketchup that took a long, long time to fully solve. And I bet you they're still sort of working on it, is that ketchup, anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s and loved ketchup at a diner would have a hard time getting the ketchup

out of that glass bottle. And there were all kinds of tricks. I remember one of them was that if you tapped on the 57 on the label, was that it? Yeah. That it would come out better. Yeah, that's true. Then you had the jackass who would just smash the bottom

of it until ketchup would shoot out all across the table. That works, but not well. Or the more sheepish person at the diner might stick a butter knife in there. And be like, die, ketchup. And cook, and coax it out. And the reason all this is happening is because ketchup, and this is a good little dinner party factoid,

is a non-Newtonian fluid. So if you ever change your oil or even pour water out of a cup, you will notice that it all pours out at the same rate. It has a single viscosity. It's a Newtonian fluid. Newton's like, hmm, that's a great. Ketchup, it can start to come out very slowly.

And then all of a sudden it starts picking up steam and coming out of that bottle. And that's when you know you're really cooking. That has different external forces acting upon it to either increase or decrease that viscosity. Right, so it has multiple viscosities, which makes it a non-Newtonian fluid, right? Yep.

And when you put force on it, specifically shear force, it changes the viscosity. It actually decreases the viscosity of the ketchup, which increases the flow rate, which means it comes out of the bottle faster. And one of the ways that you can introduce shear force, S-H-E-A-R, is to tap on the bottle. Yes.

That concussive force loses or changes the viscosity and the ketchup flows more quickly. So it actually is true. So there was something to that then. Yeah, that tapping on that embossed 57, the one that was like embossed on the bottle. Yeah. That's the perfect spot to tap.

Because if you hit it with the heel of your palm onto the rear of the bottle, if you hit it normally- If you spank it on the bottom. If you, right, if you do that lightly, all you're doing is reducing the viscosity of the ketchup right in the rear. But the stuff toward the neck of the bottle that you're trying to get out,

it remains highly viscous, right? If you tap toward the neck of the bottle, you're gonna reduce the viscosity of the ketchup that's up there in front, and it'll start to slide out. If you hit that thing on the bottom hard enough that you change the viscosity of all the ketchup inside, yeah, it's gonna come shooting out. And you're gonna look like an idiot.

All your friends are gonna laugh at you, and you'll die alone. That's right. So they had a problem with this, and they thought, in 1968, what about ketchup packets? This kinda solves that problem, cause you can squeeze it out. And they said, yeah, that's kinda neat. It might do well for restaurants,

but no one's gonna have a Ziploc bag full of ketchup packets in their fridge unless you're my mom, and they're from like eight different fast food restaurants. Sure. God bless her. So that, you know, those are still around, but it finally, it took till 1983

to come up with the plastic squeeze bottle, which still didn't fully work, because as this, our own article points out, they made funny farting noises, which I guess is unseemly at a dinner table. Sure. And then that what the industry insiders call serum, that thin, watery, kinda gross stuff

that nobody wants on their hamburger or hot dog. Ketchup juice. Yeah, toward the end, that serum comes out, and nobody wants that. So those squeeze bottles weren't the ultimate solve. Yeah, it's basically just separated water separated from the ketchup solids. Yeah.

And there's... On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends, to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, by blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. There are actual academic papers on this conundrum,

this problem with serum separation and ketchup. No, I'm sure. People trying to figure out how to get around it. They, I think they've hybridized a new kind of tomato that allows for less serum separation once processed in a ketchup even. What could need to shake it up? I'm a novice, but.

Yeah, you do. You do shake it up. And it typically works, but in I think 2002, Heinz and Huntz, and apparently Huntz was working on it first and Heinz got wind of it and started their own project. But almost simultaneously, Heinz and Huntz released a new type of squeeze bottle that you could stand upside down

so the ketchup stayed toward the bottom, right? And it was actually designed to catch the ketchup juice, the serum, and remix it back into the ketchup solids as it flowed out. That's right. The dude named Paul Brown is the hero to many because he created the silicone valve. And it wasn't just for ketchup.

In fact, I don't even know if it was originally. It was for shampoo. It was for shampoos, I think, that he was trying to come up with. Well, that makes sense. But he's a hero to ketchup lovers. Yeah. So these liquid valves,

they had right angle slits cut into the valve. So when you squeeze a bottle, it flows out nice and neat. And then they close back up when you stop squeezing, which seals it back up inside the bottle. And then it's revolutionary. It's a dome that has the slits cut into the side of it. And then around the dome, it's a place where the serum collects.

And then as the ketchup is moving out, it's supposed to mix back in together. It's so funny how much science has gone into this. Right, just to get the ketchup right. And it still isn't perfect. Like anybody who uses this bottle knows that you still get ketchup juice when you first squirt it unless you shake it first.

Yeah. And even then, you're still gonna get a little serum. It's just a fact of life, you know? Yeah. You just, you don't wanna do it on a bad day because that can be the thing that straw that just breaks the camels back, you know? Where you just,

suddenly you're sobbing, standing in your kitchen, holding that squeeze bottle of ketchup. See, that's why you go for mayonnaise because although it is a non-Newtonian fluid, there's no mayonnaise serum. Did you finish your Cupid mayonnaise yet? I did. And I need to go to the little mart near my house

to see if they have more. Any halfway decent Asian market will have it. I'm sure they do. I mean, you can buy matcha powder and eel, so I'm sure you can buy this stuff. Yes, they will have Cupid mayonnaise. All right, so 2002 is when that new valve was introduced by Heinz and Huntz.

Does it mention poor Del Monte? I wouldn't feel too bad for them though. They're still selling a lot of ketchup. Yeah, they're still making that money. You know? I wanna know, I wanna hear from people though that are like, now I'm a Del Monte man, through and through.

Oh, there's somebody, somebody out there. We wanna hear from the legit ones, not hipster ones. Yeah. Yeah, like, I like Malort and Del Monte ketchup. Right. And PBR. I don't wear shirts.

So 2002 was when that was invented, and then, or I'm sorry, implemented, and then there was that still final problem, apparently with ketchup, where you get to the bottom of the bottle of the squeeze bottles and you can't get it all out. And that was solved with a little bit of technology, courtesy of MIT, called LiquiGlide.

Yeah, I don't know if they've implemented this yet. It sounds like adding something that is really unnecessary that could conceivably be toxic. Oh, is it not in there yet? I don't believe so. From the House of Works article, makes it sound like they've invented it and they're planning on it,

but they haven't put it in yet. Yeah, so the thing with LiquiGlide, I looked up what that was all about, and I think the deal is, is it essentially sort of there's a coating on the inside of the bottle that makes it inside of the bottle pre-wet in a way. Okay, it's like that slippery. That, that, what was it that Clark Griswold

came up with in Christmas vacation? Oh, it was like a silicone that he ended up putting on the, yeah. That's LiquiGlide. Yeah, basically. I thought if there was gonna be any vacation reference in this, it would be real tomato ketchup, Eddie? I don't know, what was that one in?

That was when he spooned, yeah, he spooned the ketchup on the sandwich and it was kind of this chunky mess in real tomato ketchup and he went nothing but the best, Clark. So LiquiGlide, by all accounts, is, they say food's safe, but I always wonder about this stuff.

Like, I don't trust the FDA, so, or I'm not gonna say that. I don't fully trust the FDA in all cases. So, I just can't imagine that this, that we haven't been poisoning ourselves all along with food containers, you know? Don't you wonder, like, if there's going to be that revelation that, like,

it's a cookbook moment or soylent green as humans, just that moment where we come to realize that this beep, whatever thing it is, is, this is the thing that's been giving everyone who's ever had cancer since it's been invented, cancer, you know? Like, this is the smoking gun. Don't you just think that there's gotta be,

I assume it's just plastics in general? I think it's a mix of a lot of things of modern manufacturing, so. Yeah. And farming and pesticides and, I mean, you name it. So depressing, should we take a break? Yeah, maybe we can pull this one back from the brink. All right, we're gonna get to Ketchup versus Catsup,

which I know everyone wants to know about. ["Ketchup vs Catsup"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, we shouldn't put it off any longer.

All right, hit me. So catch up, K-E-T-C-H-U-P. Yep. Versus cats up, C-A-T-S-U-P. Weird. The House of Works article, I didn't see, I didn't actually look, but I didn't see this anywhere else, is that they're pronounced the same.

Correct. So you've seen people say catch up, and you knew that in their mind, they saw the word cats up. Yes. All right, I did not realize that. So you would say cats up? Yes, but I always say catch up.

I say cats up like mockingly. Oh, okay. But that's how I pronounce it, you know? Yeah. But apparently, they're both just bastardizations, anglicizations of whatever word catch up originally comes from, either that Fujian word or the Malaysian word for, again,

that anchovy fermented paste. And so I think Heinz used catch up starting pretty early on, correct? Yes. So that's an interesting story, and you just basically told the whole thing. That was it? Well, yeah, they came, Heinz,

even though they're like the global leader in catch up, they came to the market pretty late, like 30 years after catch up was sold and mass produced in the US. Heinz came along finally, and they wanted to distinguish themselves from their competitors. So they use catch up, but catch up wasn't a new word.

It was the original word. If you look back at like some of those 18th century recipes, it's catch up, K-E-T-C-H-U-P. And then apparently sometime in the 18th century, people started calling it cats up. And so that was the preferred term, the spelling. Okay. And then Heinz distinguished themselves

and brought catch up spelling, the popularized spelling with a K back. And because they got market share, that became the norm. Exactly. And then so it was Del Monte, who was the big outlier for years and years and years. Yeah, 1988 was when they finally said,

oh, all right, no more cats up. Yeah. Go home with catch up. Yep, and they did, they gave in. What about this other thing that I know a lot of people have argued over for generations is fridge or no fridge? So, I mean, it's got a lot of vinegar in it.

It's supposedly, as far as Heinz is concerned, they say it's shelf stable. Yes. Meaning that even after you open it, it's got enough stuff in it that it's going to stay fine. Right. Outside of the fridge, but they still recommend keeping it in the fridge.

Yeah, they say, and this is a direct quote from Heinz, whoever the latest Heinz heir is. I think it's John Kerry. Oh, right, wasn't that, wasn't his wife the Heinz heir? Yeah, Theresa, Theresa Heinz. Right. So John Kerry says,

because of its natural acidity, it's shelf stable. However, its stability after opening can be affected by storage conditions. So we recommend, like any processed food, it be refrigerated after opening. So in other words, if you live in Yuma, Arizona, you might not want to keep your ketchup and you don't have air conditioning.

You might not want to keep your ketchup on the table. But you probably could if you really wanted to. But if you lived in Southern California, where the breeze is always cool and the air is always clean, then you might want to, you could put it on your table and you'd probably be fine. Yeah, and again, it's got like a number of different preservatives in it.

It's got vinegar in it. It has sugar, which is a preservative. It has pectin, naturally, found in tomatoes. It's a preservative. It's probably gonna be fine, but... But keep it in the fridge. I mean, why not? Yeah, we don't listen to us.

Unless you have like, if you don't have enough room in your fridge for the bottle of ketchup, then you have too much salsa and sriracha. Right, sriracha. Sriracha. You hipster, you. Yeah, yeah.

Sriracha is really good, actually. And in fact, once we'll get to that, there are sriracha ketchups. They're pretty popular these days because this article says millennials like their spice more than their parents. Depending on where you are in the world, there are all flavors of ketchups

and all ways to use ketchup, depending on where you are. Yeah, and I just want to say, I love how that was put. Can't you see a hipster's parent coming to them and be like, what do you like more? Your spice or me? Yeah. I like my spice more than my parents. Well, you know, that's not what they meant, right?

I know. Okay. But let's take a tour around the world. I know what you were leaning up to. I just had to double back to that. All right, let's go to Jolly Old England or maybe then his weightlet even. Okay.

Because apparently they like sweeter ketchup in those two places. Yeah, and in the Philippines, they like sweet ketchup, but they like sweet ketchup that's made from a banana base rather than a tomato base, but they're not crazy over there, so they dye it red. So it looks like tomato ketchup. Yeah, and we also should say that in England,

they might be more apt to reach for the HP sauce before the ketchup though. Right, the brown sauce, right? Yes, they love that stuff. Yeah, I think that's their number one condiment over there. HP sauce? Uh-huh. Or do they just call it the brown sauce?

They call it the brown. The brown? No, wait, that's heroin. Big brown, no? Big brown? Apparently Americans, like we said, well, we eat a lot of ketchup, but we're not the leading consumer

because the Finns and the Canadians love this stuff more than we do even. Yeah, which is pretty shameful, America. Step it up. Pretty shameful, yeah, mayonnaise and salsa. So in China, Jamaica, and I believe Thailand, they like to put ketchup on fried chicken.

Got to try that one. Oh. What about pizza? Oh. Eastern Europe, apparently. And Trinidad, India, Japan, and Poland. That's how you know it's good, man. That is a diverse collection of countries

that all put ketchup on their pizza. You know what's funny is my friend Eddie can say all of these foods, ranch dressing. Well, yeah. I mean, ranch dressing should be the number one condiment in the world. Hold on, I have to tell you something. You have to go to Japan one of these days, right?

OK. There are over there. They, oh, I thought it was just understood. You have a standing invitation to come to Japan every time we go. Because you are the ambassador. All right. I've got the sash and everything, but Japan's misspelled.

It's a, they have pizza over there, and rather than tomato sauce, it's going to knock your socks off. They use the Japanese mayo. What? With corn and sometimes ham or like pancetta or something like that. All right. So you've got a dough.

Yeah. Then you've got a spread of mayonnaise. Yeah. Corn off the cob and ham. Yes. And it is mind-blowingly good. Is there cheese? I don't remember if there was cheese in it.

I think I fainted. No, they're not big on cheese or dairy. They don't have that much room for cows. Although all the cows they have are like Kobe beef cows. I think that's what they kind of dedicate their cow space to. Did I ever tell you the story of being at the Chinese restaurant when I was a kid? There was a guy getting takeout.

And he went through about probably about five or six different things asking if it had cheese on it. Like egg rolls have cheese on it. Mugu guy pans have cheese on it. And the sweet Chinese owner is kind of an older guy. Kept saying like no, no, no, no. And at the very after like the fifth thing, the guy stopped them and said in his very sweet Chinese

American accent that no Chinese food has cheese on it. Was the guy just messing with them or something? No, man. I think, I don't know. I guess he was just unfamiliar. I mean, this was the 1970s. Oh, yeah. So maybe he didn't have experience with Chinese food.

But as funny as an adult to think about like any Chinese food with cheese on like melted on top. Yeah, that's got white American. So Sweden, if you go to Sweden, they will actually squeeze ketchup over their pasta. That's like Honey Boo Boo. Really? Yeah, they used to put.

And I never really watched this show. But I mean, I was a conscious human being back then. So I was aware of this. But they would they would cook pasta and then put butter on it and then squeeze ketchup on it. And that was like Honey Boo Boo spaghetti. Oh, my God. No comment.

We used to be colleagues of Honey Boo Boo's at one point. Did they work for Discovery? Yeah, they were all on TLC. I have to remember to add that back to my resume. Right. Where else? What else we got? What kind of crazy ketchup do we have?

OK, so all right, you ready for this one? Yeah. This is I've never heard of this before in Canada. Have you ever had while you wouldn't have? But have you ever seen ketchup potato chips? Yes, they're pretty good. They're better than barbecue chips, if you ask me. Hairs makes a good one, right?

Apparently the Canadians do some wacky thing with it where they take they take ketchup potato chips and turn it into a ketchup cake of some sort. I've not had this before, but we're going to be in Toronto and Vancouver this year. So I expect multiple ketchup cakes. Yeah, you don't really have to make us ketchup cakes. I should point out too, since we're talking about that tour,

that Toronto and Vancouver are far and away leading in ticket sales right now out of the gate. So Canada, like America needs to step it up, because Canada is kicking your butts. Man, that's the great thing about doing multinational tours is you can pit one country against the other. Yeah, right? Yeah, especially as everybody's kind of devolving

into nationalism right now, you can really get it going. You know what kind of chips I did have the other day was the, what do you call it, the country gravy sausage and country gravy? Oh, the Lays? Yeah. I haven't tried those, are they good? Yeah, I mean, do you like white gravy sausage gravy?

Sure. It tastes like that. Really, they nailed it, huh? They nailed it. Because sometimes those things are way off. Well, yeah, they have a contest now, don't they? Yeah, yeah, they do. I'm trying to remember some of the other ones,

because they've had some good ones. But oh, chicken and waffles, chicken and waffles one was really good. Was it? Yeah, it had like just this hint of maple. But yeah, it kind of tasted a little fried chickeny. It was good. Crazy.

What other kinds of crazy ketchups do we have? What about ketchup ice cream? No, thank you. So Baskin Robbins apparently came up with it, and it died in the lab. Yeah, I bet. But apparently, it was based on a Heinz ice cream recipe for Heinz Carnival Cream.

So that was the thing. I mean, again, I would try this stuff. Did I ever tell you about the time you and I went to Plaza Fiesta and tried tuna gelato? Oh, yeah. And it tasted just like raw tuna. Yeah. It was insane.

Yeah. Never heard of it before. Never seen it anywhere else. It was like this one specific place I had it. Man. If you ever find yourself in Atlanta, Georgia, with some time to kill, go to Plaza Fiesta. Try to find the gelato place and see if they

have the tuna gelato. They have a good cowboy store over there, too. Yeah, they have a bunch of them. Like good boots, hats, and belts, and checkered shirts. And brother, if you're throwing a quinceanera, that's where you go. Yeah, I'm sure. So lastly, Chuck, we have to give a shout out.

We would be really remiss. If we didn't mention that one of tomato or ketchup is a big ingredient in something called pruno. Yeah, we talked about prison wine in our prisons episode. I did not. I don't think I remembered that that was. In fact, maybe I didn't know. Did we say that it was an ingredient?

I don't think so. I didn't notice it until now. But it's like, you use that in sugar packets to feed the fermentation process. In a sock, right? Can you make it in a sock? I don't know if you could make it in a sock. I think it needs to be a little more airtight than that.

Maybe not. Maybe you could, although it all just drip out. I'm not sure, man. Oh, man. For the recipe I came across, it's like in a big gallon-sized Ziploc bag. But yeah, after day two or three of fermentation, you feed it with ketchup packets and sugar.

Gross. Yeah, and then you got some pruno, which you should never try. No. You got anything else? Yeah, we should cover this thing, this last thing you sent. Headline, Israel ketchup or forces Heinz to relabel sauce as tomato seasoning. So in Israel, the leading ketchup maker is OSEM, OSEM.

And they have a 66% market share. And in Israel, as in most countries, they have food standards where you can only call something something if it has this much of whatever. Yeah, and apparently, Israel's standards are much higher than the US or Europe's. Yeah, so you have to have a certain percentage of tomato concentrate to be labeled tomato ketchup in Israel.

And so OSEM, even though they have 66% market share, went after Heinz, they said, hey, we did a study with an independent lab that had no skin in the game, leading European external laboratory. And they found out that Heinz did not have the required percentage of tomato concentrate. So they can't even call it ketchup anymore. And I believe it's being enforced over there, right?

Yeah, well, this was from 2015, and the thing leaves off. I didn't see any updates. But the article leaves off that Heinz was petitioning with the health ministry to change the tomato concentrate requirements down to something like 6%. Well, here's the thing. As Heinz said, their claims have no substance.

Well, then why are they lobbying to get the percentage lowered, you know? I think what happened was Heinz was selling the same ketchup that they sell in Europe and America. And this is just speculation on my part. But they were probably selling the same ketchup that they sell elsewhere, but in Israel. But Israel has higher food standards, at least as far

as their ketchup goes. And their competitor nailed them on it. That's what I think happened. But yeah, they can't, on the label, they can call it ketchup in English, but they can't call it ketchup in Hebrew. Yeah, they can only call it. It's a beta seasoning.

It's milk. It's pretty funny. It is. It's a funny world, Chuck. It is. And now ketchup is done. I guess I didn't think it would take us in our 900-something episode to finally get the ketchup, but we did. Well, and this now frees up. Now I have permission to request mayonnaise.

OK, that's a deal. We'll do that. Maybe we should just have condiment month. OK, I like the sound of that. Well, in the meantime, if you want to learn more about ketchup, you can type that word in the search bar at HouseToForks.com. You can also check out Nat Geo's articles on it.

Like I said, fast code design. Mental flaws had a great one. And we got some stuff from our friends at Listverse who had a pretty interesting compilation of some cool tomato facts or ketchup facts. And since I said tomato instead of ketchup, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Wow! Signal Update.

Did you get tweets about this? I did, and I ignored them all because I think this is a lie. Oh, all right. So I think it's propaganda. Here we go then. Alien. Hey, guys. First want to let you know that I love the show.

Always look forward to new episodes Tuesday, Thursday, as well as the selects on Saturday. I know you would be interested to find out that I saw a news article the other day that states that an experiment was ran earlier this year based on a paper from 2015 that claimed the Wow! Signal was caused by hydrogen clouds from comets, which transisted that area of the sky back in 1977.

In January of this year, those comets transited once again, and it was determined they were indeed the source of the signal. Of course, this sparked quite a bit of controversy among those hoping that this was a sign of alien life. Alas, it appears that wasn't so. I can't help but be a little disappointed ever since learning of the Wow! Signal.

I knew it was a long shot. Anyway, keep up great work. Love to see you in Charleston, South Carolina someday. I'm sure you'd love that city. And Sean Flanagan, I do love Charleston. Yeah, Charleston is a top-notch town. Yeah, I don't know if that has enough people for us to go, but maybe.

I don't know. People might come from around the southeast to that show. Who knows? But heck, we went to Birmingham. Let's go to Charleston. Yeah, it's, I mean, us playing there is a good enough reason to get people to go to Charleston. Maybe Bill Murray would come.

Oh, yeah. Is he still there? I know his family is. Yeah, he lives there. OK. I mean, I think he's got more than one place, but I think he. Well, tell you what, Bill Murray, if you're listening, we'll list you for our show if you'll come.

He's just crazy enough to show up. Yeah. So that's from Sean. And we had a lot of people write in about the wow signal. So yeah, it's disappointing that everybody bought into it. Like, oh, no, it's not aliens. It's this hydrogen cloud. Good bit comets.

Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. We're at SYSK podcast. And I'm at Josh underscore um underscore Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or at stuff you should know. You can send us all an email to stuff podcast at house.workstuff.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web stuff you should know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com on the podcast. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show. Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use a dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.