67: Sugar (Part 1)

Añadido: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]This week on Lunchbox Envy, it's added [music] to 3/4 of the packaged food in the supermarket. In the 17th century, the governor of Barbados was paid in it.

[00:00:10]And you can sprinkle it over bees to treat them for mites. It's sugar.

[00:00:25]>> [music] >> Hello and welcome to Lunchbox Envy. I'm Alex and I'm here with my fellow Q elves, Manu and Jack.

[00:00:31]>> sweet, sweet day for us.

[00:00:34]>> A big topic. This will be part one. Um we're going to do the history and the culture and the science and definitely do more culinary part two with Rosie and maybe another chef. Oh, that'd be lovely. Um I realized I didn't really know what sugar was. No? I've heard of like monosaccharides and complex sugars and natural sugars and polysaccharides.

[00:00:52]I'm like, "What's What How does it work?"

[00:00:53]>> So basically, sugar is made up of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in different forms. So basically, start with the monosaccharides. So there's a single molecules. We are going to over simplify this, but if you imagine your basic LEGO blocks uh are glucose, fructose, and galactose.

[00:01:12]Mhm. So they are three flavors of monosaccharide. So they're all pretty much the same molecule but with slight tweaks. And glucose is the one that we absolutely love as humans because it's the main way we get our energy. So So it's people petrol. Yeah. It's basically people petrol. We all And you get glucose from all carbohydrates you eat.

[00:01:31]When you add two of them together, they make a double LEGO block. Okay. Which is known as a disaccharide.

[00:01:38]Uh the three main ones are sucrose, lactose, and maltose.

[00:01:42]>> Ooh.

[00:01:43]So you notice they all end in "ose".

[00:01:44]Sucrose is glucose added to a fructose.

[00:01:47]Mhm. Lactose is a galactose added to a glucose.

[00:01:51]>> Uh-huh. And maltose is a double glucose.

[00:01:54]Ooh. You know what else is a maltose?

[00:01:55]Maltesers. Uh >> [laughter] >> there must be some, yeah. Once you have more than two saccharides, they make a polysaccharide and these can be like very very long chains.

[00:02:05]And polysaccharides are things like starch and cellulose which makes up plant matter.

[00:02:11]>> Isn't the one that we're going to talk about the most sucrose? So that's glucose and fructose.

[00:02:16]>> That is like table sugar, right?

[00:02:17]>> the sugar that's in front of us now is sucrose. Yeah. What's interesting though is sugar despite being thousands of years old has only entered western diets about 300 years ago in a serious way.

[00:02:29]But fats and salts and proteins, they're all ancient. We've been eating those for so much time. So actually we're really just taking our first dose as a species of sugar.

[00:02:39]>> Massively skewed everything really.

[00:02:40]Yeah, yeah, which is possibly the reason for the obesity crisis. But yeah, even like simple carbohydrates like rice and and wheat, that was only sort of 10,000 years ago.

[00:02:49]And in the context of a human species is just like the last chapter.

[00:02:54]>> So we're not meant to eat Well, meant to eat. That's very clear we're not meant to eat sugar.

[00:02:59]And all of our taste buds have receptors for sweetness. It triggers endocannabinoids which are the sort of happy chemicals that make us feel good and want more.

[00:03:08]Do you know why it does that?

[00:03:09]>> Well, we hypothesize that lactose, cuz it lactose makes up 40% of breast milk, the babies that craved sugar consumed more calories as newborns and therefore more likely to survive in the early stages.

[00:03:21]>> So we're all addicted to sugar so we've never fully weaned. Well, this is also the idea we love milk chocolate so much because it's got a very similar fat to sugar ratio as breast milk. We're like hardwired to crave these foods. Like same with fat and salt. Basically combinations you don't get very much in the wild. The fat, salt, and sugar that is very similar to breast milk.

[00:03:44]>> They should make dairy milk instead of nipples to see if sales go up. So if they make it even more like breast milk.

[00:03:48]Hershey's Kisses are quite addictive.

[00:03:53]Just on consumption, I was looking the the recommended annual consumption. I thought it was interesting to look at it annually >> [laughter] >> cuz it's nearly always daily, but recommended annual consumption is um about 11 kg a year. Okay. Under rationing in World War II, it was 9 to 12 kg. So, when sugar was rationed, when society was told by the forced by the government to limit their sugar intake, we got it right. The amount we actually eat is kind of close to 16 to 20 kg, which is already over the 11 kg. But, that's on a free sugars only basis. When you kind of try and account for how much sugar is just generally in the food supply, how much is added, um you get closer to 30 kg. Ooh.

[00:04:30]In America in the 1961, which was at the peak of sugar consumption, 47 kg a year.

[00:04:36]That's like almost the weight of >> It's almost your body weight.

[00:04:40]>> [laughter] >> What? It is crazy. It's yeah.

[00:04:44]>> I eat a lot of sugar. I bake a lot.

[00:04:46]>> do I? I never run out of sugar. Really?

[00:04:48]I see. I used to have it around. I never I never put sugar in things. I just take all my sugar pre-processed. Like, everything I have is in the sugar, you know. Um is that guy called Carlos Montero, the the sort of founder of the idea of ultra-processed foods. Um he said he noticed cuz he did a study in his native Brazil and he noticed the people who had more sugar in their house actually had lower incidences of non-communicable disease like diabetes and heart attack. But, that's because all all the people who have less sugar in their house it's in them. They've eaten that.

[00:05:16]>> [laughter] >> All the people with empty packets of sugar lying around. It's like basically the theory is that like if you're if you've got sugar in the house, it's because you bake a lot. And if you're baking, you're making your own food and therefore you kind of know what's in it and you can control the proportions.

[00:05:31]Whereas people who didn't have sugar in the house weren't necessarily eating less sugar, they were just buying pre-made chocolate bars and stuff.

[00:05:37]>> So, ingredient household.

[00:05:38]>> Yeah.

[00:05:40]As a topic, it's quite like when we did salt because it's like, "Oh, it's a food, but also it's like a basic chemical of life."

[00:05:46]Like, it is such a massive, substantial contributor to human history and culture and like obviously diet and how empires were formed and how history was shaped and I would say it's almost like the oil of foods. Like it's it's impacted culture and society so much. So yeah, should we talk about where sugar comes from? Or Yeah. Yeah. Well, what about where the word comes from first of all?

[00:06:08]>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. I read that it's Sanskrit for gravel. It is Sanskrit for gravel.

[00:06:12]Yeah, but there are two different words.

[00:06:14]So one of them is kanda Mhm. and the other one is sarkara Uh-huh. and from each we get sarkara gives saccharin Mhm.

[00:06:23]and eventually sugar and kanda leads to candy. Nice.

[00:06:27]Both they're sort of synonyms in Sanskrit for gravel or something gritty and granular. Mhm. That surprises me then because I thought that the gravel-like appearance of sugar is quite a fairly recent thing and that we've been growing sugarcane to like feed animals and like how how you get to that from that to sugar? I'm just surprised that the name comes from like a gravelly gritty thing. So have we known have we been refining it for a long time? Oh, for a really really long time. Um so we've been growing it for ages. So sugar was first domesticated in New Guinea around 6,000 BCE, but people were chewing it rather than turning it into the product that we have on the table. Um so chewing gum was invented before sugar? Oh, yeah. [laughter] Chewing gum is now chewing [snorts] gum sugar free, you know?

[00:07:10]actual resins, not even sugarcane. Like gum is super old. And then it was first crystallized to make that great in India um around 500 BCE. Okay. So like 2,500 years people were just chewing the cane in the grass.

[00:07:24]>> someone had the great idea to cook it down. Uh which is an incredibly complicated process. So the two main types of sugar that we get now is sugarcane, which accounts for about 80% of the sugar that we have um and then the other is from sugar beet, which a >> very sweet root vegetable. And the reason we use so much of that is because it's uh it makes sure that we've got like a diversified crop. Um because when we got so hooked on sugar in Europe, we realized we should really figure out how to make this ourselves just in case anything happens. Chemically, they both produce sucrose and like they're the same. Although I read some bakers can tell the difference.

[00:08:07]>> No, I bet they're lying. I call >> [laughter] >> They apparently they caramelize slightly differently. Okay. I read that 50% of the UK's sugar in supermarkets comes from domestic beet.

[00:08:17]>> Oh. So we make 50% of our sugar.

[00:08:20]>> That's so cool.

[00:08:20]>> Massive beets my DJ name.

[00:08:22]>> [laughter] [music] >> Okay, let's crack into our first lunchbox and that is Manu. I was silly excited about this one because I got to buy sugarcane.

[00:08:40]>> Oh, cool.

[00:08:41]>> I bought sugarcane. Looks like a bamboo.

[00:08:43]Yeah, I've never seen it before actually. I mean I've seen it, I've never had held one before. It's a big green cylindrical plant stem and it's massive and it's >> Sturdy as well. Like it's hard. It's very solid. Manu was chopping up a body with a massive knife.

[00:08:55]>> It was You looked very worried.

[00:08:57]>> Well, I don't think we have liability insurance if you chop your hand off trying to cut the sugar.

[00:09:01]>> My fingers are still there. I wanted to talk a little bit about how this becomes this jar of granulated sugar that's incredibly white and beautiful looking.

[00:09:11]So it's a grass like bamboo. Uh-huh. It is weirdly high in sucrose, which is why it's >> Oh, yeah.

[00:09:19]>> we decided to harvest and breed over generations to make it sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. Um so it's about 17% sucrose, which is insanely high.

[00:09:30]>> Wow. Uh would you like to try a bit?

[00:09:33]>> Yeah.

[00:09:33]>> Raw raw. What am I? So you You chew it.

[00:09:35]This was one of my favorite things whenever we used to go visit family in Zimbabwe, is like I'd always just get given a piece of sugarcane and I'd wander around like num num num >> [laughter] >> All day. It's right. This bit has been sliced from the inside. This is like the core of the cane.

[00:09:47]>> this is just the inner inner bit of the cane. So you bite it and then you suck the juice out of it.

[00:09:53]Ooh.

[00:09:55]Interesting. Not that sweet. Not as sweet as I was expecting.

[00:09:59]It tastes like melon. Mhm, no it does taste very fruity. Um went to East Street Market to get this.

[00:10:04]And there's not that much sugarcane I bought.

[00:10:07]And the guy I could tell he was trying me cuz he's told me how much one piece was and looked at me like is she she going to buy this? This is ridiculous.

[00:10:15]>> How much was it? A fiver. But you could tell in his face that this it shouldn't cost a fiver. Did he sweet talk you?

[00:10:22]>> [laughter] >> Anyway, but it's it's really nice. I think people buy it like this um to make into juices. It's It'd be really unusual if you made your own sugar at home. One of the reasons you wouldn't make this at home is cuz it is insanely labor intensive and it's a really really really complicated process.

[00:10:39]>> Even though I saw it it's quite prolifically it grows at about up to 5 cm a day.

[00:10:44]But it when it's when it's between 9 and 18 months old, that's when it's got the most sugar. So it's right for the harvest.

[00:10:50]And even better is when it starts to flower, that's when the sucrose content gets up to 17%. So you got your field of beautiful sugarcane and then you set it on fire.

[00:11:01]What? [laughter] I know.

[00:11:03]And then you set >> But sugar is so expensive. Why would you burn it away? Um so you set it on fire and this is I'm not sure if this is widespread anymore, but it's part of uh part of the history of processing to drive out pests.

[00:11:16]Sugarcane grows in tropical countries, so these pests are like you really don't want to interact with them. It's like snakes. Yes, snakes and stuff. So you drive out the pests. You also it removes the outer leaves of the sugarcane, which can blunt your knives. Oh, but the actual sugarcane is thick enough that it's fire resistant. Yes, and it's quite liquidy inside. So, your sugarcane is safe. You go in, you cut down your cane.

[00:11:37]Oh, there's a word for that. Oh. Uh, if you cut it down at the base, it's called ratooning. Oh, nice.

[00:11:44]You ratoon your cane. You ratoon That sounds really south, like deep south.

[00:11:48]Ratoon your cane.

[00:11:50]>> [laughter] >> Is that what they do with the massive machetes, right?

[00:11:52]>> Yeah, they're big. You take it to the factory, you wash it, you crush it, and then you mill it, which is like even more intense crushing.

[00:11:59]>> you bop it. And then >> [laughter] >> I don't I don't play Bop It. Twist it.

[00:12:04]Ratoon that all on the floor.

[00:12:06]>> [laughter] >> Um, and then you uh, you basically juice all of the mush you've created.

[00:12:13]>> Okay. Which we just did in our mouths.

[00:12:15]>> Yes. And then you can use this waste pulp, which is called bagasse, to make >> Big ass. Big ass.

[00:12:23]It's b a g a double s e.

[00:12:26]>> Oh, bagasse. Bagasse. I was going to say cuz uh, sugar ironically gives you a big ass.

[00:12:30]>> [laughter] >> Um, and then you could make these. Oh.

[00:12:36]Oh. So, a lot of the disposable cutlery and plates that we have is made out of mushed-up sugarcane.

[00:12:42]>> he's just brought a whole pile of You could have just brought one. We've got like a hundred plates there. Actually, [laughter] I couldn't buy a single one.

[00:12:48]I did try, but it's actually really hard.

[00:12:51]>> it's kind of plasticky, kind of woody.

[00:12:53]It's sort of the material that egg boxes are made from, but a bit more a bit less, yeah, a bit less fluffy.

[00:12:59]>> make egg boxes, you can make A lot of packaging comes like this now. Like if you order electricals, a lot there'll be a lot of brown like kind [clears throat] of It's sort of carboardy, but quite fibrous. Is that all from sugarcane?

[00:13:09]That's crazy.

[00:13:10]>> it's but I don't know if it tastes sweet. I don't know if it's edible.

[00:13:14]But you are finding out, and I commend you for that.

[00:13:17]So, that's what you've got with the mush, the bagasse. And then the juice goes through so many processes.

[00:13:26]I will not bore you with all of them, but one of them is not pretty. It's basically like pouring the juice through a sulfur dioxide vapor to bleach it.

[00:13:35]It's a lot of like intense chemical processes, intense heating, um and what you end up with is like a really kind of pure juice and then molasses, which is the darker uh darker liquid which we use to make lots of other products, lots of other sugars.

[00:13:53]>> Like rum.

[00:13:55]Yes, you can distill it. This bit of the process I thought interesting is that some refined white cane sugar, to decolorize it you process it using uh bone char, which is like the burnt bones of animals.

[00:14:08]>> Yeah. And so actually your white cane sugar might not all be vegan. Ah.

[00:14:13]Wow. To add to our nothing is vegan series. Oh, damn it. You could kill two birds with one fire, couldn't you?

[00:14:20]>> [laughter] >> Burn some animals in there. Imagine you're a poor bird who escaped the sugar fuel fire. Then get caught to be turned into bone char. Wait, so is there any bone char left in the sugar after it's been processed?

[00:14:31]>> No, it doesn't stay in there. It's just used as a tool in the refining process.

[00:14:35]But I think because it's just a tool and it's certainly not in there, it means it's harder to kind of track if you're trying to work out what's vegan and what's not. Because if that if that sugar is one ingredient in something that you eat that is then labeled as vegan, it is really hard to tell. But probably an animal probably did die to uh yeah.

[00:14:51]Sorry guys. I mean it's going to get worse before it gets better.

[00:14:54][clears throat] Beet sugar doesn't do this process, so that's a good one to go for if you want to be absolutely sure that no animals were involved. Uh so then we have the molasses and we also have the really pure juice and that's heated and heated and heated and heated until it crystallizes and that's when we get our like white gold.

[00:15:13]>> Yeah. Exactly.

[00:15:15]So yeah, that's the that's the bare bones process. That's so insensitive to the animals who died. Oh god.

[00:15:20]>> [laughter] >> I mean to careful with your language.

[00:15:23]Okay, so one person in the history of sugarcane who is really cool um is a woman called Janaki Ammal. And she's an Indian botanist who actually made sugarcane sweeter. Oh. So When did she live? Her dates are 1897 to 1984. She was born in Kerala. Born into a well-to-do family, but they were low caste. So there wasn't like a crazy amount of pressure on her to marry um super well, but instead the family put a lot of pressure on her education, which was fantastic cuz she obviously loved it. Enormous nerd this woman.

[00:16:00]Well, she was working in the Women's Christian College of Madras.

[00:16:03]Um she got a scholarship to the University of Michigan where she studied botany. And then she became the first female doctor of botany in the US ever.

[00:16:12]>> No way. Wow.

[00:16:14]And then she uh went back to India and she started working at the Sugarcane Breeding Station. And what she did was studied lots of different grasses and made a sugarcane that was better suited to growing in India because at the time they were having like quite a lot of production issues. They were having to import a lot. And what she did was create a sugarcane that not only kind of stopped uh the need to import other sugars because it was doing so well, actually turned India into the second biggest producer of sugarcane in the world, which it still is today. Wow. So she's like big big big sugar lady.

[00:16:49]>> I'm talking about people who changed the food world. Like the little boy who um worked out how to pollinate vanilla. Yeah. Anyway, so she eventually leaves India. Um she moves to the UK uh and she becomes the first female ever to work as a botanist at the Royal Horticultural Society. I feel like she was living in a time where whatever she did she was going to be successful doing it.

[00:17:12]>> [laughter] >> I don't want to like minimize her achievements. And then in the 50s she's literally summoned by the Prime Minister Nehru to come back to India to kind of restructure their botanical survey, and in her 80s, she was awarded the Padma Shri, which is one of the highest civilian honors you can earn in India.

[00:17:30]So, yeah.

[00:17:30]>> What a legend. And apparently quite eccentric. Like she carried around a squirrel and had like [laughter] a teddy bear and stuff. I like her even more.

[00:17:37]Yeah, really, really cool cool lady.

[00:17:39]So, how did we get to this industrialized process of how we make sugar? What is the history of domesticating sugar to to the world making it? It was a long story.

[00:17:49]>> [laughter] >> So, there's a man called Dioscorides, who's a 1st century traveler, travel writer, basically. And he went east to what is now Pakistan and talked about a kind of concreted honey called saccharon found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, which has the appearance of salt and is like that, brittle. And that's funny cuz the Greeks and the Romans described it kind of similarly, I think probably around 300 BC. One of Alexander the Great's generals described it as a reed in India that brings forth honey without the help of bees. So, I guess the only thing they had for comparison that was sweet was honey.

[00:18:22]So, from India, where we discovered it was first sort of turned into the the grains that we all recognized, it slowly spread westwards and eventually would conquer the whole world uh because it's so damn popular.

[00:18:35]Uh and then um as sugar travels through the Silk Roads, friend of the podcast, basically everything in the world gets globalized by either the Columbian Exchange or Silk Roads. Anyway, the first place it then went to and was domesticated and grown was the Middle East between 500 and 1,000 common era because it's hot enough. Trouble is, it really needs water, and the Middle East isn't not as rich in water as the tropics are, which is where sugar is naturally found. So, what they had to do was basically irrigate the out of parts of the Middle East. Uh there's a quote from Andrew Watson of the University of Toronto who wrote a book called Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. He said, "There's hardly a river, stream, oasis, spring, known aquifer, or predictable flood that wasn't unused." Basically, just to irrigate this water to get it to the sugarcane fields.

[00:19:21]Uh but it is quite hard to measure the amounts from a long, long time ago because it doesn't leave any archaeological trace because basically microbes like to chomp on it. So, there's there's very little sugar left over. Uh but it was used quite medicinally at the time. Um I found one recipe uh involved mixing it with gold powder and then blowing it in someone's face to try and help cure their eye problems.

[00:19:44]Uh >> [snorts] >> I know no no accounts of whether it worked or not. Uh and then by 1000 CE, the Kingdom of Venice took over the Mediterranean market and they started growing it in places like Sicily and Crete and Cyprus.

[00:19:58]Do these places all still grow sugar?

[00:20:00]Well, they did or they could. Basically, it's not commercially viable. And in fact, this is where the sort of inslavery process starts to happen is under the Venetians because you need a lot of a workforce. It's very labor-intensive crop.

[00:20:15]Uh and it's also quite wood-intensive because you need to keep fires burning to boil this sugar mass away. And so, these early enslaved people were probably from uh Turkey, Bulgaria, and the Caucuses, Arabia. They were under the Venetian control. And then, around 1200, the Ottomans take over. So, basically, European sugar trade starts to slow down because the Ottomans don't want to give it to the Europeans. So, then they start looking westwards.

[00:20:43]Christopher Columbus, you have heard of him. I I cannot with this man. He will not stop.

[00:20:50]Uh he sailed west from Spain to an island which was growing sugar.

[00:20:55]Madeira. Yeah. So, basically, the Portuguese colony of Madeira is a tiny little island off the coast of Africa.

[00:21:02]Almost like a third of the way across the Atlantic. But, the clever Portuguese had realized you could grow sugarcane on Madeira, and Christopher Columbus was basically trading sugar before he discovered the New World.

[00:21:14]Basically, the European sugar trade um wound down because it was getting too expensive and the Ottomans wouldn't share. They were literally burning Europe down.

[00:21:24]Yeah. It was mad. The deforestation because of sugar. Didn't Madeira lose like all of its trees?

[00:21:30]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so they were they were basically seeking elsewhere to start growing their sugar.

[00:21:34]And then, with the discovery of basically America, uh they were like, "Great!

[00:21:40]A chance to grow more sugarcane."

[00:21:42]>> Mhm. So, obviously, you can't talk about sugar without talking about the slave trade because this is one of the things that >> Yeah. drove it. Sugar was one of actually, I think it was the biggest thing that enslaved people were being used to make. People think of cotton in America, but it was actually sugar. I read that the ratio slaves employed to sugar production was 10 times that of other plantation crops, like like tobacco and cotton. Like, you needed way more people. Three-quarters of all enslaved people out of Africa were destined for sugar plantations. But, at this point, I think the Mediterraneans um sugar industry is still on its last legs, but what really killed it off was Brazil uh because there was so much wood to keep the boilers going. Uh and the Portuguese also had the island colony of São Tomé, uh which was used as a like a basically a marketplace for enslaved people. And Brazil's sugar production was greater than that of the rest of the Atlantic combined in 1600. Still the biggest producer of sugar today, isn't it?

[00:22:40]>> Yeah. I read that by the 1700s, sugar was the most important traded commodity internationally, and it was responsible for a third of the whole European economy. Woah. Which is unbelievable.

[00:22:53]And so, what about where sugar beet came from?

[00:22:54]>> I know part of the reason why it's so big is that the British threatened the French with sugar sugarcane. Yeah, in the early 19th century, right? There was a big naval blockade and France basically couldn't get its sugar from anywhere and this is under Napoleon.

[00:23:08]Yeah, Napoleon Bonaparte. I want my sugar. It's literally did exactly what he did all the time, which is basically offer a large sum of money to his to his cabal of geniuses to say fix this food problem. So, he started giving out million franc incentives to farmers to to develop this to make it and so the reason we have a European sugar industry is down to Napoleon. Wow. Thank you, Napoleon.

[00:23:31]>> [music] >> Okay, let's move on to our second lunch box and that is Jack's. So, I brought you five lunch boxes. Ooh. So, Magnus talked about how we go from nature to what we find in our supermarket shelves.

[00:23:50]I wanted to delve a bit more into different varieties of things you find on the supermarket shelves cuz even in the common supermarkets you get brown sugar and white sugar, right? I wondered what the difference was.

[00:24:00]White sugar's basically the rawest, most chemically basic form of sucrose that we have. Sugar is only white because we process it at a higher oven. Yeah, not all sugar is white. Yeah, exactly. Not hashtag not all sugar. I mean like as [laughter] in I don't want to turn this into a race thing.

[00:24:19]So, anyway, sugar is naturally quite brown even once you've processed it enough to get the grains out. So, when you make white sugar, you centrifuge the molasses out. And by centrifuge you mean spin around and around so that the heavier stuff stays in the center and the lighter stuff gets thrown on the outside. In fact, a lot of brown sugar you add molasses back in to make it brown, which seems so [snorts] counterintuitive.

[00:24:42]>> So, hang on a second. So, when they're processing it, they get they take the molasses out and then if you want brown sugar, they put the molasses back in?

[00:24:48]Often, yeah.

[00:24:50]I think it's just more commercially viable that way. But also you can control the flavor of the sugar. So, it's like how rich do I want this? How deep?

[00:24:58]>> And so, it's the amount of molasses and the amount by which it's been ground are kind of the two variables for different types of sugar?

[00:25:05]>> Basically, I wanted to do a sugar taste test because people think that sugar is just sweet.

[00:25:09]>> Mhm. And that's not really true.

[00:25:12]Um sugar is as individual as wine. Mhm.

[00:25:14]Some argue.

[00:25:15]>> [laughter] >> Anyway, so I brought you, from right to left, turbinado sugar. Basically, partially processed so that it's still got some of the molasses in. Large chunks, it's brown, it's quite gravelly, sandy, almost like rice. Yeah, absolutely. And then the second one in is coconut.

[00:25:33]So, coconut sugar comes from the sap of a coconut plant.

[00:25:36]>> Oh, nice. Wow. So, that's not come from sugarcane. That's cool. And that that looks like fine brown dirt.

[00:25:42]>> fine dirt.

[00:25:42]>> Can you do that? Make sugars with different plant saps?

[00:25:46]>> Yeah. I read about um dibs, which is uh the plant sap from the date palm.

[00:25:50]>> Oh, nice. You can make sugar from dates.

[00:25:53]Uh because a lot of fruit, obviously, naturally has sugar in. Mhm. And then the middle one there, which actually what would you That looks very gravelly.

[00:25:59]>> This is reminding me of going to the museum of edible words.

[00:26:01]>> that looks exactly [laughter] like the dirt that we ate.

[00:26:05]>> It's just dirt. It's just gravel. Okay.

[00:26:06]So, that's panela, which is from uh Colombia. Right. And that is um also non-centrifugal brown sugar, which is jaggery.

[00:26:15]>> Ugh. And that is in a very different form.

[00:26:17]>> fudge.

[00:26:18]>> Because it's in cake form. It's basically like a solid block. I've shaved a couple of slices off.

[00:26:24]Uh and yeah, like you said, >> like fudge. And then finally, we have in liquid form maltose.

[00:26:29]>> Mhm. Oh my gosh, now that just looks like honey. So, it looks like honey, but if you notice, I'm lifting the spoon up.

[00:26:35]It's got a much When you lift up a honey spoon, you'll get a strand, like a cheese strand, and it will break off quite easily, but this is going a lot further before it breaks. So, it makes for a very beautiful, like, gloopy sugar.

[00:26:48]>> giving PVA glue. Anyway, would you like to I've got the panela.

[00:26:53]Ooh, yeah. Interesting. That's very smoky that one. Yeah, I think that's very raisiny. Yeah, very very kind of fruity. Yeah. Ooh. I'm going to try the other one. This is the maltose. Maltose comes mostly from China because before they discovered sugarcane, they discovered a sweetener made from sorghum and rice. And basically if you process grain in the right way, it can make a sweet sugary uh liquid. Um but it's actually got less sweetness to it. So I don't know if you noticed when you tried. Okay. The coconut one is fantastic. Like it's so moorish and a bit malty. Like I would eat I would eat a lot that. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, the coconut one is really nice. Why do I not know about that? Why is that not more common?

[00:27:34]>> know. I guess it's hard to process cuz you don't really use it raw usually, do you? You can't really scale it up.

[00:27:40]Well, I guess this is when you said that all sugar is not the same.

[00:27:44]When we think about like the sugar that we eat, the sucrosy stuff that's made from cane and beet, that is chemically the same.

[00:27:51]One of the reasons it's such a useful ingredient is because like salt, it doesn't really have any other flavor to it apart from sweet. Whereas all of these have like a beautiful array of flavors that the molasses gives or whatever's in the maltose. The impurities, yeah. It there's not often there's foods that is such a blank canvas and you can add to so many different things which people do. That's why it's that sugar in so much of our food. And it doesn't affect the flavor apart from adding like that one specific element. I do think there is a case for heritage varieties and different processing and the terroir of sugar. Um and the >> terroir. I love [laughter] it. So yeah, that's my friend of the podcast. So I want to talk also a bit about Hawaii cuz we said that earlier that um sugar went from east to west, but some of it it went the other way around the world. So sugarcane was one of the things that the Polynesians took with them when explored the Pacific and discovered Hawaii. Oh.

[00:28:50]So we're talking 8,000 BCE, sugar arrived in Hawaii from with the Polynesians.

[00:28:57]Unfortunately, by modern days, it's been sort of heavily monocultured because commercially viable to make something that is grows fast, is cheap to produce, and makes a consistent product. But in the intervening 8 to 10,000 years, there were lots of different varieties of sugarcane that have been become extinct.

[00:29:16]But I read about a guy called Noa Kekuewa Lincoln.

[00:29:19]Uh he's a man who's an expert in indigenous cropping systems, and he uh wanted to sort of untangle this monoculture. So he went about it in quite an anthropological way, I thought.

[00:29:30]He read lots of old press cuttings. Mhm.

[00:29:33]He talked to old people, and he analyzed language and songs for clues about these different varieties.

[00:29:39]>> That's cool. Which I think is really cool. There's one song from the Ni'ihau island, "My love returns to Ni'ihau to hidden waters of the pa'ao fish, to the breadfruit that blossoms on the flats, the sugarcane of Halali'i dug out by hand."

[00:29:54]So that gives a location, which is Ni'ihau. Mhm. Uh it gives a name for the cane variety, Halali'i. Uh and a tip on tending the plant, dug out by hand.

[00:30:02]>> Yeah. And it's proximity to breadfruit.

[00:30:03]And all these little clues meant that he went sort of Indiana Jones style and like found examples of these sugarcanes.

[00:30:10]>> That's amazing.

[00:30:10]>> That's so cool. And yeah, he's found about 80 varieties by name, but a lot of them uh haven't been matched up to existing ones because they've gone extinct. But there's another one that was translated as dew from the north, which he then realized when he came across a sugarcane in Kona, which is on the west of the Big Island. Uh which cast shadows on the north side of its stems, which preserves the dew, keeps the moisture.

[00:30:34]>> Oh.

[00:30:35]And he found that by talking to an old old person. I can't remember the name.

[00:30:38]What I'm getting from this is talk to old people sometimes.

[00:30:42]>> But also and then on the atem atem and all that.

[00:30:44]>> work often yields [laughter] the best results. Uh and then a lot of sugarcane varieties actually share names with local fish. So, the black sturgeon fish and the flagtail tilefish uh two examples local to Hawaii, and they're known respectively as mākai'ko and maka'a. And the former is a deep dark purple, which matches the cane of the same name, which is also deep dark purple.

[00:31:09]And then the latter, maka'a, means glowing eye. And guess what? Both the fish and the sugarcane have a little eye pattern on them. Wow. So, yeah, it's just an amazing sort of way around. And actually, the song I mentioned, hala lili, means little hala tree.

[00:31:24]The hala tree is all over the islands of Hawaii. And sure enough, it grows in windy places where the sound builds up and covers the base. Cuz as we said, sugarcane's like a long thin pole. And if you can just see the top, it looks like a little hala tree. Aw. That's amazing. Well, that kind of cultural >> Yeah.

[00:31:40]>> bit like preserving languages. It's all sort of people want to hold onto cultures before they disappear from the record. Um but he also has a vested interest cuz he makes rum.

[00:31:49]>> [laughter] >> I see.

[00:31:50]>> But he's making rum out of these single-origin cane species.

[00:31:54]Uh and he says he wouldn't dream of drinking a wine and not knowing what grape it came from.

[00:31:59]And so, he wants to sort of apply that to rums and >> I like that. It's going to be so good for his marketing as well. Like, aw.

[00:32:05]Looking at all these different types of sugars. I presume all of these came in bags? Yes.

[00:32:12]>> They did. But that was not always the case. And uh sugar was sold in bags. It used to be sold in loaves. You used to go out and buy a loaf of sugar.

[00:32:20]A conical loaf of sugar. Is there sugar left?

[00:32:22]>> Should we talk about sugar um what is it? Presentation, transportation, packaging. Okay. I feel like maybe the generation before us are more familiar with sugar coming in cubes, but it's kind of a rarity these days.

[00:32:35]>> isn't it? Um although, I read that the Domino brand which you can find in America not actually cubes. Someone measured them and they were 12 and 1/2 mm by 12 and 1/2 mm by 13 mm. I've noticed this.

[00:32:48]I've noticed that a lot of sugar cubes are not cubes, they're cuboids. Yeah. Um but before cubes were a thing, uh sugar used to be sold in loaves in conical loaves. They were of sort of rounded top cone shape. The earliest records for these date back all the way to 12th century Jordan in fact. Ooh. Um I think in Europe we got them for about 1470.

[00:33:09]They kind of reached England around 1544. Mhm. They varied considerably in size. So the bigger the loaf, the lower the quality of sugar.

[00:33:17]>> Okay. So in the 15th century a loaf could be about 14 in in diameter at the base and 3 ft tall. Oh my gosh. That's massive. It's a lot of sugar to put in like as it as far as as your shopping basket goes, yeah.

[00:33:31]Um and weigh about 30 lb. Um How how are you moving these things about? Were you just like whoa, waking them off the floor?

[00:33:39]I think that's what that's what the seat at the front of the trolley is for. Oh then.

[00:33:43]That's actually not for babies.

[00:33:44]So the way that conical loaves came about is down to how sugar was refined.

[00:33:48]You have your brown sugar and you want to make it whiter.

[00:33:52]And one of the ways of doing that was applying a sort of white clay solution to the dissolved loaf and you pour it in at the dissolved end and then it would slowly drain through and carry off all the molasses and presumably also kind of dye it white I guess so particularly cool. Uh we mentioned in the Lambeth side a donair kebab. Yeah, I was just I was thinking that. It's so similar to a donair kebab shape and it turns out that the same reason. Like and then they would drain that, dry it and wrap it.

[00:34:20]Often they'd wrap it in blue paper because that make it white stand out more so it looks really nice and pure.

[00:34:25]And then a lot of households would buy those and you might buy quite big ones if you were a big household. So you'd probably have that in your blood or store room. And then there were various implements that existed and Tim Heywood would love this to break it down. So there were little sugar axes, little axes for smashing through the sugar and sugar hammers and sugar nips, sugar choppers, sugar scrapers. You use this sort of the axe and the hammers to break through the hardened outer layer of the sugar so you can get into the inside. So it had like a casing. The sugar nips are this like they're like a pair of pincers, kind of like scissors, but they they've got two sort of spades on the end of each. So they sort of grabbed extracted a lump out of the That's really cool. the whole conical thing. So that's sort of where the first sugar lumps came from. That's fascinating Alex, but please don't call me sugar nips.

[00:35:14]>> [laughter] >> You can call me sugar nips. That's fine.

[00:35:20]>> [music] >> Okay, time for our third and final lunchbox and that is mine and I am going to make you a cup of coffee in the style of 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Ooh, okay. Exciting. I have my cafetière here of black coffee. Mhm.

[00:35:39]This is what he did. He would fill his mug up to the brim with sugar. What?

[00:35:44]Like so.

[00:35:45]>> [laughter] >> Oh, no. Piled like a pile of over over the rim.

[00:35:50]And then slowly pour the coffee onto that dissolving the sugar. Oh.

[00:35:57]Oh my god.

[00:35:59]Is that the right amount?

[00:36:00]>> ominously.

[00:36:02]It's coming out like treacle. I bet that tastes good.

[00:36:05]>> [laughter] >> Would you want to try it? It's decaf, so Yeah, so that Yummy, okay. What a lunatic. You You get a lot done in your day. You wouldn't have very many days though, yeah. He lived I think 1813 to 1855. 42. I would say that had something to do with it.

[00:36:25]>> [laughter] >> I wanted to talk today about the health impact of sugar.

[00:36:31]And also dispel some sugar misconceptions and myths.

[00:36:35]So we all know that sugar is not very good for us. Certainly not in the quantities that we have it today. And that actually sort of has its roots all the way back in the 1950s when heart disease was killing a lot of American men. And part of the national conversation in the medical community was how do we stop this? What's causing it? Didn't Eisenhower get have a heart attack and instead of keeping it secret he sort of admitted it to the American public?

[00:37:01]>> Oh, really? And that sort of that sort of popularized the idea that Americans were eating too much cholesterol. Anyway, the medical world was sort of split on on what was causing heart disease whether it was on the one hand fat and cholesterol or on the other hand sugar. And for a while a lot of people were saying, "Oh, it's it's fat and cholesterol." So the sugar industry was pretty relaxed because business is good for that. That's fine.

[00:37:25]But then people started wondering and talking about whether maybe sugar had something to do with this. And this made the sugar industry nervous.

[00:37:32]Institutions such as the Sugar Research Foundation, there's an internal memo in 1964 that proposed they fund some research to refute their detractors. All they care about is making money. It was in that interest for everyone to believe that fat and cholesterol was the sole cause of like heart-based diseases so that they wouldn't worry about sugar. And they found a scientist at Harvard called Mark Hegsted who was he already believed that saturated fat caused heart disease.

[00:38:00]Although actually part of the reason he believed that was because the dairy industry had funded some previous research.

[00:38:08]He also did I think he was a legitimate scientist as well. And so the Sugar Research Foundation paid Hegsted to review some papers that said that sugar was to blame and sort of tear them apart and say this is rubbish. It's actually fats and saturated put >> comma in the wrong place. Yeah. Your referencing all met, yeah. That kind of thing, exactly.

[00:38:29]>> spelled hemoglobin wrong.

[00:38:31]>> [laughter] >> Um, but the resulting review ran in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967.

[00:38:36]Yeah. Um, and it concluded there was no doubt that it was only reducing fat that could prevent heart disease. Um, it was never disclosed that the foundation paid for this review. And in those days as well, like I think a one or two well-placed reviews in a couple of magazines can really turn the tide um, in in mainstream scientific conversation.

[00:38:54]>> like, um, the dad of PR. Um With the breakfast, yeah.

[00:38:58]>> Yeah, yeah. Getting the doctors >> isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Paying uh, doctors to put this in newspapers and then everyone fell for it.

[00:39:06]Anyway, the consequence was that, um, everyone started sort of getting behind this idea. And by 1980, official dietary guidelines were telling Americans to cut fats. And what happens is is that manufacturers have to cut fats because the all the consumers are looking for reduced fat products. And they replace it with sugar and refined starches. So that it would still taste just as nice.

[00:39:27]>> Cuz you need the same calories. They eat my naturally your body's looking for homeostasis. It it really was a war between like the fat industry and the sugar industry because like you're going to have to have one or the other in all your products. So calorie intake rose and obesity rates climbed because there was so much sugar in everything. And decades later, there was a researcher called Cristin Kearns who found this paper trail. Cristin Kearns was writing a paper a story about dentistry and teeth uh, in in all that archive correspondence and published it in 2016.

[00:39:55]There were historians and other people who pushed back and basically said, well, actually, fair enough, like the sugar industry were pushing, but also the fat and cholesterol and the dairy industry were also pushing the other side and like it's kind of So it's it's kind of damning on the food industry and like medical complex as a whole.

[00:40:11]>> Politics and stuff. But it's astonishing that really you can trace in some ways all the sugar in all our food, especially in America, you can trace back to basically a few years where the sugar industry were a bit worried and decided to push it.

[00:40:25]Anyway, this got me thinking about legal wranglings and loopholes in sugar industry and it reminded me of the Tic Tac phenomenon. Oh, yeah. I know that fact.

[00:40:33]>> such a good sound. Is this the best?

[00:40:35]Okay, so this is a packet of Tic Tacs.

[00:40:38]Now, in the UK, they're not labeled as sugar free, but in the US, they are.

[00:40:42]Mhm. And yet they're made almost entirely of sugar.

[00:40:45]Okay, America, explain yourself. It's kind of a genius legal loophole. So, basically, in the US, the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, allows products that have less than 0.5 g of sugar per serving. Uh-huh. Because that's such a tiny amount, they're allowed to label themselves as 0 g of sugar, sugar free, because like in a serving, it's negligible. If you eat a bowl of cereal and it's got 0.5 g of sugar, it's fair enough. Tic Tacs are 94% sugar. Mhm. But they weigh only 0.49 g each. So, they're just just under. And Tic Tacs say that the recommended serving is one Tic Tac, which obviously is Who is doing more [laughter] Tic Tacs?

[00:41:28]>> more Tic Tacs? So, it means that they're allowed to say there's no sugar in a Tic Tac because you're allowed to round it down to zero, basically. Is it bad my first reaction to that was like, that's such a good idea?

[00:41:39]>> [laughter] >> I was like, this is funny. That's like salami slicing. There's like a type of financial fraud where you just take like instead of taking a million pounds from someone's account, they'll definitely notice. You take like one pound a million times.

[00:41:52]It's known as salami slicing. If you have a log of salami and you cut a slice, no one will notice the difference, right? But I do think that is also a really big problem in food generally, like like the serving suggestions are usually just such nonsense. They're like, serves eight and it's like five Maltesers.

[00:42:07]>> [laughter] >> Giving sugar to children. Do Do we think sugar makes kids hyper? Uh yes. The trope of sugar making kids hyperactive is massively blown out of proportion.

[00:42:21]There's actually no studies that have been able to show that sugar makes kids hyperactive.

[00:42:26]So it's basically in the 1970s there was a pediatric allergist called Benjamin Feingold. So he was studying how different foods affected kids with ADHD.

[00:42:37]Uh-huh. And he conducted a study found 75% of the kids who had a reduced sugar intake showed like way better concentration all of these amazing health benefits. But his study was so poorly conducted there was like basically no control group. It was all really wishy-washy and every study that's tried to replicate his results since have found that it's more like less than 2% actually kind of showed the same boosts in concentration and all of these amazing benefits.

[00:43:07]>> terrible science get through? Like if he did a really poor experiment then like why didn't it get peer reviewed? I don't understand this. This is crazy.

[00:43:12]>> It's the 70s. It's the 70s. I saw a study that showed it but it was quite clever. It basically told parents who come to pick up their children from daycare. I think it was a quite a scientifically controlled daycare that they'd given them sugar.

[00:43:27]Half of them they'd given them sugar and half of them they hadn't. But actually they'd given none of them sugar and then parents reported hyperactive behavior in the ones that thought they had sugar.

[00:43:37]And so it's actually just we look for the patterns that we expect to see.

[00:43:40]Yeah.

[00:43:42]Um there's one thing they think it might be. Eating lots of sugar can give you a dopamine kick and the dopamine kick actually might lead to hyperactivity. So there's something about being in an environment say like if you're at a birthday party you're given sugar. It's all very exciting anyway.

[00:43:59]>> that makes way more sense that you're given sugar in environments where there's exciting anyway. And you don't didn't you don't get you don't get chocolate in the library cuz >> [laughter] >> you're going to get over the books. And also if it was also blood sugar you'd get hyperactive off a potato. Yeah.

[00:44:13]Exactly. Yeah.

[00:44:14]Um sugar also famously is very bad for your teeth. Mhm. Um and in Tudor England sugar was obviously very expensive as we had discussed earlier and only wealthy people could afford to eat so much that it would rot their teeth. Queen Elizabeth I famously had very blackened teeth. There are multiple accounts of her having blackened teeth because she ate so much sugar. She had a love sugar.

[00:44:35]Um there's also accounts of her stuffing her cheeks with cloth to fill the kind of uh gaunt Oh no, cuz she lost teeth.

[00:44:44]That's very um who is the Godfather? Oh yeah, Marlon Brando.

[00:44:48]Still so skeptical when we hear about historical accounts of like people not washing and not brushing their teeth like I can imagine I can imagine people like the amount that dentists make you do now with interdental flossing and stuff. They just didn't have that technology back then in terms of like really removing bacteria. And the other big difference as well as fluoride. They didn't have fluoride in their teeth.

[00:45:08]What's really interesting is um there are studies of skeletons from Pompeii and Herculaneum. We always I know what we always come on Pompeii in this podcast cuz there's always so much food evidence. But they have surprisingly good dental health and they think it's a combination of the low sugar diet because honey was the primary sweetener in that area. A lot of beets.

[00:45:27]But also there's a high natural fluoride content of the drinking water because of the volcanic geology.

[00:45:34]Um famously around Pompeii.

[00:45:36]It's so cool.

[00:45:37]Huge factor. I've heard that people uh like intentionally blacken their teeth to make it look like they were rich enough to afford sugar and therefore they were Yeah, I looked at I couldn't actually find evidence that people did it. I think that's an exaggeration. I mean I think it's probably true that blackened teeth at certain points in history were associated with wealth in the upper classes because they were people who were able to afford sugar.

[00:45:57]But I don't think uh that anyone actually went to the point of blackening their teeth to look richer. There's one example in Japan. There's something called ohaguro, which is the blackening of teeth as a cosmetic practice. But that's because white teeth were seen as animalistic and black was civilized and elegant. So that gives a whole different reason. Um on the other side of sugar being really bad for you, sugar being used in a healthy way. And we mentioned in the intro that you can use sugar in beekeeping.

[00:46:25]So powdered sugar, if you dust your bees in powdered sugar, you know, like at the end of a cake when you just kind of, you know, garnish.

[00:46:33]Yeah, exactly. Some beekeepers use this to protect bees against Varroa mites.

[00:46:38]Apparently, because the sugar encourages the bees to groom each other, which physically dislodges the mites.

[00:46:44]Its effectiveness is debated. I think it probably helps. It's not necessarily like a completely amazing cure, but I can I kind of that makes sense to me, the logic. When kids get head lice, you should just cover them in sugar.

[00:46:55]>> [laughter] >> They'll lick each other's heads, yeah.

[00:46:58]That's such a good idea. Um another use for sugar, apparently it's used as a concrete retarder. What's a concrete retarder? So basically slows down the setting of concrete.

[00:47:08]So you can control by adding, you know, different amounts of sugar to concrete, it'll set at a different different pace.

[00:47:15]And actually there's one example in 2014 in central London, some builders had a cement leak and it leaked into a signaling station on the Victoria line.

[00:47:24]And they obviously closed the Victoria line, but one of the first things they did was rush to all the supermarkets and buy up all of the sugar they could.

[00:47:31]>> [laughter] >> They poured it into the cement to stop it setting so they could sweep it up quicker. Wow. That's so clever. Cuz if it set, there'd be even more chaos.

[00:47:38]You'd have to chip it away. So does that mean there's parts of the Victoria line that taste delicious? We should start licking the walls. Yeah.

[00:47:46]>> [music] >> Okay, that is it for this week's edition of Lots of Sparks and Andy and part one of the sugar episode. We will be back with part two. Watch this space.

[00:47:59]>> Uh you can follow our socials for foodie facts and podcast updates. [music] We are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok at Lunch Box MV Pod. You can also get in touch and send us your fact, recipes, and questions by emailing us [email protected]. [music] Before we go, I actually have been I've been seeing other podcasts. Oh >> [laughter] >> my god. Yes, it's called Here's What You Do. It's a really fun quiz podcast hosted by uh professional quiz writers James Smellie, Jonny Robinson, and John Mitchinson, who are In fact, uh James used to work on QI years ago.

[00:48:30]>> Yeah. So, each episode, they do a quiz, but they make up a quiz [music] format each week. They make different quiz formats. It's really fun.

[00:48:35]>> work.

[00:48:36]I love it. It's a really entertaining quiz. So, you can listen to my episode now, which is out this week. And I'll stick a clip of the episode at the end of this this episode as well.

[00:48:44]>> Yeah, have a little listen. We will see you next week. Goodbye. Bye. Bye-bye.

[00:48:50]>> [music] >> Lunch Box MV was hosted by Dan Chambers, Manny On Rio, and produced by me, Alex Bell. This has been a quite interesting podcast.

[00:49:02]>> [music] >> I'm going to give you five things that all sound like foodstuffs, but only one of them is actually a foodstuff. Oh, nice.

[00:49:22]So, it's basically odd one out, but it's odd one in. Yeah.

[00:49:27]Okay, which of these is the real foodstuff? Mint police, bread crust bomb, salty brine, pork adobo, muffin top.

[00:49:35]>> [laughter] >> You get two points for identifying the correct foodstuff, but a point for every correct thing you can identify beyond that. I don't think you'll get many of them cuz a lot of them are quite niche.

[00:49:47]Well, I think I know number five. Yeah, number five I feel I'm confident with.

[00:49:50]Is it mint police? Yep.

[00:49:52]>> Brilliant. Okay. As in stop, mint police.

[00:49:55]>> [laughter] >> I don't know I don't know I don't know how to demonstrate contest with that.

[00:50:00]What's the pork one? Pork adobo? Pork adobo. A D O B O. A D O B O.

[00:50:07]>> [laughter] >> It is pork adobo.

[00:50:10]I'm clipping that up, Johnny, and using that as a buzzer at some point.

[00:50:13][laughter] That That's actually the theme tune to this quiz now. This round.

[00:50:18]It's another title, but it has a song.

[00:50:19]>> [laughter] >> James, what have you gone for? I think the food is salty brine. That feels like a food.

[00:50:25]>> John, how about you?

[00:50:26]>> I've gone for pork adobo. And Johnny?

[00:50:29]Same. Pork adobo. Well, you are both right. It is pork adobo. It is that Pork adobo is a Filipino curry made with pineapple and dark soy.

[00:50:37]>> Lovely.

[00:50:38]>> [screaming] >> Would you like to find out what the rest The rest of the things were? Yes, please. I said that pork adobo was an instrument. It sounded a bit like an oboe. So, I was like, "Oh, the pork adobo."

[00:50:48]>> It does sound like an instrument. Yeah.

[00:50:50]So, the mint police, any guesses? No idea.

[00:50:53]>> The mint police is a police force uh designated to the US mint. They police like money fraud and stuff. Yeah. They are literally the mint police. A bread crust bomb, any guesses? Not a clue. No.

[00:51:04]>> I I said a band. No, it would be a good band name. Um and I can't guarantee it's not a band, actually. But, it's called ejected tephra. It's a type of lava bomb that comes out of a volcano that has It's like kind of liquid It's like a mozzarella ball, I guess. It has a brittle outer shell, and it's soft and molten on the inside. And so, when it land It gets blown out of the volcano, when it lands, it explodes.

[00:51:23]>> Delicious. Gosh, we're learning loads, eh? Salty brine? I thought it's like you just like stick a bit of pork in and leave it there for a few hours. It is that. I suppose it is. It's also the name of an American broadcaster. He was called Walter Brian. He lived from 1918 to 2004, and he was called Salty Brian.

[00:51:39]Love it. That's an incredible name. And muffin top? I imagine some of you got that. We've all got it, Alex.

[00:51:46]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, the like the area that sticks out above your trousers.

[00:51:50]>> your jeans, yeah.

[00:51:51]>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great.

[00:51:52]Well, you all get one. So, hang a second. That's two points for John and Johnny, and then a one extra for all of you.