Food Safety Talk 305: Walking Cud Factories

Don and Ben are joined by surprise guest Paul Breslin from Rutgers. Paul is a geneticist who works in the area of taste and when he heard that Don had a podcast he had to be on it. After Don plays his favorite, but Ben's least favorite game of "guess the guest," where Ben almost got there, they start in on food, food chemistry, genetics and evolution. The guys talk about the ubiquity of fermentation in human foods, cooking, why foods taste the way they do, the evolution of taste receptors. They also get into questions like what does eating pure DNA or RNA taste like. They talk about hot foods/spices, electronic noses for pathogens and spoilage and some other stuff.

Show notes so you can follow along at home:

• ChatGPT question about the sky

• Paul Breslin, Ph.D. - Dept. of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers SEBS

• Paul Breslin: Department of English - Northwestern University

• Fermentation Seminars - Dept. of Biochemistry and Microbiology

• Próxima Parada / OliverHazard, with Ben Chapman Tickets | Carrboro, NC | Cat’s Cradle

• Why Fire Makes Us Human | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

• Kombucha - Wikipedia

• The Art of Fermentation - Chelsea Green Publishing

• Rob Dunn | Applied Ecology | NC State University

• The evolution of sour taste | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

• DNA Is Safe To Eat. RNA Isn’t Bad Either.

• Ribonucleotides differentially modulate oral glutamate detection thresholds | Chemical Senses | Oxford Academic

• 600. Eating Raw Chicken Every Day — Risky or Not?

• Spicy In Means Spicy Out: Capsaicin-Associated Anal Burn (CAAB) in Three US Metropolitan Populations, a New Proposed Classification System

• Application of electronic nose as a non-invasive technique for odor fingerprinting and detection of bacterial foodborne pathogens: a review - PMC

• But How Does the Worm Get in Your Brain? - The New York Times

• Hooters of Brunswick | East Brunswick, NJ | Hooters of Brunswick

• Cara L. Cuite, Ph.D. – Department of Human Ecology

• A new model for food research: CAFT - Rutgers University

• Michael Rogers | Food Science

• University - WUR