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The warmth in a cinnamon roll is not heat. It is a pain signal. Your tongue has a receptor called TRPA1, built to detect cold and tissue damage. Cinnamaldehyde activates it directly. Your brain reads the result as warmth because ...

The fortune cookie itself is not Chinese. It descends from tsujiura senbei, a Japanese cracker sold near Kyoto shrines, brought to California by Japanese bakers in the early 1900s and adopted by Chinese restaurants after WWII. In China, most people ...

"Pure Vanilla Extract." Right next to it on the shelf, "Vanilla Flavor," a few cents cheaper. Most people assume it is the same thing in fancier words. It is not, and the difference is written into federal law. An extract ...

The most feared additive in the American pantry is manufactured, in large amounts, by your own body. It is also present in breast milk at higher free levels than in a bowl of ramen. The molecule is glutamate, and it ...

Every spring someone asks why we cannot just flavor a product with real strawberries. A fresh strawberry is 91 percent water. To get something a factory can dose you need 9 to 10 kilos of fruit for one kilo of ...

Everyone says banana candy tastes fake. The chemistry says something more interesting. Isoamyl acetate (3-methylbutyl acetate, CAS 123-92-2) is a true character impact compound. Strawberry needs hundreds of volatiles working in concert before the brain commits to "strawberry." Banana does ...