QUESTION: Why does food get spicier the closer you go toward the Equator?
ANSWER: Wouldn't you think it'd be the other way around? How come Scandinavian food doesn't make your mouth burn and your eyes water and your nose run? What is Scandinavian food, anyway? And does it tend to spill on your Lapp HAR HAR HAR?There are several explanations that have been making the circuit, and we'll rank them in reverse order of credibility.
1. People in hot countries need to sweat, so that the breezes will cool them. This is a bit inane: Any food with a high temperature would do the trick. Coffee, for instance.
2. Spices contain chemical compounds that preserve food from spoilage in hot places with poor or non-existent refrigeration. The problem with this answer is that we have never heard of tropical cultures using hot sauce or chile peppers to preserve food. What's more likely is:
3. Spices mask a grody flavor caused by spoilage. We realize that in "grody" we have a word that probably will not appear in any English language dictionary and thus will be changed by every copy editor who strays near this column. But you know what we mean.
We'd have to wager that the real answer is a tidy little mental nugget that echoes the words of the guy who was asked why he robbed banks:
4. Because that's where the spices are. Your basic gingers and hot peppers of the capsicum family grow in the tropics, and so that's where people eat 'em. There is a great diversity of plant life, including spices, near the Equator, and a sparsity in climes of higher latitude.
QUESTION: Why are calories so delicious? Why don't we ever crave sprouts?
ANSWER: A calorie is just a unit of energy. It has no taste. Strangely, though, the things we find delicious always seem to contain heart-gumming, waist-inflating, jowl-begatting numbers of calories. Chocolate cake is what comes to mind.
Here's the truth: We don't have some evolutionary predisposition to like high-calorie food. We just like food, period. Evolution has made us omnivores. We can savor almost anything, from low-calorie health food to pink frosting. "There are people who have cravings for lettuce," says Louis Grivetti, a University of California professor of nutrition.
But wait: Clearly, sweets and fats are more satiating for most people. Why?
Everyone has taste buds that are sensitive to sweets, but we also are geared for sours and bitters and all sorts of other flavors that are characteristic of low-calorie food. If we have a sweet tooth, that's an acquired taste. Many other cultures don't slather on the icing the way we do. As for fats, that's largely mechanical. Fat has good "mouth feel" because it melts and spreads across your tongue, coating the taste buds. But once again, we can get used to eating nonfatty, nonsweet foods.
Think about it: You probably use less salt and sugar than you used to, and it doesn't bother you a bit. (Salt is an acquired taste, dating to the time when it was used to preserve meat, presumably in places where there wasn't enough Tabasco.)
QUESTION: Why do they call certain foods low-sodium rather than low-salt?
ANSWER: Sodium chloride is salt. But so is potassium chloride. No sodium, but still salt. A salt simply means a substance with cations and anions, but you don't need to worry about those, because the bad boy is not salt per se, but sodium. About 8 percent of the U.S. population is sensitive to sodium and needs to eat low-sodium food to avoid high blood pressure.
QUESTION: Why does no one ever discover premature oil?
ANSWER: Your laser-like mind instantly perceives what a great question this is.
Oil is dead dinosaurs and primordial swamp ferns and deceased microscopic plankton, right?
And it became oil because this organic stuff got buried for several tens of millions of years, right?
So why in tarnation doesn't anyone strike a patch that needs just one or two more eons until it's ready? Why don't they hit the stuff that's still a little green? Why is oil always ripe?
The answer is obvious. The organic stuff is originally dispersed over a wide area of subterranean rock, called "source rock." It gradually turns to oil when exposed to heat and high pressure, and then slowly migrates through fissures and crevices and pores in the rock. The oil is lighter than the water that saturates rock, so it tends to float toward the surface. The weight of all that rock also squeezes it upward to regions of less pressure.
Eventually, it hits an impermeable layer of rock, and is trapped. It collects in the "reservoir rock." That's an oil field. We can't hit green oil because if it's premature it won't have turned to liquid oil and migrated to a reservoir.
The big question is, how much credibility can we assign to the story of a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed? You know how one day he was shooting at some food, and up through the ground came a-bubblin' crude? Black gold? Texas tea? Well, that's utter nonsense. Oil doesn't shoot out of the ground like that, it just leaks serenely. In rare cases it will pool and form a tar pit like the ones in Los Angeles. This should be a cautionary tale: Never, never take your geological knowledge from TV sitcoms.
THE MAILBAG:
A reader named Dallas J. in Grantsburg, Wis., has complained about our assertion that a human being has a one-in-a-million chance of dying from a falling meteorite. He points out that only one person has been injured by a meteorite in all of recorded human history, and therefore the odds should be longer. We can explain: Although the impact of a large meteorite is exceedingly unlikely, such a catastrophe would kill millions of people. This increases the chance of death for any one person.
Send questions to Joel Achenbach, Tropic Magazine, The Miami Herald. 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.