But what about foods that don’t pop naturally the way that popcorn does? Quite a bit of the technology used in the manufacture of breakfast cereals is employed specifically to make those foods “poppable”—to produce desirable, popcorn-like qualities in foods that don’t normally have them. Foods like whole-grain rice and wheat, for example. Or grains that have been milled into flour, then mixed with other ingredients to make dough that is then baked into individual pieces of cereal.
POPCORN 101
To understand how whole grains and dough end up as Puffed Wheat, Cheerios, and Kix, it helps to understand what makes popcorn pop in the first place.
• A kernel of popcorn consists of a hard shell that surrounds a dense, starchy center, and there’s a lot of moisture in the starch. When you place a bag of unpopped popcorn in a microwave oven, the microwave “cooks” the popcorn by heating the moisture in the starch. The starch softens and develops a consistency similar to gelatin as it cooks.
• When the moisture is heated to the boiling point, it converts into steam and begins to expand. Or at least it wants to: What makes popcorn different from most other grains is that its hard outer shell does not allow the steam to escape. Instead, the kernel of corn becomes like a tiny pressure cooker: The steam pressure builds up until the outer shell can no longer contain it, and it ruptures.
In winter, the air in the average American home is twice as dry as the Sahara Desert’s.
• If you’ve ever opened a bottle of champagne or a shaken bottle of soda, or squirted a dollop of shaving cream into your hand, it’s easy to understand what happens next: When the shell cracks, the pressure drops and the moisture in the starch instantly converts from a liquid state to a gaseous state, creating air bubbles in the cooked, gelatinous starch that cause it to froth up into a foamy mass, expanding it to 30 or 40 times its original size. The steam escapes, leaving behind the dried, crunchy, styrofoamy starch that we know as popcorn.
POP! GOES THE CEREAL
Wheat and rice don’t have external shells that trap steam the way that corn does, so if you want to obtain popcornlike results with these grains, you have to provide the pressure cooker. When cereal companies want to make puffed wheat, puffed rice, or puffed dough, they do just that, using a process known as “gun puffing” developed by Quaker Oats researchers at the turn of the 20th century. Why is it called gun puffing? Because the process was perfected using an actual Army cannon—one that saw action in the Spanish American War—that was converted into a pressure cooker. (Corn kernels can also be gun puffed. That’s how Kellogg’s Corn Pops are made.)
Corn Pops, Puffed Wheat, and Puffed Rice
• Whole grains are steam cooked in a pressure cooker (or cannon) until the pressure builds to about 200 pounds per square inch (psi), or about 13.6 times the normal atmospheric pressure (at sea level).
• When the grains have been properly cooked, the pressure inside the pressure cooker is released all at once, just like when popcorn pops. There’s even a loud POP! when the pressure is released.
• The sudden drop in pressure causes the moisture in the grains to flash into steam, puffing up the grains just like popcorn.
• The puffed grains are baked dry, and in the case of puffed-wheat cereals like Kellogg’s Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp, lots of sweeteners are added to make them more appealing to kids.
Cereal killers? Kellogg’s Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp are over 50% sugar by weight.
“Extruded” Gun-Puffed Cereals Made From Dough
How do they make Kix, Trix, Cheerios, Alpha Bits, Cocoa Puffs, and other “extruded gun-puffed” cereals?
• Various combinations of corn, oat, wheat, and rice flours are mixed with sugar, water, coloring, flavoring, and other ingredients to make a sweet dough, which is then fed into a machine called a forming extruder.
• The extruder forms the dough into the desired shape just like you might have done if you played with Play-Doh when you were a kid: To create a star shape, you squeeze, or extrude, the dough through a star-shaped hole. If you want a round shape, you squeeze the dough through a round hole. If you’re making Cheerios, you punch a hole in the middle to get a donut shape, and if you’re making Alpha Bits, you use letter-shaped holes.
• As the extruded dough emerges from the hole in the proper shape, rotating blades cut it into individual cereal pieces.
• The freshly extruded dough pieces have too high a moisture content to be suitable for gun puffing, so they are dried until their moisture content drops from as high as 24% down to a more desirable 9% to 12%. (Unpopped popcorn kernels, by comparison, have a moisture content of 13.5% to 14%.)
• The dried pieces are fed into a gun puffer. The puffed cereal is then toasted dry.
RICE KRISPIES
If you’ve ever watched cookies bake in the oven, you know that the dough puffs as it cooks. Rice Krispies are made the same way, in a process that’s called “oven-puffing.”
• First, rice is pressure cooked at a low 15–18 psi (vs. the 200 psi used in the gun-puffing process) with water, sugar, salt, flavoring, and other ingredients.
• The cooked rice is then dried to reduce the moisture content from 28% to 17%; then it is “bumped,” or fed through rollers to flatten the grains slightly and create small cracks in the rice, which will aid puffing.
HBO’s first broadcast: an NHL game between the Rangers and Canucks on Nov. 8, 1972.
• The cooked, bumped rice is dried a second time to bring the moisture content from 17% down to around 10%, which is ideal for oven-puffing. The grains are then fed into a rotating oven and baked at 550°–650°F for about 90 seconds to give them their distinctive puffy appearance and crunchy texture.
• So what causes the famous Snap! Crackle! Pop! sound? The walls of the puffed Rice Krispies kernels are so thin and brittle that many of them collapse when they come into contact with milk.
CORN FLAKES AND BRAN FLAKES
Looking into a bowl of Corn Flakes or Raisin Bran, it’s easy to imagine that all those flakes started out as one single sheet of cereal that was crumbled into a thousand individual flakes. But that’s not how they’re made.
• It turns out that it’s much easier to make each flake separately. In the case of corn flakes, kernels of corn are processed to remove the hard outer shell and the germ, the part of the kernel that would have grown into a corn stalk if the kernel had been planted as a seed. What’s left after the shell and the germ are removed? Chunks of starch, each of which will become an individual corn flake.
• The chunks are cooked in a solution of water, sugar, salt, flavoring, and other ingredients until the hard, white starch has become soft, translucent, and a light golden brown in color.
• The cooked corn is fed into “de-lumping” equipment to break up any clumps; then it’s dried in a hot-air dryer and fed through giant rollers to flatten the chunks of corn into flakes.
• The flakes are toasted until they reach the proper golden color and have a moisture content of 1.5 to 3 percent.
• Bran flakes are made pretty much the same way, except that whole grains, not chunks, are used to make the flakes. Flaked cereals can also be made from rice or from dough.
“People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them somebody famous said them first.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Study: Kids who eat high-sugar cereals eat twice as much as kids who eat low-sugar cereals.
CEREAL FACTS
A few more golden nuggets for you to savor.
• First athlete to appear on the front of a box of Wheaties: Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards, in 1958. Athlete with the most Wheaties box appearances: NBA star Michael Jordan, with 18. Tiger Woods has appeared 14 times.
• Most unusual cereal premium of the 1980s: actual $1 bills, stuffed into 1 out of every 20 boxes of Cheerios in General Mills’ 1986 “Treasure Hunt” sales promotion.
• In 1960 Post cereals sponsored The Danny Thomas Show, s
et in New York City, but the big-city show didn’t appeal to rural Americans. When the company decided it wanted a homier showcase for its traditional Grape-Nuts cereal, which had been on the market since the 1890s, an episode was created in which Danny Thomas’ character, a nightclub singer, makes a trip to a small town in North Carolina and has a run-in with the local sheriff. The episode was a hit; the spin-off Andy Griffith Show was born.
• How did Kellogg’s Product 19 get its name? The advertising executive assigned to come up with a name for the product in 1966 couldn’t think of one…until he noticed that it was the 19th product developed by Kellogg that year.
• First slogan used by the Trix Rabbit: “Rabbits are supposed to like carrots. But I hate carrots. I like Trix.” (It was later changed to “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.”)
• Why was Franken Berry cereal temporarily pulled from store shelves shortly after it was introduced in 1971? According to the character’s designer, graphic artist Bill Tollis, “When kids went to the bathroom, their stools were pink from the food coloring.”
• In 1937 Wheaties held a contest to find the most popular baseball announcer in the country. First prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood. Winner: a 26-year-old Iowa sports announcer named Ronald “Dutch” Reagan. While in Hollywood, Reagan took the screen test that launched his movie career and set him on his path to the Presidency.
President Eisenhower damaged the floor of the Oval Office with his golf spikes.
BIRD BRAINS, PART III
Caw! Caw! 256! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! (Translation: On page 256, you learned that crows and ravens are really smart. Here’s our final installment of brainy birds.)
POLLY WANNA DOCTORATE
Have you ever seen a talk show where an animal expert comes out with a parrot and they perform tricks? The handler asks, “What sound does a pig make?” The parrot replies, “Oink. Oink.” This isn’t as impressive as it may seem. Using treats as rewards, the bird was simply trained to give that response to that question. It would be much more impressive if the bird could give a vocal response that required actual thinking.
An African grey parrot named Alex could do just that. But Alex wasn’t a genius among birds, he was just one of several young parrots at a Chicago pet store, selected at random by a college student named Irene Pepperberg for an experiment in 1977. After watching a TV show about gorillas that use sign language, Pepperberg wanted to see if a parrot could also learn to converse with a human. So for the next 30 years, she and Alex—whose name is short for Avian Language EXperiment—worked together in a lab at Boston’s Brandeis University. By the time Alex died of natural causes in 2007, he had learned more than 100 words, could identify 35 objects by recall, and understood the words “yes” and “no” as well as relative adjectives such as “bigger,” “smaller,” “different,” and “same.”
WHAT A BLOCKHEAD
In one test, Dr. Pepperberg held up a tray of objects and asked, “How many green blocks?” There were several blocks on the tray, not all of them green. There were also several green objects that weren’t blocks. To come up with the answer, Alex needed to know how to differentiate between colors, how to differentiate between objects, and how to count. He inspected the tray for a moment and then answered, “Two.” He was correct. Alex even understood the concept of zero, something that humans don’t really pick up on until about age three. Dr. Pepperberg showed him a tray with three triangles, four squares, and five circles, and asked him, “How many are six?” His reply: “None.”
No wonder they smell so good: Laid out flat, a human’s nasal membranes would be be about the size of a quarter. A dog’s would be the size of a paper towel.
But Alex’s abilities went beyond using words and numbers; he understood emotions, too. When Dr. Pepperberg was stressed out, Alex would say, “Calm down.” When Alex himself was getting a little tired of answering questions, he’d say, “I want dinner” or “I want to go back” (to his cage). According to Pepperberg, he displayed the emotional equivalent of a two-year-old child and the intellectual equivalent of a five-year-old child. In fact, several of the cognitive tests that were created specifically to teach Alex—and now his successors, Griffin and Arthur—are being used by developmental therapists to teach learning-disabled children how to talk and count. “This kind of research is changing the way we think about birds and intelligence,” said Dr. Pepperberg, “but it also helps us break down barriers to learning in humans—and the importance of such strides cannot be underestimated.”
COMING HOME TO ROOST
The more that scientists discover about parrots, crows, and other birds, the smarter they get (the birds and the scientists). Yet because the field of avian psychology is only a few decades old, there’s still a lot about bird behavior that we don’t know. For example, how does a flock of thousands of starlings seem to move as a single organism? And how exactly does a migrating Swainson’s hawk find its way from Brazil to the same tree in Oregon year after year? Does it have a built-in magnetic homing device? Or can it actually see Earth’s magnetic field? Biologists and psychologists alike are pecking away at these mysteries—trying to gain more insight into the avian condition in the hope of better understanding the human condition.
SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BIRD
Want more evidence of avian intelligence? While researching this article, we learned about so many birds with amazing abilities that our gooses would be cooked if we didn’t include just a few more.
• Herons: Displaying a behavior that may have been learned by watching humans, the striated heron uses bait to catch fish. It lands on a riverbank and tosses an object into the water—an insect, berry, twig, people food, or even a fisherman’s discarded fly. It waits until a hungry fish swims by, and then dives in and grabs it. Not all striated herons catch their fish this way, but it’s been observed that those who do yield more fish than those who don’t.
• Honeyguides: These African birds eat beeswax, but to get at it, they must pierce tough beehives and survive the onslaught of angry bees. Two honeyguide species get around the problem by finding a honey badger and leading it to the hive. The badger gets the honey and the birds get the wax. But if a honeyguide doesn’t find a badger, it flies to a village and starts pestering people, who know exactly why it’s there. The bird leads the villagers to the hive and awaits its sweet reward.
• Cowbirds: Brown-headed cowbirds are like mob enforcers. Females don’t incubate their own eggs; instead, they wait until a female of another species, say, a warbler, lays her eggs. Then the cowbird flies in and lays her own eggs among the warbler’s. If the warbler throws out the cowbird’s eggs, the cowbird comes back and destroys the warbler’s eggs. Over time, the warblers—and more than 200 other host species—have come to understand that if they want to raise their own chicks, they must raise the cowbirds’ as well…or else.
• Owls: Ironically, “wise” owls rank quite low on the avian intelligence scale. Who needs tools when you have such keen nocturnal senses and silent flying abilities? But a recent discovery shows that burrowing owls do indeed use stools…er, tools. They collect animal dung and spread it out near their burrows. The dung then attracts beetles—an important part of the owls’ diet.
• Snowball: A pet cockatoo named Snowball is believed by ornithologists to be the “first non-human animal that’s conclusively demonstrated to be capable of beat induction.” In other words, he can dance. After his dancing videos became famous on YouTube, scientists at Harvard University studied the bird, along with other animals, to see if they could dance. Snowball proved his abilities by keeping perfect time even when the music was slowed down and sped up. (Dogs, cats, and chimps were found to have no sense of rhythm whatsoever.) So the next time you’re on the Internet, type “snowball” and “cockatoo” into a search engine. And while you’re tapping your toes to the video, appreciate all of the brainpower it takes for that little ball of feathers to come up with such incredible dance moves.
INVENTORS, U.K.
You may not be familiar with these British people’s names—but you know the things they invented.
INVENTOR: Bryan Donkin (1768–1855)
STORY: In the early 1800s, Donkin, an engineer by trade, ventured into the pursuit of a cutting-edge invention. In 1812 he acquired the patent of British merchant Peter Durand: an idea for preserving meat in cans made of tin. Durand never actually made tin cans, but Donkin made the concept a reality when he developed a method of sterilizing meat inside sealed cans by heating them very slowly, and in 1813 opened the world’s first canning factory in London. Apart from the exclusion of lead soldering used in the original tin cans, and the change from tin-coated iron to tinned steel in the 1860s, the product has changed little since then and is still being produced by Crosse and Blackwell—the company that took over Donkin’s original business—to this day.
INVENTOR: Stephen Perry (dates unknown)
STORY: In 1839 Charles Goodyear of New Haven, Connecticut, invented the process of vulcanization of rubber, in which natural rubber, made from the sap of rubber trees, is heated and mixed with sulfur. This made the normally fragile raw rubber very tough, durable, and elastic, and led to its many uses in the modern world, not least of which are the tires that bear Goodyear’s name. Just a few years later, an English businessman named Stephen Perry had a vulcanized-rubber factory up and running in London, and one day found himself with a small, thin, stretchy loop of vulcanized rubber, which he used to bind a bunch of letters. On March 17, 1845, he was issued the very first patent for the rubber band.
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