Now I Know (21 page)

If you want to have an extra level of comfort that your bread is fresh, you can follow Snopes’ advice: “Contact the manufacturer of your favorite brand and ask” about their color-coding system.

Oranges are orange. Some things in life are just that simple. But that fact is becoming increasingly untrue, and there may not be much we can do about it. The bacteria are winning, and orange oranges are their victims.

In 2006, some Florida citrus growers detected bacteria called Las (
Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus
, for the armchair biologists) on their trees. Las causes a disease originally discovered in Asia called Huanglongbing, or HLB. Once a tree is infected with HLB, it cannot be cured and, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, dies within five to ten years. (A healthy orange tree can live for as long as a century.) Oranges from trees infected with HLB do not ripen the same way those from healthy trees do and end up misshapen. Further, most of them aren’t entirely orange. They’re mostly green.

A certain type of insect carries the disease, so even if farmers cut down infected plants, Las will still find a way to spread. According to
Scientific American
, the citrus industry invests about $16 million annually in the fight against the bugs, bacteria, and disease, but for the moment, it does not have a solution. The insect itself—called the Asian citrus psyllid—is a difficult target, because it is incredibly tiny; the USDA notes that it is “no bigger than the head of a pin.”

Although this is bad news for citrus growers, it isn’t a nightmare scenario for lovers of orange juice—at least not yet. The green, misshapen, and diseased fruits are perfectly safe to eat. Their chemical makeup is a bit different than typical oranges and they taste slightly more bitter because of that. However, as
Smithsonian
magazine notes, the taste difference is too subtle for the typical person to notice. Mixing the juice of the “bad” fruit with juice from uninfected oranges masks the bitter taste enough to make it almost entirely undetectable, so there is no immediate risk to the OJ market, so long as enough healthy citrus trees exist.

More good news is that by themselves the Asian citrus psyllids cannot travel long distances, so the disease is not able to spread too far—unless people end up assisting its spread. And that is exactly what is happening. The USDA has set up a website,
www.SaveOurCitrus.org
, that specifically advises people to “reduce the spread of citrus diseases by not moving your homegrown citrus fruit or plants across state lines.” Video and radio ads echo that request. For the sake of OJ drinkers everywhere, it hopes people will heed that call.

Seedless. Nutritious. Portable. Tasty. Yellow. You pretty much know what you’re going to get with a banana. And you should get it before it’s gone.

Bananas—or more accurately, the Cavendish, a specific type of banana that most of us consider to be
the
banana—are, if nothing else, an incredibly consistent fruit. There’s a reason for that. All Cavendish bananas are clones and therefore genetically identical to every other Cavendish out there. (It’s not uncommon for fruits to be cloned. Navel oranges are also clones, for example.) But being clones has a big downside—if there’s a disease that affects one Cavendish, it affects all Cavendish.

Which is why the bananas most people eat—and we eat a lot of them, more than twenty-five pounds of bananas per American each year (that’s the most of any fresh fruit!)—aren’t the same bananas that were eaten fifty years ago. Prior to 1960, the standard commercial banana type was the Gros Michel (a.k.a. “Big Mike”), a larger banana type that, by many accounts, was also tastier. But the Gros Michel was susceptible to Panama disease, caused by a fungus that attacks the roots of banana plants. Panama disease spread rapidly through major banana plantations, crippling businesses and making Gros Michel cultivation commercially impossible. After billions of dollars of research and development, the Cavendish—which is genetically resistant to Panama disease—became the world’s top banana.

Could the Cavendish go the way of the dodo and the Gros Michel? Absolutely. A relatively new strain of Panama disease, Tropical Race 4 (“TR4”), can destroy Cavendish crops, and the only known way to stop it is genetic resistance, which the Cavendish (being a clone) won’t ever develop. TR4 has already attacked banana plantations in Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and has spread to Southeast Asia. According to
Popular Science
, experts believe that it is only a matter of time, perhaps decades, before TR4 sends the Cavendish down the same path as Big Mike. But there’s a very good chance that it could be longer. Plantation owners learned their lessons from the Gros Michel banana Apocalypse and take extreme measures to prevent this from repeating; there are even reports of plantations burning down entire fields due to a slight Panama disease infection, hoping to stop its spread.

In the 1930s, a certain brand of dinnerware was all the rage—Fiestaware. Unlike most dishes, which were mostly white, Fiesta’s came in a variety of colors—blue, ivory, green, yellow, and orangeish-red. The popularity of these dishes was beyond comparison (for dishes, at least)—even famed artist Andy Warhol was among Fiesta’s legions of fans. Two of the colors were also difficult to copy. Fiesta’s red and, to a lesser extent, ivory dinnerware required a special, expensive ingredient in order to make the colored glaze.

That ingredient? Uranium. Fiestaware was radioactive.

Fiesta made its way into American homes in the mid-1930s, advertised as the first solid-color dinnerware available. (Some smaller brands made similar offerings but nothing on a national scale.) To obtain the red glaze, Fiesta used uranium oxide, which did the job but, of course, has the unfortunate side effect of needing uranium. In 1944, the presence of uranium in the dishes led its manufacturer, the Homer Laughlin China Company, to eventually pull them off the shelves.

But not for health reasons—the potential for harm caused by the radioactive dinnerware is still debatable. The red dishes disappeared from shelves due to national security needs. That year, the United States, under the Manhattan Project, was trying to develop an atomic bomb and needed uranium. The government seized any and all uranium it could find, including that owned by Homer Laughlin. The company pulled the red offering from its product line later that year.

In 1959, the red Fiestaware made a comeback, this time using less radioactive depleted uranium instead of natural uranium. As for the vintage, much more radioactive stuff? It may be okay to keep as a collectible, but the EPA lists it as emitting “elevated levels” of radiation—so collector (and certainly, everyday diner) beware.

Modern Spanish-style bullfighting dates back to 1726. That year, a
matador de toros
—literally, “killer of bulls”—named Francisco Romero revolutionized the tradition. He took on the bulls on foot, unlike his predecessors who had battled the animals while on horseback. More importantly, Romero introduced some new equipment into the battlefield—a sword called an
estoque
, and a cape known as a
muleta
. As we all know, the
muleta
is, traditionally, red.

The bulls, on the other hand, have no idea what color it is.

For nearly 300 years, matadors have mimicked Romero’s costume. At some time during the past three centuries, the red cape became the subject of a myth: When bulls see the color red, they become irate and charge at it. The myth is so widespread that it even permeated children’s cartoons: The protagonist finds himself in the arena with a bull and (often accidentally) shows something red to the creature. This, in the cartoons, enrages the bull, putting the cartoon character’s life in peril.

But in reality, that’s not the case. People have trichromatic vision—we have three different color receptors in our eyes. Bulls have dichromatic vision; that is, they only have two color receptors. We can look at the
muleta
and determine that it is red. Bulls, on the other hand, can’t discern between colors well enough to recognize red.

On the August 22, 2007 episode of
Mythbusters
, the cast put this to the test. First, they put out red, white, and blue flags; the bull charged at each one, without any noticeably extra ire directed toward the red one. Next, the Mythbusters dressed three dummies as matadors, one in each of the three colors. The red matador met the bull’s horns last. Finally—most conclusively, too—one of the Mythbusters dressed in all red, but stayed as still as possible while two professionals, wearing blue or white, respectively, danced around the bullring. The bull ignored the red-clad Mythbuster and instead chased the dancing cowboys.

Most likely, bulls are attracted to the
muletas
due to the movements the matadors make with them, and not because of their color. For the most part, the red
muletas
are still used out of respect for tradition, but there’s a second reason. Although the bulls can’t tell that the matadors’ capes are red, the audience certainly can. When the bull wins, the
muleta
’s color masks the matador’s blood. With well over 500 matadors dying in bullfights since Romero reinvented bullfighting, that’s probably a good thing.

Travel south from New Zealand and you’ll eventually hit Antarctica. Continue inward on the southern continent and you’ll end up passing through a thirty-four-mile long Antarctic glacier known as the Taylor Glacier, named after Griffith Taylor, a geologist and Australian explorer who was one of the first people to lead exploratory expeditions of the area. Next to the Taylor Glacier is Lake Bonney, a saltwater lake trapped under an ice shelf ten to fifteen feet thick. Oozing slowly from underneath Taylor Glacier and onto Lake Bonney’s ice cover is a five-story-high frozen waterfall.

The water comes out blood red. And that isn’t even the most interesting part of what is now called Blood Falls.

Griffith Taylor discovered Blood Falls in 1911. At the time, Taylor and others believed that there was some sort of algae alive in the glacier, creating the dark-red tint in the ice. As it turned out, this isn’t the case.

Buried well below Taylor Glacier—we’re not entirely sure how far below—is a prehistoric lake, which has been trapped there, undisturbed, for an estimated 1.5 to 2 million years. The lake is entirely cut off from the rest of the Earth’s outer environment. It receives no sunlight. It has no oxygen. It has very high levels of saline (it’s a saltwater lake), sulfur, chloride, and iron. (The iron oxides cause the seepage at Blood Falls to turn red.) As one would expect, the temperature of the water hits extremely low levels; the high amount of salt is the only thing keeping the water from easily freezing.

What may seem like an inhospitable environment, though, is anything but. There’s something living in this subglacial lake, and given the lake’s seclusion, the life forms have been there for millennia. They aren’t the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti, but according to
Science
magazine, multiple species of microbes live in the lake—at least a dozen and perhaps twice that. They’ve somehow survived without oxygen or any known way of producing it. The leading theory suggests that the microbes somehow use the sulfate and iron instead, but because no other known life form on Earth does this, we don’t understand how.