Bold as brassica
What would be the effect on young adults and young children of seeing positive expressions on the faces of strangers who are eating raw broccoli?
Katie Edwards at Aston University, UK, together with colleagues there and at the University of Birmingham, also in the UK, tried to find out.
The journal Appetite published a first-hand account of that adventure, along with the title “Exposure to models’ positive facial expressions whilst eating a raw vegetable increases children’s acceptance and consumption of the modelled vegetable“.
No need to mince words or broccoli about what they found. In their words: “contrary to the hypotheses, models’ facial expressions whilst eating broccoli did not significantly influence initial willingness to try broccoli”.
Circles of life
In the 1960s, young intellectuals in Western countries urged each other to adopt the philosophy and ways of Zen (Zen Buddhism). To have a thoughtful, wise, good life, people were encouraged to “go the ways of Zen” and to “be at one with the universe”.
Six decades later, thoughts and chatter have advanced.
Although no replacement has been widely adopted in the West as a counterpart in the 2020s, Feedback suggests Venn (Venn diagrams).
Venn, like Zen, aims for a simpler understanding of matters that seem complex. Venn masters sometimes describe their practice this way: a Venn diagram uses overlapping circles or similar shapes to illustrate the logical relationships between different kinds of items.
Adopt the philosophy and ways of Venn. Perceive and cultivate the overlaps in your life. Draw a Venn diagram of the qualities of every person, place and thing from your entire life, from birth until now. The overlaps in the Venn diagram will reveal the commonalities. Embrace them. Be at one with the few.
Go Venn.
Talent for titration
Superpowers, trivial or otherwise, have the reputation of being all or nothing. John Hancock tells Feedback of an exception – maybe a partial exception – to that.
He says: “It seems I am able, consistently, to pour out almost exactly half of a 339 ml bottle of beer, such that 2 identical glasses have the same level of beer within 1 or, at most, 2 mm. This is done in one pour without any aids – I just seem to know when to stop pouring!”
(Feedback notes that Hancock’s name is familiar to citizens of the US. On 4 January 1776, a previous John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, a document that told Britain to go suck eggs. That Hancock wrote in lettering so big and bold that his name became a synonym for “a person’s handwritten signature”. In the US, people still tell each other to “sign your John Hancock”. That earlier John Hancock, unlike this current John Hancock, disdained half measures.)
Questionable discomfort
There is another recent addition to Feedback’s collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know.
“The possible pain experienced during execution by different methods” perhaps brought surprise to readers of the journal Perception in 1993. It also won the 1997 Ig Nobel peace prize for its author, Harold Hillman at the University of Surrey, UK.
If you find an equally striking example, please send it, with citation details, to Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.
The Teflon diet
Teflon, much appreciated as a “non-stick” coating on frying pans and other cookware, could become an everyday additive to food, especially in weight-control diets.
Readers of a 2022 study called “Engineering properties of Teflon derived blends and composites: A review” get a quick hint of that in a single, slightly cryptic sentence: “By volume of Teflon reduced calories in food and observed satisfactory results accepted by community“. That sentence refers to a paper published in 2016 in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology.
The 2016 paper has an intellectually yummy title: “Polytetrafluoroethylene ingestion as a way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content“. The authors, Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway, in the US, explain that polytetrafluoroethylene – also known as PTFE or Teflon – is a plastic. They propound its merits: “Animal feeding trials showed that rats fed a diet of 25% PTFE for 90 days had no signs of toxicity and that the rats lost weight.”
They go on to hypothesise “that increasing the volume of food by mixing the food with PTFE powder at a ratio of 3 parts food to 1 part PTFE by volume will substantially improve satiety and reduce caloric consumption in people”.
Polytetrafluoroethylene, they write, “contributes no flavor (evident by its use in tongue piercings) and hence does not detract from the eating experience”. It is also “extremely inert… so it will not react within the body”.
It is thus “an ideal material for use as a nonmetabolized food volume bulking agent” – and in food that definitely won’t stick to your ribs.
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