Parties just aren't the same without alcohol. Everyone knows booze is the great social lubricant. Put 20 people in a room and they may get along well enough, but after a drink or two they'll be more social, more at ease with themselves and their surroundings. This is the basis of bars, cocktail parties--and maybe civilization, according to Jeffrey Kahn. In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, Kahn argues that beer may have been around as far back as 10,000 years ago, and is responsible for society's development as we know it.

"Five core social instincts, I have argued, gave structure and strength to our primeval herds," he writes. "They kept us safely codependent with our fellow clan members, assigned us a rank in the pecking order, made sure we all did our chores, discouraged us from offending others, and removed us from this social coil when we became a drag on shared resources...But then, these same lifesaving social instincts didn’t readily lend themselves to exploration, artistic expression, romance, inventiveness and experimentation...To free up those, we needed something that would suppress the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive."

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And that something was, of course, beer. Kahn points to evidence that, counter to common theory, humans first started growing and storing grain to make beer, rather than food. Mexican anthropological work indicates that the ancient grass teosinte was ideal for brewing, but a poor grain for making tortillas or bread; only after farmers domesticated that grass into maize did they primarily use it for food. Similarly, studies of stone age brewing tools in the Mediterranean indicated that beer may have been an important societal component.

Kahn writes that beer may have loosened rigid social structure, encouraging more creative thinking and collaboration. Eventually, it found a place in important social and even governmental decisions: "Beer was thought to be so important in many bygone civilizations that the Code of Urukagina, often cited as the first legal code, even prescribed it as a central unit of payment and penance."

Today no judge would order a guilty farmer to pay his neighbor in kegs of beer, but our modern-day equivalent to sitting around the ancient campfire--a night at the bar or your average house party--still relies on beer to help everyone get along.

We should've known, back in 1999, that Go-Gurt was emblematic of all that was evil in the food industry. Go-Gurt wasn't just a sugary snack designed for kids, not just another dessert to go along with cookies and Little Debbies and Reese's for breakfast. It was a sugary snack using the good name of yogurt, a food with an unblemished reputation for healthiness. And it came in a tube.

Go-Gurt is notable for hitting the market in early 1999, and for coming from General Mills, one of America's biggest processed food companies. Shortly after Go-Gurt ads hit the airwaves, the CEOs of food companies including General Mills, Pillsbury, Kraft, Nabisco, and Coca Cola met to talk about America's growing obesity problem. Some of them wanted to fit it, to cut back on the use of sugar, salt and fat that made some of their foods deliciously addictive and also incredibly unhealthy.

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Over a decade later, America's only grown fatter. The meeting didn't work, and now we're learning why. This meeting serves as a staging point for a recent New York Times article called The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. Reporter Michael Moss begins with the meeting, writing that General Mills CEO Stephen Sanger listened to a presentation from Kraft's CEO urging them to consider industry-wide regulations on how much sugar, salt and fat they allowed in their products, and then responded himself:

"To react to the critics, Sanger said, would jeopardize the sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful. General Mills would not pull back. He would push his people onward, and he urged his peers to do the same. Sanger’s response effectively ended the meeting."

Moss' article on the New York Times, in-depth as it is, is still only part of the story. He's actually written an entire book on the subject, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, that deals with the horrible foods we eat and the horrible marketing that compels us to eat them. The book was released on February 26 and is available in a Kindle edition on Amazon. If the New York Times article or quotes like these excerpts from NPR leave you wanting to know more, thinking about picking it up:

Imagine biting into a head of steamed broccoli and loving it. It's not covered in cheese, or butter, or dressing. It's just plain old broccoli, but it's delicious, somehow sweet like a strawberry or pineapple, tasty enough to appeal to even the pickiest kids. Broccoli may not ever taste so sweet on its own, but with a little chemical modification, it could be. According to Smithsonian Mag, scientists are looking into chemically modifying foods to make them seem sweeter to our brains.

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And they're not talking about injecting sugar into our veggies. More sugar would be bad, as artificially sweetened foods are already a major cause of health problems and obesity, especially in the United States. They're talking about supplementing sugar with something else, fooling our sweet tooths into being satisfied while feeding us healthier foods in the process. The answer may lie in fruit volatiles, which excite our sense of smell:

By determining how sweetness is triggered, we could use chemical compounds to affect how we perceive other foods.

"The sweetness of a farmer’s market strawberry or a hand-picked blueberry comes largely from volatiles, or chemical compounds in food that readily become fumes," writes Smithsonian Mag. "Our nose picks up on and interacts with dozens of these flavorful fumes in any given food, perfuming each bite with a specific flavor profile. The sensations received by smell and taste receptors interact in the same area of the brain, the thalamus, where our brain processes them to project flavors such as sweetness."

By determining how volatiles trigger the sensation of sweetness, we could theoretically use those chemical compounds to affect how we perceive other foods. A bland bit of celery suddenly becomes sweet. Everyone knows that the senses of smell and taste are linked, but study into volatiles shows a deeper connection than most of us realized.

When it comes to the science of taste, describing the mouthfeel of a drink or snack isn't enough. Fat, it turns out, is especially tough to nail down. According to Edible Geography, researchers first discovered a taste receptor specifically tuned to fat only last year. We mostly detect fat through texture, which makes it hard for food companies to formulate studies for fat-free or low fat foods.

If you've ever eaten a bite of fat-free ice cream and thought it tasted wrong, somehow, here's your answer: When you rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth the papillae should feel ever-so-slightly rough, but when your tongue is coated with fat from milk or cheese or something else, it's smooth and friction free.

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Now, scientist George A. Van Aken has come up with an alternative that isn't susceptible to the descriptive power of human taste testers. Edible Geography explains the concept behind Van Aken's "acoustic tribology":

Van Aken took a tiny contact microphone, packed it in polyethylene to keep it dry, and secured it behind a test subject’s upper front incisor teeth in order to record the acoustic signal produced by the varying vibrations of their papillae as their tongue rubbed against their palate.

Instead of relying on tasters to describe what their tongue is feeling, scientists can listen to that sensation. And you can actually listen to the difference yourself below:

24 hours or eight months. Those are the extremes of how long a batch of Simply Orange juice can take to go from the tree to a glass on someone's breakfast table. Huge difference, right? It's all in the name of uniformity. Coca Cola, which owns the Simply Orange and Minute Maid brands, uses algorithms and mathematical modeling to plan every exacting step in the process of juice production, from the moment they're picked to how long they sit in a tank. Math ensures that each bottle contains the same juice makeup and keeps OJ shipping year-round, even though the peak growing season in Florida lasts only three months.

Every last decision comes from an algorithm called Black Book, according to a recent Businessweek article. Coke has broken down the orange into 600 separate flavors. They've set up what they claim is the largest juice bottling facility in the world. They've made Black Book so comprehensive, it can determine the perfect blend of juice batches to maintain consistency or re-plan months of scheduling if a sudden frost affects an orange crop. Black Book's creator, Bob Cross, also created an algorithm for Delta to help them maximize revenue for every flight.

The science--or perhaps business--of making orange juice results in some funny job titles, like "blend technician." It's also remarkable how planned out every step of the production process is. Crops of oranges in Brazil are even monitored by satellite to determine when they're ripe.

Coke has broken down the orange into 600 separate flavors.

Businessweek's full account is worth a read, because Coca Cola's juice business is both fascinating and successful. They own 17 percent of the world's top markets and are gaining ground while Pepsi is shrinking (of course Coke's biggest competitor would own Tropicana). Perhaps the most impressive thing about the algorithm-controlled juice process is the name that covers it all up. Could there be a more perfect brand name to hide the rigorously controlled production more than "Simply Orange?"

Question: What makes you more drunk, vodka mixed with Coke, or vodka mixed with Diet Coke? Sounds like a trick question, but the answer isn't about slipping more vodka into one of the glasses and disguising it with the sweet taste of non-diet soda. A recent scientific study reported on my Smithsonian Mag found that diet soda, when mixed with alcohol, actually leads to higher breath alcohol concentration than a regular soda mixer. And not just a little higher--18 percent higher. In the tests, that was the difference between a legal-for-driving blood alcohol concentration and a DUI.

The experiment involved 16 people drinking .03 ounces of vodka per pound of body weight, with half of the group getting diet mixers and the other half getting regular soda (Diet Squirt and Squirt, specifically). All of the results pointed to diet drinkers being more intoxicated: their breath alcohol content was notably higher and they had slower reaction times in a computer test.

Worse, both groups were asked to describe how drunk they felt, and the diet drinkers rated themselves the same as the regular soda drinkers. "Subjective measures indicated that participants appeared unaware of any differences in the 2 alcohol conditions, given that no significant differences in subjective ratings were observed for the 2 alcohol conditions. No gender differences were observed for BrACs, and objective and subjective measures," observed the study's authors.

The study still leaves a nagging question, of course: Why? What's the difference between diet soda and regular soda? Aspartame and sugar, most likely. One of Smithsonian Mag's commenters pointed out that fructose increases the rate of alcohol metabolism. No such luck with diet, which means you'll face a dilemma with that next mixed drink: Let the sugary soda go straight to your gut, or stick with diet and be drunk by the second glass?

3D printing moon bases? The European Space Agency is on it. Printing skin cells like ink from a desktop printer? Science is trying that one, too. Combine the two together, and what do you have? The recipe for a twisted sci-fi body horror flick, certainly. And, maybe, a way to 3D print food. Science is hard at work on 3D printing technologies that can pump edible materials, rather than plastics, through extruders, creating delicious dishes instead of fun knick-knacks. We're thinking replicator, but not the MakerBot. This is all Star Trek.

Wired reports that 3D printing food for space missions is a real possibility in the future, with some big advantages. A 3D printer would take up less space than a large carton of food (although the materials for the printer would take up space as well). The printer could inject important vitamins and minerals into food to keep astronauts healthy. And it could help relieve the monotony of eating the same meager selection of rations for months on end. The article even imagines family members on Earth putting together digital recipes and beaming them to astronauts to keep them from feeling too isolated. Nothing like a home-digitized meal, right?

Photo credit: BBC News.

Variety is the strength of 3D printing in theory--after all, Star Trek's replicator could make virtually anything--but in reality, it's probably the technology's greatest shortcoming. Wired writes that "Some items, like frosting or processed cheese, are easy to make printable. A chocolate treat, for instance, is created using a syringe filled with melted chocolate to build up a shape specified by a computer layer by layer.

But other materials – fruits, vegetables, and meats – are much more of a challenge. Even with flavored gels, printing a wide variety of foods would require figuring out how to lay down potentially dozens of different materials, each with their own characteristic viscosity or perfect temperature range, using interchangeable printer heads."

Flavored gels just won't cut it, in most cases. Texture matters in food as much as taste. Still, there are cases where 3D printing food already works and makes sense. Take chocolate, for example. 3D printing chocolate? We're already there, and Japan has figured out how to make it creepy by letting people 3D print their own faces. Cornell's Fab@Home venture is leading the charge on developing printable food tech and hopes to have models for sale for home use within the next few years.

Wired cites some experts confident that 3D food printing will be able to properly replicate existing food textures in 15-20 years. Unlike many NASS-driven technologies, which trickle down into common use after being invented for the space program, 3D food printing may trickle up. No matter how many scientists are working with the technology, we bet it's chefs like the Modernist Cuisine team who figure out how to make the technology compelling. And delicious.

It's hard, now, to imagine a world without ice--giant cases full of ice churning non-stop at even the dingiest motels, ice bagged and waiting outside every convenience store, ice conveniently crushed and dispensed from the fronts of our refrigerators. There was always ice at the poles, of course, but it wasn't exactly accessible. Two hundred years ago, if you didn't live somewhere it got awfully cold during the winter, ice was a rare and precious commodity. That's mostly what makes the story of Frederic Tudor so fascinating--in the early 1800s, he figured he could get rich selling ice across the world, so he set out to do it.

And it worked. After about 20 years. The Atlantic's chronicle of the tale covers Tudor's early ambition to ship ice thousands of miles from Massachusetts to the tropics and other parts of the world and the advances that eventually made him a rich man. At first, people scoffed at his idea, assuming the ice would melt on long voyages to warmer climates. It did.

So Tudor packed it tighter and used sawdust for insulation, and the ice lasted longer. Nathaniel Wyeth helped Tudor grow his business by coming up with an alternative to hand-sawed ice (imagine cutting chunks of ice out of frozen New England ponds all day--slow, laborious, and expensive). Wyeth used a horse-drawn plow to carve up frozen lakes and "mass produce" more convenient blocks of ice.

And Tudor was a smart businessman; as The Atlantic writes, he "first gave away his ice for free...like a drug dealer...then charged once people were hooked. After people tried their drinks cold, they could 'never be presented with them warm again,' Tudor wrote.

Tudor's own history is fascinating, but so is the way he affected the world. The availability of ice improved food preservation and changed the kinds of foods and drinks people consumed on a regular basis (hello, ice cream). Artificial ice didn't take over the majority of the ice trade until the 1900, when cities grew, demand increased, and pollution became increasingly problematic. Long after refrigeration could produce ice, the Queen of England still drank from Walden Pond.

Every year there's a new hot topic in food processing, some once-believed-innocent ingredient that will make us fat or unhealthy put us in an early grave. High fructose corn syrup is everywhere, replacing more natural sweetening agents and giving thousands of food a nice sugary flavor. Our carb-heavy grains are full of trans fats that are bad for the heart. MSG's unhealthy effects grabbed so much of the public consciousness Chinese restaurants had to assure their customers they weren't using too much.

But bad ingredients are only part of the problem with mass-produced foods. Sometimes it's not some awful chemical we need to look out for--it's just plain old label fraud. Smithsonian Mag posted a list of six not-what-they-appear-to-be foods on Monday, and odds are you regularly consume one (or more) of the items included.

Turns out liquids are especially susceptible to being fakes or watered-down. Last year, as pomegranate became especially popular, juicemakers watered it down with cheaper juices from pears or grapes. Smithsonian Mag's list includes some surprising elements--apparently Olive Oil has been cut down with soybean and other oils for decades or even centuries. And the fraud goes beyond that: the Fake Food Watch blog recently posted about life leaf oil being marketed like modern day cure-all snake oil. It can even cure malaria!

Cheap imported honey has recently been filled with antibiotics to keep it safe and corn syrup to keep it sweet. Wasabi is sometimes just horseradish, a little mustard and some food coloring passing as the real thing. The newly minted Food Fraud Database keeps track of complaints about "contaminated" foods--just search for an ingredient like wheat and see the scary list of adulterants that you're probably eating along with a slice of bread or bowl of cereal.

Avocado's never been bigger. No, the avocado fruit isn't evolving and hulking out into a beefier green snack; the avocado industry itself is booming. And it's not because millions of people have stumbled upon the deliciousness of guacamole by accident or word of mouth. Football--specifically, the Super Bowl--and some brilliant advertising have transformed the avocado industry from regional treat to national snack fruit.

Photo Credit: Flickr user jaredfrazer via Creative Commons

As Smithsonian Mag reveals, avocado was mostly eaten in Mexico, California and Texas until the 1990s. That's where the fruit is grown, so it makes perfect sense. Then two things happened. The North American Free Trade Agreement began in 1994, allowing avocados grown in Mexico and South America to pour into the US, and the avocado industry began advertising guacamole as the Super Bowl party food.

California doesn't grow avocado year-round. In the winter, there's a local avocado shortage. But that's not a problem for Mexico and Chile, who happily started shipping truckloads of avocados up north in time for the big game. This year, 79 million pounds of avocado are expected to be eaten at Super Bowl events. In 2000, before the marketing had really done its work, we ate a mere eight million pounds of avocado at February football parties.

Mexico has been the largest supplier of avocado in the United States since 2008, which is great for Mexico. The industry has successfully marketed the food as a late-winter staple, which doesn't help California farmers but has helped overall avocado sales increase year after year. Smithsonian Mag delves into how representative this is of a lot of the food we eat in the United States--we rarely know where it's come from, or how it's made. And marketing leads us by the nose.

The fork changed us, and we never even knew. It civilized us, of course, giving us table manners and delicate tools to fit small chunks of food into our mouths. But the fork and its partner in crime, the knife, actually changed our mouths, too, according to the author of the book Consider the Fork. The Atlantic interviewed author Ben Wilson about his book and some remarkable discoveries, chief among them that the human mouth has changed in the past 250 years. The fork is to blame.

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About two and a half centuries ago, humans had an edge-to-edge bite, meaning our top and bottom teeth aligned for some good guillotine-like chomping action. Apes have the same kind of bite, which is ideal for mashing and tearing a piece of meat. Enter the knife and fork, and suddenly (well, not actually suddenly, but the change is still dramatic) humans develop an overbite. Not the bad overbite kids got made fun of for in middle school--that's a jaw alignment issue--just the now-natural tendency for our top row of teeth to fit snugly over the bottom. Says the Atlantic:

"What changed 250 years ago was the adoption of the knife and fork, which meant that we were cutting chewy food into small morsels before eating it. Previously, when eating something chewy such as meat, crusty bread or hard cheese, it would have been clamped between the jaws, then sliced with a knife or ripped with a hand -- a style of eating Professor Brace has called 'stuff-and-cut.'

The clincher is that the change is seen 900 years earlier in China, the reason being chopsticks."

Amazing to think that utensils have directly shaped human evolution even as they've changed how and what we eat. And the fork, knife and chopsticks are hardly alone in that honor. The Atlantic interview goes on to talk about cauldrons, which led to the easy consumption of soft foods--and in turn allowed humans to survive into adulthood even if they had lost teeth. According to Wilson, no toothless skulls have been discovered in civilizations that predated pottery. Today, we've gain a new appreciation for pots.

Tech fans know all about patent wars. In 2012, Apple and Samsung duked it out in the courtroom over software and hardware, icons and style that had supposedly been lifted from the iPhone and dropped into the Galaxy S line. Some of these patents are things we take for granted as common sense software evolutions, but Apple wants to protect them. It makes the iPhone more unique. It makes the brand stronger. You get the picture--but did you know the exact same thing happens with mac and cheese?

Kraft patents pasta. More specifically, Kraft patents pasta shapes for its kid-friendly boxes of Mac and cheese, locking its specially engineered dinosaurs and astronauts away from the competition. Step off, Hamburger Helper--you've got to design your own damn pasta animals.

The Design Decoded Blog dug up some of Kraft's patents after the Wall Street Journal profiled Guillermo Haro, who has designed more than 2000 shapes for blue boxes of mac over the past 22 years. 280 of those shapes actually made it into production, which means only about 15 percent of Haro's designs are worthy of becoming macaroni. Then again, that's nearly 300 unique pasta designs, ranging from dracula to a teddy bear to the United States of America. And licensed characters are big sellers; Kraft designs special mac and cheese shapes to appeal to kids, who like dinosaurs but like Spongebob a whole lot more.

Haro has to design characters and his other creations to maintain a recognizable shape even when they're boiled in water. They can't break apart or be too detailed. They have to retain just the right amount of cheese.

Kraft's cartoon character tie-ins give them a leg up on the competition, but they're not the only ones patenting specialty pasta shapes. The Pasta Shoppe produces a range of characters, including college mascots. Annie's is all about the bunny pasta. For 20 years, pasta companies have been waging war right under our noses. We wouldn't want to go up against Kraft, though. Toy Story and Spider-man? Who could beat that?