Myth Busting Again

 Tomatoes lose their flavour on the fridge.

Houseplants

I’ve been myth busting again this week. Not content with clarifying that the amount of lobes a pepper has decides its gender, that copper slug traps are useless, Epsom salts doesn’t stop blossom end rot, there’s no such thing as killer ladybirds and the moon is always the same size in the sky in any one night. I have found another thing for me to get my teeth into. It’s the myth that houseplants purify the air. It apparently comes from a misinterpreted NASA study about plants.

Reported Facts

These are what are generally reported as facts.

1) Plants clean 90% of chemicals in 24 hours

2) Use 1 plant per 100 sq feet of home for most effective air purification

3) The best 10, 15, 17 or 20 plants are listed by name

It is all wrong.

The NASA study showed that plants remove a small amount of certain chemicals from the air. A 1500 sq ft home would need around 400 large plants to remove most of the tested chemicals, enough to turn the house into a jungle.

Reports that list the best plants for the job are probably not valid lists. The microbes in the soil of the pot are more efficient at removing chemicals than the plants themselves.

It all boils down to journalists cherry picking the data that suits their story. Most have probably just reported what previous reporters other bloggers said, just like any other news story then?

Maybe the actual health values are just the plants themselves. Sitting there motionless in their posts as the busy world goes by could be just the focus wee need for a few minutes (or seconds) reflection on the day. Also I think tending the plants can be restful and meditative – as long as we are not having to pick up shriveled leaves from behind the sofa.

Tomatoes in the fridge

Do you keep eggs in the fridge or out in the kitchen? Some folk say that eggs last longer at room temperature and like in our house, the poor eggs get moved from the worktops to the fridge depending on who believes what.  But have you ever thought that keeping tomatoes in the fridge might not be a good idea either? Maybe it’s both eggs and tomatoes that should stay at room temperature. Here’s why:

Chilling a tomato in the fridge will keep it looking fresh for a longer period of time than if you left it on the counter, but it will also drain all that earthy, slightly grassy, distinctive tomato taste right out of the fruit. 

Scientists and foodies have known for some time that cooling tomatoes is detrimental to their flavour, but they were not exactly sure why — until now.

According to new a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, when a tomato’s environment drops below 68 degrees, the genes responsible for making it taste like a tomato get turned off.

The tomato gets cold and tells itself to stop making aroma compounds and the change is irreversible as the chemical changes have taken place.

Tomatoes taste the way they do because of a combination of sugars, acids and a collection of chemicals that scientists call volatile compounds or aroma compounds. Aroma compounds are what you smell, and they make up the wonderful part of the flavour.

 The sugars and acids are what you taste on the tongue, but there would be no excitement to the flavour without the aroma compounds. Now that this is known it probably won’t be long until a variety is developed to cope with both live in and out of the fridge and be hardy enough to cope in all temperatures. Maybe we aren’t too far away from frost hardy ones too.