If You Throw Away Those Banana Strings, Stop Yourself!

Those stringy bits on banana peel are the ones that make bananas smell and taste special! They’re called phloem bundles, and they transport all the nutritive elements from the leaves to all the other parts of the plants. They’re also edible!

The first vegetable ever grown in space is potato. They managed to grow five small potatoes from tubers. If we ever go space-travelling, we’ll probably try some space French fries! So sad because of the gravity it’s gonna taste dull up there, just like any other food.

Potatoes, just like watermelons and celery, are pretty liquid: they are 80% water! Technically, you can squeeze some potato juice or smoothie, but... yeah, they taste better when roasted.

Since potatoes are packed with water, it can help them absorb and reflect Wi-Fi and radio signals, just like humans do. Fancy a potato wave protection shielding?

You don’t need to actually eat any garlic to taste it. If you rub a clove of garlic on your feet, you’ll taste it within 15 minutes! There’s no explanation, but it actually works, so maybe it’s a placebo effect.

Lemons get juicier if you warm them up a little bit in a microwave. The heat softens the frozen membranes, so the juice can flow out freely. More lemonade for you!

You might’ve never heard about the Keppel fruit, but it has a superpower of making your sweat smell like violets. It doesn’t mean people now can stop taking showers, though.

Oranges aren’t really orange in the wild. The climate in subtropical regions isn’t cold enough to break down the chlorophyll, so the fruit peel stays yellow or greenish. Such oranges usually get treated with ethylene gas that can help turn the oranges, you know, orange.

You should drop the cranberries to see if they’re tasty. These berries can bounce because of teeny tiny air pockets inside. This air lets them bounce and float. The higher the berries bounce — the better they are!

If you prefer some beef over pumpkin seeds, you’ll deprive yourself of some protein. In fact, pumpkin seeds and broccoli have more protein per calorie than any meat.

Almond is often mistaken as a nut, but in fact it’s a fruit that grows on a tree and looks very much like a peach. A nut should be dry, yet almonds have a fleshy layer. You open up that layer and get the seed you eat.

Your morning coffee is actually stewed fruit. Coffee beans are a berry pit, so it’s basically a drink made of berries.

If an onion was grown in a soil poor in sulfur, its taste is gonna be soft, and you won’t shed a tear while cooking. If the soil was rich in sulfur, well, make sure there’s a Kleenex box for you! When cutting an onion, rinse the knife with cold water to make your cooking tearless. You can also try chilling the onion, the cells will react slower and you’ll cry less.

There are two types of baby carrots. These can be the veggies picked before they reach maturity or simply trimmed adult carrots. This is just a marketing trick to turn carrots that have no market value into a product that can be actually sold... for a higher price.

There are no calorie negative veggies. Some people claim that eating lettuce, kale and celery requires more energy than it can give. These veggies still have up to 10 calories per stack, which is little, but the digesting requires somewhere around half a calorie.

If you ever read a cool fact about the outer part of a cucumber being used as an eraser, don’t fall for it! I tried it and kinda ruined my notebook.

When you eat a lollipop, you actually just swallow some flavored saliva! The world’s largest lollipop weighs over 7,000 [lb (3,170 kg)] pounds — that would require a lot of saliva!

When you buy some grated cheese, get ready for a surprise. If the package says it contains cellulose, it means that cheese does contain wood pulp. Don’t worry, it’s digestible! It’s added to prevent it from clumping.

If you grabbed some wasabi in a supermarket, you probably bought mere horseradish. True wasabi is quite difficult to make, so it’s usually replaced with horseradish and some extra flavorings and colorants. So, about 99% of wasabi sold in the US is not the real thing!

What’s in common between ranch salad dressing and sunscreen? It’s titanium dioxide they use to make it white. This dressing isn’t originally white, just like Caesar or blue cheese dressing.

Farm raised salmon are actually white (no titanium dioxide involved here). To make them look like their wild brethren that are naturally pink because of abundant shrimps in their diet, farm raised salmons are artificially dyed.

Your favorite fruit candies may be shining because they’re covered with carnauba wax. Many fruit, especially apples, have a thin layer of this wax too! Not only it can make candies and fruit appear glossy, but it also makes your car shine! And delicious!

Peaches and nectarines seem different, but in fact these are the same fruit. If the fluffiness gene is dominant, we get peaches. If not — we get smooth nectarines.

Apples taste better when they’re sliced because like this they’re exposed to oxygen. It activates a special enzyme responsible for ripening and visible browning. The same happens when you hit an apple: the oxygen gets inside the apple through tiny cracks, and it gets riper on that side.

Now, are you into white chocolate? Bad news: it’s not even close to real chocolate. It’s basically a mix of sugar, milk, vanilla, and cocoa butter. Cocoa butter isn’t enough for chocolate — it should contain chocolate liquor or powder.

On the other hand, limes and lemons are quite different. Lemons float, but limes sink. It’s all because limes are denser than lemons.

200 years ago ketchup was used as a medicine! Doctors used to believe tomatoes had a lot of medicinal properties, and so did ketchup. We still love it, but as a dressing.

Chipotle pepper isn’t some special type of peppers, it’s your good old jalapeño. Dried and smoked jalapeño is chipotle! The only product that never goes off, even if you don’t store it in the fridge, is honey. It has low pH and lots of sugar, that’s why organisms that can spoil it just can’t live in honey.

All those bright candies are colored with... beetles. Red food dye is made of carmine, which is made with cochineal beetles. Red lipsticks are made with these beetles too! Yeah, yeah, yeah! Jam and jelly seem basically the same thing, but there’s a huge difference between them. Jam is made of fruit, while jelly is made of fruit juice.

The expiration date on mineral water isn’t about water going bad. Actually, no water can spoil — but the bottle can. Over time, it starts leaking some chemicals that aren’t quite safe. Tonic water can be fluorescent in UV “black light”! It contains quinine, which makes it both bitter and glowing!

The color of plates and cups can affect your food perception. A group of 57 volunteers drank hot chocolate out of different cups, but most people claimed the orange cup hot chocolate was the best. Red color plates are cool for those on a diet: it looks alarming, so you end up eating less.

Crackers are even worse for your teeth than sugar! It’s not sugar, but acid that decays the tooth enamel. Sticky crackers produce that acid. It’s a good environment for bacteria, they’re gonna feast in between your teeth!

Strawberries and raspberries technically aren’t berries! These guys have their seeds on the outside. A true berry keeps them inside — grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, and even  bananas!

I said bananas were berries, but still it’s only partly true. It’s actually a berry that grows on herbs. If you wanna ripen it fast, just throw it in a plastic bag together with an apple or tomato. These two produce ethylene gas, which helps ripen other fruit.

We all know the apples we buy in a supermarket aren’t freshly picked. Before they get to the supermarket, they can “sleep” for 6–12 months and stay as good as new!

Watermelons can be boys and girls! Yeah, this fruit does have genders. Boys are taller, and they have more water inside. Girls appear shorter and rounder. They’re also sweeter!

Allspice isn’t a mix of seasonings as you may think. It does smell somewhat like nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves, but it’s actually an independent fruit. It’s also called Jamaica pepper and is picked from the trees just like cherries.

Brown sugar is another marketing trick — both types have the same origins. Their only difference is that brown sugar contains molasses. Molasses  is the dark syrupy byproduct that you get when you extract sugars from beets or canes. How sweet!