Developmental Snapshot: Chocolate, Miraculin and the Periodic Table

Chocolate tasting, Princeville Botanical Gardens, Kauai, Hawaii

Vacationing with a 10 and a 13 year old is akin to keeping close quarters with two extraordinarily opinionated (and ever so slightly immature) scientists obsessed with making sense of the world.

Random examples of classification thirst:
"Who do you think thinks more about the universe? Your or I?"
"Mom, do you think that guns made wars less or more humane?"
"How many senses do Hammerhead sharks have? Do you want me to explain that to you?"

I interrupt this particular thread with another one (but no worries, I plan to attempt to synthetize it all eventually): Are you like me someone with serial idioysyncratic themes permeating periods of your lives? My periods are never as marked or productive as... Picasso's blue period but... nevertheless have distinct themes lasting for weeks or months typically.

The current theme: the periodic table.

It all started a few weeks ago. I was reading the New York Times and stumbled upon the now popular editorial by Oliver Sacks on the joys of getting old. This is a lovely piece about getting old.  However, what stuck to me the most was that Dr. Sacks had been dating his age by the periodic table since early childhood; e.g., he talks about turning 80, Mercury's number.

This was immediately highly contagious: I downloaded a periodic table app and started reviewing elements. Note, that I do have a previous history with chemistry: I loved it in college and was an enthusiastic student in Biochemistry, my major, so this was not completely whimsical but still...any atomic passion had been rather dormant for years.

The phase continued and I downloaded this book on the periodic table for the vacation plane. A fascinating book.  I loved the section on taste buds and the perception of sourness stemming from protonic influx into our cells; in this section, the author mentions a molecule many of you probably have heard about and/or tried (but I had not): miraculin, which can be extracted from the "miracle berry".  Miraculin confuses perceptions of sourness (though I suspect that different individuals respond to it differently): it is a complex glycoprotein and shifts shape and binds to sweet taste buds' receptors upon influx of acidic (sour) foods.

So, going back to my young proto scientists: we are visting a marvelous garden a couple days ago: a festival for them (plants/flowers and classification galore) and me too as the garden includes a prolonged chocolate tasting sequence, which I of course find particularly delightful, not just because of general chocophilia but because of my current periodic table-philia. So, for instance, I react like a teenager reading People magazine's report on the latest celebrity love affair when I hear about chocolate's chemical properties and its sky-high Manganese content.

Then, our tour guide points to a little tree: a miracle berry tree! My 13 year old gets over-excited: he too has heard about this and given his enthusiasm, we are given 3 berries, one for each of us, and a lemon to share.. The verdict: yep, the lemon tastes ike deliciously sweet lemonade. More experimentation follows: pineapple, tomatoes (weirdly sweet), oranges, dragon fruit...all fantastically sweet.

My 10 year old quips: "that's one way of making me eat fruits, mom!"

Next on my reading list: Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.

Till Later,

Anne