Savor Classics: Cinnamon

Cinnamon's heat drove hundreds of years of intrigue before becoming the kitchen staple it is today. Anney and Lauren dig into the troubled history of this delicious bark.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to s favorite protection of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren Vocal Bam, and today
we have a classic episode for you about cinnamon, one
of my absolute, very favorite things. Yes, uh yeah, you
you talk. You talk about a lot about that in
in the episode that that has not changed since September.

(00:29):
It has not changed September tween seventeen. But I will
say I'm very much more of a savory person than
a sweet person, and especially during times of stress and
comfort food, which is right now for a lot of
us and for me, So I haven't been having as
much cinnamon as I normally do. And I know that

(00:50):
you can use cinnamon in savory things absolutely um, but
most of my favorite uses of cinnamon are in baked
good like coffee. I know, I'm a weirdo. I put
cinnamon in my coffee sometimes. That's still not a weird thing.
That's that's the thing that humans do, and I am
a human that doesn't. There you go, m uh. Speaking

(01:15):
of baked goods, we do also have a Cinnamon Rolls
episode from from November of twenty nineteen UM in which
we discuss some of this very baked good related stuff. Um. Yes,
and I would say that episode probably if I had
to rank what has generated the most listener mail, it
is in the top five. People wrote in and are

(01:39):
still writing it about cinnamon rolls and whether or not
the pairing of love it with chili is a thing,
which it seems that it very much is. Yeah. Yeah.
And then when I was doing my cursory like cinnamon
news before this, a lot of the articles that came
up were about making cinnamon rolls for Father's Day. A yeah, yeah,

(02:01):
I saw a lot of recipes for Father's Day with
like cinnamon rolls topped with bacon or whatever it is
that it is, Yes, exactly. Um. And I did find
one article that I would love to delve into, maybe
more personally. I don't know if we would do a
whole episode on this, but it was talking about how
much are eating behavior has changed during quarantine and how
like I think I said, according to one study of

(02:25):
changed their eating habits, which totally makes sense. Oh yeah,
of course. Um, but this was somehow involved with cinnamon rolls.
People are eating more snack foods I think you mentioned
the name checked cinnamon rolls, and people are baking more. Um,
and Uh. Yeah. One of the news pieces that that
I ran across was the the podcast Oregan Lives Oregan Lives.

(02:48):
I think it's Oregon Lives anyway. Um podcast from Oregon
reported a week ago that um Portland local home baker
Whitney Roots has raised were fifty two dollars for the
Oregon Food Bank by auctioning off these giant homemade cinnamon
rolls that she makes. Oh wow. Yeah. Um. It apparently

(03:12):
started as just like like, oh man, I have this
kid at home with me, we should probably do something. Um,
let's have a baking project. Um. And so they made
the cinnamon roll and uh post pictures of it on
the internet and your friends were like, oh man, make
me one. Like, oh man, like, I'd pay money for that,
and people have so uh so that's great. Um. And yeah,

(03:37):
cinnamon is definitely part of the of the larger COVID
related baking trend. Um New Market Analysis is predicting a
growth rate of the cinnamon market value of over eleven
um between now and due to its increased use as
a flavoring. Wow. I don't think that's just because of COVID,

(03:59):
but it is probably a factor. Yeah, that's another thing.
I'd be really curious to see is how many of
these cooking shifts, um and eating shifts, eating habits are
going to stay once we are once again free to
go out into the world. Yeah, it's a it's it's

(04:22):
a it's a whole question mark out there. Um, you know,
I still it's I don't know if you know, support
do do stuff that gets you through your day, y'all. Uh,
And you know, try to support your local businesses, support
your local black owned businesses. Um. Your your dollars matter,
so put them, put them to good use. Yes, yes.

(04:46):
And in the meantime, as always, if you have any
baking projects, let us know about them, especially banking projects.
And in the meantime, you can enjoy this classic episode. Hello,

(05:10):
and welcome to Food Stuff. I'm Anny Rees and I'm
Lauren vocal Bam, and today we're digging into the kind
of totally depressing history of cinnamon. I thought you were
gonna make a spicy pun. Oh no, no, that's okay,
that's good. Cinnamon is one of my favorite spices. I love.
I put it in coffee, I put it in all
kinds of things that probably shouldn't go in. Come on,

(05:32):
there's nothing that it shouldn't shouldn't go in. Yeah, but
there are things that definitely I get a side eye
when I put it matches with both with both sweet
and savory flavors. Come on, It's true. And I feel
in the States a lot of people kind of pin
it into the fall. But it's all year round. You
can use cinnamon. It's for sure, multi seasonal. I'm glad

(05:54):
you agree. So the word itself has a lot of
fun meanings. Translations from the Italian canela meaning little tube,
or there's wood from China and India and Iran, and
the Indonesian word means sweet wood in the Victorian language
of flowers, which I had to look up because I
had no idea what that was. Oh really, Oh it's great,

(06:17):
I know, it's fantastic. How have I gone so long? Victorians?
Y'all they had an entire language of flowers. Yes, And
in the name might have led you to it might
have um And in this language, cinnamon translates to my
fortune is yours? Wow? Yeah, that sounds lovely, doesn't it
very fitting? Yes? Here in the United States, you're likely

(06:39):
to encounter two types of cinnamon in the grossery store,
Cassia and Ceylon. Cassia is kind of the stronger in
flavor in aroma and mostly originates from Indonesia, China. In Vietnam,
it's also generally cheaper um. Ceylon cinnamon, meanwhile, is from
Sri Lunka and southern India and has more like mild

(06:59):
sweetness to it um and In the UK and Europe,
Cassia is labeled as cassia, but both can be labeled
cinnamon in the US. Both however, are the soft inner
bark of a type of evergreen shrub in the Cinnamomum
genus that sounds like you're summoning a demon cinnam mom. See,

(07:22):
oh yeah, I know you're You're not wrong. Ceylon is
from sea lannicum um, often also called sea verarum, which
means true cinnamon. Cassia, however, can come from a number
of species um. The flower and leaves are also edible
in addition to the bark. Cassie leaves in particular are
a classic ingredient in Indian cooking, and cinnamon oil can

(07:44):
be processed from the leaves of both type of plant.
The main flavors in cinnamon come from a few oils
cinnamalde hyde, which is just a great name for anything eugeneol,
and also camphor, which I had no idea was an
ingredient in cinnamon or ingredient like component. Yeah, it's not
like sometimes when you're mixing up your cinnamon plant then anyway,

(08:08):
left to grow wild cinnamon will grow up to a
height of thirty to fifty feet a k a like
ten to fifteen meters UM. But when it's cultivated, it's
usually kept like a human height of of shrub that
is much larger than I would have guessed, right, I'm
not really great at guessing things though. Yeah. I also
I've never hung out around a cinnamon plant, so um.

(08:30):
Cinnamon is still largely harvested and processed by hand using
methods that have been passed down through farming families for
centuries UM. The the exact tools and process will vary
based on the type of plant that you're dealing with,
but but basically a shoot from the shrub is cut down,
or if the shrubs trunk is larger than a section

(08:51):
of bark will be cut off um and then the
tough outer bark is scraped off and in the case
of smaller shoots the soft moist inner bark and has
to be painstakingly rubbed free from the stock so that
it can be peeled away in these long pieces that
will make a you know, high quality attractive quills, which
is one of the fabulous names for cinnamon sticks. I'm

(09:13):
going to say cinnamon quills for the rest of my life.
It's the best. The bark curls up as it drives,
and the cinnamon can then be processed into sticks or
powder or what have you. M hm, however you consume
your cinneamon. The cool part here is that if you've
got a lot of cinnamon plants, you can harvest just
about continually as they come into maturity. UM. You can

(09:34):
also just let them go and harvest whenever it's convenient.
There are some families in Sumatra that use cinnamon as
an income supplement when you know, just whenever they need to.
The the uncool part here is that it is really hard,
really skilled labor, and traditionally the people selling the cinnamon
have made a lot more money than the people actually
harvesting and processing it. That is starting to change, um though,

(09:58):
through the work of human rights organis stations and farmer
co ops. UM and the farmer's own work and increasing
a societal ability to make demands upon the industry and
and by technology, their mechanics, mechanized processes that are in
just continual development these days. So good news all around there,
But for all those parts that have not changed. Um,

(10:19):
let's let's get into the history of cinnamon and how
it has been used and and and farmed for for millennia. Back,
but first let's take a quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back, Thank you sponsor. Yes, So,

(10:46):
though it was almost certainly used before this, cinnamon first
appeared in written records out of China, going all the
way back to two thousand and eight hundred BC. EF. Yeah,
and I believe it was a medical botanist guide, all right. Yeah. Um.
In two sixt VC, the town of Kuaielin, meaning Cassia Forest,

(11:10):
was founded in South China, suggesting that spice was integral
in the region. Cassia cinnamon probably um. According to the
book History of Food, ancient Taoists considered cinnamon a food
of the immortals. Um. There are legends saying that the
rabbit in the moon because instead of the man in
the moon, they've got the rabbit in the moon. Yeah.
Um uh. The legends of the rabbit in the moon

(11:30):
would use a giant Cassia tree to climb down to
Earth and then would eat the trees bark and prepare
and alxir from it that that had like magical strength powers.
That's a great story. Yeah um. And people would would
carry around a little bits of cinnamon in pouches to
kind of ward off disease and other negative vibes. Um.
Later on, cinnamon would become an integral part of five

(11:52):
spice powder, which generally contains way more than five spices.
The five is kind of metaphorical and or poetic and
might mean something closer to like many or complete rather
than literal. Five. Extra bonus fact as we go through
this show, I'm just gonna eventually have I'm going to
carry a pineapple. I'm gonna have a bag of cinnamon.

(12:12):
I'm just gonna start integrating all these strange food habits.
You could at the very least have a really good
Halloween costume. That's true. That is such a good idea.
Thank you, Laurence. I am food stuff. Yes you don't
know food stuff. Well, I have a story to tell
you and a podcast to direct marketing opportunity. Okay, so

(12:36):
back to cinnamon history. The ancient Egyptians used cinnamon, along
with other things like mirror, as a perfume during evolving
cinnamon makes a cameo are two in the Bible, Moses
uses it as an anointing oil, and the Hebrews also
used it in religious ceremonies. Cinnamon enjoyed such high prestige

(12:58):
it was seen as an appropriate gift for monarchs, and
records show that it, along with cassio, was given as
a gift at the Temple of Apollo and Malitis Militis. Yeah.
Traders from the Middle East brought cinnamon to Europe, where
it was used both medicinally and to add a little
something something to food. Yeah. The Roman Empire in particular

(13:19):
imported a lot of it, but more for fragrances and
to spice up wine. Yeah, they didn't really like it
in their food. Learning a lot about the Romans, It
had the additional use of covering the smell of funeral pyres,
and there's a popular story that Roman Emperor Nero ordered
a year's supply of cinnamon to burn on his second
wife's funeral pyre to atone for his guilt in because

(13:42):
he had accidentally killed her, Yes, kind of accidentally on purpose. Yes, yeah,
there's still some some. Well, we're gonna move on. It
was pretty expensive at the time too, so he must
have had gold pouches worth of guilty. Our old friend

(14:04):
Pliny the Elder wrote in first century CE that grams
of cinnamon equaled five kilograms of silver, or in other words,
fifteen times the worth of silver by weight. Wow. Yeah,
cinnamon had other uses that justified kinda this price. Um.
It was prescribed throughout the Middle Ages to treat hoarseness, coughing,
sore throat, and indigestion. And it could be used as

(14:27):
a preservative. Yeah, so it's got a little bit of
anti micro microbial properties in there somewhere. Some Romans also
apparently considered it an aphrodisiac, although really at this point,
I'm not sure what they didn't consider an aphrodisiac. It's true,
probably nothing. So many things about romans um And of
course cinnamon was part of the Silk Road trade that

(14:50):
you know, largely overland trade routes from China through India
in the Middle East and up to ports of call
along the Mediterranean it's unclear much of the cinnamon was
the Cassia type and how much was Ceylon. But hey,
speaking of celon cinnamon. While all of this was going on,
the people on the island of Ceylon which is present

(15:11):
day Sri Lanka, were developing the production techniques that would
drive the cinnamon trade for hundreds of years. The Synonys
and the Tamaal people they are operated in a feudal
caste culture, and the folks who wound up primarily working
in tending and peeling the cinnamon where a cast called
the Salagama And I'm I'm so sorry if I if

(15:31):
I if I mispronounced that, I really just tried. The
Salagama cast were relatively recent immigrants to the island and
they didn't have much political clout despite the importance of
the work that they were doing. So they would pass
their skills down from generation to generation and pass their
profits up to the royal families who are running the
islands kingdoms. And at the time and all the way

(15:56):
up to the sixteenth century, Europeans weren't precisely sure of
cinnamon's origins. They didn't know where it was coming from. Yeah, yeah,
this was by design. Of the Arabic and North African
merchants who wanted to maintain a cinnamonopoly. Uh. Yeah, And
there were a lot of stories about where cinnamon originated,
where it came from, and how people got it. Yeah,

(16:19):
a lot of these are pretty great. Yeah. Greek historian
herodotus Um wrote a couple of legends about about it
in the fifth century b c. One that huge birds
gathered cinnamon sticks and stored them on enormous, unclimbable mountains,
but tricksy humans would leave big old chunks of box

(16:39):
meat at the base of the mountain, and when the
bird came down to collect it, the extra weight of
the meat caused some of the nest to break, leaving
the cinnamon sticks right for the picking up, that is.
He also wrote that it might that cinnamon might be
found near a lake that was protected by these screeching
bat creatures, which gatherers could only protect themselves by wearing

(17:00):
full suits of tough hides with holes cut only for
their eyes. Another story suggests that to get your hands
on some cinnamon, you had the brave deep snake guarded canyons.
In some legends, the snakes could fly, My goodness, getting
cinnamon was a dangerous business. Going back to Plenty again,
he wrote that he believed cinnamon came from Ethiopia and

(17:22):
the only way to get it was via saliss or
Less rafts fueled by quote man alone and his courage.
I'm not sure saliss or less rafts interesting. I yeah,
I don't think that man and his courage are really
great sources of fuel necessarily for movement anyway. Plenty, I

(17:43):
don't know about that one, alright, Plenty, we're dubious, friend, Yeah,
We've got our doubts. Another written story from twelve see
asserts that Simon was fished out of the Nile source
at World's Hedge with nets. So there were a wide
variety of stories. No one knew in Europe anyway where

(18:06):
this stuff was coming from, but they loved it, loved it.
Um twelve seventy CE marks the first time cinnamon growing
in Sri Lanka shows up in European writing. The rise
of the Ottoman Empire and other shifting powers in the
Mediterranean prompted the Europeans to expand their trade routes into
Asia and North America, and Marco Polo definitely talked all

(18:29):
about where the relatively inexpensive Cassia cinnamon comes from. But
he he definitely admitted information about Ceylon cinnamon, which at
the time was not called Salon cinnamon because it would
have been a pretty dead giveaway, right. Um. But during
the twelve and hundreds, Venetians created something of a monopoly
on the cinnamon trade. They employed these networks of Arab

(18:51):
agents to bring the stuff overland from India to Alexandria
and in Egypt, where the Venetians would sail to pick
it up along these highly secured trade routes that they
had blocked out, and they were able to run up
the price as much as they wanted because it was
so popular in medieval cooking in because no one else
could get their hands on it. Um. It appears in
about two thirds of French recipes from that time. That's

(19:14):
that's quite a bit, quite a bit of the recipes there.
And note that this was primarily for the wealthy. I
mean when we say that people loved it, wealthy people
loved it. Um. Spices in general were used as a
status symbol At banquets. Hosts would sometimes show off by
offering a plate piled high with various spices to their guests. Wow,

(19:36):
that person must be rich. Yes, it makes you think, like,
what would they think of a spice cabinet? Oh? Man,
that blow their minds. I feel like everything we talked
about on here it was once as a status tybal.
In a letter written by Columbus Columbus again to Queen Isabella,
he claimed that he had discovered cinnamon in the New World,

(19:56):
with the samples he sent turned out not to be
the real thing. I wonder what he said. Spanish explorer
Gonzalo Pizarro traveled the Amazon in search of what he
called cinnamon country. Meanwhile, the Portuguese wanted in on this
trade too. After forging a water route to India by
going south around Africa around the Cape of Good Hope,

(20:18):
the Portuguese would found cinnamon in Ceylon in in Or
about fifteen eighteen. And so, of course, of course they
took over the island Kingdom of Cote, probably not saying
that correctly, but I tried enslaved the population and ruled
over the cinnamon trade for about one hundred years. And
it was pretty atrocious. Uh, not only on the island itself,

(20:42):
which was terrible enough, because they really were disrupting it's
you know, enslavement is is certainly a different thing from
from a feudal caste system. They also would destroy populations
along the coast of nearby nearby Mozambique and settled there
in order to keep guard over their roots back and
forth from Ceylon. And you know, just like sink and

(21:05):
rival ships on site, like hanging any agents from other
countries that they found or kingdoms floated floating around. It's
nasty stuff. Yeah, candy. Another kingdom of Ceylon teamed up
with the Dutch to chase the Portuguese out of Ceylon
in Sight. But now the Dutch took control of Clon
as a payment for their military aid, a position they

(21:27):
held for a one hundred fifty years. One Dutch captain
wrote quote, the shores of the island are full of it,
and it is the best in all the orient, it
being cinnamon. When one is down wind of the island,
one can smell cinnamon eight leagues out to see. Yeah.
A jury is out on whether or not the Dutch
were really that much better than the Portuguese in terms

(21:48):
of their treatment. No, I don't think they were during
their reign over the cinnamon trade. Simon Rose up to
become the most profitable spice in the Dutch East India Company.
When word read the Dutch that some cinnamon had been
discovered off India's coast, they threatened and paid off a
local king in India to destroy it. Yeah, it was

(22:09):
during this time that the demand for cinnamon grew so
high that the Dutch had to figure out and to
cultivated instead of collecting bark from wild trees. But once
they did, or rather like eight ten years afterward, because
that's about how long it takes for the shrubs to
but sure, there was such a glut of cinnamon that
they were afraid that the market would collapse. They allegedly

(22:30):
burned large quantities of cinnamon in Holland in seventeen sixty
just to keep the prices up. Meanwhile, the British wanted
into Lord Brown of the British East India Company founded
that the largest cinnamon a state in Asia and seventeen
sixty seven on the southwest coast of India. It's a

(22:50):
bit of a tungue twister in there. Only a few
years later, in seventeen eighty five, the British she used
control of Ceylon after their victory of the Anglo Dutch War,
and this was a huge boon to the dipping economy
of the British Empire, having lost the lucrative American colonies. However,
over the next hundred years, the price of cinnamon would
fall really considerably as other places around the world started

(23:13):
to cultivate it, and its popularity would wane a little
bit as things like a chocolate started to come into vogue,
not that the two of those are bad together, you know.
And I also read like coffee and tea helped lower
the price of cinnamon, and I was like, I put
cinnamon in those things. A um uh. Sri Lanka would

(23:34):
finally gain independence from the British in ninety by the way, wow,
and that brings us more or less to u to now.
You know, cinnamon is pretty common, especially in the fall,
like we said, and the price is fairly stable. It's
a global industry of about thirty five thousand tons per year.

(23:55):
It is quite the global industry. And he is where
I could have written a transition sometime over the past
couple of days that I've been working on these notes,
but instead I didn't do that. So you know, let's
just take a quick break for another word from our
sponsor and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you,

(24:23):
yes uh so. Um So, I want to talk a
little bit about the that that it concludes our history portion, yes, yes,
And I wanted to talk a little bit about some
of the some of the science and culture around cinnamon,
because as if all of that was not fascinating enough,
you know it, being that it has been used as
a medicine for so long, a lot of people have

(24:44):
looked into those actual properties. There's been a lot of studies,
specifically into the potential of cinnamon supplements to help with
with blood glucose levels. I'm not sure where and when
that idea got got passed, but but but as it
turns out, in some studies, taking cinnamon supplements have helped

(25:06):
patients with type two diabetes lower their fasting plasma glucose levels,
which of course can help them control the effects of
the disease. Um and they also improved a few measures
of cardiovascular health. You know, they reduced the bad l
d L cholesterol and improved the good hdl uh or lipoproteins,
not cholesterol technically, but yeah, and stuff like that. Um. However,

(25:29):
in other studies, those effects weren't so certain. Um, I
guess it's something to watch for more research about in
the future. UM. It's also been studied for its potential
anti microbial properties, as I mentioned earlier, but the practical
results of that are pretty inconclusive as of yet. Basically,
adding cinnamon to food might help prevent the growth of

(25:52):
pathogenic bacteria, and researchers might eventually be able to use
some of the stuff in it in cinnamon to to
help replace traditional antibiotics, which of course would be great.
It would be because antibiotic resistance, as I believe we
have mentioned before several times, is not the business. It
is not good, and it is on the rise. It is.

(26:14):
Cinnamon oil is reported to be an effective mosquito ant
and moth repellent, but I couldn't really find any actual
science to back that up. So I don't know if
you if you're interested in that, then then go go
check it out. Maybe try it. I mean, at the
very worst, you're gonna smell like cinnamon oil. Yeah, this
is definitely something that I would try to test, but

(26:35):
I don't know how I would. Oh, there's a lot
of things that can't control when it comes to the insects.
They're not going to play ball. I don't think. Yeah,
but okay, I might give it a role if we
if we ever run across a tank of mosquitoes, then yeah,
we'll see, we'll see, We'll see what happens. I'll keep
some cinnamon oil prepared on the flip side. Um in

(26:57):
large enough quantities, exposure to cinnamon is not great for you.
It's oils are irritants, um so, so anytime that you're
using it in like a beauty product, just just use
use a small test um before you maybe spread it
all all the heck over your skin. It's certainly um.
Workers in the cinnamon industry have been shown to experience
system symptoms like asthma and u skin and irritation, hair

(27:20):
loss and weight loss. Those last two things, they're not
even sure how they work. They're they're like, they're like,
is are the oils causing breakage? Are they causing prevention
of of hair to grow in the first place? Weird
times anyway, um uh. And the weight loss too, is
even for folks who aren't doing the manual part of
the labor, who are just working around the dust. They

(27:42):
think it's something something's going on. They're not sure what um.
Cinnamon also does contain a chemical called camarin, which can
cause liver toxicity in large enough amounts, but I'm talking
like silly large amounts, Like even the amount that Annie
uses is no or near enough to cause livery toxicity.
And imagine like a bath a full of cinnamon something

(28:05):
like that, Like like maybe like back off on like
heavy use of cinnamon supplements unless you're doing so under
the direction of a medical professional. Yeah. Yeah, I always
had this idea that I knew was un scientific and
incorrect in the back of my mind that the reason
cinnamon helped purportedly helped you lose weight it's beat up
your metabolism. Um. It was because it's, uh, it kind

(28:30):
of not burns, but it's got like that bite. Yeah,
and it was just like revving things up. I truly
believe this for a little while. And that was actually
sort of the basis. I didn't write down notes on this,
but that was sort of the basis of UM. The
concept in European culture of spices like cinnamon that have
that warming effect being good to eat in the winter

(28:51):
as like a like a balance of the humors kind
of concept. UM. And I totally want to go into
that in a future episode when I have more time
to to read up on it. But um, because it's
sort of it's sort of counterintuitive to the way that
a lot of tropical um cultures use spicy food and
during the summer as a way to kind of stimulate
sweat production and cool you off. Right, But there's anti

(29:14):
macrobial things involved in both of those maybe maybe. Yeah,
so that's interesting maybe maybe. Al Right, that concludes the
science slash health portion. So let's talk about some cultural
cinnamon things. Yeah, cinnamon, as you may have noticed, is
riding the train of that of that pumpkin pie spice monolith.

(29:37):
Oh that's a terribly mixed metaphor. Um. I appreciate it, okay.
Um And and so cinnamon cinnamon has really jumped in
popularity over certainly over the past couple of years. But
but it's also just great. Yeah, that's such a lovely aroma. Okay.
Popular cinnamon things are cinnamon toast, which is that was

(30:00):
I was a kid. That's what I had for breakfast
pretty often. Cinnamons crunch, which is one of my favorite cereals,
also had it very often. Um, and this is apparently
the most popular cereal in half of the United States.
Over half of the United States. It's called crook canell
in France, curiously, cinnamon in UK and Ireland, and cinni

(30:22):
minis in Poland, so you can get it out of
the U. S. Um, there's cinnamon sinimon rolls in general.
And here we have a place called Sinnaholic snickerdoodles. It's
one of my favorite cookies. So they're so good. Um.
And apparently there's cinnamon in Coca Cola. It kept like
I found myself somehow on the Coca Cola website when
I was like cinnamon things. How did I end up here?

(30:45):
I guess it's in there. Um. And they a lot
of cultures outside of the US use it and savory
dishes way more than we do anyway. Um, Like it's
popular in Indian curries are in gene or chili sure
um oh oh, and cinnamon whiskey. Yes. Although fireball had

(31:07):
been around for a couple of decades, it leapt to
this sudden and much contested prominence in it reached about
two per cent of the overall dollar share of spirits
in the United States. And what that means is that
two per cent of all the money in the country
being spent on booze was going to sales of Fireball.

(31:30):
That's crazy, I know, I mean, you know it was.
It was a big time for flavored whiskeys in general.
But like, but like dang, y'all wow. I also wanted
to talk about the Cinnamon challenge, oh boy, which which
is a dare of sorts. Um. If you haven't heard
of it, You're supposed to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon

(31:52):
in less than a minute without the aid of any
water or other other helpful liquids. Um. And sounds simple,
but in case you've never actually seen it happen, trust me,
it's not. Um. The dare has been around for at
least a decade, but it went viral again in like

(32:12):
thanks YouTube. UM. A search on YouTube, by the way,
pulls up one point six billion videos on the subject. Yeah. Um.
The reason that it's so difficult is that because cinnamon
is ground tree bark, it contains a lot of stiff
cellulose that that resists saturation with water. Um and therefore
also like spit you know, um, and you can you

(32:36):
can see this in action if you sprinkle cinnamon over
coffee because it just kind of sits there until you
physically mix it in um. Or if you put a
drop of water on a little bit of cinnamon that
you've got, like in a spoon or on a dish,
um it'll the water will beat up instead of sinking
in your saliva. Similarly, um cannot mix into a spoonful
of cinnamon um, which means that you cannot swallow it,

(32:57):
which means that you'll choke on it and like spit
out a cloud of cinnamon and probably continue choking for
a while and like look like the dare is like
a little bit mostly harmless, but it can have some
serious consequences. If you accidentally breathe cinnamon in that cellulus
that I mentioned, we'll just sit in your lungs, like

(33:18):
not breaking down, but instead slow releasing that snimalde hyde
that is an irritant that can cause chronic inflammation and
eventually scarring in your lungs, which is like having emphysema.
You don't want it. A few teens actually choked hard
enough that they collapsed along, and at least one actually

(33:40):
choked to death. So if you're looking for a gross
food challenge, i'd recommend baby chugging a gallon of milk instead,
which will probably just make you throw up a lot. Yeah. Actually,
don't do that either. No, don't do either of those things.
And and to thus concludes Lawrence kill Joy corner. Oh yeah,
Joy killed. Yeah. I'm really glad I wasn't. Um, I

(34:04):
wasn't a kid during these things, because this is a
dumb thing I would Oh yeah, m I don't. I
don't think I would have. I wasn't much into dares.
I'm like, okay, well, I don't want to give away
too much. Don't send me any dares people. Oh no, yeah,
oh that's that sounds like a dare in itself. Come on,
I need Annie. Don't don't hurt her. Um. There is also,

(34:27):
of course, an episode, of course, of course of Deadwood.
Um the show, the HBO show Deadwood, called Unauthorized Cinnamon. Oh.
I love that title, I know, right, I wish we
could steal it for those episode. Yeah, sorry, yeah, no,
I guess I guess Deadwood gets to keep that one,
all right. Um. But yeah, that's about That's about what
we have to say about that. And that brings us

(34:51):
to the end of our classic episode on Cinnamon. That
We hope you enjoyed it. Um as always, if you
you have any uses for cinnamon now heavens no, I
got a Grammy for it. Oh, I love any any
ideas or suggestions. We always enjoy seeing what you're up to. Yes,

(35:15):
so you can send any of those things to our email,
which is hello at savor pod dot com, or also
on social media. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram,
and Facebook at savor pod and we do hope to
hear from you. Savor is production of my Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

(35:36):
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our
super producers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you
for listening, and we hope that lots more good things
are coming your way