Savor Classics: Tomato Ketchup

This popular American condiment descended from fermented fish sauce and had a hand in creating the FDA. In this classic episode, Anney and Lauren dip into the non-Newtonian science and fancy history of ketchup.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to Savor Protection of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren vocal Baum, and today
we have a classic episode for you about catch up. Yes, yes,
I love some ketchup controversial. Was there any particular reason
this was on your mind? Uh? Nope, nope, Okay, nope, nope, nope.

(00:32):
Or I mean, I guess I was. I was looking
through the classic episodes and uh, as as I say
in our full new episode this week, I didn't want
to do bananas as a classic right now because it
was like too close in some subject matter to the

(00:55):
full episode. Um. And then yeah, I guess I was like,
oh yea condiments, I guess. I guess they were like
grill out this weekend, this past weekend, the July four
weekend or something. Uh catch up A summary to me? Yeah, yeah,

(01:16):
I would agree. I would agree. Yeah, I talked about
in this episode. I love catchup. Mm hmm. I haven't.
That's with many things during the pandemic. I haven't really
had it that much. Really. You don't have a bottle
at home? I do, but it's like a really old battle. Yeah, probably,

(01:40):
but I do think about it sometimes sometimes I'll open
their fridge and I'll see it and I'll be like, yeah, yeah,
I remember, uh yeah, well yeah, this this episode is
from February of so if that's also when your catchup
bottle is from, then it's probably about time about Oh

(02:02):
my goodness, were we doing some kind of weird Valentine's
Day send up? I were doing catchup? No idea. I
think I probably what happened is I was like, I
don't know, Annie, like what do you feel like talking about?
And you were like, catch up. That's probably true that
I bet in my mind because immediately I thought of

(02:23):
a Valentine's Day sent up. So I think even if
I didn't say that, that's probably what was going on.
That's like Red and Pink catch up, completely amazing. UM.
I will say that, according to an extremely brief Google
um search, catch up is one of the things that

(02:44):
has been thrown off by this our COVID pandemic um. Apparently,
catch up sales went up over the first year of
the pandemic um, which caused the significant shortage of Ketchup UM,
specifically of Ketchup available in single serving packets that the

(03:08):
restaurant industry uses UM, and so there was a whole
catchup kerfuffle about not being able to get like like
the preferred brands and having to like switched to alternate
brands and all kinds of stuff. I did see some
of that. I saw. I saw some hindes versus hunts,

(03:31):
some coming together of heads on that one. And speaking
of are super Fan super Listener Cats, Sparkling Blue. Sina's
a post about how in Canada and a part of
Canada which I cannot remember, there is a Ketchup popsicle

(03:52):
available now, h ye can I probably would like I
love Ketchup, and if it's just ketch Up in a
popsicle form, then I'm just shaking my head slowly. I
don't know what else to say about that. That's fair.

(04:13):
And speaking of just to briefly mention, because I don't
want to go into this, but Ketchup has been involved
in our January six hearings that we are having here
in the United States. Oh yeah, well, so Ketchup. You
know it's getting around. What a world? What a world?

(04:34):
Uh well, I suppose, then, without further ado, let us
get into this glorious story of Ketchup. Hello, and welcome

(04:55):
to food stuff. I'm any rees and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum,
and today we're talking about Ketchup. Oh yes, way more
about Ketchup than I thought was there. It's really fascinating,
it really is. It touched on so many things I
never would have guessed. It's part of the reason why
we have the f d A. Yeah, it really is.

(05:16):
It's such a fascinating story. And it's also one of
my weirdest favorite foods that I have one of your
favorite foods in general, or I've I've kind of grown
out of it. But when I was a kid, I
would eat ketchup sandwiches, and I think it's a common
kid thing to do. I've never heard of it, but

(05:39):
I'm I wouldn't be surprised because kids do like those
weird things like pickled juice. I feel like kids really
like pickle juice. Um. Anyway, I would also I preferred
ketchup to French fries, but I knew it wasn't socially
acceptable to just get ketchup ketchup, so I would order
fries and then not really eat them and just kind
of like try to be subtle about the fact that

(05:59):
I was mostly eating just catch up up until what
age because you say that you ordered the fries, so
you were old enough to be like verbal and perhaps
like have your own money. Yeah, I was definitely. I
remember very vividly being called out on this in college.

(06:19):
That's amazing. Yeah, I also like ketchup. I can't profess
to have that level. Well, it's weird and it's It
brings me to a topic I really want to talk
about one day, is why do we like the foods
we like? Because that's strange. I know that's strange. Why
is my body like? Yeah, ketchup, get me more of this.

(06:42):
It's very bizarre. But anyway, we should start talking about
what it is, right, ketchup? What is it? It's a
condiment that uses tomatoes as a base, usually with vinegar, sweetener,
and spices like onions, are garlic. Other common spices include pepper, cayenne, pepper, paprika,
also a pepper, mustard, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon. And you

(07:04):
can find it pretty much on every hamburger, every hot
dog or not. I've I've found some very heated opinions
about that one. I have a very heated opinion about
that one. Do you remind me to ask you about
it later? Um, every dinner table in the US at least, um,
or is it dipping sauce for front fries or pretty
much any kind of potatoes and a potato product, right, Yeah,

(07:27):
And as far as taste goes, I'm going to imagine
you've had it, but if you haven't, it's kind of
a sweet, savory, sort of twangy barbecue sauce esque taste. Sure. Yeah.
Oh and um, we like to talk about spelling on
this podcast. It's a great audio thing, I know, isn't it.
It's so fun to explain. But so you've probably seen

(07:51):
catchup k E T c h up. That's the more
common spelling, but also cats up like c A T
S e P still pronounced ketchup. Yeah, but I say,
in my head though, it's cats up too, And basically
the reason this whole thing exists, Um, it was mostly
cats up until Hines of Ketchup Fame came along and

(08:14):
wanted to stand out from the crowd, and they marketed
their product as ketchup. Yeah. More on that a little
bit later, Yes, but first, how do we get catch up?
Does it spring forth whole from I'm not sure what
it would spring forth from. I don't like, what's what's
what's the zeus of of of ketchup of condiments? Oh,

(08:35):
the first condiment. I don't know if a condment family
tree would be very interesting actually, okay regardless. Um, first
you've got to grow some tomatoes. Those tomatoes are then
grated and the ones that passed ketchup mustard are washed, chopped,
and scaled. That is pre cooked for preservation and sterilization purposes.
Then you pump them into a cyclone. A cyclist, it's

(08:58):
a it's an industry term for a machine that separates
and filters the pulp and the juice out from all
the stems and skins and seeds. Still cool, Still pretty cool. Yeah.
You then cook the pulp for about thirty minutes, adding
in various flavorings as you go. The whole thing is
then filtered through a finishing machine to get rid of
any chunks um and or maybe milled for texture consistency.

(09:23):
Excess air is removed, and it's packaged hot to prevent
bacteria growth, then cooled to prevent flavor loss from from overcooking.
M hmm. And there is a crazy amount of science
that goes into when you add different flavorings and in
what formats uh Onions and garlic can be steeped in
in bags like like tea. Spices can be added ground

(09:45):
or as essential oils. Adding your sugar too soon can
create a burnt taste, and vinegar and any oils will
evaporate if you let them cook too long. There's a
lot going on there. There's a lot going on there,
more more than I had personally thought about previous to
reading long industry papers. I really thought it was just
like blended tomatoes with sugar in there. Right. No, No,

(10:06):
very complicated. Kind of makes me appreciate it more. Speaking
of sugars, there has been something of an industry kerfuffle
over the type of sweeteners used in Ketchup, partially because
your typical tomato Ketchup is almost a quarter sugar by weight.
As health professionals and the public at large have become
more concerned about added sugars, sneaky sugar foods like Ketchup

(10:27):
have become a target, and so different brands use different types,
from beat sugar to high fruc toast corn syrup. Oh man,
we need to do an episode about high fruc dose
corn syrup sometime we do. I feel like we've tackled
a lot of sweetening things because we're just so into it,
so into things tasting sweet that yes, high fruked toast
corn syrup were con for you. It's coming. Yeah. And

(10:50):
speaking of health, um, it's complicated. Ketchup is about fifteen
calories per tablespoon, and each tablespoon has about four grams
of sugar sleep from added sugars, although the label doesn't
differentiate between added and natural sugars because tomatoes do have
they in them, but we I think we can we
can guess it's mostly added. Yeah. Um, and eight tablespoons

(11:13):
of ketchup will put you at the recommended daily sodium limit.
I feel like you could get to eight pretty quickly.
You could certainly get that. Um it does have some
vitamin A, vitamin C, and lycopene. A two thousand four
study from the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that
women who had elevated blood levels of lycopene lower their

(11:35):
risk apart disease by fIF um. I think it's also
been there studies about it being good for preventing cancer.
M So people use that as an excuse to eat
more Ketchup and catch up companies capitalized on it as well.
But as we often say on this show, bodies are complicated.
More research is needed, and there are better ways to

(11:56):
get your lecopine than catch up, probably like tomatoes. Um
a kay. We don't say that last bit too often,
but it's still true. Still true. Yes, if we look
at Ketchup by the numbers of US households reported having
a bottle of Ketchup in the refrigerator. Yeah, Americans buy

(12:17):
about ten billion ounces a year, which comes out to
around three bottles per person, which is a lot of Ketchup. Yeah.
I kind of wonder, like, I don't know why, but
meat loaf for our things recipes that have catch up
Because for me it's a condiment. I'm not using it
in recipes, but I bet if you used it for

(12:37):
something like that. I don't know. Thoughts for another podcast.
We do make most of our ketchup here, but also
import a lot from Canada. This is way more Ketchup
than the rest of the world consumes, by the way,
as we were responsible for about thirty seven percent of
the global ketchup market. Wow. Of course, there there are

(12:58):
other tomato based condiments in other countries, but Ketchup is
very local. According to the U s d. A, and
unopened bottle of Ketchup will last a year in your pantry,
and an opened one a month, and if you refrigerate them,
an opened bottle is good for six months. I feel
like I've had the bottle of Ketchup in my refrigerator

(13:18):
for far longer than that. Oh yeah, I can't, I
shuddered to think. Moving on, if we just look at
Hines Brandon Ketchup per year, they sell six hundred fifty
million bottles. They are I believe, the leader of the industry. Well,
I mean there's certainly the leader in the industry is
a single brand, but I think about like fifty of

(13:41):
the Ketchup that we buy as Hines. Yeah, I would
believe it. Salsa out sold Ketchup for the first time
a couple of years ago. I know. Ketchup is currently
the third best selling condiment in the US, behind salsa
and the number one mayonnaise, which is one of my
four foods that I don't like. Really yeah, I totally

(14:02):
forgot about it because I just never have mayonnaise. Until
I was reading this, I was like, oh, oh yeah,
I'll see. I like dipping my fries and mayonnaise. I
can understand it, and I watch people in the joy
in their eyes, and I wish I could. I wish
I could enjoy it. But sometimes I like it mixed
in other things, you know. Okay, alright, it's not a

(14:24):
total alright, Yeah, we'll have to Okay, whole other again,
whole other episodes. Okay, um uh. Yeah. The greatest share
of the catchup market is not the home market, which
we have just been talking about, but the fast food industry.
Different analysts are reporting different futures for the market, with
maybe decreases in the United States as young consumers are

(14:44):
shying away from traditional fast food, but increases globally as
the global middle class kind of expands and French fries
are eaten by more other people. This is true. You're
welcome world, yeah, question mark. In the United States, ketchup,

(15:04):
no matter how you spell it, has been defined specifically
as tomato ketchup since at least the nineties, like legally,
but there's been all kinds of flavors of ketchup. Banana
ketchup using bananas in the place of tomatoes is popular
in the Philippines. In our fridge at work, there is
saracha ketchup. I find that interesting. Uh, there's pear sweet mustard,

(15:27):
also funny, mango, cranberry, carrot, apple, plum, goes on and on,
cucumber and grape. Where the two gray that I ran across.
I'm not sure what that looks like. But yeah. Oh,
by the way, what makes some ketchup fancy? If it's
homemade and you're at a hipster rip stock? No, well,

(15:47):
I mean that too, but no, it's a grading term.
The U s d A defines three grades of ketchup
see through A or standard. Extra standard is a great phrase,
and fancy um better color can, insistency and uniformity make
better grades of ketchup. So fancy ketchup is the best noted.

(16:08):
The world's largest ketchup bottle, because you know there is
one is located in Collinsville, Illinois, which at one time
was home of the largest ketchup bottling plant. It's a
combination water tower ketchup bottle that measures in total seventy
feet or fifty two meters, and it has quite the

(16:28):
fan club. There's literally a fan club. Um, it's got
a website and an annual festival. It looks really cool.
And I love Ketchup so oh field Chip always every episode.
I don't know how we're going to fit in all
these field chips. It was built way back in It
was almost torn down in the nineteen nineties after the

(16:48):
town's ketchup operations removed elsewhere and the property that it
sits on was sold, but a restoration and preservation effort
saved it still there. The same town also built the
world's the world's largest Ketchup packet, and this one actually
held ketchup on like this water tower which never right,
was never filled with ketchup. That to my personal knowledge,

(17:10):
um about a hundred and twenty seven gallons went into
the world's largest Ketchup packet. That's about four and eighty
one leaders. It measured four by eight feet or one
point two by two point four meters, and to fill it,
Hines donated four thousand normal ketchup bottles to the town.
The town sold the chance to to pour those bottles

(17:33):
in for a buck apiece to raise money for a
local school. Okay, and the packet, hypothetically and unless someone
something has changed, lives at the Hines corporate headquarters in
Pittsburgh and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records
as the world largest condiment. Satchet, satchet satchet. That's not
a term I would have used, but I do enjoy it.

(17:56):
And one more record for you. The fastest anyone has
drank a bottle of ketchup on record, anyway, is in
point three seven seconds. The record holder used a straw.
Oh man, see, I like ketchup and my stomach is
not on board with that. Yeah. I made the same

(18:17):
face that Annie is making right now when I read
about that one. There's a photographic attached. It's great as
all of this might indicate. Ketchup today is seen rightfully,
so I would say has very much an American condiment.
But that was not always the case, and the first
catchups were not invented in the US. Nope. The story

(18:38):
of ketchup is frequently described as a prime example of
globalization and shifting global political power. Catchup, ketch up? Yep.
More on that after a quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you, sponsor, Yes,

(19:03):
thank you. Let's start our history segment with one of
our favorite things, etymology. Yes, catchup. We're so excited about it.
I hope that you were just as pumped as we are.
Ketchup probably comes from the Chinese word which, um, what
did kits yap mean? You ask? It was the name

(19:26):
for a fermented fish sauce. That's the car going off
the road. By the way, I'm really good at sound effects. Yeah.
Wait wait so fish fish sauce. Yeah, fermented fish, fermented
fish back darea poo. Yeah, I know another thing we love. Yes,

(19:48):
Ketchup in its original form did not have tomatoes. If
you've ever looked at a catchup bottle, and I'm guessing
you have, maybe you recall it. The label reads tomato ketchup, which,
until someone pointed this out when I was researching it,
I had never never like clicked yeah that it does
in fact say tomato catchup as in ketchup isn't or
it wasn't always tomato based. The first written mention of

(20:12):
a fermented fish paste our sauce in China dates back
to three d BC. It might be made with fish
and trails, meat by products, or soy beans, and the
things I read said it was good at complimenting savory flavors.
I feel like fish sauce. There's there's a whole garum
thing In Roman times need to anyway, Yeah, please continue.

(20:34):
Here's one of the first recipes from five four BC.
Take the intestine, stomach and bladder of the yellow fish,
shark and mullet and wash them well. Mix them with
a moderate amount of salt, and place them in a jar,
sealed tightly, and incubate in the sun. It will be
ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring

(20:56):
our fall, and one hundred days in winter. Who mm hmm,
incubate in the sun? I do. I've never had a
recipe that said incubate and son preferably far away from
anywhere where you hang out, I would imagine, But then
someone might steal here. I mean you can't. So this

(21:18):
sauce stored and kept easily, meaning it was popular on
long journeys and trade routes from China. It traveled to
Malaysia and Indonesia via traders, picking up the names could
chop and catch chop, respectively. After sailors from England encountered
it in the seventeenth century, they tried to recreate the
condiment in their own country. The word catch up like

(21:41):
catch c a T H plus up you p was
first recorded in the New Dictionary of the terms Ancient
and Modern. Of the Canting Crew was a title with
the description High East India Sauce in A British merchant
gave this advice on buying ketchup. Soy comes in tubs

(22:03):
from Japan and the best ketchup from northern Vietnam. Yet
good of both sorts are made and sold very cheap
in China. I know not a more profitable commodity. Wow
in sev seven are in some places I read It
appeared in the seventeen fifty reprint The Complete Housewife included

(22:23):
a recipe for a sauce called English ketchup, made out
of twelve to fourteen anchovies, ten to twelve shallots, white wine, vinegar,
white wine, mace, ginger clothes, whole peppers, a whole nutmeg,
lemon peel, and horse radis mixed together and then shaking
a bottle once or twice a day for a week
and toda. This recipe was frequently reprinted up until the

(22:45):
nineteenth century, so people must have liked it, and key
here too something I I forget a lot um. People
didn't have refrigeration at this time, right, so you either
had like cold ish sellar right, are we're making this
like shrug? Yeah, you eat fresh food exactly. So, just

(23:06):
like the sailors, they appreciated the long shelf life of ketchup,
and early attempts to recreate ketchup in England included beer, because,
of course they did, of course they did a little
over a decade later in the seventeen forties, spiced sauce,
as ketchup was known in England was a regular condiment
at the dinner table. Still not how we'd think of it,

(23:28):
though the consistency was thinner, the color was a lot darker,
and on top of the stuff we just mentioned in
that recipe, the English might add cinnamon, mustard, seeds, are
kai in, pepper or walnuts, oysters, muscles, celery, plums, peaches,
or mushrooms. Jane Austen was a fan of mushroom ketchup.

(23:49):
Another sipe I found called for not one, not to
but one hundred oysters, three pints of white wine, lemon,
peels and mace and cloves. That's a lot of oysters.
That is many, okay h It wasn't until eighteen twelve
the first recipe for ketchup using tomatoes was published courtesy

(24:10):
of James Mice. Mice was a horticulturist and a scientist,
and the recipe referred to tomatoes as love apples. That's
one of my favorite episodes. That was such a good one. Anyway,
Who knows how long Mes worked on perfecting his tomato
ketchup because he mentioned it in eighteen o four, eight

(24:30):
years earlier, and he mentioned it that he believed love
apples would make a fine catsup. I'm just gonna use
cats up to differentiate so I don't have to spell
it every time. One thing I read positive that all
of the things added in ketchup at this time and
currently tomatoes, mushrooms, oysters are big on that fifth taste

(24:53):
or savory yeah, which I thought was interesting. Meanwhile, speaking
of our tomato episode, tomatoes were growing in popularity around
this time. There was this kind of stunt that happened
in eighteen twenty in which one Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson
stood on the steps of a local New Jersey courthouse
and eight tomatoes. He just went through tomatoes until the crowd,

(25:18):
which had gathered, which was convinced that they were poisonous,
was like, oh, I guess, I guess he's fine, I
guess they're not poisons. I guess they're not poisonous this
whole time. Yeah, Yeah, it's a great it's a great story,
and uh, you could check out our tomato episode to
learn more. And if you haven't heard it, I highly recommended.
Recipes for ketchup or tomato soy as it was now called,

(25:40):
were present in many of the first American cookbooks, including
The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph around eighteen thirty four
and Ohio and doctor John Cook. Bennett got the idea
that tomatoes were this universal gut pantsia that they could
like treat all sorts of digestion problems, and you started

(26:00):
publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which was then concentrated into
pillform and sold as patent medicine. It's kind of fascinating
how it went from don't eat these stairs pors and
its will kill you too. Here their medicinal take a
film very quickly, humans are we can just pop around

(26:21):
in that mind um. Miss Beaton's book of household Management
and eighteen sixty one bestseller King with several ketchup recipes,
mostly of the mushroom and oyster variety, and over the
next few decades, tomato ketchups medicinal popularity would grow to
the point that people apparently thought of tomato ketchup as
being like a health tonic. Wow. There was a problem

(26:45):
brought on by addition of tomatoes, though it didn't preserve
as well, and that whole long lasting thing was an
enormous part of ketchups appeal. The tomato growing season was
short too, so growers needed a way to keep tomato
preserve all ye're long. A lot of companies attempted to
commercialize tomato ketchup, but they ran into a a lot

(27:07):
of problems, sometimes deadly ones with yeast, mold and bacteria.
Oh and they also contained cold tar to get that
red color, and boric acid that were not good for
you know, um, Okay. The thing here is that you
had like two months out of the year to produce
fresh tomato pulp for ketchup, and you couldn't make a

(27:31):
year supply of catchup very quickly, and you didn't have
good refrigeration or even reliable canning technology yet, so you
wound up with people adding various chemicals to preserve the pulp.
Stuff that is not super good for you. Boric acid formulin,
which is a solution of formaldehyde and water um benzoic acid. Also,
the acids in ketchups would interact with the copper tubs

(27:53):
that they were often cooked in. Uh huh. In eighteen
sixty six, Pierre Blots of French cookbook author called commercially
available ketchup filthy, decomposed, and putrid. A study out of
California conducted in eight found that ketchup brands contained injurious
ingredients like salasilic acid, you know, like known carcinogens, known

(28:17):
carcinogens in the eighteen hundreds. Something had to be pretty
bad at that anyway. Yeah. One of the guys leading
the effort to rid ketchup of benzoates was Dr Harvey
Washington Wiley, Oh man, this guy, Yeah, more on him
in a minute. But he was so passionate about this

(28:38):
that in eighteen seventy six he joined forces with a
fella in Pittsburgh named Henry J. Hydes, Yes that Hides,
who by that time was already making catchup. He started
selling the stuff in eighteen seventy one and running H. J.
Hines Company. He, or more likely his chief food scientist G. F. Mason,

(28:59):
got the idea to use ripe tomatoes. Previously, they've been
using green and yellow in hopes that they'd last longer,
resulting in a brownish type sauce that they would then
die red um and these red tomatoes they have more pectin.
He also upped the vinegar and his product, which which
helped it last longer, and added sugar. He was so

(29:19):
confident in his product he sold it with the money
back guarantee. Now that it no longer had preservatives, it
would see a sort of a health product again, and
it was marketed as Tomato Catchup. And part of the
recipe that Mason came up with was really processed, not
ingredients like clean manufacturing practices and quality control. What's weird,

(29:43):
but but let's let's back up just a little bit here.
So Hines had gotten his start bottling and selling horse
ranish that his mother made a humble business that by
the eight nineties had grown into a large food processing firm.
The story goes around that time he got the idea
to market Hynes fifty seven varieties catch up from a

(30:05):
sign in New York City advertising twenty one varieties of shoes,
and he thought that adding a number was a cool idea,
and that fifty seven was a cool number, possibly because
it combined his favorite number five with his wife's favorite
number seven. Okay, although, to be fair, when he first
started marketing at the company already produced over sixty products,
so there were certainly enough varieties to count. Most of

(30:27):
it wasn't types of catchup, though. It was like rice
flakes and olives and pickles and mustard and vinegars and
stuff like that. Hynes seems like he was this legit
good person who genuinely cared about people's health and welfare
and about making money, and he managed to turn his
enthusiasm for that first thing into like a lot of
that second thing. In the late eighteen hundreds, he was

(30:51):
giving his factory employees free access to medical and dental care,
on site emergency care, and life and death insurance. The
company provide uniforms and laundry service, and washrooms and on
site manicures to make sure that employees came to the
line clean. They didn't just get a lunch break. There
was art in the cafeteria. The Pittsburgh factory had a

(31:12):
swimming pool, a gymnasium, and a rooftop garden. I kind
of want to bottle ketchup in the eighteen hundreds in Pennsylvania.
It sounds lovely, right and Hines what was marketing this?
He He opened his factories to public tours. He sold
his products in clear glass bottles. He hired traveling salesman
to display Hines products in local grocery stores like on

(31:33):
China with fine linen uh, and espouse the quality of
these foods. They were more expensive, but they were purer
and amidst all of this, Dr Wiley, who by the
turn of the century was the chief chemist at the
Federal Bureau of Chemistry, was on this public campaign to
bring pure foods to the public by regulating the ever

(31:56):
increasingly industrial food industry. He hired a poison squad that
apparently voluntarily ate whatever he gave them to help him
prove that highly processed foods made under unsanitary conditions were
bad for your health. Oh wow, they volunteered apparently, Yeah,

(32:17):
government employees. Good times. Uh. He went on speaking tours
railing against big business cost cutters as the hosts of
Satan and promoting a pure food act as necessary for
the survival of the human race. He had quite a
rhetoric the public and perhaps especially religious folks connected with

(32:37):
the larger temperance movement loved it. They were super into this,
apparently to to get then President Teddy Roosevelt on board,
he pointed to fillers being used in Scotch, so you know,
whatever works must now. And Hines was also all about it,

(32:59):
you know, like like, oh, man, you want to pass
some laws demanding sanitary manufacturing conditions, come at me, bro
I'm ready. The company was already a leader there and
would nothing but profit at forcing their competitors to start
shaping up. Hines's son, Howard, who by that time was
working in the company, was quoted as telling Roosevelt that

(33:19):
such laws would inspire a confidence in commercially prepared foods,
and as my company would get its full share of
the larger business. In helping the industry, we should be
helping ourselves. Mm hmmm. And then Upton Sinclaire's The Jungle
came out, yeah, in February of and all all of

(33:39):
this kind of like simmering upset at all of the
malpractice going on in the food manufacturing industry came to
a boil. The Pure Food and Drug Act would be
passed in June of that year. It enforced proper labeling
of ingredients on packaging and paved the way for the
Food and Drug Administration to be created. It's astounding ketchup

(34:03):
ketchup um. And after this, ketch us popularity really increased,
especially after the American Civil War Merchants Review named ketchup
the sauce of sauces in the New York Tribune named
ketchup the national condiment of eighteen nine six quote on
every table in the land, and Hines really cornered the market.

(34:25):
Five million bottles sold by nineteen o five. By nineteen
o eight, they had sold two point five million dollars worth.
According to Hines, to separate himself from his confeditors, he
chose the spelling ketchup, as they mentioned at the top,
instead of catsup. The more and more ketchup people bought
from stores, the less and less recipes for it appeared
in cookbooks. Hinz Company was pouring money into morality based

(34:50):
ketchup advertising after that Pure Food and Drug Act passed,
and that's part of how they started making so much
more money. UH. One ad read you can have the
danger of drugged food by getting Hines pure food products. UH.
Some ads apparently suggested that the government was going to
start confiscating any foods that contained preservatives, so you know,

(35:11):
grocers should start replacing their stock with Hines products. Stat
whoa that was? That was not true. Then in the
nineteen thirties, Hines Company began tomato breeding programs to create
hybrids that were sturdier and more prolific, and this would
become huge, huge, Like by the nineties, they had started

(35:31):
commercially selling seeds, and hind Seed became the market leader
in tomato seeds. They started out looking for disease resistant tomatoes,
but the research capacity that they set up let them
flow with all kinds of different marketing changes over the
next few decades. For example, in nineteen sixty five, mechanical
tomato harvesters became available, which would greatly reduce the time

(35:55):
and cost of picking tomatoes if you had a crop
that could withstand the force of a machine, right a
little bit rougher than a human picker, So Hines developed
that crop. These days, they developed hundreds of new tomato
varieties every year and choose a few to advance on. Wow. Well, uh,

(36:15):
speaking of Wow, and Nixon made headlines in sixteen not
sixteen and nineteen sixty nine, it came out that his
breakfast of choice was cottage cheese and ketchup. And when
I read that, I made a very loud, audible sound
of disgust that drew worry from my nearby co workers.

(36:38):
It's not the worst thing I've ever thought of, but
I don't like thinking about it. No, it's just not
a pleasant image or taste sensation in my brain. Let's
move on. Individual ketchup backets came on the scene in nine.
Two years later, in nineteen seventy, the thirty two ounce
bottle is introduced. By the nineteen eighties, Ketchup is the

(37:00):
butt of a joke and pulp fiction, and the source
of letters of advice to and landers. My husband is
eating too much ketchup. I where he's uncultured. I I
did read it, and I got kind of a laugh
out of it. And under Reagan, the US government attempted
to get ketchup classified as a vegetable to meet the
vegetable component of school lunch requirements. Hi, Yeah, YEAHI The

(37:25):
plastic squeeze bottle came out in night three. There are
innovations ongoing. Some were successful than others. In two thousand
there was a green ketchup, and pink and blue, and teal,
and orange and purple, and in two thousand two the
upside down Ketchup bottle. Those upside down bottles are equipped
with a specially designed silicone valve with slits arranged at

(37:49):
right angles to each other so that they part with
pressure with a squeeze of the bottle and steal back
up when relaxed. Keep your ketchup freshure. Oh. And then
in twenty hen, amidst public concerns about corn syrups pervasive
use as a sweetener, both Hines and other leading brand
Hunts started offering ketchups sweetened with sugar instead of high

(38:11):
frucdose corn syrup. Hunts replaced high frucdose corn syrup across
their entire line of ketchups, while Hines introduced a ketchup
called Simply Hines, which had reduced sodium and replaced the
corn syrup. And according to research albeit from the corn industry,
this is a good case study about how consumers care
more about the amount of added sweeteners in a product

(38:32):
overall than than what kind of sweetener is being used.
But sales numbers do appear to bear that out, and
Hunts eventually went back to using high frucdose corn syrup
after a dip in sales. Huh. Hines meanwhile put extra
money into that breeding research and development to build a
sweeter tomato and reduce dependence on corn syrup overall. Huh.

(38:54):
That's very interesting ketchup. Who knew? Uh? That is our
history portion. But ketchup has more surprises for us in
the science bit. And more about that after one last
quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back,

(39:26):
Thank you sponsor. Okay, Lauren, let's talk about non Newtonian fluids.
It is this like non Euclidean geometry. Do I need
to be scared? Terrified? Oh? Heck, she's very scared. I
can tell no, it's not scary at all. Uh. As
I mentioned earlier, the fifty seven part of Hine's fifty
seven Ketchup is definitely just a just a marketing thing,

(39:49):
but the placement of the fifty seven label on the
bottle is absolutely not. And that's because ketchup is a
non Newtonian fluid. Really, let's unpack that. A Newtonian fluid
is one that has a viscosity, a thickness or a
resistance to flowing related only to its temperature. Water and

(40:10):
oil are Newtonian fluids. Uh you know, pressure and non
heat related agitation don't affect the rate of which they flow.
So like, no matter how hard you shake water, it
always flows the same way, right right right. This has
nothing to do with density, mind you. Like honey is
both more dense and more viscous than water, It takes

(40:30):
longer to pour, and it's also heavier, it'll it'll sink
and tea or something like that. But think of cream.
It takes longer to pour than water, so it's more viscous,
but it would also float on top of water anyway.
Unlike water and other Newtonian fluids, non Newtonian fluids are
affected by pressure and agitation. Think about quicksand or okay,

(40:56):
maybe you've never really thought about quicksand, but it's about
twice as dense as you are, meaning that you can
float on top of it, but only if you don't struggle.
If you struggle in quicksand, you agitate it and it
makes it less viscous, and you'll sink. That is why
you should always stay calm and move slowly should you
get trapped in quicksand survival tip of the episode. You've

(41:18):
heard it here on food Stuff, exactly where you expect
to get your quicksand survival tips. You should also stay
calm and move slowly if you ever get trapped in
toothpaste or catch up. More practically, though, you can put
this to use when you're trying to get ketchup out
of a glass bottle. Uh, it's so viscous that it
gets jammed up at the neck. But by applying agitation

(41:42):
sheer stress, that is, to the ketchup at the neck,
you can make it less viscous and it will flow faster.
And you can do that by just tapping the neck
of the bottle right on that fifty seven label, or
if you're using different brands, sort of like midway up
the glass neck, tapping it at the bottom of the
bottle does not work because that only affects the viscosity
of the ketchup at the bottom of the bottle, which

(42:04):
is not where the problem is, right, And yet that's
what almost all of us do. Yeah, it seems it
seems illogical, it does, doesn't it. Nope, not logical at all.
According to non Newtonian fluid physics. I say it again, catchup. Um.
You may also have seen videos online about how you
can use ketchup to clean or polish things, particularly on

(42:27):
objects that are metal because of the acidity and the
tomatoes and the vinegars. From the things I read, because
I have never tried this, it can clean pots and
pans and minutes. It can remove the tarnish off copper.
It's good for polishing brass and steel shining cars. And
I do kind of want to try it because for me,

(42:49):
putting ketchup on something, it's gonna make it worse. But
I believe that it is true. Um. I think they'll
all start really small, with like a penny. Yeah, maybe
not like an antique or any like my my cousin's
very nice car or something. Oh yeah, probably not that. No,
I just put ketchup on your car. It's gonna be fine. Um.
And if you want to make it, it's relatively easy

(43:11):
to make and to customize to your own taste. Absolutely,
should you be interested. The consistency is a little tricky
to imitate, but it's totally worth your while. If you're
a ketchup fan and recipes abound online or worth worth
your while. I don't know. I I was talking with
a with a food industry friend about this before we
came in here, not immediately before we came in. And

(43:32):
it's not like hiding in the office. But there's a
little bit of of an argument in the food industry
about whether or not one should make their own house
catch up. I have heard that yet, because yeah, because
the flavor of ketchup is so when people ask times yeah,
and so anything else is kind of I mean, it
can be delightful, yes, but it's like, oh, this doesn't
taste like ketchup, and that's a lot of people's experiences,

(43:55):
I think making it at home, they're like, well, this
is nice, but right. I definitely think that in restaurants
you are running a risk if you don't offer also
bottled ketchup, because people will be angry that they're not
getting what they what they think of ketchup as um.
But yeah, like I've made it once and all I
did was add like more, I made it spice here

(44:18):
and I liked it. But yeah, if you're looking for
hins like that sweet ketchup, you're never going to get it. Yeah,
just buy it, Just buy it. That's why all the recipes,
like we said, they started disappearing out of the recipe
books because people were like, I want this thing and
I can't do it, so so even try. All right,
don't let that discourage you. Should you want to try

(44:39):
a different type of ketchup, especially something like banana ketchup. Yeah,
I know, I'm very I really want to try that. Yeah,
and that brings us to the end of this episode.
I did think of another ketchup thing. Yes, So currently,
I've watched the movie everything everywhere, all at once, like

(44:59):
way too many times. Oh yeah, there's a scene with
the catship like, oh, it's organic and if you haven't
seen it, I'm not going to explain it because I've
I've told people this movie cannot be spoiled because it's
so so weird. But I also wouldn't want to risk
spoiling anyone. So yeah, actually, now that now that I

(45:20):
think about it, I guess there's like two kinds of
catchup references in the movie at any rate. Um uh, so, yes,
there's that. Go check that film out if you like
incredibly bonkers action movies that made me cry multiple times. Anyway, Um,
I was like, oh no, rocks. I'm weeping now. Um,

(45:45):
but I guess also like one more follow up. We
still have not done an episode about high fruc dose
corn syrup, which is something that we like kind of
promise that we're going to do soon, um in this
episode from eighteen. So that hasn't happened. I mean, speaking
of the multiverse and time being weird. Soon could beat

(46:07):
all kinds of things. True enough, it will happen. It's
on the list. It is. It is on the list,
and as we've said, it might take some time, but
if it's on the list, we'll get to happen. Yeah, yeah,
well good, here you go. I love to think there's

(46:28):
one listener who's just been holding out that one episode
on catchup, like what they're gonna talk about it. It's
just waiting and waiting and waiting. We will get to you.
We will, and yes to all the other listeners and
that one. If you would like to contact us, you can.
Our email is hello at savor pod dot com. We're

(46:50):
also on social media. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at saver pod and we do hope to
hear from you. Saver is production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, you can visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our
super producers Dylan Fagin and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you
for listening, and we hope that lots more good things

(47:12):
are coming your way.