May 21, 2025 • 14 mins
William A. Mitchell invented some iconic snack foods and candies. Learn all about him today!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here for Dave, and this is short stuff. We're
talking about one of the greatest Americans to ever fiss earth.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right, a food scientist named William A. Mitchell who
was a research chemist for thirty five years at General Foods.
And this is a great guy. He seems like it.
There was an interview with a guy named Marv Rudolph
who worked with Mitchell, that said he just knew how
to amplify flavors in food. He knew what colors to
(00:36):
make something to make it more attractive, and if you
had a problem, he was a guy to go to.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
He could figure it out.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The other great thing was, and this is also from
the same interviews, they tried to promote him at General
Foods to management many many times, but he didn't want
to do that. He was a lab guy and wanted
to stay in the lab.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yes, and that is the sign of a true artiste. Yeah,
because I think we talked about our Peter Prince full
episode appropriately enough, because that's what we're talking about here.
You can very easily get raised. I guess promoted, thank
you out of your field of expertise and suddenly you're
a manager and not everybody's a manager. We can tell
(01:16):
you for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, I've done that job. I'm okay at it. I
don't love it.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'm terrible at it. Just screaming, pounding my fists on desks.
It doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
But Mitchell, and we'll get to the things he invented
after this, maybe because that'll be a nice little teaser.
But he has more than seventy food patents that he
invented from nineteen forty one to nineteen seventy six. But
this was a guy that was born to very very
hard work in a Minnesota farm family, or to a
Minnesota farm family in nineteen eleven, isn't it right?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, because his dad died while he was in elementary school.
Although I suspect if you're born to a Minnesota farm
family in nineteen eleven, you're gonna work regardless. But I
think the pressure was on William Mitchell even more than
the average Minnesota farm child born in nineteen eleven because
of his father's death. So Bill Mitchell had to harvest
(02:08):
peas and beans for other farmers to help supplement the
income of their family by the time he was a teenager,
the family was living in Colorado and he was trapping
muskrat and I guess selling them at the local muskrat
market and harvesting melons for other farmers too. So he
did a lot of work that probably the average person didn't.
(02:29):
But he also worked his way through college too, I
guess as a carpenter.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Before that, though, he got a job that would kind
of come in handy later on as a food scientist
because he worked the overnight shift at the sugar crystallization
tank room for the American Beat Sugar Company. So that
work with sugar just sort of put a pin in
that because that'll come back.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, you can kind of imagine that's probably where he
started to develop his love of food science, right.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I mean, I don't know one going only guess he
was around all that sugar.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, he really hyped him up. Well. I say that
because pretty early on after he graduated with a master's
degree in chemistry, he went into research chemistry with a
I guess a lean toward food. Because it was at
the Agricultural Experiment Station in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm guessing he
worked a lot with corn and so that was his
(03:21):
first career was essentially in food science, or he started
working with food as a scientist. How about that?
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And as you will see, he was not a person
to be deterred because not long after he started that job,
that was a pretty bad explosion from heating a cracked
beaker with alcohol in it, and he got second third
degree burns over eighty percent of his body. Took some
time off to recover a few months, and then that
is when he landed his job and moved to White Plains,
(03:50):
New York with the general food foods excuse me, more
than one food corporation.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Don't say it. Don't say any names yet, I won't, okay,
because we're going to take a break real quick, and
we're come back and talk about some of the great
things that Bill Mitchell did with his life later after this, so, Chuck,
(04:27):
we talked about Bill Mitchell being an amazing person. And
one of the reasons why is because he developed some
of the best foods that came out of the twentieth century.
Not the best for you foods, right, the best?
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, I wondered.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
After I did this research, I was like, Man, are
we gonna get people writing in because we're like celebrating
this guy for creating junk food.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Well, they just can soak their heads.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Great. I like that term. That's a nice way to
say other things.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
So one of the first things was in nineteen fifty seven,
he was like, how about a powdered drink that tastes
sort of like sort of citrusy and people might I
think it's good.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
For you, but it's a ninety eight percent sugar.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, it is primarily sugar. Got a little bit of
vitamin C in there. Oh, and those flavor crystals happening.
You're gonna mix that together with water. You're gonna get
a bright, very bright, almost unsettlingly bright orange color, tangerine
color drink.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
And it's called tang Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
And you said flavor crystals. That was a big one
because William Mitchell was known in the food science industry
is the master of disaster. Yeah, and in parentheses they
would put disaster being flavor crystals. That just couldn't find
anything that rhymed with it.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Tank wasn't a big hit right away though, it took
a little while to catch on, but one of the
big things that helped, you know, helped launch it. No,
I guess pun intended was when it went into outer
space in nineteen sixty two. It was on board John
Glenn's Mercury spaceflight because he was like, Man, we're storing
this drinking water in metal cans and metal vats and
(05:59):
it tastes great. So he's like, just throw some tang
powder in there and you're all good.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah. So yeah, I mean this was the time when
America was just totally fascinated with space. You know, you
could have put an old leather boot in space and
solder his tang and people would have drank it.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
So you talked about John Glenn saying it was gross
to drink metallic water. Later on, buzz Aldrin said tang
is gross. As a matter of fact, he said tang sucks.
And he said it while he was doing the most
twenty thirteen thing you could possibly be doing. He was
presenting a Spike TV Guy's Choice Award to Felix bombgartnerm.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I was Hee the parachute Guy. Yeah, yeah, that jumped
from space. Yeah yeah, sponsored by Red Bullet.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah. And I don't know how it came up. I
didn't see the clip, but that was what made the
rounds of the media. Tang sucks in quotes.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Oh good for you buzz speaking of being sponsored though,
by the time Apollo eight rolled around, Tang was such
a thing for space flights that the televised event was
sponsored by Tang.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
They were like, we got we got to get in
on this thing.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Did you drink Tang when you were a kid?
Speaker 3 (07:10):
A little bit? But we I drank a lot of water.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
My mom was you know, we couldn't afford a lot
of stuff, even though Tang was like super cheap, and
I think my mom also didn't want us just having
a ton of junk. It wasn't like super health food
family or anything, but it was just one of the
things like I'm not going to waste my money on
that garbage.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
I guess you probably didn't drink kool aid either.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
A little bit here and there.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Those were treats I usually got at other kids' houses.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, kool Aid was the best.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Did you just drink all that stuff?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I drank so much kool aid. Cherry lime was really good,
grape was probably the best.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Oh my god, good freezer pops too.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes, But if you ever made it chuck, you would
put the kool Aid powder in a pitcher and it
would be like a couple of tablespoons maybe pops and
did you report literal cups of sugar on top of it,
add water, stir and just thank me later.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, hey too, lad.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
It was it was nuts, Like, looking back, it was
insane that that's what kids drank.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Pretty great, God bless the seventies.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Bill Mitchell was trying to solve a lot of problems
often when he came up with these inventions for food,
try to save people time in the kitchen at the time,
you know, trying to save moms time in the kitchen.
And in nineteen sixty seven he was like, jello takes
way too long to make because you have to use
this hot water boiling water to dissolve that stuff. So
he came up with a and got a patent for
(08:36):
a quick set form of jello using cold water. He
was like, look at that, everybody, Yeah, presto chaninjo you
got cold jello and no time flat.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
No time flat. So what's interesting is jello is very
famous for making some really weird being a part of
some really weird mid century recipes. So Bill Mitchell had
his hand in jello. He also had his hand in
another ingredient some really weird recipes from century, which was
cool whip, which was total and still is almost totally
(09:05):
artificial whipped cream. It's made with water, hydrogenated vegetable oil,
high fruit toast, corn syrup, corn syrup, and then skim milk.
And the skim milk is a modern addition. There used
to be nothing that was a milk product in cool whip,
which meant you could freeze it, which was a huge
boon to general foods.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Right, yeah, but I think you missed one ingredient, love
the hand of God.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So you're a cool whip dude, huh.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I mean, we don't get it because it's just, you know,
it's garbage. But you know when we pumpkin pine and
pecan pine and stuff like that around Thanksgiving and Christmas,
we will get cool whip. I don't like the shake
of can ready whip stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
We're a cool whip family.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
And it does not last long on our house because
it just gets eaten out of the container with a
spoon by all three of us.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Same with ready whip, though, you just turn it up
and spray it right in your mouth and then when
it's out you it gives you a pretty good bat.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Yeah, but I like that cool it better. I like
the taste.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I like it frozen too. I like it both ways.
But it's really good frozen as well.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah. I think I told you before cool. Yeah, we
talked about it was cool whipping peanut butter. It's a
dangerous combination.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Oh, I still didn't try that. I forgot. I'll have
to try that this Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
You know, you probably just shouldn't. I don't think you should.
It's like you might as well have just said I
think I'll start smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
So the granddaddy of them all, Bill Mitchell, had a
hand in in that. He kind of laid the groundwork
for the product to come. But back in nineteen fifty six,
William Mitchell was trying to figure out ways to carbonate
kool aid to basically create instant soda. Yeah, and he
(10:48):
was like, let me just figure out how to add
carbon dioxide to flavor crystals, because again he was the
flavor crystal king. Yeah, and I guess he did enough
so that, like he created a legacy process of adding
CO two to two flavor crystals. It just wasn't creating
the soda that he was looking for, so he shelved it,
(11:09):
and then somebody else came along and picked it up. Right.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, twenty years later, somebody else tweaked it just a bit,
and thankfully the world, the United States and the world.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Over got pop rocks.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Can you describe pop rocks if people don't know what
those are?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Oh, they're a little very tiny candy on the kind
of like this size and shape of nerds. And if
you don't know what nerds are, we're just totally lost here.
Not quite as codd if they are at all. But
when they touch your tongue, that co two that's inside
just like starts to get released, and it makes the
candy crackle. So not only does it make a cool sound,
(11:48):
fizzing sound just like the top of like when you
pour a sprite, it like you can feel it on
your tongue too. It's very delightful.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
So, I mean the idea was you would take a
scoop of this and add water. So in this case
the water is just your saliva and the moisture from
your mouth and your tongue.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, And I.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Gave Ruby some when she was like four or five.
I was like, you've never had pop rocks, kiddo, you
got to try this out, and she was. It was
sort of one of those great mind blowing moments. As apparent,
She's like more no, not really, She's not one of
those kids that it's weird. She loves the thing, but
maybe it's the ADHD shees. She kind of forgets about
it after that.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Usually ADHD laser focuses on something like a big sugar rush,
so she's fortunate. Yeah. So there was a myth. I
think some people probably still believe this if they've heard
it Chuck, that if you drink soda and pop rocks
eat pop rocks at the same time, you're at risk
of blowing your stomach up from all of the carbon dioxide.
(12:50):
And that is just not true. But it was persistent
enough that General Foods had to take out a full
page ad back in the seventies. And I looked it up.
It's an open letter to parents talking about pop rocks
and how it's safe, and it was written by Bill Mitchell.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Oh that's great.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, So they trotted him out and they were like,
tell everybody Bill, because we don't understand how they work.
You explain it.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, they stood next to him with a knife gently
pressed into the side.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Of his neck. So we salute you. William A.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Mitchell, he retired from General Foods in nineteen seventy six.
Tried to find out some dirt on this guy, but
he seems like just a pretty great person. He was
a father of seven, he's married for sixty years, and
when he passed away in two thousand and four, his
obituary said he was devoted, stimulating and loving parent and
made a pretty big impact on, you know, the diet
(13:42):
of American kids.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, we should say one of those seven children is
Cheryl Mitchell, his daughter. She became a food scientist as well,
followed in her father's footsteps. And if you like rice
dream you can thank Cheryl Mitchell or Elmhurst nut grain
and seed milk you can thank her as well. And
she's known as a quote world authority on sweetener's rice
processing and the extraction and metabolism of.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Anulin parentheses, but not flavor crystals.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
No, that was her dad's jam.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, I love the legacy continues, so pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Same here, all right, Well, thank you and thank you
for signing off as a salute to William Mitchell to Chuck,
I appreciate it, and I think that also means short
stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here for Dave, and this is short stuff. We're
talking about one of the greatest Americans to ever fiss earth.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right, a food scientist named William A. Mitchell who
was a research chemist for thirty five years at General Foods.
And this is a great guy. He seems like it.
There was an interview with a guy named Marv Rudolph
who worked with Mitchell, that said he just knew how
to amplify flavors in food. He knew what colors to
(00:36):
make something to make it more attractive, and if you
had a problem, he was a guy to go to.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
He could figure it out.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The other great thing was, and this is also from
the same interviews, they tried to promote him at General
Foods to management many many times, but he didn't want
to do that. He was a lab guy and wanted
to stay in the lab.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yes, and that is the sign of a true artiste. Yeah,
because I think we talked about our Peter Prince full
episode appropriately enough, because that's what we're talking about here.
You can very easily get raised. I guess promoted, thank
you out of your field of expertise and suddenly you're
a manager and not everybody's a manager. We can tell
(01:16):
you for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, I've done that job. I'm okay at it. I
don't love it.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'm terrible at it. Just screaming, pounding my fists on desks.
It doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
But Mitchell, and we'll get to the things he invented
after this, maybe because that'll be a nice little teaser.
But he has more than seventy food patents that he
invented from nineteen forty one to nineteen seventy six. But
this was a guy that was born to very very
hard work in a Minnesota farm family, or to a
Minnesota farm family in nineteen eleven, isn't it right?
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, because his dad died while he was in elementary school.
Although I suspect if you're born to a Minnesota farm
family in nineteen eleven, you're gonna work regardless. But I
think the pressure was on William Mitchell even more than
the average Minnesota farm child born in nineteen eleven because
of his father's death. So Bill Mitchell had to harvest
(02:08):
peas and beans for other farmers to help supplement the
income of their family by the time he was a teenager,
the family was living in Colorado and he was trapping
muskrat and I guess selling them at the local muskrat
market and harvesting melons for other farmers too. So he
did a lot of work that probably the average person didn't.
(02:29):
But he also worked his way through college too, I
guess as a carpenter.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Before that, though, he got a job that would kind
of come in handy later on as a food scientist
because he worked the overnight shift at the sugar crystallization
tank room for the American Beat Sugar Company. So that
work with sugar just sort of put a pin in
that because that'll come back.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, you can kind of imagine that's probably where he
started to develop his love of food science, right.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I mean, I don't know one going only guess he
was around all that sugar.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, he really hyped him up. Well. I say that
because pretty early on after he graduated with a master's
degree in chemistry, he went into research chemistry with a
I guess a lean toward food. Because it was at
the Agricultural Experiment Station in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm guessing he
worked a lot with corn and so that was his
(03:21):
first career was essentially in food science, or he started
working with food as a scientist. How about that?
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And as you will see, he was not a person
to be deterred because not long after he started that job,
that was a pretty bad explosion from heating a cracked
beaker with alcohol in it, and he got second third
degree burns over eighty percent of his body. Took some
time off to recover a few months, and then that
is when he landed his job and moved to White Plains,
(03:50):
New York with the general food foods excuse me, more
than one food corporation.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Don't say it. Don't say any names yet, I won't, okay,
because we're going to take a break real quick, and
we're come back and talk about some of the great
things that Bill Mitchell did with his life later after this, so, Chuck,
(04:27):
we talked about Bill Mitchell being an amazing person. And
one of the reasons why is because he developed some
of the best foods that came out of the twentieth century.
Not the best for you foods, right, the best?
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, I wondered.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
After I did this research, I was like, Man, are
we gonna get people writing in because we're like celebrating
this guy for creating junk food.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Well, they just can soak their heads.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Great. I like that term. That's a nice way to
say other things.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
So one of the first things was in nineteen fifty seven,
he was like, how about a powdered drink that tastes
sort of like sort of citrusy and people might I
think it's good.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
For you, but it's a ninety eight percent sugar.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, it is primarily sugar. Got a little bit of
vitamin C in there. Oh, and those flavor crystals happening.
You're gonna mix that together with water. You're gonna get
a bright, very bright, almost unsettlingly bright orange color, tangerine
color drink.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
And it's called tang Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
And you said flavor crystals. That was a big one
because William Mitchell was known in the food science industry
is the master of disaster. Yeah, and in parentheses they
would put disaster being flavor crystals. That just couldn't find
anything that rhymed with it.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Tank wasn't a big hit right away though, it took
a little while to catch on, but one of the
big things that helped, you know, helped launch it. No,
I guess pun intended was when it went into outer
space in nineteen sixty two. It was on board John
Glenn's Mercury spaceflight because he was like, Man, we're storing
this drinking water in metal cans and metal vats and
(05:59):
it tastes great. So he's like, just throw some tang
powder in there and you're all good.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah. So yeah, I mean this was the time when
America was just totally fascinated with space. You know, you
could have put an old leather boot in space and
solder his tang and people would have drank it.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
So you talked about John Glenn saying it was gross
to drink metallic water. Later on, buzz Aldrin said tang
is gross. As a matter of fact, he said tang sucks.
And he said it while he was doing the most
twenty thirteen thing you could possibly be doing. He was
presenting a Spike TV Guy's Choice Award to Felix bombgartnerm.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I was Hee the parachute Guy. Yeah, yeah, that jumped
from space. Yeah yeah, sponsored by Red Bullet.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah. And I don't know how it came up. I
didn't see the clip, but that was what made the
rounds of the media. Tang sucks in quotes.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Oh good for you buzz speaking of being sponsored though,
by the time Apollo eight rolled around, Tang was such
a thing for space flights that the televised event was
sponsored by Tang.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
They were like, we got we got to get in
on this thing.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Did you drink Tang when you were a kid?
Speaker 3 (07:10):
A little bit? But we I drank a lot of water.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
My mom was you know, we couldn't afford a lot
of stuff, even though Tang was like super cheap, and
I think my mom also didn't want us just having
a ton of junk. It wasn't like super health food
family or anything, but it was just one of the
things like I'm not going to waste my money on
that garbage.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
I guess you probably didn't drink kool aid either.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
A little bit here and there.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Those were treats I usually got at other kids' houses.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, kool Aid was the best.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Did you just drink all that stuff?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I drank so much kool aid. Cherry lime was really good,
grape was probably the best.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Oh my god, good freezer pops too.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes, But if you ever made it chuck, you would
put the kool Aid powder in a pitcher and it
would be like a couple of tablespoons maybe pops and
did you report literal cups of sugar on top of it,
add water, stir and just thank me later.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, hey too, lad.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
It was it was nuts, Like, looking back, it was
insane that that's what kids drank.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Pretty great, God bless the seventies.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Bill Mitchell was trying to solve a lot of problems
often when he came up with these inventions for food,
try to save people time in the kitchen at the time,
you know, trying to save moms time in the kitchen.
And in nineteen sixty seven he was like, jello takes
way too long to make because you have to use
this hot water boiling water to dissolve that stuff. So
he came up with a and got a patent for
(08:36):
a quick set form of jello using cold water. He
was like, look at that, everybody, Yeah, presto chaninjo you
got cold jello and no time flat.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
No time flat. So what's interesting is jello is very
famous for making some really weird being a part of
some really weird mid century recipes. So Bill Mitchell had
his hand in jello. He also had his hand in
another ingredient some really weird recipes from century, which was
cool whip, which was total and still is almost totally
(09:05):
artificial whipped cream. It's made with water, hydrogenated vegetable oil,
high fruit toast, corn syrup, corn syrup, and then skim milk.
And the skim milk is a modern addition. There used
to be nothing that was a milk product in cool whip,
which meant you could freeze it, which was a huge
boon to general foods.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Right, yeah, but I think you missed one ingredient, love
the hand of God.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So you're a cool whip dude, huh.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I mean, we don't get it because it's just, you know,
it's garbage. But you know when we pumpkin pine and
pecan pine and stuff like that around Thanksgiving and Christmas,
we will get cool whip. I don't like the shake
of can ready whip stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
We're a cool whip family.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
And it does not last long on our house because
it just gets eaten out of the container with a
spoon by all three of us.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Same with ready whip, though, you just turn it up
and spray it right in your mouth and then when
it's out you it gives you a pretty good bat.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Yeah, but I like that cool it better. I like
the taste.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I like it frozen too. I like it both ways.
But it's really good frozen as well.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah. I think I told you before cool. Yeah, we
talked about it was cool whipping peanut butter. It's a
dangerous combination.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Oh, I still didn't try that. I forgot. I'll have
to try that this Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
You know, you probably just shouldn't. I don't think you should.
It's like you might as well have just said I
think I'll start smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
So the granddaddy of them all, Bill Mitchell, had a
hand in in that. He kind of laid the groundwork
for the product to come. But back in nineteen fifty six,
William Mitchell was trying to figure out ways to carbonate
kool aid to basically create instant soda. Yeah, and he
(10:48):
was like, let me just figure out how to add
carbon dioxide to flavor crystals, because again he was the
flavor crystal king. Yeah, and I guess he did enough
so that, like he created a legacy process of adding
CO two to two flavor crystals. It just wasn't creating
the soda that he was looking for, so he shelved it,
(11:09):
and then somebody else came along and picked it up. Right.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, twenty years later, somebody else tweaked it just a bit,
and thankfully the world, the United States and the world.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Over got pop rocks.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Can you describe pop rocks if people don't know what
those are?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Oh, they're a little very tiny candy on the kind
of like this size and shape of nerds. And if
you don't know what nerds are, we're just totally lost here.
Not quite as codd if they are at all. But
when they touch your tongue, that co two that's inside
just like starts to get released, and it makes the
candy crackle. So not only does it make a cool sound,
(11:48):
fizzing sound just like the top of like when you
pour a sprite, it like you can feel it on
your tongue too. It's very delightful.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
So, I mean the idea was you would take a
scoop of this and add water. So in this case
the water is just your saliva and the moisture from
your mouth and your tongue.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, And I.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Gave Ruby some when she was like four or five.
I was like, you've never had pop rocks, kiddo, you
got to try this out, and she was. It was
sort of one of those great mind blowing moments. As apparent,
She's like more no, not really, She's not one of
those kids that it's weird. She loves the thing, but
maybe it's the ADHD shees. She kind of forgets about
it after that.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Usually ADHD laser focuses on something like a big sugar rush,
so she's fortunate. Yeah. So there was a myth. I
think some people probably still believe this if they've heard
it Chuck, that if you drink soda and pop rocks
eat pop rocks at the same time, you're at risk
of blowing your stomach up from all of the carbon dioxide.
(12:50):
And that is just not true. But it was persistent
enough that General Foods had to take out a full
page ad back in the seventies. And I looked it up.
It's an open letter to parents talking about pop rocks
and how it's safe, and it was written by Bill Mitchell.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Oh that's great.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, So they trotted him out and they were like,
tell everybody Bill, because we don't understand how they work.
You explain it.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, they stood next to him with a knife gently
pressed into the side.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Of his neck. So we salute you. William A.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Mitchell, he retired from General Foods in nineteen seventy six.
Tried to find out some dirt on this guy, but
he seems like just a pretty great person. He was
a father of seven, he's married for sixty years, and
when he passed away in two thousand and four, his
obituary said he was devoted, stimulating and loving parent and
made a pretty big impact on, you know, the diet
(13:42):
of American kids.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, we should say one of those seven children is
Cheryl Mitchell, his daughter. She became a food scientist as well,
followed in her father's footsteps. And if you like rice
dream you can thank Cheryl Mitchell or Elmhurst nut grain
and seed milk you can thank her as well. And
she's known as a quote world authority on sweetener's rice
processing and the extraction and metabolism of.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Anulin parentheses, but not flavor crystals.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
No, that was her dad's jam.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, I love the legacy continues, so pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Same here, all right, Well, thank you and thank you
for signing off as a salute to William Mitchell to Chuck,
I appreciate it, and I think that also means short
stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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