Wild, Wondrous Food Findings

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

When we’re deciding what to eat (and what not to eat), human beings tend to rely on conventional wisdom. Junk food is bad for you. Eating too quickly is bad for you. And tasting an apple that’s been sitting alone in an office for at least 438 days? Really bad for you.

These are just a few examples on a long list of commonly accepted food principles that Atlantic writers have disproved or questioned in recent years. Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream, David Merrit Johns reported in our May magazine issue. Our science writer Katie Wu recently found that fast eaters like herself aren’t necessarily “doomed to metabolic misfortune.” And, yes, our science editor Rachel Gutman-Wei tasted the apple, which was left alone at the Atlantic offices at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Although she probably wouldn’t recommend that you reach for an old-apple appetizer, she learned from experts that apples are more protected than some other fruits against water loss and microbe attacks, and that the specific apple she was studying had been preserved remarkably well.

Today’s newsletter explores the many pieces of food wisdom our writers have challenged—sometimes at personal risk—in the name of science, or even just in the name of curiosity. Although I’m slightly worried about my colleagues’ self-preservational instincts, I’m also grateful to them for sharing these wild and wondrous findings.

Weird Food Facts

Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result

By David Merritt Johns

Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.

A Crumpled, Dried-Out Relic of the Pandemic

By Rachel Gutman-Wei

I returned to my office and found an apple that had somehow not rotted away.

Eating Fast Is Bad for You … Right?

By Katherine J. Wu

The widespread advice to go slow is neither definitive nor universal.

Still Curious?

• Unfortunately, some cicadas taste like nature’s gushers: If you must eat them, go for air-fried, advised the writer Haley Weiss, who tasted a variety of them when Brood X was taking over parts of the U.S. in 2021.
• Expiration dates are meaningless: Although there’s no perfect way to know whether food is safe or not, there are better ways than expiration dates to tell, Yasmin Tayag wrote last year.

Other Diversions

• NASA learns the ugly truth about UFOs.
• The indignity of grocery shopping
• How to watch a movie in 15 easy steps

P.S.

I’ll leave you with photos of an astounding recent food event that doesn’t come with gastrointestinal risk but carries its own dangers: the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake, in which participants chase a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a steep and uneven hill.

— Isabel