How smoothies, chutneys and blenders transformed the way we eat

Time of India

11 hours ago

If Agatha Christie were alive today, she would use a smoothie in one of her plots. Christie had a deep knowledge of poisons and devised many ways of delivering them, usually in a strongly-flavoured dish to cover suspicious tastes. But as The White Lotus showed, a smoothie works well.
In the TV series, a father first tries to poison his family using a toxic tropical fruit (Cerbera odollam, known as othallam in Kerala, where it is often used for suicides). He puts it in a blender with coconut milk, pineapple juice and rum, to make poisoned piña coladas, then changes his mind and discards it. But he doesn't clean the blender and, the next morning his son uses it to make a protein smoothie and almost dies.
Smoothies
work for poison delivery because, unlike milkshakes, they aren't supposed to taste good. They were created as a milkshake alternative by Steve Kuhnau, a USbased nurse who was allergic to dairy. Since he couldn't drink milkshakes, he started blending alternatives using fruits, ice, vitamin supplements and protein powders. It worked so well that he started using them for patients in the burns unit he worked in, who needed nutrition, but had trouble eating .
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Kuhnau set up an outlet, Smoothie King, to popularise the concept. Smoothies didn't have to taste bad, but their focus was
functional food
delivery, which appealed to people who had problems with eating, both for medical reasons, or for reasons of appearance and efficiency, like models and bodybuilders. Melania Trump starts her day with a smoothie packed with vegetables, berries and seeds. A tech entrepreneur invented a smoothie, that supplied all the body's nutritional needs to reduce time wasted in eating.
Smoothies help people try foods they wouldn't otherwise. Kale has long been known for its healthful properties, but people find it too tough and bitter. When blended with vegetables and herbs, kale smoothies are now a healthfood staple. In The Book of Difficult Fruit , Kate Lebo writes about chokeber ry (Aronia melanocarpa), a native American fruit that's healthy but so tannic that people find it hard to swallow. To get them to try, she says, first call it the more appealing sounding aronia, and then give it to them in a smoothie .
All this is possible because of the home electric blender, a product first described as a 'disintegrating mixer for producing fluent substances'. This was the phrase used by Fred Osius, an inventor who saw the potential, but had problems devising a final prototype. He took the surprising step of taking the concept to Fred Waring, a famous musical bandleader who he had heard was interested in mechanical gadgets. Waring didn't just invest, but also found engineers and designers to improve the device significantly, and launched it in 1937 as the 'Waring Blendor'.
Waring used his showbusiness connections to promote blenders. He got bartenders to try it for drinks like piñacoladas, and actors and singers, whose appearance was vital for their success, to see its value in making
health drinks
. The greatest coup was when Jonas Salk used blenders to purée inactivated virus material into injectable serum form. It confirmed the value of blenders, but also their quasi-medical appeal.
Yet, 'disintegrating mixing' is an established part of cooking. Sausages are made this way, grinding together all the leftover parts, with grains and spices, to create something delicious. Sauces like mayonnaise or hollandaise, which are emulsions where liquids are held together by egg proteins, can easily split, but lazy cooks know that dumping it all in a blender can mechanically reintegrate the parts. There's a textural difference, which culinary experts can detect, but most people won't. Similarly,
chutneys
made on grinding stones taste subtly different from those made in blenders, but few bother with the first type today. Chutneys could be the Indian precursor to smoothies, examples of delicious disintegration.