One of the keenest pleasures of perusing urban-legend site Snopes.com (besides sending snotty messages to email lists following the earnest posting of a faux petition or virus scare. “This is an urban legend, please check Snopes.com” etc., etc. Man, that’s good stuff) is checking out the annals of food-related urban legends.
Some tales are 1970s childhood classics: worms in Big Macs! Spider eggs in Bubble Yum! Mikey ate Pop Rocks and Coke and exploded!
Other items are modern memes still being passed around. No, microwaving in plastic won’t give you cancer. Red Bull doesn’t give you brain tumors (but it might help cure a hangover). KFC changed its name to de-emphasize the Fried part, not to cover for its use of genetically modified animals. There’s no cat meat in Chinese food.
I’m a skeptic, so I never fell for any of the above urban legends. But I was surprised to learn that graham crackers were invented by a guy who thought eating a vegetarian diet rich in lightly processed wheat would save mankind from the dangers of excessive lust. Whoa. I wonder what he’d think about Teddy Grahams?
If you love the story of the Graham cracker, for more krazy turn-of-last century cereal worship, check out T.C. Boyle’s novel The Road to Wellville.
How about that microwave ovens “cook from the inside out”? Blatantly idiotic.
The microwaves hit the outside of any food and if not absorbed by the outside penetrate farther into the object. I’m no chemist, but this is what I recall. Certain molecular bonds are excited by the specific frequency of the mircowave, namely H2O. Since most food has water in it this works well. The energy is absorbed by the molecule, which causes it to vibrate more and thus creates heat. Something like that.
People just accept the slogan that microwaves cook from the inside out without thinking about it. What they really means is that they create heat at the molecular level in the food rather than transferring heat from an external source. But that’s not very catchy. I liked when they were called radar ranges.
Fun fact: I tried to heat a cup of vegetable oil in a microwave once and couldn’t do it. I guess it didn’t have the right OH bonds.
I think I’m still happy not to have a microwave. And I still won’t think too hard about what may happen to my food’s molecules when I eat out.
Good post, Franco-American! I’ve made those points several times on Chowhound, but the myth is all-pervasive. What’s really idiotic is that anyone who has ever used a microwave knows from experience that the outside cooks before the inside, and yet despite the evidence of their experience, people who have them still believe microwaves cook from the inside out!
Mawrter, all cooking changes food at the molecular level — that’s what cooking is!
Microwaves do cook from the inside out. The microwaves come at an object from all sides and are most concentrated in the center where they collide causing the food to cook from the inside out.
Sorry, Big Terrier, that’s simply not true. Put something frozen in the microwave and test it for yourself!
The reason your theory is not true is that microwaves only penetrate about 1/4 of an inch below the surface of the food — they never even reach the center! I believe your statement that microwaves come at the object from all sides is also untrue — otherwise, why would microwaves have turntables and why would cooking instructions always direct you to rotate the food/dish partway through cooking.
Franco-American is correct: the idea that “microwaves cook from the inside out” is a mis-understanding of the fact that the microwave energy cooks by generating heat inside the cells of the foods. That heat is then distributed through good old conduction into the parts of the food the microwaves can’t penetrate.