Learning New Things

Here are two interesting things I found out recently.

Yellow cheddar cheese is artificially colored with Annatto. The original reason for coloring it have been long forgotten, but how weird would cheese whiz look if it was white? Most importantly, there is no difference in flavor between yellow and white cheddar, although I could have sworn…
You know the brightly colored ponds at the south end of the San Francisco Bay that you can see from the air? They are salt evaporation ponds which were purchased by the public from the Cargill Corporation in 2003 in order to convert them to wetlands. They’re still being used to produce salt for industrial purposes but someday will no longer be bright red (the color is due to all of the brine shrimp and other little beasties living in the ponds).