The Experiment

When I was little, one of my homework assignments was to blindfold my Mom and cloths-pin her nose and then feed her a bite of apple and then a bite of onion to see if she could tell the difference. This was an experiment to prove that if you can’t see or smell the food then you can’t identify it.

Very cool assignment.

When my mom got home from work, I sat her down in the chair and covered her eyes and put a cloths-pin on her nose. Then I fed her a rather large bite of onion that she chewed and swallowed. Finally, not having an apple in the house, I shoved a big spoonful of margarine in her mouth.

She was not a happy lady. Between gagging fits, she explained that it’s not just smell that helps us to identify what we are eating, but also that texture plays a role (a HUGE role if my mother’s reaction was any indication) in food identification.

When I was visiting my Mom I sprinkled cornstarch all over her kitchen to kill the ants that were coming in the house, due to the unusual amounts of rain KS had been having. Yesterday I asked her if the ants were still around. She said that they are gone now, but not before the weirdest thing happened. She said that overnight there were so many ants that they could have carried away the blender to make their own Margaritas in their own anthill Tiki Bar if they had wanted to.

I sort of giggled and said, “Yeah, sorry about that. I found out it's cornmeal that kills ants, not cornstarch. I probably only gave the ants dry-mouth and helped them out with any annoying sweaty foot problems.”

Thank goodness the cleaning lady finally came and wiped off all of the counters - even behind the microwave. For all I know cornstarch makes ants reproduce 100 times faster than normal.

Yet again I gave my Mom the proverbial big ol' mouthful of butter, all in the name of science. No wonder she sleeps with one eye open when I’m in the room.