Our Florida Escapade (Patreon)

Hi there, Minutefoodies!

You're probably wondering when our next video is coming out, and the answer is: real soon! Fret not, you should be able to enjoy it later this week. We're hard at work on it, but we also took some time this month to do a little MinuteFood trip!

Kate and I were invited by the University of Florida Plant Science Symposium to do a workshop on science communication on behalf of MinuteEarth, which tbh was sooo much fun! We ran into some technical difficulties and were a bit pressed for time, but we ended up doing something I personally really enjoyed doing, and judging by the feedback we got, everyone else enjoyed it too! The whole thing was recorded, so it might be cool to share it with all of you once we get the footage? Yes? No? What do you think?

Top left: our amazing workshop. Top right: omg look at us so professional! Bottom left: amazing people doing the assignments we gave them. Bottom right: posing with some of the organizers. I'm still not over the fact that they're grad students and yet they did such an amazing job with organization.

In any case, this is the second time Kate and I have seen each other in the flesh in almost 8 years (and last time was more than 5 years ago!), so getting to hang out was incredibly cool already, but we obviously also HAD TO do some MinuteFood-ing! And we ended up roping some people in, to boot.

First, the lovely people over at the Sensory Lab in the University of Florida showed us around, told us all about how they perform taste tests, what a tasting panel looks like, and how they try to deal with the barrage of biases that come with something as subjective as the perception of taste. They even put together a mock panel for us!

The intricacies of the look and taste of orange juice

And second, we don't wanna share too much before we actually make the actual video, but we got to do a lil' tasting of a certain something that we think is gonna make for a real interesting topic. We don't wanna show the thing just yet but you can definitely see our reactions!

omg what are we tasting? what could it be? guess you're gonna have to find out! come on let me tease you just a little bit

Hopefully, in time, these will turn into full-fledged videos. In the meantime though, I just wanted to make a lil post about what we did because I think it's all really cool and we don't really get to have a lot of behind-the-scenes anyway. In any case, that was our Florida escapade! I hope we get to do more fun in-person stuff like this in the future.

In any case, happy cooking!

-arcadi