A pharmacy for foodies
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- Опубликовано: 3 окт 2024
- Abigail Thorn, Jordan Harrod and Annie Rauwerda face a question about a surprising shopping solution.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcas...
GUESTS:
Abigail Thorn: @PhilosophyTube, / philosophytube
Jordan Harrod: @JordanHarrod, / jordanbharrod
Annie Rauwerda: / depthsofwiki
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2024.
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I've heard that its only extra virgin olive oil that can be used as a contraceptive
💀
I see what you did there, but obviously that would be extra vajeen olive oil
lateral with tom scott is singlehandedly reducing the internets bacon number
that plus dropout and smosh for the US-based creatives
Tbf, hes been doing that for years.
I had to Google what you meant by that. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon didn't even cross my mind.
I think I worked out that to close a massive bacon loop he had to work with Ashens, and then he did on the Game Garage, which helped massively.@@TheDisplacerBeast
Because there are so many different people on his shows and podcast or did he actually meat Kevin Bacon?
Re: the International Food Isle. This is where learning the language a little can save you money. Most of the British expats would buy baked beans from the International Isle in Prague supermarkets, paying around £5.00 for a tin. Whereas I learned a little Czech, so bought white beans in tomato sauce from the tinned veg isle for 20p! They are literally the same haricot beans in tomato sauce as baked beans are!
Even abroad, if they were willing to pay around £5.00 for a can of beans, they deserve to be ripped off. 😁
"Haricot beans" is an interesting concept. It's beans in French and in English ("Beans Beans"). And those were Czech, so they were even *_more_* international. 😄
BTW, I suspect you mean "aisle", not "isle". Unless it was surrounded by water.
Definitely not the same as Heinz though. Mind you, Heinz is not even the same as old Heinz any more.
Sad British expats in Spain paying through the nose for ancient stale tiny bags of Walkers crisps rather than check out the huge bags of cheap and wonderful flavours of fresh local crisps fried in olive oil, some of them cooked in the shop where you bought them.
@@TR-rz1xt - Heinz sources their ingredients from different places, depending on the factory. I know the UK factories used to buy tomatoes from Portugal (in fact, from a specific region in Portugal) for their baked beans sauce. I don't know if they still do, though, that was a couple of decades ago.
Oooh, I *almost* had this experience as a trainee in a pharmacy around 15 years ago!
A woman comes to the counter and asks for a syringe. I ask what kind of length and width she needs, thinking it is for diabetes. She doesn’t know.
- Well, what do you need it for?
- Oil.
- Oil?
- Yes, to spray into the leg.
- The… leg?
- Yes.
- What… sort of oil?
- Olive oil.
- Olive oil?
- Of course.
- I’ll… go ask a colleague for help.
Colleague comes over looking just as confused as me.
- You want to spray oil into your leg?
Customer looks at us and bursts into laughter. “I want to spray olive oil into the turkey leg!!”
(I think it was turkey. I am not sure, could also have been duck.
I was also confused because of an earlier experience with a druggie asking for “tools” meaning a syringe kit they could get for free - which no one has told me about until I asked a colleague for help.
The oil customer did not want the free toolkit.)
Back in the day I'd regularly go to my local chemist to buy a "fit kit". Pretty much the same as your "tools" except they charged around $5 per dozen. They'd always offer me counselling, but I had to be honest and tell them all I was doing was refilling a bunch of inkjet cartridges for my friends and I from a $5 bottle of india ink. They'd then see the stains on my fingers and knew I was telling the truth.
Jordan: . . . the whole thing where Lysol used to be a contraceptive . . .
Everyone else: 😧
worth it for the "yeah, that is not getting cut" comment
I don't know how it is internationally; but in Swedish pharmacies, you can still buy saffron and mustard.
Because pharmacies were used to handle small weight of expensive goods, they often doubled as spice traders.
and it used to be said that spice has medicinal properties
@@wiseSYW you can even do interstellar travel with spice
@@wiseSYWit kinda does, spice is perfect for a sore throat, IIRC.
Well, sometimes.
As a Swede living in Finland I was very confused when I was told to go to the pharmacy when I asked for citric acid in a food store.
@@DavidWeinehallI think Finnish pharmacies used to sell Salmiakki aswell, probably as a cough medicine
I knew this one pretty much immediately. I remember a bottle of olive oil with a pharmacy label on it (meaning it was on prescription) was in our bathroom cabinet well into the 1990s, and knew it was for ear wax problems. I also remember in 1994, when I was 11, I went to a school camp, and had to help with the cooking on one of the days. I came back home after the camp and told my mum we had somehow fried the eggs in water, and my mum had to explain to me the concept of cooking with oil, as we had only ever used lard in our house, so that is how alien cooking with oil was to many Brits even in the 1990s, let alone the 70s.
Poached eggs in a pot of boiling water are a thing. But I get what you meant.
@@comicus01 Even in my family's home we had little egg poacher dishes that sat in a larger pan for making poached eggs. But the eggs I made and ate on camp were definitely in the form of fried eggs rather than poached.
Mid-seventies, as a French teenager, I went to England for a language journey. Carol, the mother of the family that hosted me was a great cook. In fact I went there two more time the following years, all by myself, no courses, no external organization.
Carol mastery of the kitchen was not the only reason I went back, but I am sure it contributed.
Almost 50 years later, we still keep in touch, sending a card and a letter for X'mas and birthday.
And my immediate guess was sodium bicarbonate, because if I have seen it in supermarkets now days, I remember it was sold in pharmacies then. And it is used to cook dry beans.
In Thailand, olive oil is mainly known for hair treatment.
This was awesome fun! More Abigail, please!😁👍
more of everyone!!!!!!
@@paradoxica424 Yeah, but the others have already been on more than once. This is Abigail's first, so wanted to mention her specifically.😉
Very yes!
@@paradoxica424 also very yes!
I immediately knew this one from Off Menu. Every now and then, they’ll have a guest over 60 on who’ll say something like: “When I was a kid, olive oil was something you got from the chemist to put in your ears!”
I knew about the 'put olive oil in your ears to treat earwax' thing
Thanks to a couple of ear cleaning videos that the algorithm sent my way recently I learned that it’s still a common practice, even by professionals.
I had the inverse experience to the question of going to the supermarket to buy olive oil for my ears to prepare for having them syringed. I still use it when I notice them getting blocked.
Thanks Jordan. Adding "check out the international foods aisle" on my shopping list.
Abigail! So excited to see you here!
2:56 JELLO!!
THEY HAD TO BUY JELLO COMPONENTS AT THE PHARMACY!
4:16 damn it! I was far off. (...why is olive oil in the pharmacy? )
5:50 I guess I was either too young or not anglo saxon enough to figure that one out.
Maybe it was considered a 'nutritional supplement' like cod liver oil, but not seen as something you'd add to food?
@@empath69oh, they explain why a little later in the episode
Olive oil is still recommended for ear wax / softening ear wax before other methods of removing it... They sell it in tiny bottles at Specsavers even.
The lack of "Let's be havin' ya" jokes is telling of the audience of this podcast
Yeah that’s the most memorable Delia Smith moment for me
@@ADRgmanI would give my opinon of Delia but I'm an Ipswich fan, so that tells you everything! She's not popular round here......
Yup, I heard Delia Smith and that was my immediate thought
Maybe because we're a Commonwealth nation, but HP sauce is just with all the other condiments in Australia. My grandfather, who is Scottish, used it like Americans use ketchup. It's actually a very tasty sauce.
Some supermarkets I go to, it's in the "British section", next to the Mexican, Chinese, Indian, South African etc. They also have Pot Noodle, Jaffa Cakes, Tunnock's Tea Cakes, Yorkie Bars, Yorkshire Tea, Batchelor's mushy peas (original and chip shop), Fray Bentos Pies, and various other sweets/mints. They're usually over-priced, but sometimes get severely marked down near expiry date.
@@zalibecquerel3463 At my local Woolworths, it's not even called the international aisle. It's called the Asian aisle and it just happens to have a small Mexican section. Any other "international" foods are just put in the normal categories.
It's in the international aisle at my local Woolies. Baked beans are certainly with the regular canned stuff though!
Olive oil wouldn't be a good personal lubricant either. It would work, but it can lead to blocked pores, irritation, and infections. Also, oil-based lubricants can cause latex to break down, so if you're using olive oil as lubricant and a condom as your contraceptive, you're dissolving bits of your condom, creating weak spots that can lead to breakage. Best to stick to water-based or silicone-based lubricant.
Add some Lysol, though, and it should be a-ok!
@@quehabloand it will get the oil off the sheets
Spit
Abigail and Tom scott, the collab we all needed
And Annie! And Jordan! Wth is this dream?!
I have one of Delia's first cookbooks, and yes, it does indeed say this.
Oh dear. I feel so old… I got this almost instantly.
I remember my dad using olive oil for his hair.
Ah, so he was a pimp from the 1960s?
My wife has a 100+ yr old electric sewing machine, and the care instructions (in Italian only) specifically say NOT to use olive oil to lubricate the bearings.
I went for a hearing test yesterday, and was humiliated to be told that there was too much wax to do the test. The audiologist told me to go and buy Earol - which turns out to be a tiny little bottle of - you guessed it - olive oil. It came with a lovely little shaped squirter, so I didn't begrudge Boots the £4 it cost.
Watching this makes me feel very old... I remember it well. (I still use it for earwax - it works very well!)
many substances have multiple uses, some very very unrelated...
just remember not to re-use any olive oil from ear cleaning xD
So glad to see the episodes with Abigail Thorn are finally coming out!
I moved a few years ago, from a pretty big city in the southeastern US to a pretty small city in the southeastern US. What I used to find in the international aisle now requires a specialty store, whereas here the international aisle is where you find pasta sauce.
I had guessed it was Potassium Nitrate for curing meat, which used to be best gotten at a pharmacy.
BTW, for anyone planning to use olive oil to soften earwax: it's likely that you need high-acidy olive oil for that, and most olive oil sold in supermarkets is "extra-virgin" (low acidity). So, either look for the cheapest, nastiest olive oil (that's likely to be more acidic, and better able to penetrate & break down the wax in the first place) or - even better - buy actual wax-softening eardrops, that generally include an antiseptic as well.
It is the oily part that does the softening. The B.P. standard for olive oil to be used vs. earwax stated that it should have an acid value of less than 0.5, less than extra-virgin with a maximum of 0.8.
@@pattheplanter - Earwax softening drops (including the ones that are - or claim to be - based on olive oil) generally use urea hydrogen peroxide to soften the wax. The oil is there just to keep it from drying out and solidifying again.
Without fatty acids and with no extra ingredients, the oil won't break down the wax.
The item in question can also be used to force insects out of patients' ear canals, when those patients are unlucky enough to have a bug trapped there...
Thank you for not cutting that XD
Fanny Craddock had a similar thing, and got an angry letter from a woman who'd accidentally bought some sort of olive oil ointment or salve. To which she updated her instructions to "When you go to the chemist ask for CULINARY olive oil, or olive oil for cooking with...".
0:41 is my new wallpaper. Thanks Abby!
It's just so British to imagine spices being rare, prescription-only products. "Warning: foreign foods may have qualities unfamiliar to British consumers known as 'flavors.' Use caution when sampling unfamiliar dishes."
IIRC, this happened again in the early nineties. Delia came out with a Chocolate and Amaretti dessert for Christmas that required Liquid Glucose -- basically corn syrup, for the Americans -- and emptied out all the pharmacies. My mum worked at a pharmacy then, and they literally had queues outside. She got some and frankly, the dessert was a bit "meh".
I knew this one straight away because of the Australian documentary Back in Time for Dinner. I know the Australian one is based on a British one of the same name, but I haven't watched the British one so I don't know if this fact was mentioned there (but it probably was).
In the US, sometimes the British aisle or the British part of the International Foods aisle will have a variety of marmalade that doesn't have the ridiculous amounts of sugar that most marmalade sold here has. It's honestly better, IMHO, but tends to be more expensive.
I miss Tom Scott exploring show but Lateral is a fun puzzle show.
I actually knew this, because my parents had the book. You can still buy purified olive oil (and almond oil) at British pharmacies - my son has had it prescribed for earache!
(Son is 12, in case anyone's wondering how long ago this was. Not long!)
In Canada we tend to use canola oil now. Canola of course was developed at the University of Manitoba.
I'm just relieved to hear that it wasn't to cook with Castor Oil! :)
Here in Seattle, the International section of the local supermarket has things like Japanese and Korean-specific instant noodles....whereas the pasta section has AMERICAN instant noodles.
....OK, they're made by the same companies, but the pasta isle has the cheap bulk ones (like, 10 for a $1 a few years ago, before inflation hit), whereas the International section has the expensive ones in single packets.
British section of the internal aisle Down Under usually contains Irn-Bru too 🤤
I'm Italian, I would never ever have guessed the answer... It's something just so commonplace even I have it in my kitchen, and mind you I maybe cook twice a month
Olive Oil as a contraceptive... I'm sure there's a Popeye Joke in there somewhere.
In the original comic strips, her brother was Castor Oyl.
Funnily enough as soon as I saw the question I knew the answer because I happened to watch a Sean Lock stand up clip last night talking about the exact same thing 😂
It STILL IS used for that, and it's particularly helpful for dry, itchy ears. There's a purified medicinal version at you can regularly find on pharmacy shelves both in the UK AND the US. (I have a bottle of it in my medicine cabinet as I type this.)
If you go to an audiologist in the UK for a cleaning, they're quite likely to recommend using it a few days before your visit. (Less likely in the U.S., because here lavage is more common than microsuction for ear cleaning, and thus things being "too dry" isn't really a problem. :D )
Personally, I was expecting the answer to be some of the older raising agents, like hartshorn (ammonium carbonate, a.k.a. baker's ammonia) which shows up in some very OLD cookie recipes, or sodium hydroxide (lye), used in pretzels. Things like that are only available from pharmacies or in specialty stores these days.
It must’ve taken a lot of restraint to not make a joke out of”British aisle/isle”
Oh my god Abby's face for the lysol - also gj Tom, we need more british trans representation.
Do we?!
I am old, olive oil was often found in pharmacies and not in supermarkets. Now to watch the video.
I am now worried that my parents may have been feeding non-foodgrade olive oil when I was a rugrat!
As long as it's unadulterated, it should all be "food grade". It's just highly likely they used high-acidity (i.e., very cheap) olive oil to soften wax. So you were probably being fed _crap_ (though perfectly safe) olive oil. But you had immaculate ear canals.
@@RFC3514 Low acidity, highly refined olive oil was the sort used for ear wax. As far from extra vigin as you can get.
I mean, I'm only in my mid twenties, but I remember my mother being advised by a doctor to use olive oil prior to having ears cleaned out, but also the North East is probably a bit behind on medical advancements
My first thought was tumeric or some other spice that the British people of the time would prefer to use as medicine than to eat.
They're always Heinz beans too. Blergh!
Lysol would probably work for that. Olive oil, until about the 1980 Olive oil in Britain was for washing out earwax, so you'd buy it from the pharmacy
I now have this image of Delia Smith dressed up as Popeye . . . 'Uck-uck-uck-uck-uck!' : )
Once Tom said Mediterranean food/diet, my guess was garlic/garlic powder.
Initial thoughts: there was a product that had a specific taste/texture/effect they could get a reference from ("this thing is just like this product"), or it was a product like a taste enhancer, perhaps a pallet cleanser?
Maybe that if they didn't like "this thing", they should go get tested and/or get remedy about some health conditions that could adversely affect taste (cold, flu, covid, etc.).
2:35 Citrus/cherry flavouring in cough drops, lozenges, and the likes? Maybe the same about ginger, cinnamon, or other somewhat exotic spices/herbs that were considered medicinal back then, and difficult to obtain otherwise?
Pine Fresh Contraceptives! That SHOULD be a ting.
Fun fact: Olive oil's use as a lube was in fact one of the many reasons for its widespread cultivation back in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome! An idle joke, perhaps, but yeah, it does in fact have use as a lubricant.
I wouldn't use it these days; it weakens latex condoms, can weaken the skin walls, (and for some peoples, causes rashes or breakouts by default anyways), it requires some post-cleanup unless you want skin irritation for sure, and it can trap bacteria in places, where, due to the oil, your body will not effectively clean itself. So it's much better to go with something water based in general.
To me, the international food aisle tells you more about the origin of the immigrants to that particular city (or geographic region within a city) than it does about the perceptions of what "international food" is by the locals. For example, I live in a part of a Canadian city which has become extremely well-populated with South and East Asians (particularly people of Pakistani, Indian, Vietnamese, Filipino and especially Chinese origin, so much so that even though we have an "official" Chinatown downtown, my little suburb has far more shops and restaurants catering to that particular demographic...like, a minimum of 5X as many*). So our international food aisle has all kinds of tinned exotic fruits (e.g. jackfruit and mangosteen), about 20 different types of dry wheat and rice noodles, a selection of those fried chickpea/lentil-flour snacks popular in India, etc. I don't think you can find baked beans or mushy peas there. And HP sauce is in the sauce aisle (near ketchup).
*A fact of which I take FULL advantage.
UK pharmacies still do this, got some from there only last year after my GP recommended it.
My nearest pharmacy here in Montreal sells so much food and at such a low prices that I buy most of my food there. So for me, it could be anything.
The last time I was abroad, I went to an "American" store and asked for Bud Lite, Velveeta, and an AR-15. I was sorely disappointed that none were available.
Yup, certainly used warmed olive oil for sorting out a blocked ear when I was a child in the 80s/90s (when I'd get a lot of ear issues from school swimming lessons).
Great fun, this is why I love when there are three women as guests! :D
Still used for ear wax now but definitely not for indigestion.
You can still use it as laxative, but isn't well known as such in some countries.
@@Call-me-Al you could probably use any cooking oil for the same purpose,just not engine oil unless we want it coming back out through your mouth instead 😅
they still sell olive oil in pharmacies (or at least did when i had a blocked ear a couple years ago)
My first thought was graduated syringe, get 15 mL of whatever measured properly. But then was thinking sea salt.
"The British aisle is always HP sauce and baked beans." Yes, Tom, but also Aero bars and Jammie Dodgers 😛
Also, olive oil can definitely be used as a contraceptive. Someone orders an Oleato at Starbucks? Don't sleep with them. Ever.
My first trip to the U.K. was just a few years after Tesco's disastrous attempt to expand into the U.S. with their now-defunct "Fresh and Easy" chain of grocery stores, so I was curious to see what a real Tesco store looked like. Most stores seemed to be either one step above 7-Eleven or one step below Wal-Mart.
I thought it was going to be caffine because pharmacies were often also soft drink stores because they had caffine and CO²
Definitely true in the USA (e.g. see the drug store in West Side Story) but I don't know if that was ever a thing in the UK.
I was a pharmacy tech in the late 90s, and there were all sorts of curious ingredients I discovered I could easily order and know to be food-grade or better. Sodium hydroxide, citric acid, coke syrup, caffeine citrate, alginate, bunches of other things that I can't remember.
I was thinking along the lines of soft drinks since they were originally sold at the pharmacy.
My dad grew up in Shanghai in the 1970's when rationing was still common, and he said the only way you could get a ration card to buy watermelon was if you had a doctor's note prescribing watermelon to treat a fever!
Cola syrup. You used to be able get coke syrup at pharmacy because it was prescribed for stomach upset.
Having had problems with my ears and build up in recent years, I was advised olive oil until I could get hold of a medicine that would basically do the same thing.
The Olive oil did indeed work quite well.
Olive oil works very well for indigestion, in fact if you drink filter coffee with olive oil, it will make everything in your stomach and intestines exit your body at speed with no other ill effects.
the instant diarrhea potion
“My” dad used to mix olive oil and eucalyptus oil together to rub on our chests when we had a cold so we could sleep better. Both bought at the pharmacy in Canada
Hmm, spices of all kind were for a long time sold by pharmacies. Saffron?
You can still buy "apotekets tinktur" in Sweden which is once spice combination used to make mulled wine.
You could also get things like citric acid
My first thought was *nitrates for preservatives, then cinnamon oil, sulfur, glycerin...
I knew that olive oil was a health product throughout many decades even centuries and still is but I didn't know that it wasnt marketed in the food sections simultaneously during certain years.
I really thought it was citric acid
Great guess, but I suppose citric acid, baking soda and other culinary chemicals like that were already being used in Britain for a long time by then.
Sodium bicarbonate is mentioned in Mrs Beeton's cookbook, although she used sodium carbonate more frequently. However, I still guessed that it might have been a pharmacy product in the 1970s.
99% of the ear cleaning sprays available on the market are either pure olive oil or a blend containing it (with other plant-based oils and/or mineral oil)
I’m not quite old enough for it to not be in food shops but I do remember it still being in the chemists, in the window at least
I have to take the train to a little shop that is right outside of the main gate of the Normandy Barracks in Sennelager if I want HP sauce.
Back in the early days of motoring, chemists / pharmacies were where you got petrol for your motor car.
I remember in the 80s, being able to get glycerin, potassium nitrate, sulphur. And yes, yes we did... Oh and plaster of paris, which you can probably still get.
I was thinking "why on earth would frickin petrol be in the pharmacy" and then I remembered you'd said *early days*.
I'm guessing they hadn't figured out a better place to put it at that point. Dedicated specialist shops for motoring needs hadn't started yet
Olive oil as laxatives? Crazy it wasn't in stores.
I found the concept of olive oil only in the pharmacy weird but than I remember that my Pakistani father only uses tiny cans of olive oil instead of chapstick, and it is indeed sold in the pharmacy here, but mostly still in the standard food shops
I figured pretty quickly it'd be an ingredient, but my first two "candidates" would have been sodium bicarbonate and glycerol.
British aisle in the USA is lemon curd and mint jelly XD
And I assume Marmite and PG tips?
i love lemon curd but what in the actual fuck is mint jelly and who decided mint would be their jelly flavour of choice
My guess is activated charcoal? It is a great absorbent so it can absorb toxins but can be used to make things black, so maybe to make food black? Or maybe to absorb calories?
My thought was glycerine, as this is still a good idea today. A 50ml or smaller bottle of glycerine bought from the baking aisle of a supermarket can be more expensive than a 500ml bottle from the chemists.
Thought you were onto something with mushy peas, as wasn't bi-carb added to marrowfat peas while boiling to keep the colour greener? Might be remembering wrong though.
ABIGAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THORN!!!!!!!!
Wait you guys got Abigail Thorn. So cool!
this isnt just a 70s thing - olive oil is still regularly sold in pharmacies to treat ear wax and infections!
My first thought was chemicals for gingerbread or sth… seems like I wasn’t too far off
I actually still take medicinal olive oil (gel pills) with vitamin D3, at a doctor's recommendation, because I'm very sun intolerant and therfore can't spend enough time outside for my body to produce it naturally without adverse affect, and D3 is fat-soluble, so my body processes it better with the oil than without.
Side note, don't use oil based lube in any holes in the pelvic area. Some oils are safe for oral use, but not all. Though food-grade olive oil should be fine for mouths.