Vsauce!
Kevin here.
In my video about how hot your internal organs are I wondered if you could cook something
inside your body.
Well… it turns out there ARE a couple of cooking techniques you can actually do with
your body oven.
First of all, your body is 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 F), if it’s that hot outside you could
fry an egg on the roof of your car -- the surface hits 65C (150 F) and higher.
So why can’t you at least soft boil an egg in your mouth?
Or in not your mouth?
Maybe you can….?
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way -- even with a fever, your body tops out at
about 42 degrees Celsius (108 F) before brain damage starts to happen.
It’s no use cooking food for a brain dead body.
Even if you did go higher, so like your friend Harold could eat your body food, you’d probably
die long before the chicken parmesan inside you got cooked.
Heat stroke is happening around 40.5 degrees (105 F), which can cause seizures and multi-organ
disruptions, but you can survive that.
You just cannot sustain temperatures higher than that, so we’re looking at 42C (108F)
as an absolute maximum.
And look, pregnant moms don’t cook their babies!
Fetuses ARE about half a degree celsius warmer than the mothers they’re growing in, but
that’s fine for their thermoregulation.
Unborn babies have their own system, so “Buns in the oven” of course aren’t actually
baking.
So if you can’t get your body super hot, what options do you have for cooking food
inside your meat puppet?
Before anyone out there tries to soft-boil an egg in... themselves, we need to talk about
what cooking even is.
It’s actually important to answering this question.
We all know not to eat raw meat, unless it’s carefully selected and prepared, like sushi
or steak tartare.
And most people have a sort of revulsion to even the thought of eating raw meat.
It’s slimy, chewy, and weird.
You’re programmed not to like it for your own safety, because our ancestors have been
cooking food for 2,000 years.
20,000 years.
200,000 years.
2 MILLION YEARS.
For 2 million years.
Here’s why.
Cooking makes food easier to chew, it usually improves flavor, like the carmelized brown
char on meat from the Maillard process, and it makes the food last longer.
It’s also safer because it kills harmful bacteria and parasites.
No one wants worms inside them.
I mean, I’m sure somebody wants worms inside them.
There’s always an outlier.
You know who you are.
The 1991 discovery of the 5,000-year old frozen man Otzi in Italy revealed he was carrying
a wooden box to transport hot embers wrapped in maple leaves and a complex kit for starting
new fires.
Imagine instead of carrying around your phone you carried around a…hot George Foreman
grill.
The food safety aspect of killing bacteria mattered to Otzi and it matters to us.
According to the USDA, most meat needs to be cooked to 63C (145F) and poultry to 74C
(165F) to be guaranteed safe.
But… that’s not really necessary.
It is for restaurants because at those temperatures you can be 100% sure that no bacteria survive
-- they want to achieve instant pasteurization so they don’t poison dozens of people at
a time.
The USDA made these rules to be clear and foolproof.
Instant pasteurization happens for chicken at 74C (165F), so that’s the rule.
But if you don’t need it instantly, you can cook it much lower -- like 60C (140F)
-- to keep the meat soft and juicy.
It’ll just take half an hour at that temperature to ensure all the bacteria’s gone.
Lower temperature, longer time -- and from Fiji to Samoa to Morocco to the Americas,
everyone’s always had a sense of this.
Slow-cooking fire pits were a staple in most indigineous cultures because they were simple
to build, easy to use, and they worked.
The better our cooking technology got, the more we seemed to forget that we don’t necessarily
need to blast food with heat.
The British physicist Benjamin Thompson helped drive the understanding of thermodynamics
in the 1800’s, but he was stunned that he, “left a joint of meat in a drying oven overnight
and was amazed when, the next morning, he found that the meat was tender and fully cooked."
Welcome to the concept of the slow-cooker, Benjamin.
That guy would’ve been blown away by DUMP DINNERS.
But it’s easy to cook something with a fire or a crockpot, for this brain-wrinkling exercise,
we want to cook with our bag of bones.
Imagine, if you will, that you’re in the Australian Outback.
It’s 50C (122F).
You strip down to your spiderman undies, apply the highest possible SPF sunscreen all over
your body to mitigate sunburn, and you lay a raw steak on your stomach.
If you had a constant system of covering your torso and legs with cold wet towels to combat
the creep of heat stroke, you could slow-cook and flip at intervals to probably get your
stomach-steak to rare or medium rare without dying.
The human body isn’t a great oven, but it could be a pan.
But, I mean, that’s really dangerous and ridiculous.
You could just lay the steak on a rock and go box a Kangaroo or whatever.
I don’t know what you wanna do.
If you boosted your body temperature and stuffed raw fish in your mouth, you could come very
close to cooking it after about an hour -- at 40C (111F), a fish fillet about 15mm thick,
or the width of your fingernail, cooks in under 20 minutes.
That’s not a bad solution for the body cooking question.
We are making progress.
What about eggs?
No… no.
It doesn’t matter where you put them inside you.
You need more heat, because you’re gonna be about 50C (80F) short.
WHAT CAN YA DO?
Fermentation happens inside your body as useful bacteria extract energy from carbohydrates
and make lactic acid and… intestinal gas.
It’s mostly done in the large intestine, and it can actually produce enough ethanol
to impair you like drunkenness.
Auto-brewery syndrome is real and it can even happen inside the bladder.
It’s a really rare condition where your body makes you drunk from the inside out.
Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts are famous for fermenting
during digestion and blowing up your stomach like a hot air balloon.
And then you gotta let the air out of that balloon.
Talking about farting.
That’s what farting is.
So you could ferment sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, or yogurt inside your body -- it’s just
hard to get it out intact.
But is fermentation cooking?
If you consider fermentation under the umbrella of cooking then so is dehydrating -- and you
could vacuum seal fresh herbs with a moisture-absorbing desiccant like those, y’know those little
silica gel packets that come in everything and you’re not supposed to eat, so don’t…
well if you hypothetically vacuum sealed one of those with some fresh herbs and then swallowed
it.
That plastic pouch is safe even in boiling water, so your body won’t break it down
and it’ll just pass through intact.
By the time it comes out?
You’ve subjected those herbs to probably 24 hours of body temperature warmth and absorbed
most, if not all, of the water.
Your body would have cooked perfectly dehydrated oregano for your spicy chicken and lime taquitos.
I’m going to call this new technique ‘pass-through cooking.’
It’s a real thing now.
Pass-through cooking.
I invented it.
Don’t do it.
Don’t blame me because something bad happens because you swallowed…
Don’t do that!
You could actually do the same thing with meat to make beef jerky, or… ostrich biltong.
That’s cured and dried anywhere from about 16C (60F) to 50C (120F).
You might need two or even three rounds of pass-through if ya know what I mean, so…
you’d have to wash and disinfect the vacuum sealed pouch each time of course.
If you didn’t use a protective pouch?
Not only would it never dry out, but you’d just digest it as usual, with stomach acids
breaking it down and your digestive system processing it.
That’s called eating, not cooking.
And you’re probably familiar with eating.
Alright, so where do we land on cooking stuff inside yourself?
Well, you can’t make eggs benedict in your mouth, stomach, or… elsewhere.
But you can dry the parsley to garnish it, and if you don’t mind passing through sealed
strips of pork belly about 20 times in 2 weeks, you could even wet-cure the bacon to go with
it.
And maybe have some body kombucha to wash it all down.
If you could get it out safely.
Alright, if you want me to answer any of your weird questions in a future video pop over
to the brand new Vsauce2 subreddit and ask away.
If you want to put wrinkles on your brain all year round get the new Curiosity Box platinum
plan.
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So do that.
And as always -- thanks for watching.