In all you do, remember that chemistry is fun, and unless you are doing theories alone, you will admit that chemical reactions are mind blowing. From the chemical reactions that happen in the atmosphere to the ones that happen in our body, we continue to enjoy the benefits of chemistry but in all these, there are some chemical reactions that wouldn't have happened if not for the intelligence and work of hands some people in their labs, kitchens, factories or even workshops, and these reactions have really changed our world today and how we see and perceive things.
While it might sound like a broken record, humans' ability to invent fire was a big break through in chemistry, and it has been able to help us cook our food, as well as perform some burning which have both good and bad sides but going back to cooking, fire has been able to help us cook our food so as to enable us digest them well.
To tell you how awesome it is to cook meals, I remember having to eat beans that wasn't properly cooked some days back because I was terribly hungry. When I am at home in Kogi, my sister does the majority of the cooking and she is quite slow. That night I decided to be myself and decided to go to the kitchen to get some of the beans even when they weren't properly cooked. I was hungry and I needed to eat. I suffered from indigestion that night and had to use the toilet severally all through the night. It isn't a story to forget so soon and this story emphasizes on the importance of cooking which is thanks to the discovery of fire.
Now that the food is ready, another set of chemical reaction has occurred which is why the food is delicious and worthy of being eaten and that is the Maillard Reaction which is a common reaction in food, turning simple sugar and amino acids to melanoidins. When you eat food and there is that delicious taste, I do not mean the seasoning taste even though that has a greater impact in the taste of the food, I mean the cooked taste. If you want to feel this taste, you can decide to roast a yam with its back and you would understand that the taste exists. Pick out a food and you will realize that they are either made up of sugar or amino acids, and with the increase in temperature, the result becomes complex flavor compound. This is usually common in brown foods like fries and roasts. So while fire made food easy to digest, Maillard reaction made it worth eating.
Another interesting way humans were able to combine things together to get a solution was in the case of saponification. We cannot do without taking our bath and so many of us love to use soap. Soap didn't just magically fall on earth to use just like the biblical manna, it took to work of people to combine things together for the journey of soaps to begin. In other for people to mitigate health hazards from water bathing alone, they found a way of mixing water with alkali ash, animal fat, and oil to form soap. Since animal fats are triglycerides it was broken down with an alkaline base to get fatty acid salt which is the key ingredient in soap helping it to attract both water and greasy things that are nonpolar.
The just concluded Olympics showed Players being awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze Medals, even when we know they aren't the real metals. Earth doesn't have bronze, but it has a good amount of other metals like Gold, Silver, copper, and Platinum, but these metals are too malleable and soft, too heavy or too valuable, so there needed to be a way to solve the problem. About 7 thousand years ago, humans started to create Bronze by mixing Copper with Tin which was harder and more durable than copper, and extremely less valuable than gold.
In all we do with chemistry breakthroughs and reactions, we cannot forget Fermentation. Although it looks like an interwoven connection between Biology and Chemistry, we cannot but deny the fact that is is chemistry and we cannot also deny that it is almost inseparable from our modern civilization. With fermentation where sugar is converted into acids, sugar, gas, we have been able to use microbes to turn grains, fruits, and milk into better food for our consumption. We cannot deny that while these things might look inconsequential currently because they have become a part of our lives, they molded our civilization
Reference
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/maillard-reaction
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4745522/
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/how-prehistoric-humans-discovered-fire-making/
https://www.cleaninginstitute.org/understanding-products/why-clean/soaps-detergents-history
https://potagersoap.com/blogs/news/what-is-saponification
https://www.makin-metals.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/History-of-Bronze-Timeline.pdf
https://www.copper.org/education/history/60centuries/raw_material/thebeginnings.php
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8618017/
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/component/biochemistry-fermented-foods/
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