Why it’s called gluten, glutamate, gelatin, gelato, etc

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This video, I’m glad to say again, is sponsored  by Squarespace. Hey, so why do they call it   gluten? Well, I have some gluten right here,  or more precisely, this is a precursor of   gluten. These granules are the roughly isolated  protein component of wheat. The dry weight of a  

Wheat kernel is mostly starch, but after that it’s  protein, it’s like 10, 15% protein. And if I mix   that protein with the other precursor of gluten,  that is water. Well, everything just balls up into   this sticky substance called gluten. That kind  of reminds me of glue. Yes, gluten is named after  

Glue. It seriously is that simple, though less  obviously, also named after glue is glutamate.   The salt of glutamic acid, we use it to supplement  umami taste in food. Does MSG get sticky in water?   Not at all. So why is glutamate named after  glue? You can extract glutamate out of gluten,  

But there’s nothing particularly special  about that. Glutamic acid is found in all   kinds of proteins, not just the gluten proteins. Indeed, the old Glu amino acid is found in the   proteins of nearly all known living things, not  just wheat seeds. And the proteins we commonly  

Use to make adhesives are not particularly  high in glutamic acid. So why is glutamic acid   named after glue? Consider gelatin. Gelatin is a  protein commonly used to make glue, edible glues   often. And yet gelatin is not particularly high  in glutamic acid, which is indirectly named after  

Glue. Is gelatin named after glue? Well, they  both start with a G. The answer is maybe kind of.   This is really interesting, this is a story about  how our words for food evolved in tandem with our  

Words for other things like adhesives. Indeed, I’m  willing to bet you that the products we call glue   and food co-evolved, or more specifically, I’d bet  you that glue evolved hand in hand with a soup.   I mean, the earliest known adhesives used  by early humans and Neanderthals and such,  

Those are probably tree resins, right? That makes  sense. You’re just walking through the forest,   you get some sap on your hand, that’s sticky,  I can use that for something. And if you heat   that resin, you can make an even better glue.  This is birch tar, which people have been using  

For literally 200,000 years. And in 2019, these  scientists demonstrated that you can make birch   tar by burning birch bark next to a smooth rock,  that’s all. The tar settles on the rock and you   just scrape it off. It’s easy to imagine how  that might’ve first happened accidentally,  

Right? You build a big fire to cook your meal  that evening and stay warm and you just happen   to burn the right kind of wood in the right  kind of conditions that night. And you notice   this black sludge collecting nearby and it’s  sticky and you think, I’ve invented glue.  

Then about 20,000 years ago, humans started  inventing pottery. And if you spoke the   Proto-Indo-European language back then, you would  have referred to the sticky substance with which   you make pottery as Glei. Glei is thought to be  the Proto-Indo-European ancestor of the modern  

English word clay, remember that now. And once  you figure out how to fire clay or bake it hard   to make it water safe and heat safe, well then you  can boil liquids in it. And the great age of soup  

Making was thusly born. It’s easy to imagine an  ancient person boiling up some hunk of wild beast,   and after a while, noticing that this sticky  substance settles on top. When you boil collagen   in water for a long time, it becomes a new sticky  protein that we call gelatin. But that ancient  

Cook who touched that sticky stuff on top of the  soup did not call it gelatin. You know what they   might’ve called it? They might’ve called it Glei. Glei is the Proto-Indo-European root of all kinds   of words. Words that in various ways all  communicate stickiness, including words  

Like glue. Glue also probably comes from Glei. It  means something that’s sticky as clay is sticky.   So that makes sense. Glei clay, clay, Glei.  That’s how Glei came to mean, to stick. And then   that becomes the basis of the later Latin word  for glue, which was gluten. Gluten is literally  

Originally just the Latin word for glue. And thus  words like gluten have been used for centuries   to describe all kinds of sticky things, not  just wheat paste. Consider glutenous rice,   sticky rice like I get from a Thai place. And  whenever you refer to this as glutenous rice,  

Some pedant on the internet just invites  himself into the chat to say, hey, that’s   a misnomer, there’s actually no gluten in rice. But I am the pedant who corrects other pedants.   And the word gluten used to refer to sticky  substances of all kinds, not just wheat paste.  

Just as flour used to refer to ground up grains of  all kinds, but now we mostly just use it to refer   to wheat. Flour is short for wheat flour. In the  same sense gluten is now short for wheat gluten,  

But there used to be all kinds of things that we  called gluten. Here in the OED, the year 1639,   we see gluten used to describe the bonds of  friendship. Here in 1597, they refer to gluten as   the fourth humor or elemental substance of animal  life, I guess. And while humanism turned out to  

Be total pseudoscience, you can definitely make  glue out of animal parts. These are dog treats,   but any mass of bone or skin or other animal parts  that you can’t eat, what you can do instead is   boil down in a process known as rendering. And here we are the next day. The rawhide  

Has almost completely dissolved into a crude  gelatin solution that we can boil down some more,   and concentrate into a substance that we call hide  glue. Hide glue is still used in carpentry to this   day. This is why whenever the dog is being bad, I  threatened to take her to the glue factory. Hey,  

Why do animal proteins get so sticky when you  boil them? It’s actually all kinds of proteins   that get sticky when you boil them or damage  them in some way, and this is going to be very   much an oversimplification, but this is a way  that this concept is taught in schools. Okay,  

Think of healthy intact proteins as being like  chocolate covered caramels. These things are   sticky and yet they are not sticking to each other  because their sticky parts are contained inside   themselves. But if you bash the protein open  with heat or with chemical treatments like acids,  

The sticky middles come out, and then the proteins  do stick to themselves and stick to each other.   Lots of diseases like Parkinson’s are thought  to be caused by misfolded proteins in the body   that end up sticking to each other and forming  protein clumps, yuck. Anyway, with hide glue,  

We have basically busted up these proteins with  heat and water such that they will tangle and   stick to each other. As it cools and dries down  and solidifies, the resulting substance is glue,   and we call it glue because the Latin word for  glue was gluten. Because the Proto-Indo-European  

Word for sticky clay was Glei. Everybody got that?  Good. When will the princess be married? I mean,   so scientists used to refer to all kinds of sticky  things as gluten. In 1866, the German chemist,   Karl Heinrich Ritthausen took some wheat gluten.  He busted open the proteins with sulfuric acid,  

And he isolated glutamic acid, so named  because he got it from wheat gluten. The   G in MSG stands for glue indirectly. How about the G in gel? I mean,   if we take that dissolved raw hide and we just  chill it in the fridge, it sets up into a gel,  

Jello. The busted proteins stick to each  other in a web around the water, so we’ve   glued the water in place in essence. Glue kind  of sounds like gel and gel sounds like gelatin,   jello, gelato, that’s a good one. Those are words  thought to come from the Indo-European root gel,  

Which meant to freeze. It’s where  we get the words cold, chill, gel,   gelato, glass, all of that stuff. And for  what it’s worth, the famous etymologist,   Julius Pokorny advanced a theory that, Glei, the  root that means to stick, actually comes from gel,  

The root that means to freeze, which  does make total sense, right? I mean,   this is basically frozen water, frozen with  glue. And of course the word glue comes more   directly from the word for clay, and clay does  freeze, right? When you dry it or fire it hard.  

I don’t know, there aren’t many a  Proto-Indo-European speakers around for   us to ask, but it is definitely possible that  the words gel and chill and cold and glue and   glaze and glass and all of that, they all come  from the same thing. Just as it is possible,  

Indeed, likely that soup and glue have a common  ancestor in the form of a big boiling brew of   tough animal parts. Rib sticking as they say.  And I’m quite glad to say that Squarespace is   back supporting the Ragusea family of Programs.  Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or  

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