2013年底，我准备高中有机化学课的时候设计下面的全天然香蕉成份信息图形。
这几年，广告上写的三个关键词有「全天然」、「有机」、「无化学成份」。我想通过这张信息图形告诉大家一切都是化学成份做出来的。大自然生产的化学成份比科学家在实验室里能合成的成份复杂多了。为了简洁我写了几十个组成香蕉的重要成份——还有几千个天然有机化学成份没写上。
全天然香蕉里面有一些成份是有毒性的。但是，因为香蕉里面的剂量极少，所以它们对我们的人体是无害的。大自然对剂量的掌握是非常精准的，自然界中，所有的化学成分都有完美的剂量。这个信息图形的意义是告诉大家：
随心分享！
From today, all 12 Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana (and other Fruits) posters are available for just $99 with free world shipping by clicking the image below.
They’ve been featured on dozens of news websites and magazines and received over 2 million views in total this year. They started as an educational ‘hook’ for the classroom (specifically to introduce organic chemistry), but went viral online and sparked articles from all sides of the “is natural always best?” debate.
From today, get the entire original 12-poster set on sturdy 300 gsm card stock for just $99 with free world shipping by clicking the button above. (Usual selling price is $10 each plus postage).
Following last week’s Starbucks® graphic, it seems right to follow up with a quick poster on the Ingredients of An All-Natural Roasted Coffee Bean.
The Ingredients poster series was featured in Forbes last week (article written by Robert J. Szczerba, CEO of X Tech Ventures).
Follow me on Twitter (@VCEasy) to see all the latest posters (unfinished ones included!)
Cherries are extremely sweet, and are unusual in that they contain more glucose (52%) than fructose (42%). Their bright red colour comes from the carotenes and capsanthin (the E160 colourings) that are present in high quantities throughout the fruit.
Cherry flavour comes from a huge collection of aroma compounds produced naturally by the cherry. To make all of these compounds in the lab, then mix them together in the correct proportions would be ridiculously time-consuming and expensive.
When making artificial cherry flavourings, only the first two compounds are usually added: (Z)-3-hexenol and 2-heptanone. Artificial cherry flavouring thus tastes absolutely nothing like real cherries: it lacks most of the ingredients that give real cherries their delicious flavour.
It’s quite a different story with oranges and lemons, though. Most of the flavour of oranges and lemons comes from (+)-limonene and (-)-limonene, which, by themselves, smell like orange and lemon, respectively.
I enjoyed reading the discussion that last week’s Artificial vs Natural Peach spawned on Tumblr and Facebook. People discussed the meaning of “natural” versus “domesticated”, and debated whether humans have really “improved” fruits in the last few millennia or just evolved them into giant candy.
I hope that people now see the irony in the title, “Ingredients of an All-Natural Peach”. The fruits we grow aren’t natural at all—but I still love to eat them!
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Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting more Ingredients posters onto this blog. I have a whole stash of them lined up, ready for you to eat…
I’m also looking for your ideas. What would you like to see the “ingredients” of next? Vanilla? Tea? List them in the comments below.
Stay up-to-date by following @VCEasy on Twitter, where I tweet about Chemistry for visual learners. These posters usually appear there first.
Enjoy 🙂
Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana went viral back in January 2014 and attracted over 2 million views on various websites worldwide. The posters and t-shirts are now available in 7 different languages.
Since January 2014, I’ve sold almost $8,000 worth of merchandise online, including t-shirts, posters and coffee mugs, and next month, Banana T-shirts will be available in two physical stores in the US and the Netherlands. Other successful bloggers are picking up on the trend as well: here’s a great contribution to the ‘Ingredients’ phenomenon from Compound Chem:
My favourite contribution overall has to be this one (below). it’s simple and artistic and states a very strong message. It’s part of an educational series by Sense About Science, and you can download their groundbreaking report from their website here.
The reality boils down to six points:
In the meantime, I’ve been producing educational Chemistry and Physics booklets for VCEasy, which are being released for free to high-school students via the internet. (VCE is the name of our high-school syllabus in Victoria, Australia.)
The VCEasy Visual VCE booklets are designed to give students a concise, visual summary of all the essential knowledge for their VCE course—with nothing superfluous added, and nothing taken away. Just 100% VCE notes.
The design is highly visual, and each page corresponds to one Key Knowledge Point taken directly from the VCAA Study Design. More information (including free downloads) are available here.
This post is a shameless list of newspapers and famous blogs that published articles about the All-Natural Banana, which has now exceeded 2 million views on the internet.
It’s also spawned a successful clothing line and a poster print business. In other words, for what started as a simple teaching aid, “Ingredients” is getting pretty big. 🙂
Here’s the list:
I’m now sending multiple print shipments every day, most of them international.
It now exists in 7 languages. More on that soon.
It has over 120,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook (but I don’t use Facebook)
And it’s been shared widely across social media like Twitter. In other words, it’s gone viral.
Exciting changes to the T-Shirt Store will be announced tomorrow. 🙂 James
It’s Australia Day and beetroot burgers are in ‘season’.
Chemically, beetroots are remarkably simple.
The colour in beetroots comes from just two E-numbers (which are each groups of about 10 compounds); and the flavour comes almost entirely from geosimin. So simple.
Happy Australia Day!
Welcome Kiwi to the all-natural gang.
Merchandise is in the T-Shirt Store.
Also, some exciting changes are coming to the T-Shirt Store very soon.
Welcome Passionfruit to the all-natural gang.
His merchandise is already in the T-Shirt Store.
Enjoy 🙂 James
Here are high-resolution PDFs of all three posters. Free to use. Feedback welcome.
Click each image to download the PDF poster.
About these posters: As a Chemistry teacher, I want to erode the fear that many people have of “chemicals”, and demonstrate that nature evolves compounds, mechanisms and structures far more complicated and unpredictable than anything we can produce in the lab.
This is the last of three posters in the “ingredients” series. I think I’ve made my point.
I’ve exhausted it, in fact. Enjoy.
There are now 20 graphics on my to-do list. I’ll probably make about 5 of them, and only one or two of those will be any good. 😛 (Making graphics is a bit like taking photographs—you take 1000 photos on holiday, delete 500 and put no more than 6 on your wall.)
The Table of Esters and Their Smells did surprisingly well. It got over 2,000 downloads on its first day. 🙂
The graphic below is a follow-up to Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana. To make these graphics, I calculated the percentage composition of all the interesting ingredients and wrote an “ingredients” label for each fruit using E-numbers where they exist. Anthocynanins, which are said to give blueberries their “superfood” status, are also known as E163, for example.
As a Chemistry teacher, I want to erode the fear that many people have of “chemicals”, and demonstrate that nature evolves compounds, mechanisms and structures far more complicated and unpredictable than anything we can produce in the lab. Enjoy!
I like the “fresh air” at the end. Nitrogen is E941, Oxygen is E948 and Carbon Dioxide is E290. (Argon, which comprises about 1% of the air we breathe, also has its own E-number: E938.) Thousands of minority ingredients including DNA have been omitted for brevity’s sake.
Sources
James Kennedy 