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Intrigue For Monday's Show: Mystery Powders

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And today's last word in business is, can you eat that?

You've heard of mystery meats, right? Well, how about mystery powders - courtesy of the ever-innovative food industry?

NPR science correspondent Allison Aubrey asked me to come up and have a sneak peek at what she's cooking up for Monday's MORNING EDITION.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GREENE: Allison Aubrey, you always get me into trouble somehow. Why am I up here at your desk?

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Anything standing out here?

GREENE: Uh - I mean, there's a collection of little, tiny bowls with different colored powders in them. I guess that's what I'm seeing...

AUBREY: And what do you think those are?

GREENE: I don't know.

AUBREY: You want a hint?

GREENE: I would - that would help.

AUBREY: Stuff that goes into food.

GREENE: OK.

AUBREY: Food ingredients.

GREENE: OK. So I see - like, some of it looks like salt; a little, tiny glass bowl of flour, maybe; some blue powder; some pink powder.

AUBREY: Oh, you're getting hot. You're getting hot.

GREENE: Some - and you have – you have one little bowl with just a piece of paper with a question mark.

AUBREY: Oh, gosh. Doesn't that make you curious to know?

GREENE: It totally does. Yeah. Can you lift it up and show me what's inside?

AUBREY: Ah.

GREENE: Nothing.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GREENE: Is that like - that's going to be the mystery ingredient to some recipe?

AUBREY: This is the puzzle: What are these things?

GREENE: I hope you're not going to tell me that - like, the lovely, healthy chicken sandwich that I ate yesterday actually has a little bit of all of this stuff.

AUBREY: You're just going to have to listen on Monday.

GREENE: Well, this will be fun.

AUBREY: All right. Well...

GREENE: You've made me curious. I'm going to be, you know, really interested to see what you have to tell us on Monday.

AUBREY: Excellent. And, you know, I hope these hints were enough just to sort of whet your appetite.

GREENE: My appetite is whetted.

AUBREY: Excellent.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GREENE: And Renee, I don't know what, exactly, we'll be tasting on Monday. But Allison Aubrey is going to have the answers to this culinary mystery.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And she'll be having them, of course, on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

David Greene is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author. He is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most listened-to radio news program in the United States, and also of NPR's popular morning news podcast, Up First.