If anyone has talked to Charlie the Tuna lately, would you do me a favor and let me know? It’s been a while since I’ve seen him and I’m starting to worry.
Charlie the Tuna, you may remember, was an animated spokesfish for StarKist tuna who enjoyed a wildly popular run on network television from the 1960s through the 1970s. While most tunas tend to swim in the other direction when they catch a glimpse of so much as a spoonful of mayonnaise, Charlie always seemed to have a clear idea of what he wanted to be when he grew up, and what he wanted to be was lunch. For the better part of 20 years, Charlie
I regularly took to the airwaves baiting and begging the StarKist fishermen to haul him out of the sea so that he could have the honor of ending his life not just as any tuna but as a StarKist tuna. While the campaign may have boosted tuna sales, to me it seemed a little unsettling. More and more, Charlie’s star turn for StarKist began to look less like a career move than an unmistakable cry for help (I knew he’d been despondent lately, said a distraught Mrs. Tuna, but I had no idea he planned to go . . . topside).
It’s unlikely, of course, that there would have been any way to help a fish like Charlie--it’s tough to join a 12-step program when you can’t, strictly speaking, step. So I was left to imagine the worst, contemplating just what grisly fate awaited Charlie if StarKist ever took him up on his offer. It’s a question, actually, that’s plagued me ever since. What does go on behind the scenes at a tuna company between that last dramatic moment a tuna spends as a free-swimming fish, and the first moment it makes its appearance as the hockey puck of chunk light so familiar to consumers? And how a tuna gets from the Atlantic shelf to the grocer’s shelf is not the only secret of the commercial or physical world that’s long left me mystified. How do canned foods in general achieve their years-long shelf life? How does multicolored toothpaste get its signature stripes? And what about things you’d never dream of putting in your mouth? Pigeons, for instance? How come you never see any baby ones?
For most of my life, I’ve been nettled by questions like these, and though I’ve never taken a poll on the matter, I suspect I’m not alone. Whether you’re a postgrad or an undergrad, an average Joe or above-average Jo, there are some puzzles of everyday science that forever seem to elude solutions. But suppose you’re above above-average. Suppose you’re, say, a genius. Would a cosmologist able to crack the codes of time and space be better able to fathom tuna technology than you or I? Would a conductor able to move an orchestra to greatness be stopped in his tracks by the mystery of pigeons? To find out, I decided to track down some of America’s most widely admired minds and administer a little pop science pop quiz. The superbrains I chose were recent recipients of MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the questions I asked them were straightforwardly simple, and the answers, I found, were often wonderfully muddled.
