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.
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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 â 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.
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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.
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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.
