food
revere | June 9, 2008Last fall the animal slaughter giant Tyson Foods, Inc. was selling chickens with a USDA approved label, "raised without antibiotics." Some people thought that was a bit misleading insofar as Tyson routinely used ionophores in their feed designed to prevent a fungal disease in the birds. The USDA classes ionophores as antibiotics. The agency had "overlooked" the additive and when it was forcefully brought to their attention, they asked Tyson to add words to their label indicating it used no antibiotics that could cause antibiotic resistance in humans. Tyson added the words in December but…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2008I'm in the Bangladeshi restaurant Dil Se having a nice chicken achari. I tried to get Orkney mutton, but it was only available on advance order. Seems fitting to have a curry even in this storm-swept outpost of the British Empire. I started my dinner with a cold steak & gravy pie (from Hawthorn Bakery, Shotts, Scotland) on the cliffs above Scapa bay, whither I had taken a lovely sunny walk after the day's sessions. But there was still room for a curry.
My surname means "round twig". One of the conventioneers was of the opinion that this name fits me. I guess all the cycling and walking…
clock | May 9, 2008A special issue of The Independent on local food scene:
The road to real food
Farm to table challenges
Farmers' helpers
One missing link: organic grains
moleculeoftheday | May 7, 2008Triacetin is the glycerol triester of acetic acid:
Since it's made of glycerol and acetic acid, it's kinda-sorta-almost edible, and the wiki informs me there is talk of feeding it to spacemen. Aside from its toxicity, it has an great liquid range (3-260C), especially for a nonpolar solvent and it makes a decent plasticizer. Puzzlingly (since it's basically food), it's used as an antifungal.
clock | April 30, 2008After a lovely flight, Catriona met me at the airport. We went to the Institute where I checked in my room, set up my wifi, then went down to meet the people and have lunch: various cold cuts, true Coca Cola, and a cream puff:
clock | April 29, 2008This morning I had to get up early to go and give my interview for Radio Belgrade 1, at the same time when my Radio Belgrade 2 interview was on. This one will be broadcast in ten days or so. All the radio interviews will be recorded and placed on the web so I can link to it later. Afterwards, my Mom and I went to visit the graves of my Father and grandparents, did some shopping, and ended up in "Polet", an ancient and excellent seafood restaurant in the middle of Belgrade, where we had, traditionally, fried smelt (or pilchard):
clock | April 27, 2008Today is Orthodox Easter. Most everyone here will have lamb for lunch today. We did something different....
First, for breakfast I had snenokle (here is a recipe from a delightful Balkans food blog Palachinka) and I ground some chocolate on top of them:
Then, we had eggs. Not just painted on the outside, but simmered for many hours in onion husks, olive oil and a bunch of spices until the eggs were brown to the core:
I was a very picky eater when I was a kid. One of the things I liked was a simple beef soup with star-shaped noodles. As this is a Nostalgia Trip this week, that is what…
drorzel | April 26, 2008Every Friday (more or less) there's a "Faculty Social Hour" on campus. They have cheese and crackers, a fairly random assortment of beer, and a couple of bottles of wine, and various faculty come by to wind down a bit at the end of the week. It's a chance to socialize a little with people from different departments, talk about our students, and go into the weekend on a happy note.
Yesterday's social hour was designated as a "Multi-cultural Happy Hour," to coincide with the annual International Festival thrown by students from other countries. They had brought in much better food than usual,…
clock | April 25, 2008Last night's dinner - crepes filled with a mix of cheese, eggs and sugar, baked in the oven with some sweet cream:
And, for the drinking game, we used 'Vranac', an excellent Montenegran wine:
clock | April 25, 2008I was kicking myself all day yesterday because I forgot to take my camera with me for most of the day. First, my mother and I went to the bank to do some business which, of course, made us hungry so we stopped by a bakery and got fresh djevrek (no, although it looks like a sesame bagel, it is not - it is much lighter and crispier). Mmmmmm....
Then we went to the main building of the Natural History Museum and made some contacts there. The Director was at a meeting, but the secretary is smart, hip and on-the-ball and will be a great contact for the future as they try to design a new website…
purepedantry | April 24, 2008I can tell you from personal experience that being a med/grad student is not an environment that promotes healthy eating. Your schedule is all over bejesus and back, you're poor, and your often stressed. Rising food prices have made eating out at some place healthy a non-starter. Let's just say the easy fast food fix is very tempting.
NPR had a great story this morning about a Harvard medical student -- Michelle Hauser -- who is also a former chef. She has been teaching her classmates easy meals to cook that are also relatively healthy. This is important stuff for more than just…
clock | April 23, 2008Food is probably the most nostalgia-inducing facet of life....
Tuesday breakfast - prosciutto sandwich (right) and rosehip jam sandwich (left):
Poppyseed (left and center) and Walnut (right) roll:
Wednesday breakfast - cream and cheese and prosciutto and hot pepper and coffee:
Home-made, exceptionally strong plum brandy:
The internationally famous sarma (stuffed cabbage):
Turkish coffee:
revere | April 22, 2008It's kind of strange when suddenly there are a lot of articles on growing meat in a vat (it's probably because there was a recent conference in Norway on the topic). Even we posted on it last week and today the New York Times tells us that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - scientists excepted), the militant and sometimes violent animal rights group, is offering a $1 million prize for the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012":
Jason Matheny, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins…
revere | April 21, 2008There's an epidemic of a viral disease in Florida, although you wouldn't know it unless you were a vegetable or a farmer:
In recent years, the number of whitefly-transmitted viruses in cucurbit fields, home to crops like cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, melons and watermelons, has increased to almost epidemic proportions in Florida.
Researchers led by plant pathologists Scott Adkins and Bill Turechek at the ARS Subtropical Plant Pathology Research Unit in Fort Pierce, Fla., are dealing with a "triple threat" to cucurbits: three major viruses, all transmitted by silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia…
moleculeoftheday | April 16, 2008Phytic acid is an inositol derivative:
There was a time when phytate was mostly associated with disease states. All those phosphates make a fine metal binder, and people who lived on plants nigh-exclusively were often short on essential minerals.
We eat less plants these days, and phytate has shown itself to be capable of playing a number of different roles.
You could find worse ways to guess how prevalent diseases than to count drug commercials. By this technique, you might come to the conclusion that the bulk of the might of the American pharmaceutical industry is focused on herpes and…
revere | April 16, 2008Because of bird flu I probably spend too much time thinking about the world's industrially produced poultry. Arguably these chicken factories, with tens of thousands of birds crammed together under the most unsanitary conditions are the perfect bioreactor for virulent bird viruses, like influenza A/H5N1. They exit because chicken meat is a good source of relatively low cost protein and global appetite for Chicken McNuggets and its culinary cousins. So I guess we have to live with this vile industry. Or do we?
About a year and half ago I posted on growing meat in tissue culture. It got a very…
moleculeoftheday | April 15, 2008Inositol is a sugar:
Most sugars are aldehydes and ketones, and they zip up into rings in solution on their own, forming rings with oxygens that look like substituted ethers. Inositol is a funny one - an enzyme has to do the work and make a cyclohexane, which won't fall apart without some metabolic heavy lifting.
Because the metabolism is a little inefficient, sugar alcohols like inositol have found some use as low-glycemic or slightly lower-calorie sweeteners (some are innately extra-sweet). It's a unique handle for an enzyme to grab, so its derivatves pop up throughout metabolism.
You may…
revere | March 27, 2008I've eaten beef jerky on occasion and rather liked its spiciness. I'm not an aficionado, however, and didn't know much about it. I did look at the Wikipedia article on beef jerky where you will find more than any sane person would want to know about the food aspects of the subject, but with the increasing concern about food safety and particularly the safety of the meat supply in the US and elsewhere I was curious about it from the public health perspective.
For those who don't know, here's the wikipedia description:
Jerky is meat that has been cut into strips trimmed of fat, marinated in a…
revere | March 27, 2008Bird flu is a viral disease but its effects go beyond viral infection. An obvious but important fact. Consider Egypt.
The first poultry cases in Egypt were only a little over two years ago, but the virus quickly took root there. The poultry infections were a harbinger of human infections, 18 that year (2006), 25 the next year, 4 so far this yar. Egypt now has more human cases of the disease than any other country outside of Asia (47 cases, 20 deaths). Like other countries with bird flu problems they also have a large population who lives in close contact with birds. Many people keep poultry…