food
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2008
A couple of recent Skepticality interviews (with environmental engineer Kelly Comstock and environmental toxicologist Shane Snyder) taught me something that may seem obvious, but which was radical news to me. Tap water is an industrial product. It occurs nowhere in nature. Water suppliers use natural water to make tap water according to current scientific understanding of what's healthy for humans to drink.
To make tap water, you need to remove a lot of stuff, such as micro-organisms, industrial pollutants, organic residues and mineral particles, perhaps also salt and lime. Then you need to…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2008
There's actually a use for onion peel. Wrap it around an egg, wrap egg and peel in aluminium foil, and boil the egg the usual way. Red onion peel dyes the shell yellow, while yellow onion peel dyes it deeper tones of brown and orange.
revere | March 20, 2008I eat a lot of salad. Not because I think they are healthy but because I like salads. When I go to lunch at the hospital cafeteria I usually eat from the salad bar, and believe me, that's not a pro-health measure. You'd know what I mean if you saw the salad bar. But green leafies are supposed to be good for us, too, so that's a bonus. But a new study from CDC suggests that they are not quite as healthy as they once were:
Over the past 35 years the proportion of foodborne outbreaks linked to the consumption of leafy green vegetables has substantially increased and that increase can not be…
revere | March 18, 2008Ex-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer made a critical mistake in his relations with a prostitute: he had sex with her. Sex is bad, at least in America. You'd think a politician would know better than almost anyone. You don't have sex with prostitutes. You take campaign money from them:
The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food, beverage and consumer products companies, spent nearly $1.6 million in 2007 to lobby on food safety and other issues.
The trade group spent a little more than $1 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby the federal government, according to a…
revere | March 14, 2008There are a lot of rats in this world and they have meat on them. I always wondered why they weren't more commonly used as a human food source. Bird flu has taken care of that. Enjoy:
clock | February 19, 2008There is a lot of stuff one hears about food, sustainability, environment, etc., and it is sometimes hard to figure out what is true and what is not, what is based on science and what is emotion-based mythology.
For instance, some things I have heard over the years and have no means to evaluate if they are even close to plausible:
Claim #1: if we used every square inch of arable or potentially arable land, clearing the rainforest, turning deserts into fields, removing cities, malls and highways, killing all the animals, destroying all natural ecosystems, moving all humans to the Moon and…
clock | February 19, 2008...from different points of view:
Anne-Marie: Culinary revelation
Mark Powell: Saving the ocean with guilt or desire? and Does the sustainable seafood movement rely on guilt? (blogfish poll)
Miriam Goldstein: Guilty as charged
Amanda Marcotte: Save your soul with recycling
revere | February 19, 2008Even in the world of giant beef recalls in the US this one stands out: 143 million pounds. This dwarfs (by a factor of four) the previous recall record of 35 million pounds, and as the AP report observes, amounts to two hamburgers for every man, woman and child in the United States. This one has an added twist: not just safety but animal cruelty:
The federal agency said the recall will affect beef products dating to February 1, 2006, that came from Chino [California]-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which supplies meat to the federal school lunch program and to some major fast-food chains.…
revere | February 18, 2008I hardly know what to make of a story about market research on the top ten flavors predicted for 2008. For one thing, I have no idea what some of these flavors are. I had to Google several. But what do I know?
The top sweet flavor, according to Bell Flavors and Fragrances, isn't that exotic: mango. But here's the rest of the "sweet" list: acai, lychee, pomegranate, mint, blueberry, verbena, goji [aka wolfberry], noni and guarana. I linked to a couple Wikipedia descriptions. Particularly intriguing is noni, "Morinda citrifolia, commonly known as Great morinda, Indian mulberry, Beach mulberry,…
clock | February 18, 2008What is the difference between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer?
You go to a bar to get your Free Access Beer. You sit down. You show your ID. The barista gives you a bottle. You don't need to pay anything for it - it's free, after all. You take your own bottle-opener from your pocket and open the bottle. You drink the beer from the bottle. You return the empty bottle to the barista. You go home.
You order you Open Access Beer online or by phone. You pick what kind of beer you want. It gets delivered to your door really fast. The delivery man opens the bottle for you. You are…
revere | February 12, 2008Researchers at Purdue University's Ingestive Behavior Research Center fed two groups of otherwise similar rats yogurt with Sweet 'N Low (an artificial sweetener containing saccharin) or yogurt sweetened with glucose ( "A Role for Sweet Taste: Calorie Predictive Relations in Energy Regulation by Rats," Susan E. Swithers, PhD and Terry L. Davidson, PhD, Purdue University; Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol. 122, No. 1):
Three different experiments explored whether saccharin changed lab animals' ability to regulate their intake, using different assessments --the most obvious being caloric intake,…
revere | February 7, 2008Because he's too fat. Broiler chickens (the ones raised for meat) are essentially a cash crop, grown much like wheat or corn. When the chicken is ripe it's harvested. The Grim Reaper. We admit to not knowing much about poultry science and the business it supports, but because of our interest in bird flu we have been learning. There is a some well founded suspicion intensive poultry farming is one of the enabling conditions for the evolution and spread of bird flu.
These birds are raised under very difficult conditions and lead their short lives in extraordinary population densities, often…
revere | February 2, 2008There's a world out there I hardly know, although apparently I am part of it. The sandwich world:
High saturation in the US sandwich market will force manufacturers to focus on niche age and ethnic markets in order to boost market share, predicts a new Mintel report.
According to estimations made by Mintel at the end of 2007, the US sandwich industry is now worth more than $121bn - a massive market for product historically created to use up old meat and stale bread.
However, Mintel predicts that the market will experience slow growth of 13 per cent over the 2007 to 2009 period - only half of…
drorzel | February 1, 2008A counterpoint to Monday's question about tea:
The Super Bowl is Sunday, and a look in the fridge shows that I'm low on beer. What sort of beer should I buy to drink with the game?
Leave your suggestions in the comments.
Additional information: I generally prefer ale to lager, and don't much care for pilsner. I'm willing to try just about anything that doesn't have fruit in it, though-- when I buy beer, I expect beer. If I wanted fruit juice, I'd buy wine.
The title is a reference to party advertising at Williams, back in the day.
clock | January 28, 2008From SCONC:
Following the smashing success of their previous programs on "The Science of Beer" and "the Science of Chocolate," the Duke Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, will present "The Science of Baking" On Thursday, January 31, at 4:30 p.m. The featured guests are Emily Buehler, author of Bread Science: The Chemistry and Craft of Making Bread, and Frank Ferrell from Ninth Street Bakery. The event includes free samples, sandwiches, pastries and drinks. The meeting will be held in room 2002 of the Duke North Building. RSVP ASAP to Mary Holtschneider.
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2008
I just popped out for a burger at Arbee's, and I chose a seat with a good view of the full moon riding high over a Shell gas station. On the wall of the station was a large luminescent white sign bearing the words "Build Your Life on Eternal Truths". Chapel Hill has a huge number of churches, most being very small and privately run by their pastors, so I guess what the Shell proprietor really means is "Make sure to follow a culturally sanctioned subset of the many commandments in the Bible". Or perhaps "Spend a lot of your time participating in church rituals and talking about Christian…
clock | January 13, 2008The 176th Carnival of the Recipes is up on The Common Room and guess what? My recipe for Stuffed Cabbage is not the only one! There is another recipe for it there so you can compare and contrast!
clock | January 7, 2008Sorry to keep you all waiting so long, as there was other work to do, but here is the method for producing the most authentic sarma. As some steps may be too difficult, I will be adding tips and tricks along the way on how to do it with materials at hand - it will still be good, but you cannot call it "authentic" any more.**
Part A - Making Sauerkraut
The key to good sarma is good Sauerkraut, i.e., the sour cabbage leaves that you will do the wrapping with. And the most important piece of the puzzle for this is:
The StoneTM
Heavy, compact, dense, smooth block of rock.*** Taking one from…
sb admin | January 4, 2008"A thrilling documentary covering the origins and troubles surrounding the severe disease, Brain Freeze [a.k.a. Iceberger's Syndrome]." Link.