food
omnibrain | December 28, 2007This is one odd video. This French Orangina TV ad has furries wearing kinky lingerie and an octopus giving a lap dance to a bear.
Check it out:
I guess I shouldn't be surprised after this previous post about a French set of ads on safe sex practices.
-Via BoingBoing-
revere | December 26, 2007There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about food seems to have made label reading more common. I've always wondered if the detail was encouraging or discouraging people from reading labels. How many people read labels really? Quite a few, it turns out, at least if you believe a new report, Label Reading from a Consumer Perspective, by the…
clock | December 22, 2007...this much?
This is the source of the very funny bacon flowchart, discovered by Dr.Bacon.
revere | December 21, 2007Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers.
It also turns out it is a great way to pick up drug resistant E. coli:
Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…
clock | December 18, 2007To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to:
- correct my factual errors
- call me on my BS
- tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask
- if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so.
Here is the fifth one, so…
revere | December 11, 2007Concern about cutting down the rain forests is not just a conservationists hobby horse. As more and more trees are cut down for their wood and the land cleared for agricultural use the unplanned consequence is that more an more mobile and traveling humans come in contact with animals for the first time. These animal populations are reservoirs for many viruses, some, like Ebola and AIDS, make their way into new homes, human bodies. The rain forest is no more than an incubation period's travel from major cities.
But this isn't the only way animals and humans are thrown together in intimate and…
sb admin | December 10, 2007 This will probably never be made into an anti-drug ad campaign, but I can't imagine a stronger deterrent.
Angel's Trumpet is a flower that contains scopolamine and other alkaloids. It's known as a "biogenic drug" and presumed by naive recreational drug users to be harmless because it's a plant. However, it can cause psychosis, delirium, visual hallucinations, agitation, incoherence, aggressive behaviour, memory problems and "convulsive sobbing" as well as somatic symptoms and well, things like this incident.
A case study describes an 18-year-old male with no history of mental disorders who…
clock | December 6, 2007Workers in the Ivory Coast, producer of about 40% of world cocoa, are on strike! As chocolate is the Fifth Food Group, this may lead to global malnutrition of cataclismic proportions (how big are your hidden stashes?)
revere | December 3, 2007I'm traveling so I'll let other bloggers do the heavy lifting. And I can always count on flu bloggers of note, Crof and SophiaZoe. Both discuss and link to reports of H5N1 in refrigerated turkey meat sold in stores in Poland (I particularly recommend SZ's excellent summary of the safety issues). While I don't have a lot to add to their coverage, I'd like to inject just one more issue related to finding the virus in meat
An ongoing debate is the relative contributions of migratory (wild) birds and domestic poultry to spreading H5N1 geographically. There is evidence for both mechanisms, and…
drorzel | November 25, 2007... or, Emmy's Best Thanksgiving Ever!
We did the traditional turkey-and-trimmings dinner Saturday with both sets of parents. Again, we brined the turkey overnight, following the Good Eats recipe, and other than a small glitch with the thermometer placement, everything went very well. The turkey was nicely roasted, moist, and juicy.
And that's where the problem started. Or, if you're the dog, that's where this started to be the best Thanksgiving EVER...
Neither Kate nor I really eat gravy, and it has the reputation of being fiddly to make, so we didn't do anything with the juices that…
sporte | November 22, 2007Would you recognize your leftovers when they're magnified? Would you know turkey if you saw it at 40X?
Make a guess and click an image to see the answer.
technorati tags: Thanksgiving, food science, microscopy
Copyright Geospiza, Inc.
omnibrain | November 21, 2007Everyone has been talking about stem cells in the last couple days. Here's something to offend most of you - Christopher Reeve eating fetuses for their Stem Cells. Enjoy ;)
Now that you are probably horribly offended about something or other here's why I'm posting this video now:
Now paralyzed people can eat their own stem cells to become superpeople!
omnibrain | November 21, 2007One of the earliest references to a controlled experiment is from Daniel 1: 1-16 in the Old Testament of the Bible. In this 'experiment' Daniel pits his nutrition regime of "pulse" to eat and water to drink versus the best cuts of meat and the most highly rated wine. Check out the experimental methods and results below:
1:1 In the third yearof the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.1:2 And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God: which he carried into the land of…
clock | November 18, 2007Last Wednesday I went to Wine Authorities, the new wine store in Durham, for our monthly Durham Blogger Meetup.
Afterwards, I could not help it but go home with three new bottles of wine. The best is the one I tried from the Enomatic machine at the back of the store - 2005 Fleurie, Granits des Moriers (Jacky Piret), a gorgeous Spanish version of a Burgundy.
Since Thursday and Friday were crazy (on Thursday I spent 12 hours online monitoring the media and blog responses to the Nigersaurus paper and unveiling) and I was teaching on Saturday morning, we finally managed to have a nice dinner…
omnibrain | November 14, 2007An entertaining posting on craigslist:
Survival Of The Fittest
Date: 2007-08-30, 2:03PM EDT
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically…
clock | November 3, 2007Michael Pollan has the goods:
However many worthwhile programs get tacked onto the farm bill to buy off its critics, they won't bring meaningful reform to the American food system until the subsidies are addressed -- until the underlying rules of the food game are rewritten. This is a conversation that the Old Guard on the agriculture committees simply does not want to have, at least not with us.
In other words, contact your Senators today!
angrytoxicologist | November 2, 2007As promised yesterday, here's how I make breakfast sausage (I do it for taste but it will also lower your nitrate intake). And as to the old saying, I'd much rather make sausage than make laws.
You'll need a meat grinder. I like the food grinder that attaches to a Kitchen Aid mixer since I can use it with the strainer for other things (making applesause, applebutter,...ETC). How to Cook Everything says you can use a food processor but I highly doubt you could do it acceptably without smearing things.
Throw the small hole die and the rest of the grinder parts in the freezer.
Mix together
2-2.5…
omnibrain | October 31, 2007Cookin' babies and their brains:
How to Make a Bleeding Zombie Brain:
Brains! Build your own goopy bloody gray-matter:
Ohh my god! like... How-To Eat Halloween Brains! Beverly Hills style...
omnibrain | October 31, 2007
Ahh Halloween - when neuroscientists find all sorts of fake brains for sale and recipes to create them. This is our yearly reposting of the greatest brain recipe of all time.
This recipe was inspired by the one Alton Brown did a few years back. I liked the idea but wasn't thrilled with the recipe, so I came up with my own. By the way, I would suggest getting this mold - it looks a lot more lifelike.
Panna Cotta (brain style) with Pomegranite Sauce
Get the recipe below the fold!
1 cup milk
5 teaspoons unflavored gelatin
4 cups heavy cream
1 cup + 1 Tb sugar, divided
pinch salt
2 Tablespoons…
moleculeoftheday | October 30, 2007Lutein is just another carotenoid - like the previously covered retinal, it is a terpene.
Long, huh? That chain of alternating double and single bonds affords it its wonderful color. It, like retinal, plays a role in vision. The halloween angle is because it's one of the pigments in your pumpkin making it orange. The brilliant oranges and rust colors you see in nature tend to be thanks to carotenes.
In fact, as the leaves are changing (although it's not a great fall for this in much of the US), you're seeing the carotenes show their color as the chlorophylls fade away. In this beautiful…