food
The New York Times has a strange article up, For Your Health, Froot Loops, which profiles the controversy around a new health food guideline/endorsement organized by industry which seems somewhat fishy. This part made me laugh out loud:
Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.
"You're rushing around, you're trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal," Dr…
Visa större karta
Here are two pieces of convoluted Scandy and English etymology that converge in my head.
"Marshmallow" was originally the common name of a plant, Althaea officinalis (Sw. läkemalva), from which a thickening agent was made. This agent was added to meringue foam to produce the toastable sweet pillows we all know and love. And so the sweet took over the name of the marsh-dwelling mallow plant.
On GÃ¥lö, the peninsula where I helped with excavations yesterday, is a place called Kärrmaräng. This means "Marsh Lagoon Meadow", but the Swedish word for meringue is maräng, so "…
The 6th Aardvarchaeology blogmeet was a friendly three-hour affair with good food, good drink and good company. 'Twas me, Kai, MÃ¥rten, Per G, Sigmund, Thinker and Tor, and an excellent time was had at Akkurat.
Here's the historical record of blogmeets past. The archaeological record is, due to modern waste-disposal habits, sadly lost.
Wirström's, March '07.
Wirström's, September '07.
Wirström's, January '08.
Akkurat, September '08.
Akkurat, March '09.
Akkurat, September '09.
In the interest of consistency -- three blogmeets at each tavern -- we must find a new venue for the seventh…
I love black tea, and by that I mean brews from leaves of Camellia sinensis and C. s. assamica, nothing else, milk and sugar please.
Earl Grey is basically Assam flavoured with oil of bergamot, a citrus fruit. It's OK if there's no plain tea. But many café employees believe that Earl Grey is plain tea.
Sometimes I drink honeybush which is kind of nice, but that's another plant and nothing compared to real tea. I don't like rooibos much.
Here are my favourite teas.
Assam CTC. This is Crushed, Torn and Curled Assamica. Dark, strong, the main ingredient in "English breakfast".
Yunnan (Swedes,…
Wow, the weight-loss topic is still going strong in the blogosphere (see that post for links for several initial posts).
Pal MD has more and some more.
Dr.Isis is on a roll.
Janet is now in the discussion.
Bikemonkey joins in.
Larry's had something related recently.
It is interesting to see how experts differ on the topic...and the comment threads are enlightening as well. Take-home message: don't trust a "TV dietitian"...or diet advice in your local newspaper or Cosmo....
As you know, my problem has always been the opposite. How to gain weight?!
The only time I managed to put on a few…
PalMD is trying to eat better (and drop a little weight). Dr. Isis has been offering some advice on what sorts of meals might help Pal cut the calories while still being healthy and satisfying. Pal has been taking the advice to heart, but finds time constraints an impediment to the kind of food he want to be eating.
As you might guess, my work and family situation give me some experience in throwing together meals under time pressure. So I wanted to offer a couple of quick recipes to Pal. But I also thought I'd page Dr. Isis to see if she'd weigh in on the nutritional punch these dishes…
You may remember Dr.Charles whose blog was here on Scienceblogs.com for a while two years ago. He took a hiatus from blogging, but is now back at it with a vengeance at his new site which I warmly recommend you visit.
Today's post is interesting - and not just because it is partially about a PLoS ONE paper - Why Exercise is Not the Best Prescription for Weight Loss which fits perfectly within the ongoing discussion about weight-loss and dieting going on a couple of my SciBlings' blogs right now.
PalMD is going on a diet and monitoring his progress publicly, on his blog.
Dr.Isis tells him he…
Yesterday saw the season's first mushroom expedition. A bit early for real diversity, with only four edible species collected, but on the other hand we found quite a lot of chanterelles.
Chanterelle, Kantarell, Cantharellus cibarius
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
Orange Birch Bolete, Tegelsopp, Leccinum versepelle
Red russula, Tegelkremla, Russula decolorans
As a Swedish journalist once wrote, paraphrasing the Scarlet Pimpernel:
They find him here
They find him there
They say they find him everywhere
Is he in Heaven or is he in Hell?
That damned elusive Chanterelle
Physicists frequently get laughed at for referring to problems as "trivial" when calculus is required to solve them. "Maybe it's trivial for you, Einstein," people will say, "but it looks pretty hard from here."
It's nice to see that other fields are prone to the same sort of thing. Take, for example, this list of recipes from the Guardian, which they claim is a list of the "all-time quickest and simplest summer dishes" submitted by foodies and noted chefs.
Some of them live up to that billing, like this entry from Mark Bittman:
69. Steamed asparagus wrapped in prosciutto
That's the recipe…
The National Pork Producers Council didn't like swine flu being called swine flu. Bad for business. So we now call it 2009 H1N1 or some such thing. It's totally swine-origin, but hey, if Lord Agribusiness doesn't like it, that's that. Same thing with antibiotic resistant bacteria, like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus ("MRSA"; best source on the net Maryn McKenna's blog). The Pork Council doesn't want anyone to die of MRSA. They just don't want it associated with their product, even though a Dutch strain associated with pigs is now spreading in the US (and infecting people).
Some…
I haven't been here much, but I did begin a new series over at McSweeney's called "Days at the Museum." It's a limited-run set of dispatches (summer-length, let's say) about research at the Smithsonian and related miscellany. Tuesday was the first one, called "Ronzoni All the Way Down."
This is the central image of the story, a fairly well-known portrait by the French Barbizon artist Jean-Francois Millet from 1857 called "The Gleaners":
And what is the story? I'll repost it in full below the fold. I'd bet it's fair to say it has the character of one of Lawrence Weschler's Convergences…
Courtesy of my niece-in-law in Hangzhou, here's a piece of plastic hong shao rou, ç´çè, red braised pork, intended as a cell phone decoration. Yum!
tags: food, Helsinki, Finland, travel
Lunch: boiled egg and smoked salmon with lettuce, fresh dill, ground black pepper and butter on rye bread (open-faced sandwich). And of course, coffee.
Image: GrrlScientist, 4 July 2009 [larger view].
Today's lunch was, as always, delightful. I've yet to be disappointed by anything I've eaten in Finland. (You'll notice that this sandwich has a bite taken out of it -- that's because I forget I want to photograph some of my meals until I've already started eating.)
Dessert: Chocolate brownie cheesecake. And of course, more coffee.
Image:…
Spencer Ackerman explores and explains the importance of eating the local food when fighting an insurgency:
One of the things that struck me when I embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is how little local food I ate. When I met some friends for drinks in April 2007 after coming a month in Baghdad and Mosul, one of the first questions I got was about local Iraqi delicacies. Man, I said, I ate king crab legs with a plastic fork on a huge base around the Baghdad airport, courtesy of KBR. Or rather I tried, since you can%u2019t eat king crab legs with a plastic fork.When I went…
An idle thought struck me. Let's say you're on the latitude of Northern Europe and you've become a locavore, someone who avoids foodstuffs that must be transported far from their production site. Let's also say that you don't like greenhouses. And finally, let's say you're hooked on coffee or tea. Is there a caffeine source that can be grown outdoors in Northern Europe?
Most psychoactive substances only occur in a small group of closely related plants. But caffeine pops up in widely divergent branches of the floral kingdom. Does anybody know of a caffeine-producing plant that, say, a Dane or…
Everybody knows that energy is good for you and calories are bad for you. What newagers, health nuts and alties seem to be completely ignorant of is that both words originate in physics and that they refer to the same thing.
Energy "is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force". It can be measured in various units, in the context of food usually kilocalories. A Snickers bar contains about 150 kilocalories, which is equal to the energy content of about 20 ml of gasoline.
Both energy content estimates of course refer to the amount of chemical…
There are two main reasons I like harvesting crops from the Free-Ride garden. First, it means we'll have yummy, super-fresh fruits and vegetables to eat. And second, it often means we're freeing up space to plant another crop.
Even in Northern California, where it is said we have "climate" rather than "weather," there are crops that are seasonal. We are definitely past the "spring" planting season, and some of the spring crops are really looking happy.
For example, our peas.
As I mentioned yesterday, I planted two varieties, sugar-snap peas (whose pods are meant to be eaten) and shelling…
Owing to the fact that the snail eradication project (or at least, my direct involvement in it) is on a brief hiatus while I'm on the East Coast (and while my yard is still in Northern California), I'm going to be bringing you up to date on the garden in whose service I have been trying to control the gastropod population.
Long time readers may recall that the raised garden beds are almost a year old. We actually didn't get the first seeds planted in them until near the end of July, 2008.
Some of the seeds we planted then are just now giving us plants that are ready to harvest.
Our onions,…
tags: Snickers Bar, candy bar, Kitchen Science, cloning food, Todd Wilbur, streaming video
Famous food cloner, Todd Wilbur, wraps his head with tape and attempts to duplicate the world's most popular candy bar [5:59]
Here is an interesting follow-up to the leaked meeting minutes of the BPA cabal. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee has a Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. As a result of reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Washington Post about the meeting minutes of BPA spinmeisters (the full contents of the memo were posted here and then by the Environmental Working Group), Waxman and Sub-Committee Chair Bart Stupak have sent the following letter to Dr. John Rost, Chair of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance, Inc. (the tin can people who line their cans with a…