food
clock | June 2, 2009The Science of Chocolate
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
From drinks to desserts, chocolate is a favorite that is loved by cultures worldwide. Can a food as delicious as chocolate also be good for your health? Join us to learn about the history of chocolate from ancient times to modern day manufacturing, and find out what current research is telling us about the science of this special food.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Gabriel Keith Harris is an Assistant Professor…
clock | May 21, 2009Earlier today I went up the street to Town Hall Grill and saw their white-board where they write the descriptions of Dinner Specials....and there is a new one today with the name "Special for Bora"! Wow! The perks of being a regular customer!
Well, of course I got one, brought it home, re-arranged it on one of my plates and took a picture:
Deliciously tender fried chicken, corn on the cob and fresh (probably locally grown) vegetables: carrots, squash. onions and broccoli. A very summery, light and delicious meal! Yum!
jstemwedel | May 12, 2009In the comments of one of my snail eradication posts, Emily asks some important questions:
I'm curious about how exactly you reason the snail-killing out ethically alongside the vegetarianism. Does the fact that there's simply no other workable way to deal with the pests mean the benefits of killing them outweigh the ethical problems? Does the fact that they're molluscs make a big difference? Would you kill mice if they were pests in your house? If you wanted to eat snails, would you? Or maybe the not-wanting-to-kill-animals thing is a relatively small factor in your vegetarianism?
Killing…
mikethemadbiologist | May 11, 2009Having been at Genome Camp (a.k.a. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories Biology of Genomes meeting) last week, I didn't have time to blog about the latest movement conservative idiocy of getting all het up about Obama asking for Dijon mustard at a restaurant. It's clearly another instance of attempting to place Democrats in cultural opposition to 'real' Americans, as Jesse Taylor notes:
But perhaps the strangest part of all this is that when Democrats get hit for elitism (Kerry's cheesesteak, Obama's mustard), they're asking for things that the places in question had in stock to sell to customers…
revere | May 8, 2009While swine flu as a public health issue is starting to fade from the headlines (its true status as a public health issue is another matter), the problems for the pork industry might just be starting. The industry wasn't well to begin with, and for some of its members, swine flu could be a terminal event, just as with people. Hog prices were very low even before the outbreak and hog futures have declined another 20% since then. This is on top of increased costs related to feed (70% of the cost of production). Even if people can't get sick from eating pork, pigs are getting sick from being…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the local Walpurgis Night bonfire, met loads of neighbours old and new.
Played Abalone, Tigris & Euphrates and Qwirkle with Kai and other friends.
Went to a lovely dinner at the home of my friends Mattias & Lina.
Took a morning bike ride and walk in the woods to log a geocache that had appeared…
drorzel | May 3, 2009Why is it that you can buy apple cider all year round, but apple cider donuts are treated as a seasonal item, and only in stores for a week and a half in October?
Happily, these people make them year round, and they're available at the Schenectady Greenmarket. And they're awesome. Mmmmm.... cider donuts.
If all "green" activities came with cider donuts, I'd be a lot more environmentally conscious. Somebody work on that.
clock | May 2, 2009The movie Fresh, about the way we produce (and should produce) food is out. Here is the trailer:
Does anyone know when it will be in wider circulation?
Via
clock | April 25, 2009If you think that political or religious debates can get nasty, you haven't seen anything until you go online as see how much hate exists between people who love cilantro and those who hate cilantro. What horrible words they use to describe each other!!!!
Last weekend, I asked why is this and searched Twitter and FriendFeed for discussions, as well
Wikipedia and Google Scholar for information about it.
First - cilantro is the US name for the plant that is called coriander in the rest of the world. In the USA, only the seed is called coriander, and the rest of the plant is cilantro.
Second -…
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2009A recent article in MMWR Weekly with the unassuming title of "Preliminary FoodNet Data on the Incidence of Infection with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly Through Food --- 10 States, 2008" is incredibly disturbing.
The incidence of reported (more about that in a bit) Salmonella was 16.20 cases per 100,000 people. If we use a population size of 300 million, that means (Mad Biologist takes off shoes to do big number arithmetic) roughly 48,600 people had food associated Salmonella infections.
But it's probably higher than that, although I have no idea how much higher. For a Salmonella infection…
revere | April 15, 2009The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) calls it a "reality check," meaning, in their terms, a check against the mistaken idea that there is more foodborne illness these days. That's one way to look at it. Another is a look that is reality based. The reality is that there is a tremendous health burden from tainted food that is unaddressed, at least going by the same CDC Morbidity and Mortality (MMWR) report the WSJ was citing. MMWR was reporting on 2008 data from FoodNet on the incidence of infection from enteric pathogens commonly transmitted via food:
Despite numerous activities aimed at preventing…
bcohen | April 14, 2009In a post a few weeks ago, I included links to some current and recently passed legislation on food, food safety, and food labeling. One of them, H.R. 875 -- a bill "To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services" -- has a particular devotion to "science" and "science-based" data and "science-based" practices. It's all so very post-Bush era. Debate about it is now starting to ramp up on-line.
But what got me thinking more about food and labeling was the Honest Tea Organic Honey Green Tea with 250 mg of EGCG Super Anti-oxidant I recently…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2009There is a genre of complaints that I usually find a little silly: the Starbucks breakdown, which occurs when somebody's offered too many options. But now I've run into the problem myself. Yoghurt diversification.
I buy most of our milk & yoghurt to save my wife some carrying. And the damn yoghurt, that was a single product when I was a kid, now presents me with a four-parameter choice! I need to make sure I get:
Non-light
Enviro-friendly
Mild acidity
Unflavoured
jstemwedel | April 11, 2009Tomorrow being Easter, a day on which there is some expectation that there will eggs for which to hunt in the backyard (weather permitting), the Free-Ride offspring and I decorated some eggs. We had an old package of oil-based dyes to make "swirled" eggs (the basic idea being that you float drops of the dye on top of cold water, then lowers the egg into the patches of dye, creating a sort of Jackson Pollock swirly effect on the shell).
But for the next dozen eggs, we thought we'd try something a little different. So we gathered some plant materials we thought might have pigments that we…
clock | April 6, 2009Tuesday, April 21, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
Think Globally - Eat Locally
How much do you know about the food you eat? Were pesticides applied? Do you know where it was grown and how far it traveled to get to you? How much did its transportation contribute to global warming?
What can we do to bring about the revival of locally produced foods and all the benefits they bring - better taste, nutrition, stronger local economies and relationships with local farmers, reduced…
revere | April 2, 2009There has been more talk recently that our wastewater are loaded with pharmaceuticals. No surprise. People often dump out of date pills down the toilet, but much more important, they send them flushing in by excreting them. That's wastewater, though, not drinking water. They do get into drinking water, too, but at much lower levels. Now the EPA and collaborators at Baylor University have found another pathway to humans. Fish:
Fish from 5 U.S. rivers were found to be tainted with traces of medications and common chemicals, according to a new study from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…
revere | March 29, 2009I have a particular interest in food poisoning. I admit there is something unhealthy about my fascination but there it is. One of the more interesting ones is ciguatera fish poisoning, and CDC has just reported an unusual cluster from North Carolina. Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP) happens when a carnivorous fish higher in the food chain (e.g., barracuda, amberjack, red snapper, grouper) eats a smaller plant eating species that itself has dined on a large dinoflagellate called Gambierdiscus, commonly found around coral reefs in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. These little guys have a toxin…
ddobbs | March 23, 2009Now this makes my day: I've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Beard, foodees know, was a great eminence in fooddom, and won my heart years ago by stressing in one of his cookbooks that (to paraphrase) the quantity of food in a meal can be as important to its enjoyment as the food's quality -- especially if the food is good. His food awards are greatly coveted among chefs, food writers, and others who care about food.
So I'm thrilled that, as Eating Well editor Lisa Gosselin kindly informed me today,, my Eating Well story "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2009
It looks like chocolate fudge cake. It tastes like compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. It is basically compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. You have it at Easter, cold, with cream and sugar. It is a Finnish thing. It is very strange.
It is memma. You will grow to like it.
jstemwedel | March 20, 2009Today I decided to play with some chemicals I ordered to try to spherify V-8. It's the molecular gastronomy thing where you mix a liquid with sodium alginate, then drip it into an aqueous solution of calcium chloride to get the juice-alginate mixture to gel, forming a skin around a liquid center.
My first attempt did not produce the results I was shooting for.
First off, my kitchen scale, a lovely little device that measures with a precision of 1/8 ounce or 1 gram, is not great for measuring tenths of grams. Who knew that I'd miss Mettler balances (and weighing boats)?
Second of all, V-8,…