food
sporte | November 23, 2008This wasn't in the lab, but it was an accident, and it was funny later on.
Normally, I wouldn't think twice about storing bacterial cultures in a refrigerator. After all, bacteria on a petri plate, inside of a plastic bag, are kind of stuck. They can't get out of the plates, and even if they did, they certainly can't crawl out of a plastic bag.
I thought soil bacteria, on agar plates, were mostly harmless.
Reposted from DigitalBio's greatest hits.
Technorati Tags: humor, bacteria, taste, funny, tasting, food, Streptomyces
When my husband was finishing graduate school, he brought home some…
revere | November 18, 2008It's now two and half months since CDC and US FDA declared an end to the infamous tomatoes-no-it's-peppers salmonella outbreak of last summer. The outbreak itself was even longer: 3 months. There were some 1400 reported cases but probably many more that escaped detection. That's typical for foodborne disease outbreaks.
In case you've forgotten, here's a summary, courtesy Georgetown University's Produce Safety Project (PSP):
Although CDC and FDA initially pointed in early June to tomatoes as the cause of the outbreak based on epidemiological data, no contaminated tomato was ever found. In…
revere | November 17, 2008The team of investigative reporting team of Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel just keeps rolling along, this time with an amazing story about how microwave safe plastics are leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) at potentially unsafe levels. We are saying potentially unsafe because we really know little about the effects of hormone mimics like BPA except that at levels currently found in BPA containing plastics in contact with food and liquids produce biological effects in test systems and a recent analysis of a representative survey of US adults showed an association…
revere | November 12, 2008Half of all restaurants in the United States are fast food restaurants. They do $100 billion worth of business a year (that's one seventh of a Bailout, a new unit of expenditure). A lot of the fast food is in the form of beef (hamburgers), chicken (sandwiches, tenders or nuggets) and french fries. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, familiarly known in the trade as "penis") uses stable isotope analysis to trace the input materials in three large fast food chains. The results can be summed up in one word -- corn:
We used carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes…
revere | November 7, 2008So we have more Salmonella contamination out and about. This one is in dry pet food. But it wasn't the pets that were getting the Salmonella:
Salmonella-contaminated dry pet food sickened at least 79 people, including many young children, and could still be dangerous, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.
Even though the affected brands have been recalled and the factory in Pennsylvania closed, pet owners could still have the cat and dog kibble in their homes, the CDC said.
[snip]
"Dry pet food has a 1-year shelf life. Contaminated products identified in…
revere | November 1, 2008Blogging can vary in spontaneity. Some bloggers spend a lot of effort honing individual posts, while some do a lot of "one offs" in response to rapidly changing events. A limiting form of the latter is "live blogging," essentially reporting in real time during a meeting, demonstration or particular event. In this sense blogging isn't very different than print journalism. There are stories that are quickies, just reporting some facts or acting as a stenographer for the government, a political campaign or commercial press release. Then there are the more in-depth analytical and investigative…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2008Earlier this week, I cooked up about a pound of the bush beans from our garden. There was a mix of yellow, green, and purple beans (although, as expected, steaming transformed the purple beans to a dark green color). I dressed the cooked beans as usual and served them with dinner.
As I was clearing the table after the meal, I saw this:
Where did that pink liquid come from?!
None of the ingredients I used to make the beans were pink (or even red or orange). Was this a supernatural phenomenon (HAUNTED BEANS!!)?
Actually, on reflection, I came to a reasonable explanation about the source of…
revere | October 30, 2008We've been keeping an eye out for the FDA's expert task force review of their own draft report on bisphenol-A (BPA; for more posts see here, here, here, here, here for other BPA posts). We previously reported to you the concern that the (outside) chair of that expert panel had a risk assessment institute at the University of Michigan that was the recipient of a large gift from one of the most vociferous proponents of BPA's safety and an ardent anti-regulatory ideologue. Whether it was a result of "working the refs" or a straightforward judgment, the panel has returned its report, concurring…
revere | October 24, 2008Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and their colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The draft report says BPA is…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2008Given that today is Mole Day, it seemed only fair to follow up on our earlier experimentation with avocados. You may recall that, in discussing our efforts to dissolve avocados, we said:
One further experiment we've decided to try at some future point is to investigate whether we can make mayonnaise substituting mashed avocado for some or all of the oil.
That future point? Now a past point.
Before I report the results from our kitchen, let's talk a little about mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise is traditionally made up of oil, egg, and lemon juice (or something equivalent).
You know oil and…
jstemwedel | October 22, 2008Maybe you heard about the melamine contamination issue when tainted pet food started killing pets. But, if you don't have a pet, maybe you didn't worry so much.
Or maybe you noticed when tainted infant formula started sending infants to the hospital. Stuff that harms babies (even way far away in China) is really sad. But if you're not currently caring for a baby that ingests infant formula, eventually your attention wandered.
Then the news came that melamine levels were testing high in treats like White Rabbit candies and Panda's March cookies -- treats that may have been on your shelves (…
grrlscientist | October 13, 2008tags: Seattle Washington, University District, first things, University of Washington
Seattle, Washington.
Image: GrrlScientist, 26 September 2008 [larger view].
This will be my last photoessay from my Seattle visit. I sincerely hope I will be able to return for more visits, but because my life has gone the way it has, I think of every visit to Seattle (or elsewhere) as my last, so leaving is intensely sad. Of course, this does not mean that I don't also love NYC, because I do, but Seattle is a physical reminder of happier and more successful and hopeful times in my life, of my many…
drorzel | October 11, 2008When people attending a meeting-- particularly a meeting that starts at 8am on a Saturday-- elect to drink tea rather than coffee, they do so because they do not want coffee. For this reason, it is imperative that you not select the urns at random from a large pile of them, but rather use urns for hot water that have not been used for coffee.
If I wanted brownish coffee-flavored hot water, I would drink coffee, and not bother with the tea bags.
Thank you.
clock | October 10, 2008In this weekend's New York Times: Farmer in Chief :'
Dear Mr. President-Elect,
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration -- the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are…
grrlscientist | October 9, 2008tags: Seattle Washington, Ballard Farmer's Market, fresh produce, fresh fish, wine, flowers
Dinner at Shannon's,
using fish, produce and wine from the Ballard farmer's market.
Image: GrrlScientist 28 September 2008 [larger view].
"Do you photograph every meal you eat?" Shannon sounded amused as I pointed my camera at the mushrooms in the frying pan.
"Well .. not exactly," I replied, thinking of all the meals that I had photographed, realizing that nearly all of them were meals I had eaten while traveling.
"After photographing parts of the Farmer's Market, it just seems to be the right…
grrlscientist | October 6, 2008tags: Seattle Washington, Ballard Farmer's Market, photoessay, autumn bounty, harvest
Raspberries.
Ballard farmer's Market, Seattle, Washington.
Image: GrrlScientist 26 September 2008 [larger view].
When I was in Seattle, a couple friends and I went to the Ballard Farmer's Market, which is much much larger than when I last lived in Seattle.
The day was bright and warm, the air was lightly scented with seaweed and fish, and the autumn harvest was a photographer's dream! I could have spent days here with my camera. I really liked the contrast between the splotchy colors and curved lines…
clock | October 4, 2008The offal refers to....
....those parts of a meat animal which are used as food but which are not skeletal muscle. The term literally means "off fall", or the pieces which fall from a carcase when it is butchered. Originally the word applied principally to the entrails. It now covers insides including the HEART, LIVER, and LUNGS (collectively known as the pluck), all abdominal organs and extremities: TAILS, FEET, and HEAD including BRAINS and TONGUE. In the USA the expressions "organ meats" or "variety meats" are used instead.
Offal from birds is usually referred to as GIBLETS.
Another,…
clock | October 3, 2008Apparently yes: Freshwater Farm Ponds Turning into Crab Farms:
North Carolina's native blue crab population has been at historic lows since 2000. Dr. Dave Eggleston, director of NC State's Center for Marine Sciences and Technology (CMAST) and professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, looked at various methods for helping the population recover. He hit upon a solution which not only reduces pressure on existing crab populations, but also benefits farmers looking to diversify their crops: using irrigation ponds on farms to grow blue crabs.
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Eggleston and…
clock | October 3, 2008In today's Grist - Politics and the Dinner Table: Weighing Obama's and McCain's stances on food and farm policy:
In the end, Pollan is likely right: Whatever the candidates are saying now (or not saying at all), events may require the 44th president to deal with food issues in ways that break radically with past policies. Silly ideas like propping up ethanol production may soon be unthinkable. One candidate has demonstrated openness to the notion of sustainable agriculture and "local and regional food systems"; the other hasn't. Neither will likely push bold change unless forced to do so.…