food
revere | August 1, 2007I haven't given much credence to the hype about internet child predators. But now it turns out the predators are really there, we know there names, and they even live in our neighborhoods, although they haven't registered anywhere except the phonebook:
Some of the world's leading food manufacturers have begun marketing to children on social networking websites and internet chat programs.
Brands such as McDonald's, Starburst, Haribo and Skittles are using the internet to target children now that new rules from the media regulator Ofcom have made it difficult to advertise during children's…
moleculeoftheday | July 27, 2007Like auxins, (see also) alar is a small molecule that modulates plant growth:
Chemists will recognize the N-N moiety as a hydrazine, some nasty stuff (and 1,1-dimethylhydrazine is a hydrolysis product of this stuff). Back in the late '80's, there was a huge cancer scare about this stuff - and farmers were spraying it all over our fruit. It's regarded as many corners as an overblown food scare, but some insist that this was the beginning of a slippery slope towards food libel laws (the basis for Texas ranchers suing Oprah Winfrey for saying she was done with beef during her mad cow episode…
angrytoxicologist | July 24, 2007A study done at the University of Michigan found that organic crops produced yields no different than conventional farming in developed countries and may actually increase the yields in developing countries. This could be for a couple of reasons including "narrow row spacings, environmentally friendly soil conservation practices and natural insect control" but also the general fact that organic farmers give a lot of though on how to get the most out of their land (possibly because the CW is that organic yields are less?). An MSU extension guy says that this doesn't jive with his experience,…
clock | July 21, 2007A good WaPo article: Pelosi takes heat for OK of farm bill
Ken Cook explains it very clearly: The Pelosi Farm Bill: A Corn Subsidy Windfall
revere | July 21, 2007When I was a young-un no one ever heard about food allergies. Of course there were food allergies. We just never heard much about them. But now we not only hear about them, we hear about people, often children, who die from food allergy. Often peanut allergy. What's really weird about this is that in my day kids lived on peanut butter. Now some of them die with the slightest whiff of peanut antigen. And there seems to be peanut antigen in a lot of things, either by design or by cross contamination of equipment. Peanut antigen, you might think, is one of the most potent food allergy proteins…
clock | July 18, 2007Get yourself some Harry Potter recipes so you have something to eat while reading The Book over the weekend.
moleculeoftheday | July 16, 2007Alginic acid is a simple polysaccharide. What makes it neat is that it will form gels in the presence of divalent cations (e.g., calcium and magnesium).
It's useful anywhere a biocompatible and/or edible gel is required - one well-known use is fake cherries. If you drop a solution of sugary, red, cherry-flavored sodium alginate into a calcium-containing solution, the exterior of the droplet will skin over and form a gross little cherry-like thing.
Interestingly, the famous "molecular gastronomy" restaurant El Bulli uses alginate extensively to create caviar-like droplets of various liquids.…
clock | July 15, 2007Michael Pollan will be on On Point on NPR, talking about the farm bill tomorrow (Monday) morning at 10am EST. This is in advance of some important votes in the House next week.
clock | July 11, 2007New Habanero Blasts Taste Buds -- And Pepper Pests:
The super-hot, bright orange TigerPaw-NR habanero pepper offers extreme pungency for pepper aficionados, plus nematode resistance that will make it a hit with growers and home gardeners. Plant geneticist Richard L. Fery and plant pathologist Judy A. Thies at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) U.S. Vegetable Laboratory, Charleston, S.C., put the pepper through three years of greenhouse and field tests before determining, in 2006, that it was ready for commercial fields and backyard gardens.
Exhibiting A Pepper For Every Pot:
Peppers don'…
omnibrain | July 10, 2007I'm excited to announce that I've been named an associate editor for a new high profile journal, Chocolate Pudding Letters Review. Read below for our first call for papers:
CALL FOR PAPERS!
We are now accepting papers for the 1st issue of CPLR! DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY! Leading scientists anticipate that CPLR will become the premier outlet for major breakthroughs in the study of chocolate pudding (CP) and other viscous edible creations (VECs).
Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, 1) theoretical reviews, 2) empirical works, 3) recipes, 4) novel…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2007
I've embarked on three weeks of summertime solo fatherhood as my wife works for a cookery mag in town. Today I sent the kids and their friends out to the overcast playground for an hour, listened to the Pixies and re-boxed my computer odds-and-ends, discovering innumerable useful cables and connectors, three old Sportster modems and five or six mouses, most of which have no scroll wheel.
Parenting tip: to get kids to eat veggies, hand them out while they play video games. Zombie-like and unfazed, they will chomp carrots and cucumber as they stare at the screen. Anything that isn't directly…
revere | July 9, 2007Caffeine doesn't bother me. I seem to be able to drink it at bedtime and then go right to sleep. But there are a lot of people caffeine does bother. A lot. So how much caffeine is in various foodstuffs, like carbonated beverages, is a matter of interest. It is added intentionally for its CNS stimulating effect. In other words, it's a drug. The fact there is caffeine in the product is on the label but the amount isn't.
Colas, pepper-like beverages and citrus beverages usually or often contain caffeine. A paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Food Science shows there is huge…
clock | July 9, 2007I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week.
As I am at work and unable to moderate comments, the comment section is closed on this post, but will be open on the previous post (here) where I hope you will remain civil and stay on topic. You are also welcome to comment on this interview at several other places (e.g,. DailyKos, MyDD, TPMCafe, Science And Politics, Liberal Coalition, the Edwards campaign blog as well as, hopefully, your own blogs).
I…
clock | June 30, 2007While in San Francisco, I'd like to eat at Incanto (look around the site for their menu and progressive food and water policies, and they also have a blog). It is at 1550 Church Street, on the southwest corner of Church and Duncan Streets in San Francisco's Noe Valley. Where is that? Anyone game to go with me?
revere | June 26, 2007The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the most incompetent and dysfunctional in the federal government (Katrina is one example; but only one). DHS also has a very expansive view of its role. Almost everything is a matter of homeland security. That includes epidemic disease, where there remains uncertainty as to who will do what to whom in the event of a pandemic. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), they also want to give the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) the bird:
In an effort to prepare for H5N1, the USDA rolled out a series of measures including…
omnibrain | June 20, 2007Seriously!
According to the BBC News:
Drinking coffee protects against an eyelid spasm that can lead to blindness, a study suggests.
Italian researchers looked at the coffee drinking and smoking habits of 166 people with blepharospasm.
Sufferers have uncontrollable twitching of the eyelid which, in extreme cases, stops them being able to see.
One or two cups of coffee a day seemed to reduce the risk of the condition, the team reported in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
Not that I've ever heard of blepharospasm ;) It is a great disease name though - I'll give you that!
revere | June 14, 2007A newspaper in Taiwan newspaper is telling its readers the Chinese government reports 13% of its chili powder based products failed Chinese safety tests:
The products came from 38 companies in 12 provinces and municipalities, including Beijing and Shanghai, the report said without detailing if any of the chilli was exported.
"The products produced by small firms have lots of safety problems, while those from large- and middle-sized ones have all passed the safety tests," it quoted the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine as saying.
Many of the tested…
moleculeoftheday | June 8, 2007Safrole is a simple organic compound found in sassafras oil:
It has a pleasant odor and used to be used to flavor root beer, but sassafras oil has fallen out of favor in the past few years for a few reasons: first, safrole has been deemed carcinogenic and banned as a flavoring agent by the US FDA. Second, it's actually a drug precursor - like pseudoephedrine-containing allergy medicines, it's not illegal to buy sassafras oil (as far as I know, I've never tried!), but it's watched closely by US drug enforcement. The people buying pints at a time probably aren't making a few gallons of root…
moleculeoftheday | May 21, 2007Whenever I mention artificial sweeteners, it seems to rouse a fight about what's safe, what's not, saccharin this, Stevia that. Around the time saccharin was discovered, another sweetener came on the market: dulcin.
I'm not sure how dangerous it is relative to saccharin - it was banned due to putative carcinogenicity, which the warning label touts as one of saccharin's dangers as well. If you take a look at refused FDA imports from China, you can see that some food imports are rejected because of their dulcin content!
I am told the fact that every shipment in that link containing dulcin was…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2007
Dear Reader Arkein from the land of the Freedom Fries and EuroDisney set me a-thinking about Medieval barns, butcheries, kitchens and dinner-tables. I've got a story about that, and I believe it's far more likely to be true than that slanderous yarn about Louis XIV's pinkie.
The English language has different words for livestock species and for their meat. Cow -- beef. Pig -- pork. Sheep -- mutton. And there's a pattern to the linguistic descent of these words: the live-animal words were there already in Old English, whereas the meat words are French loan words appearing from the Middle…