food
omnibrain | December 22, 2006From the old blog:I thought I would share an abstract I ran across while paging through some journals that I ordered from the stacks.
Human Ethology: The snack-bar security syndrome
By David P. Barash
From State University College (SUC?!), Oneonta, N.Y.
Psychological Reports, 1972, 31, 577-578.
Summary.-- I studied the behavior of Homo sapiens in an eating-place and found indications of security-seeking behavior, perhaps suggesting an unconscious, species-preserving fear of predators. Solitary individuals showed a significant preference for wall tables over center tables while grouped…
clock | December 20, 2006Somehow I feel that I've been tagged by Janet for this meme, because it is public that we celebrate Hannukkah. But we really make it low-key, family-only, and have only been doing it for about a dozen years so far. Actually, this is the first time that we had guests for the first night.
1. Latkes or Sufganiyot?
Latkes. Mrs.Coturnix is a superb Latke-Meister.
2. Multi-colored candles or blue-and-white?
Coturnix Jr. lights the blue-and-white candles, Coturnietta lights the multicolored.
3. Do you place the Hanukiah by the window or away from the window?
In this house, away from the window…
omnibrain | December 15, 2006It seems warning labels might be popping up in a few more places - one of which is on the inside of clothing for larger people? I wonder if they're going to put pictures on the label? I can't see a warning label doing much good there.
Check out their other recommendations:
Clothes made in larger sizes should carry a tag with an obesity helpline number, health specialists have suggested. Sweets and snacks should not be permitted near checkouts, new roads should not be built unless they include cycle lanes and food likely to make people fat should be taxed, they say in a checklist of what we…
omnibrain | December 12, 2006Lonely at dinner?
Give this new product from a Dutch art company a try, it includes a DVD which "will allow a lonesome dinner to become one full of holiday fun and good cheer with dinner companions eating, drinking, and engaging in conversation.
The DVD will feature actors reading out different scripts in other for people to pick out which type of people they would want best."
-via engadget and some other news site
Of course there isn't a video to help you to not feel like an idiot after having a made up conversation with a TV screen.
clock | December 7, 2006Amanda just reviewed Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma and also recently wrote a post on the same topic while under the influence of the book. I agree with her 100%, so go and read both posts.
I have read the book a couple of months ago and never found time to write a review of my own. I also remember that I finished the book on a Thursday afternoon - an important piece of information as it is on Thursday afternoons that there is a Farmers' Market here in Southern Village, barely a block from me. The first thing I did when I closed the book was to walk up to the Farmers' Market…
omnibrain | December 5, 2006
One of the most important articles ever written appears in the The 1985 Old Farmer's Almanac entitled "Three Ways to Hypnotize a Chicken." Thanks for the links Eamon!
Dr. White shows her audiences two methods of hypnotizing chickens. The Oscillating Finger Method is probably the easier of the two. Place the bird on its side with a wing under its body and hold it down gently. Make sure its head is flat on the table. To hypnotize the bird, use one finger of the free hand, moving the finger back and forth in front of the bird's beak from its tip (without touching it) to a point that is about…
revere | December 4, 2006Years ago we used to joke that the cigarette murderers should just short circuit the process and add chemotherapeutic agents to their products. One stop cancer initiation and treatment. That was years ago.
Functional beer is another emerging product identified by Datamonitor, with beer manufacturers trying to regain ground lost to increasingly popular wine by launching new products with health benefits. These include vitamin beers, such as Stampede Light, which contains B-vitamins, folic acid and folate, as well as Germany's Karlesberg
Braueri functional beers aimed at women, made with…
omnibrain | December 1, 2006
Ahh Halloween - when neuroscientists find all sorts of fake brains for sale and recipes to create them.
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 vanilla
8 oz. pomegranite juice
1/4 cup cornstarch
Place milk in a…
drorzel | November 30, 2006Over at the World's Fair, David has a post with pictures showing a week's worth of food for families in various countries. It's pretty eye-opening-- the total volume of food (less packaging) for a family of four in the US or England exceeds that eaten by fifteen people in Mali.
Damn, but we're gluttons.
drorzel | November 25, 2006We had an enormous turkey carcass left over at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, so I said "Hey, turkey soup." The basic idea is simplicity itself-- cut the carcass into managable pieces, stick it in a big put, cover it with water, and simmer for a good long while. After an hour or two, you've got a big put of soup stock, with stuff floating in it.
At this point, most recipes suggest straining the stock, to remove the miscellaneous bits of stuff. Which raises the important question: Strain it into what, exactly? The stock is already in the biggest pot that we own, which is at least double the…
drorzel | November 24, 2006The Thanksgiving advice from Making Light got here too late to do us any good, but we had a fine first Thanksgiving anyway. My parents, sister, grandmother, and one of my great-aunts came up from New York, and Kate's parents came up from Boston, so we packed nine people into our smallish house, along with more food than we really needed.
But then, Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday: built around excess. What other country would come up with a holiday whose principal observation is gorging to excess, and then watching football on tv? So the turkey was a little too big-- that…
clock | November 22, 2006Well, it's Thanksgiving tomorrow night so it's time to republish this post from last year, just in time for the ageless debate: does eating turkey meat make you sleepy? Some people say Yes, some people say No, and the debate can escalate into a big fight. The truth is - we do not know.
But for this hypothesis to be true, several things need to happen. In this post I look at the evidence for each of the those several things. Unfortunately, nobody has put all the elements together yet, and certainly not in a human. I am wondering...is there a simple easily-controlled experiment that…
revere | November 20, 2006Reader Dylan has brought me the good news that the Bush Administration, with its many failings, has a plan to wipe out hunger in America. Really. And I think they will carry it out. Really.
The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."
Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.
Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is…
moleculeoftheday | November 10, 2006Saccharin, like so many sweeteners, was discovered by accident. From the Wikipedia article:
Saccharin's sweetness was accidentally discovered by Ira Remsen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Constantin Fahlberg, a research fellow working in Remsen's lab. In 1879, while working with coal tar derivatives (toluene), Remsen discovered saccharin's sweetness at dinner after not thoroughly washing his hands, as did Fahlberg during lunch. Remsen and Fahlberg jointly published their discovery in 1880 (Fahlberg, C.; Remsen, I. Ãber die Oxydation des Orthotoluolsulfamids. Chem. Ber. 1879, 12…
clock | November 2, 2006Shelley has already explained the recent study about the life-span increasing properties of Resveratrol, a compound found in wine.
Article in NYT tries to make a quick calculation (apparently erroneous) as of how much wine a person would have to drink in order to receive the same dose as the lab mice got in this study - "from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day"!
Perhaps the dose would be smaller if you could stand drinking the super-sweet Scuppernong (from muscadine grape - Vitis Rotundifolia) wine from Duplin Winery here in Rose Hill, North Carolina. As horribly sweet as it is, I…
clock | October 18, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is:
A reader asks: Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?
There is no way I can get out of this one! As far as I know, I am the only one here who actually did research on fasting! Mind you, it's been about 5 years since I last delved deep into the literature on the effects of fasting and feeding on various body functions, mainly body temperature and circadian rhythms, but I can try to pull something out of my heels now.
I'll try to somehow systematize this, by breaking the problem down…
clock | October 15, 2006Good article by Michael Pollan in today's NYT Magazine: The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
moleculeoftheday | October 6, 2006Lactisole is a pretty simple compound, apparently first found in roasted coffee. I doubt it tastes like much; maybe soapy at high concentrations. However, at relatively low concentrations (0.1% by weight), it has the unique ability to suppress sweet flavors.
The estimable Harold McGee says that it can reduce sweetness by ca. two-thirds. Why would you want to do this? So your jams and jellies taste fruitier and less cloying, apparently. Neat, anyway.
clock | October 5, 2006..but were too afraid to ask. Or, why do I, unlike some people, like stale cookies.