Food and Drink
ddobbs | June 23, 2010I'm 'posed to be writing, really writing (insert argument over what's really writing in comments), but hit so many juicy bits in my morning read today I wanted to share. Here's my eclectic mix for the day:
A great rompy scary post from @susanorlean on how her book bounced around many publishers and editors.
Keith Kloor at Collide-a-scape has a round-up of stories on the "credibility of climate experts" report
"memory performance boosted while walking"  Beautiful. Perhaps why walking oft solves writing probs.  via @mariapage:
"Theory Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" From @kerin at…
ddobbs | March 18, 2010
The sky before Katrina struck, from Rense.com Correction: I been snookered. As alert reader Alex Witze pointed out, these photos were taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas in 2002 and 2004, and have passed around the net in other guises ever since. For more amazing storm photos, go to Hollingshead's site, extremeinstability.com. He has some doozies.
You may be shocked but not surprised to hear that Insurance Company Dropped Customers With HIV.
We knew this, but The World Needs More Vegetarians.
Robert Kaplan ponders the challenge that is Man Versus Afghanistan.
I…
ddobbs | January 25, 2010
In my "Atlantic article on the genetic roots of stable-versus-reactive temperaments, I noted that the key gene variants linked to these traits appeared to have developed over only the last 50,000-100,000 years -- a short time in evolutionary time. That same idea is developed in Cochran and Harpending's "The 10,000-year Explosion." Here Razib at Gene Expression looks at polymorphisms that have developed over the last 10,000 years in response to agriculture.
Changes in human diet driven by cultural evolution seem to be at the root of many relatively recently emerged patterns of genetic…
scientificactivist | January 4, 2010Go to the bottom of the post to see my recommended methods for cooking rice.
This week, I resolved that for the new year I would start blogging more frequently. Given that I really haven't been blogging at all recently, that shouldn't be too hard. I won't bore you with the various reasons why blogging has been so slow recently, but it seems that starting a new job and a new life in a new city has upended my old routines. One activity that I have been focusing much more effort on in my new life, though, is cooking. Spurred in part by reading Ratio by Michael Ruhlman, I've been trying to…
ddobbs | July 4, 2009Spencer 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…
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…
ddobbs | December 9, 2008Looks like a special effects lab, but it's a bakery that makes bread in the shape (and look) of body parts. Via Biomedicine on Display, where you can find more photos as well as a link to this YouTube video of the baked goods.
My wife is an ace baker as well as a vegetarian. Not sure what she's going to think of this.
ddobbs | November 25, 2008Vintage Trillin:By Meat Alone: The Best Texas BBQ in the World
The first time Burka went to Lexington to check out Snow's, he arrived
just before noon. "It looked like it had never been open," he said. "It
was deserted." When he finally got there at a time when meat was still
available, he was convinced. In fact, he was rhapsodic, particularly
concerning the brisket ("as soft and sweet as cookie dough") and the
pork butt. Smith believed that Burka's description of the latter--"the
butt was tender and yielding"--was in need of some editing, but, without
having to consume any critters…
ddobbs | June 18, 2008
Nothing like that first cup of the day
Personally I am glad to read this:
First came the fine news that red wine may help prevent Alzheimer's. Now a 20-year study (admittedly a bit flabby) of 125.000 health-care in Spain found that drinking 2 or more cups of java a day may help prevent heart disease. I find this a good thing to contemplate as I drink my first cup today.
Catch it in the abstract of the paper by Esther Lopez-Garcia and colleagues in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a news story by Ewen Callaway at NewScientist, or the skeptic's take at Dana Blankenhorn's ZDNet Healthcare…