Roots
gregladen | July 14, 2016It is sad that most sushi lovers will never have real wasabi. I had assumed that I had sampled real wasabi when I spent several days eating sushi morning noon and night in Actual Japan. But even then, there is a good chance I never tasted the stuff.
The reason that most "wasabi" is fake, and the agronomy and chemistry of wasabi, turn out to be really interesting.
Here is the background info references in the video.
sastyk | November 21, 2011My mother in law ate a roasted turnip at my house the other day. It was unfamiliar enough to her in that form (she'd had mashed turnips before) that she had to ask me what it was, and it was a reminder of the fact that this time of year truly is the only time that many Americans come in contact with the lesser-known root vegetables. While carrots, potatoes and onions are part of our daily lives, and sweet potatoes and beets are at least intermittenly familiar (if commonly hated), few Americans know celeriac, turnips, parsnips, taro, rutabagas, yams, jerusalem artichokes or many others well…
gregladen | January 4, 2010I had mentioned earlier that the volcanoes of the Virugna region in the Western Rift Valley (as well as other highland spots) have often been islands of rain forest separated from each other by different habitats, including grasslands and wooded savannas. this has produced an island effect that has been a laboratory for evolution, and it is likely that these forest islands (and others in the greater region of east Central Africa and western East Africa) have been the loci of evolution of many endemic species. (See Island Africa: The Evolution of Africa's Rare Animals and Plants by Kingdon…
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
gregladen | August 14, 2008Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even if they were not right, this paper still has much to contribute, including the opening words of that publication in Science, which are very much worthy of consideration for many reasons:
It is no longer true that there are more practitioners than pieces. In fact, when I encountered this…
gregladen | February 19, 2008
Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can't find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies. This assertion is based on work done by the Grants and others with Galapagos Island finches, by Richard Wrangham and me with hominids, and by Betsy Burr and me with rodents.
The reason for this is simple. There is a rough correspondence between how much energy one can obtain from a food type and…
gregladen | February 13, 2008Can you believe this guy? Check it out:
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once proposed that humanity began with cooking. [a Twin Cities anthropologist] says love may have begun with cooking, as well.
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The earliest human ancestors, some kind of chimp-like apes, were living off raw plant foods and probably doing a bit of hunting like chimpanzees do now.
And then, somebody discovers the ability to control fire. Everybody argues about when this happened. We're saying it happened about 2 million years ago. Suddenly, all this food that was previously poisonous or indigestible…
gregladen | November 12, 2007Many years ago a couple of researchers (Hatley and Kappleman) suggested omnivory, including eating of roots, to be a common theme in the adaptations we see in bears, humans, and pigs. Some years later, Richard Wrangham and I independently and for different reasons came to the idea that roots are potentially important in human evolution, so we collaborated on a paper suggesting this. Subsequently, bits and pieces of data have been accumulating to support this hypothesis (the "root hypothesis"). And here, Jim Moore of San Diego, is reporting on living chimps eating roots in a relatively…