food, drinks, restaurants
The harp that once or twice
{ Why do some people enjoy the taste of broccoli while others find it bitter and unpleasant? Why do some seek out spicy and tangy meals on a restaurant’s menu while others stick with the bland and familiar? New research is uncovering the neurobiological and genetic sources of taste preferences, which can influence not just eating habits but also health. | Brain Facts | full story }
On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups
Although organic foods are often marketed with moral terms (e.g., Honest Tea, Purity Life, and Smart Balance), no research to date has investigated the extent to which exposure to organic foods influences moral judgments or behavior. After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods. These results suggest that exposure to organic foods may lead people to affirm their moral identities, which attenuates their desire to be altruistic.
If you’re going to eat some psychedelic mushrooms in your soup, you may as well wash it down with tequila
The aim of this article is to discuss how changes in tomato food regulation, production and consumption, can be seen as part of a broader societal change from Modernity to Late Modernity.
Based on evidence from the Swedish and European food systems we demonstrate how a system, which has been successfully managing development in food production for several decades by stressing rationality, homogeneity and standardization, is being challenged by a system that has adapted to, and also exploited, consumer preferences such as heterogeneity, diversity and authenticity.
The article shows how tomato growers develop differentiation strategies, adapting to and cultivating this new consumer interest, and how authorities responsible for regulations of trade and quality struggle to adapt to the new situation. As the products become more diversified, taste becomes an important issue and is associated with a view that traditional and natural are superior to standardized and homogeneous products.
Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse
Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.
“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. […]
Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. […]
As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century, around the time Europeans began regularly using forks for eating and soap for bathing. But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg writes, but “allegedly without effect.”)
photo { Volgareva Irina }
It’s very important not to embellish on your order. No extraneous comments. No questions. No compliments.
How much is a recipe worth? About $1.8 million, according to the owner of Kay Lee Roast Meat Joint, who boosted the sale price of her Singapore eatery by that amount when she put it on the market this year.
Betty Kong and her husband want S$3.5 million ($2.8 million) for their 60-plastic-stool establishment, a premium over the S$1.25 million assessed value of the site. The price includes the property, their recipe for roasting duck, pork ribs and crispy pig skin as well as other Cantonese-style classics, plus three months of cooking lessons — and, presumably, the loyal clientele that lines up outside, sometimes for more than an hour. (…)
While the food may be good, a buyer could find better things to do with the more than S$2 million premium than become the owner of some roast-pork recipes, writes Singaporean food blogger, K.F. Seetoh.
photo { Brian Finke }
‘Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.’ –Salvador Dali
Well-meaning friends and family members may suggest that you have a couple of drinks after living through a stressful event. A friend of mine had a bike accident recently that sent her over a car door and miraculously left her with only a few bruises. Having a couple of drinks immediately after this will of course dull her nerves, since ethanol is an anxiolytic. But is it really a good idea to get tipsy (or worse) after living through a stressful event?
lt’s well known that acute stress modulates memory in a powerful way. People who have lived through a traumatic event will often either have either perfect photographic memory of the event or partial or total amnesia. Untreated, exposure to a traumatic event can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which causes long-term problems. There exist preventive treatments that, when applied immediately after the traumatic event, have been shown to decrease the likelihood of getting PTSD. This includes antagonists of adrenaline and NMDA receptors; this messes with the acquisition of memory.
Of course good ol’ beer will mess with the acquisition of memory; that’s why people get brownouts and blackouts. It is also an antagonist of NMDA receptors (among many other systemic effects). So given that alcohol is an anxiolytic and that it causes amnesia, it doesn’t seem such a stretch to think that having a beer right after very a stressful event (within the next, say, 6 hours) will decrease the likelihood of long-term negative consequences (say, developing a phobia of biking).
This is of course the sort of hypothesis that is very hard to get funding to test. We do know that PTSD sufferers frequently turn to alcohol after their trauma and that this negatively affects outcome. And drowning your sorrows is never the solution. To be clear, taking an anxiolytic and amnesiac acutely to avoid acquiring a potentially adverse memory of a traumatic event and taking it in a sustained way after the memory is consolidated to drown it out are two completely different things.
artwork { Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 1980 }
Sometimes less is more. Yeah, if you are really fucking bad at math.
Recent years has seen the emergence of a popular ‘raw food’ movement. Dehydrating food to make it palatable, raw-foodies argue that cooking food destroys valuable vitamins and enzymes, rendering it nutritionally impoverished. It sounds logical, but – especially with vegetables – is often false. Many vegetables actually gain nutritional value after careful cooking or steaming. Furthermore, a strict vegan raw food diet is not good for long term health. (…)
Red meat is notable in that it contains a good source of B-vitamins that are essential for healthy muscles, skin and nerves. It also contains iron and other important minerals. Like most things however, steak should be in moderation as a high intake is associated with colon cancer and other health nasties. (…)
• The longer steak is cooked, the fewer vitamins it contains
• Cooking meat in water reduces its vitamin content further (the vitamins leech out into the water)
• The levels of iron and zinc increase with cooking
• Fat levels drop with cooking
photo { Thomas Demand, Junior Suite [Whitney Houston’s last supper], 2012 | NY Times | DesignBoom }
And of course Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business
Researchers have shown that by becoming carnivores, our ancestors were able to give birth to a greater number of offspring.
“Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods to be reduced and thereby the time between births to be shortened,” said lead author Elia Psouni from Lund University in Sweden. “This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.”
Past research has tried to explain the relatively short breast-feeding period of humans based on social and behavioral theories of parenting and family size. For an average human baby, the duration of breast-feeding is two years and four months. This is not long in relation to the maximum lifespan of our species - around 120 years. It is even less if compared to our closest relatives - female chimpanzees suckle their young for four to five years, whereas the maximum lifespan for chimpanzees is only 60 years.
O, wrap up meat, parcels: various uses, thousand and one things.
Definitions of a calorie fall into two classes:
▪ The small calorie or gram calorie (symbol: cal) approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. This is about 4.2 joules.
▪ The large calorie, kilogram calorie, or food calorie (symbol: Cal) approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 °C. This is exactly 1,000 small calories or about 4.2 kilojoules. It is also called the nutritionist’s calorie.
In an attempt to avoid confusion, the large calorie is sometimes written as Calorie (with a capital C). (…) The gram calorie, however, is too small a unit for use in nutritional contexts. Instead, the kilocalorie (symbol: kcal) or large calorie is used. In this context calorie and kilocalorie are equivalent.
photos { Irving Penn | Oliver Schwarzwald }
You only live once, and most people don’t even do that
You never forget your first taste of sperm. In Japanese, the word is shirako, which translates as “white children” or “albino.” You might also hear it described as, a bit more appetizingly, white pillows or fluffy clouds. To be honest, if it weren’t for the steady stream of sake and peer pressure from people we understand to be our friends, we probably would not have ordered the cod sperm sacs (tara shirako ponzu) from the specials menu at Hanako on a recent night.
{ BK | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
‘It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.’ –W. C. Fields
Absinthe, a bitter spirit containing wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.), was banned at the beginning of the 20th century as consequence of its supposed unique adverse effects. After nearly century- long prohibition, absinthe has seen a resurgence after recent de-restriction in many European countries. This review provides information on the history of absinthe and one of its constituent, thujone. Medical and toxicological aspects experienced and discovered before the prohibition of absinthe are discussed in detail, along with their impact on the current situation. The only consistent conclusion that can be drawn from those 19th century studies about absinthism is that wormwood oil but not absinthe is a potent agent to cause seizures. Neither can it be concluded that the beverage itself was epileptogenic nor that the so-called absinthism can exactly be distinguished as a distinct syndrome from chronic alcoholism.
The theory of a previous gross overestimation of the thujone content of absinthe may have been verified by a number of independent studies. Based on the current available evidence, thujone concentrations of both pre-ban and modern absinthes may not have been able to cause detrimental health effects other than those encountered in common alcoholism. Today, a questionable tendency of absinthe manufacturers can be ascertained that use the ancient theories of absinthism as a targeted marketing strategy to bring absinthe into the spheres of a legal drug-of-abuse. Misleading advertisements of aphrodisiac or psychotropic effects of absinthe try to re-establish absinthe’s former reputation.
{ Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy | Continue Reading | Read more/via: A bouquet from Mendel }
salmon (鮭 , sake)
Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish—Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?—and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple.
The Zombie’s Rage
Eating people is wrong. But why? People of different sorts, at different times, expressing their views in different idioms, have had different answers to that question. Right now, our culture isn’t obsessed with cannibalism, though we are still unwholesomely fascinated enough to buy books and go to movies about anthropophagy among the Uruguayan rugby team that ran out of food after their plane crashed in the Andes. (…)
Our modern idioms for disapproving of cannibalism are limited. There is a physical disgust at the very idea of eating human flesh, though it’s not clear that this is necessarily different from the revulsion felt by some people confronted with haggis, calf brains, monkfish liver, or sheep eyes, the rejection of which rarely requires, or receives, much of an explanation. It is widely thought that cannibalism is in itself a crime, but in most jurisdictions it isn’t. (It is criminal to abuse a corpse, so eating dead human flesh tends to be swept up under statutes mainly intended to prevent trading in human body parts or mutilating cadavers.)
artwork { Keith Haring }
Fish, when it has passed the Hands of a French Cook, is no more Fish
Having adequate personal space is an important aspect of users’ comfort with their environment. In a restaurant, for instance, spatial intrusion by others can lead to avoidance responses such as early departure or a disinclination to spend.
A web-based survey of more than 1,000 Americans elicited behavioral intentions and emotional responses to a projected restaurant experience when parallel dining tables were spaced at six, twelve, and twenty-four inches apart under three common dining scenarios. Respondents strongly objected to closely spaced tables in most circumstances, particularly in a “romantic” context. Not only did the respondents react negatively to tightly spaced tables but they were generally disdainful of banquette- style seating, regardless of table distance.
The context of the dining experience (e.g., a business lunch, a family occasion) is likely to be a key factor in consumers’ preferences for table spacing and their subsequent behaviors. Gender was also a factor, as women were much less comfortable than men in tight quarters. The findings are clear but the implications for restaurateurs are not, because a tight table arrangement has been demonstrated to shorten the dining cycle without affecting spending.
image { Desiree Dolron }
related { Monsters, daemons, and devils: The Accusations of Nineteenth-Century Vegetarian Writers | PDF }
It should be easy cause the beat is fresh
{ Ryou has crafted a series of food storage contraptions that counter the hidden, black box technology of the refrigerator by relying on “traditional oral knowledge [that] has been accumulated from experience.” | Architizer | Continue reading }
I have heard that it is common for fathers to the eat the umbilical cord
Dr Benoist Schaal, researcher at the Dijon-Dresden European Laboratory for Taste and Smell (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), states that eating habits start in the womb. He explained a study conducted by himself, along with researchers Luc Marlier and Robert Soussignan, on how unborn babies “learn odours from their pregnant mother’s diet.”
The scientists asked a group of pregnant women to consume anise flavoured cookies. Once they gave birth, researchers tested their kids along with others whose mothers hadn’t consumed the cookies. They found that the former recognized the smell and showed a good disposition towards it, while the latter rejected it.
‘The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.’ –Christopher Hitchens
In 1986, Guantanamo became host to the first and only McDonald’s restaurant within Cuba.
A Subway sandwich shop was opened in November 2002. Other fast food outlets have followed. These fast food restaurants are on base, and not accessible to Cubans.
It has been reported that prisoners cooperating with interrogations have been rewarded with Happy Meals from the McDonald’s located on the mainside of the base.
In 2004, Guantanamo opened a combined KFC & A&W restaurant at the bowling alley and a Pizza Hut Express at the Windjammer Restaurant. There is also a Taco Bell, and the Triple C shop that sells Starbucks coffee and Breyers ice cream.
All the restaurants on the installation are franchises owned and operated by the Department of the Navy. All proceeds from these restaurants are used to support morale, welfare and recreation (MWR) activities for service personnel and their families.
Vito Possolipo was sitting right over there, where that baby is. He was minding his own business, he was having a dish of zitti al forno.
By the late nineteen-nineties, olive oil—often cut with cheaper oils, such as hazelnut and sunflower seed—was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union. The E.U.’s anti-fraud office established an olive-oil task force, “yet fraud remains a major international problem,” Mueller wrote. “Olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce—and surprisingly easy to doctor.”
Nearly five years later, fraud remains a problem.
‘Never get out of bed before noon.’ –Charles Bukowski
How did we end up with a drinking age of 21 in the first place?
In short, we ended up with a national minimum age of 21 because of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. This law basically told states that they had to enact a minimum drinking age of 21 or lose up to ten percent of their federal highway funding. Since that’s serious coin, the states jumped into line fairly quickly. Interestingly, this law doesn’t prohibit drinking per se; it merely cajoles states to outlaw purchase and public possession by people under 21. Exceptions include possession (and presumably drinking) for religious practices, while in the company of parents, spouses, or guardians who are over 21, medical uses, and during the course of legal employment.
photo { Miss Aniela }
