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Acids, Cooking and Inconvenient Corpses.
I’ve written more than a few posts on food science now and it is something of a scandal that I haven’t yet talked about acids in cooking. Acid ranks right up there with salt when it comes to seasoning our food and yet I’ve skirted the issue, mentioned it here and there, but haven’t really… Continue reading
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Darwin, Lamarck and the Murder Scientist
One day, years ago, when I was a cocksure university undergraduate, I was chatting to some Jehovah’s Witnesses who had come to the door of the share house I lived in. We discussed a few things but at one point the guy I was talking to said that when it came to evolution he didn’t… Continue reading
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Genes, Gluttony and Gout
As a young man, and even into his forties, Henry VIII was a charismatic, athletic and highly attractive individual. He stood, for his times, a towering six feet two inches and he was renown for his prowess on the jousting field and for excelling at hunting, wrestling, tennis, and archery. But, by the time he… Continue reading
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Food Science Book
It’s been a while since I’ve posted but I have an excuse. I’ve been working on a book which is now available on Amazon. The book is basically a selection of my blog posts with a lot more proof reading and a lot of edits to smooth out the rough edges that you might find… Continue reading
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Egg whites: The art and science of edible foams
When considering the great florescence of thought and ideas that was the Enlightenment we tend to focus on the big ideas, the big innovations and the big thinkers like Voltaire, Locke and Adam Smith. But, as in any other time of great intellectual or technological change, there are other, smaller, ideas that fly under the… Continue reading
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Quick Bite: New research lets us know who to thank for our chocolate
It is a truism in science that the more you learn about something the more you know you don’t know. This can make talking to a scientist frustrating. A scientist will rarely tell you something without immediately telling you why it is probably wrong and that more work is needed. A good example of this… Continue reading
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Mad honey or how the Poison King and some bees outwitted the Romans
Mithridates VI, King of Pontus, was one of the young Roman empire’s most feared and formidable enemies in the eastern Mediterranean. Respected by the Romans as a strong, intelligent and, most of all, cunning ruler, he also possessed a ruthlessness and a cruelty so well developed that, at various times during his reign, he put… Continue reading
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Quick Bite: Can an asthma drug really protect people from food allergies?
Scientific discovery is very much a story of anomalies. An observation that just doesn’t fit the theory or some small detail that needs an explanation the resolution of which unravels into a scientific discovery. A good scientist values anomalies, they are a sign that there is an opportunity, a guide to something just sitting there… Continue reading
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Quick Bite: New research shows what was on the menu 2 million years ago
The Ship of Theseus is the name given to a thought experiment first related by Plutarch around the beginning of the second century. In this story the ship Theseus rescued the children of Athens with was kept by the people of Athens and used every year in a pilgrimage to Delos. Over time, and many… Continue reading
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Aphrodisiacs: Can food make you sexy?
Sex has always been something of a problem for human societies. Love, marriage, children and the passage of assets from one generation to the next has always been a primary human preoccupation. Yet in all these endeavours sex and sexual attraction lurks like the drunk uncle at a wedding; unpredictable, inconvenient but impossible to ignore.… Continue reading
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Quick Bite: You say tomato, I say potato
On the face of it a tomato and a potato are two very different things. One a fruit, soft and bursting with juice and flavour. The other a tuber that grows underground, hard but packed with starch ready to become a delicious source of nutrients after some judicious cooking. Despite this some new research shows… Continue reading
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Hunger games: Why we get hungry and why we overeat
Imagine you are driving down a long and lonely highway. You are late but also conscientious, so you want to stick as closely to the speed limit of 100 km/h as you can. For the purposes of this story your cruise control is broken or you don’t don’t trust Tesla’s self driving function so you… Continue reading
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Quick Bite: Ultra-processed foods give you lung cancer? Maybe not
In the past I’ve been critical of both observational studies and the reporting of these studies in the media and yesterday the Independent published an article called “Food that makes up more than half of western diets linked to lung cancer” which really pushed my buttons. The title is clearly link-bait and it had me… Continue reading
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Quick Bite: How to avoid death by Listeria
An outbreak of Listeria in Ireland is a good reminder of how dangerous this particularly nasty bacteria is to our food supply. The species that infects humans, Listeria monocytogenes, is abundant in soil, stream water, sewage and on plants which means it can easily contaminate our food and become a real danger in items that… Continue reading
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Saffron: The duplicitous golden spice
Humans have always displayed enormous ingenuity when it comes to short-changing their fellow man. Modern tech companies, with their opaque terms of service and relentless data farming, are a great recent example of this but to capture the eternal nature of man’s duplicity we need look no further than our daily repast. Since antiquity we… Continue reading