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Ramen and Race Relations
Immigration in any society is a complex and controversial subject. It’s something that is likely to get tempers flaring and people marching on the streets. I don’t normally have much to say on the topic, it’s normally a dead end. Like pineapple on pizza, people tend to do a lot of talking about immigration and… Continue reading
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Absinthe: Does The Green Fairy Have No Clothes?
Absinthe seems to come to us out of the mists, the alleyways and the side streets of Belle Epoque Paris. The verdant symbol of bohemian excess, absinthe speaks to us of the heyday of the Montmartre. A time when bars like the Moulin Rouge and Le Rat Mort provided the chaotic playgrounds for those from… Continue reading
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How To Cook Fish
In some of the earliest posts I wrote for this blog I discussed how cooking meat is all about anatomy. Understanding the anatomy of muscles, and how particular muscles are used by an animal, helps you understand which muscles are tender and which are tough and so how you should cook them. The toughest meat… Continue reading
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How To Stay Healthy In a Salty World
Whenever a human is eating, a salt shaker is never too far away. For six thousand years we’ve relied on salt to improve our food. To make the uninteresting interesting and the bland, well, less bland. Though our ancestors often found it hard to get enough salt, in the modern world we are awash with… Continue reading
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Do We Love Mum’s Cooking Because She Made Us as Well as Dinner?
In our popular culture we have a complicated relationship with mutants. For every Teenage Mutant Turtle and Wolverine, there is a Magneto, a Jason Vorhees or a Thing. The hillbillies from Deliverance probably qualify as mutants but I’m not sure whether Godzilla is a good guy or a bad guy? Are zombies mutants? Regardless, it… Continue reading
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Tomatoes and Fake News
Humans love a good story. We also love a simple story. We like our good guys to be good, our bad guys to be bad, we like a message that reinforces our beliefs and we definitely like some closure, everything wrapped up with a nice little bow. But, our love of a well-formed narrative, and… Continue reading
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Helminths Exposed: Inside the Sometimes Gross World of Food Borne Parasites
In 1865, Otto von Bismarck, the conqueror of France, the architect of German unification, Germany’s first Chancellor and the steely-eyed hard man of realpolitik challenged a scientist to a duel. This wasn’t an early case of nerd hazing. Rudolf Virchow, apart from his scientific career, was also the leader of the Progressive Party and one… Continue reading
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Phylloxera: The American Grape Vine Pest That Almost Ruined My Saturday Nights
Can you imagine a world without French wine? A world without the wines of Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy and Provence? A world in which French people don’t look down their nose at the wines of the rest of the world? Is such a world even possible? Well, in the late 19th century this is exactly the… Continue reading
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Vanilla II: The Curing and the Chemistry
When we left vanilla in the last post, the French had finally broken the Spanish monopoly and were beginning to establish a vanilla industry in Madagascar and French Polynesia. Normally when a monopoly is broken prices come down as supply increases and the monopolist loses control over pricing. While this was partly the case with… Continue reading
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Vanilla I: Botany and Bad Behaviour
Humans have an almost unlimited capacity to endure other people’s suffering if there are large sums of money to be made. If you don’t believe me, we need look no further than our history books for proof. History is littered with examples of people letting themselves down and behaving badly when in pursuit of a… Continue reading
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The Brassica: Cabbage, Broccoli and Other Childhood Nemeses
There is probably no more feared food group than the plants that come from the Brassicaceae family. Also known as the cruciferous vegetables, this family, surely a practical joke played by God on children, includes the plants that bring us cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, mustard greens, arugula, turnips, kohlrabi, broccoli, cauliflower and many other childhood… Continue reading
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Why is Kobe Beef So Good?
I’ve been to a lot of places and I’ve eaten a lot of things. I thought that there was nothing left that could give me a culinary jolt. I was wrong. I’m in Osaka, Japan. I’m travelling with my family and another from our home town of Brisbane. We had landed at Narita Airport two… Continue reading
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Are Michelin Stars All in Our Mind?
I’ve been watching ‘Knife Edge’ on Apple TV, a documentary that follows the trials and tribulations of Michelin star hopefuls. It is a guilty pleasure; it’s basically reality TV with some Michelin star prestige to ramp up the stakes. A couple of things did strike me when I was watching though. Firstly, why would anyone… Continue reading
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Custard, Avgolemono and Carbonara: The Science of Using Eggs to Thicken Sauces
The world of sauces can be pretty intimidating. The French, in particular, have elevated the art of sauce making to such an extraordinary extent that the whole idea of making a sauce can seem overwhelming. They have their mother sauces, their daughter sauces and a whole culinary tradition based specifically around sauces. To the French… Continue reading
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The Microbiome II: Every Microbiome Is Happy in Its Own Way
In the first post of this microbiome series I covered the beginnings of microbiology. The realisation that we were surrounded by microorganisms, the development of germ theory and the first stirrings of the idea that microbes, apart from destroying our health, could also be contributing to our well-being. We left the story in the early… Continue reading