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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 the animal, helps you understand which muscles are tender and which are tough. The toughest meat is from the muscles that did the… 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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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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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
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The Microbiome I: A New World is Discovered
For anyone with an even cursory interest in health and nutrition it has become very hard to avoid the gut microbiota. The collection of bacteria, and other microbes, that we all carry around in our gastrointestinal tract is proving to have an influence on our health and well-being unimaginable even twenty short years ago. Our… 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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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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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
The Science of Food 