The Science of Food

The rise and fall of white bread

We learned to hate the processed loaves not just because of health -- but because of class, status and race

Whole wheat bread “signifies the sophistication of your 
palate, your appreciation for texture and variety…. The grainier you like it, the more refined your sensibilities. The darker it is, the greater your chance for enlightenment.” Industrial white bread has completed its two-hundred-year trajectory from modern marvel to low-class item. As the spokeswoman for a food industry–affiliated nonprofit nutrition policy organization concluded, “It used to be, ‘Oh, you poor thing, you have that nasty brown bread.’ … Now it’s, ‘Oh, you poor thing. You have that nasty white bread.’ ” [MORE]

Slimy soy, decomposed shark, and maggot cheese

Food is a marvelous window through which to examine the multifaceted emotion of disgust. Food is a great passion, but it can also inspire terrible repulsion. Strangely, as with almost all facets of disgust, it is in our nature to be attracted to this repulsion. Who, uninitiated to the actual foodstuff, isn't at least a little curious about tasting some soft and stinky hákarl or a wormy morsel of casu marzu?

What human beings find disgusting varies greatly not just from place to place but across time. It cannot be separated from what the object of our repulsion means to us. [MORE ]

Spam in a Can A brief history of meat in orbit

WHEN THE MERCURY ASTRONAUTS went into space, strapped down in capsules set atop primitive ICBMs originally designed to carry warheads, they were famously derided by their fellow test pilots as “SPAM in a Can.”

Today, SPAM’s legacy as a term for junk mail drowns out any other association, but in the case of the astronauts, we are talking about ur-Spam, the meat product squeezed into a can — a name provided by the winner of a write-in contest, Kenneth Gaidneau (who had considered it “a good, memorable trade-name for some time, [and] had only waited for a product to attach it to”).

John Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts were squeezed into a metal enclosure only slightly bigger than themselves — half the size, for comparison, of a contemporaneous VW beetle. But tight quarters — common for test pilots in prototype craft — were not the catalyst for the Spam-in-a-can taunt. Rather, the Mercury crew members were mocked by their brethren (Chuck Yeager is said to have coined the phrase) for their relative impotence. Unlike more earthly pilots — but, presumably, much like their namesake processed pork product — the Mercury astronauts were mere passengers in their steel capsule, with no control over its historic trajectory. [MORE]

How the Potato Changed the World

Smithsonian magazine, November 2011. By Charles C. Mann

Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture.

Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. But in the 18th century the tuber was a startling novelty, frightening to some, bewildering to others—part of a global ecological convulsion set off by Christopher Columbus.

Read more at smithsonianmag.com

Who Invented the Oreo? The Unsung Heroes of Cookie Design

The Oreo. "Ubiquitous, overlooked, and yet embodying the highest design standards in both form and function—are worthy of recognition as "humble" masterpieces." Compared to its lesser and now former competitor, the Hydrox cookie, the design "is the more American-looking of the two -- its even pattern, however dowdy, has an industrial, stamped-out quality. It might be said to combine homelike decoration with an American love of machine imagery, and in that combination lies a triumph of design." {MORE}

Freakonomics Radio: Waiter, There’s a Physicist In My Soup

In the first segment of a two-parter about food and food science; it’s also about why we eat what we eat, and how that may change in the future. The first episode takes a look at the “molecular gastronomy” movement, which gets a big bump in visibility next month with the publication of a mammoth cookbook called Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Its principal author is Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft who now runs an invention company called Intellectual Ventures.

In Part 2, we get out of the kitchen and take a broader look at the past, present and future of food science. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the link in box at right or read the transcript here.) First, we hear from John Floros, a food scientist at Penn State who co-authored a paper on the history of food science. (Special thanks on this episode go to the Institute for Food Technology.) He explains why we have Napoleon Bonaparte to thank for canned food. He also explains why anyone who’s alive today might want to thank a food scientist.

Ancient Nubians Made Antibiotic Beer

Chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Sudanese Nubians who lived nearly 2000 years ago shows they were ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline on a regular basis, likely from a special brew of beer. The find is the strongest yet that antibiotics were previously discovered by humans before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

“I’m going to ask Alexander Fleming to hand back his Nobel Prize,” joked chemist Mark Nelson, who works on developing new tetracyclines at Paratek Pharmaceuticals and is lead author of the paper published June in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/antibiotic-beer/#ixzz0ykbbxjqW

 

The Inside Scoop on Ben & Jerry’s

Yep, the Penn State folklore is true. Ben & Jerry’s got its start at Penn State through a $5 correspondence course on ice cream making. Founder Jerry Greenfield gave the inside scoop on the business during a recent lecture at Penn State Altoona.

After completing the Penn State correspondence course on ice cream making in 1978, Jerry Greenfield and friend Ben Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream Scoop Shop in an old gas station in downtown Burlington, Vt. Two years later, the pair upgraded their digs to an old spool and bobbin mill and began packing their ice cream in pints. Today, Ben & Jerry’s is a producer of specialty ice cream with 64 flavors available in 31 countries. The company now has almost 200 franchised shops. [MORE]

http://www.benjerry.com/

http://creamery.psu.edu/

Penn State Ice Cream Short Course   

The joy of soy: The controversial history of the soybean – and the uncertain future of tofu

Though it was domesticated more than 3,000 years ago, the editors of the recently published "The World of Soy" state that  hardly any other food plant is as modern as the soybean - or as controversial [MORE].

Did Marco Polo bring pasta from China?

Long before paper, gunpowder and the compass, the Chinese had invented yet another staple of human civilization. A coil of dry noodles, preserved for 4,000 years, sat beneath an overturned earthenware bowl at an archaeological site in northeastern China. In 2005, archaeologists discovered the spaghetti-like tangle, effectively settling the score about whether the Chinese, Italians or Arabs began producing pasta first. But as any gourmand worth an ounce of orzo will quickly tell you, there isn't a grain of truth to Polo as the pasta pioneer.

Read the article from How Things Work here