Chemicals in My Food

"I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:51:07 -0400

“I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.”

- Francis Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”, Chapter 3,

Cesar Vega does a lovely job of showing the physical chemistry...

Fri, 10 May 2013 07:19:57 -0400

Cesar Vega does a lovely job of showing the physical chemistry of fat in ice cream without dumbing down the science too much. Highly recommended.

I could learn to like olives

Wed, 08 May 2013 06:07:23 -0400

I could learn to like olives:

The First Taste captures in reactions of a group of children trying certain foods for the first time. Vision courtesy TEDx 2013

Video

Wed, 08 May 2013 03:59:56 -0400

Ikea as a Predictor of Nobel Prizes

Thu, 02 May 2013 05:21:00 -0400

“Correlations tell the researchers the degree of relationship between factors; no more, no less. They prove useful in understanding which factors are related and in generating hypotheses for further experimental testing. Our discussion of a recent report attributing beneficial effects to chocolate consumption shows the peril of over-interpreting correlations. In nutrition research, such erroneous inferences may have dramatic effects, as they may lead to attributing beneficial (or harmful) effects to a wrong cause, hence representing a real danger for health.”

Maurange, P.; Heeren, A.; Pesenti, M. “Does Chocolate Consumption Really Boost Nobel Award Chances? The Peril of Over-Interpreting Correlations in Health Studies”. Journal of Nutrition 2013, doi: 10.3945/jn.113.174813.A

Its easy to laugh at these absurd examples but surprisingly hard to catch yourself when the correlation supports your existing view of the world.

Non-brewed condiment: The punk rock vinegar

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:33:58 -0400

Vinegar is made by a secondary bacterial fermentation of ethanol to acetic acid. A range of delicate flavors can be found in vinegars made by the careful fermentation of different sources of alcohol (e.g., beer, wine, cider, sherry). On the other hand if you ask for “vinegar” at a British chip shop you get this.

Legally this isn’t vinegar and the chip shop shouldn’t even imply that it is. It’s “non-brewed condiment” - a solution of industrially produced acetic acid (almost certainly from a fermenter somewhere in China if you’re a stickler for terroir), caramel colorings and salt. It is a completely synthetic food lacking any of the subtlety of a malt, let alone a balsamic, vinegar. And it is completely perfect for its purpose. The harsh acid cuts through the grease of the chips without imposing any other tastes. Non-brewed condiment is to malt vinegar as the Buzzcocks are to Pink Floyd.

The Gentleman's Relish

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:56:00 -0400

Modern manufactured foods are the evolved products of capitalism. The unprofitable are weeded out while the successful brands extend and mutate while striving to reduce cost. Almost every food you see in a supermarket has at least one direct competitor in the same store. If you look closely though, you may come across a solitary “living fossil” of a product still finding a niche. A good example is Gentleman’s Relish.

Gentleman’s Relish is a grey paste consisting mainly anchovies with salt, butter and some herbs made in one small plant in the south of England. It comes in tiny, very expensive plastic jars (42 g for about 3 GBP) and is spread on toast. I like it a lot but perhaps the nicest thing you could say is that it’s not for everyone.

The wonderful thing Gentleman’s Relish and products like it is they shouldn’t exist. The modern process of product development would reject the concept, the business model, the consumer analysis, the branding - everything about it, but still it is sold for profit and is enjoyed. Finding this product in your local supermarket is a bit like finding breaded coelacanth at the fish and chip shop. Learn to recognize and enjoy these unique foods.

"Science reporting would be much improved if we had a labeling system that made clear a given study’s..."

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:30:13 -0400

“Science reporting would be much improved if we had a labeling system that made clear a given study’s place in the scientific process. Is it merely a preliminary result (a small-scale heuristic study meant to suggest a hypothesis that will itself require many stages of further testing before we have a reliable conclusion)? Is it a larger-scale observational study (showing a correlation but by no means establishing a causal connection)? Is it a large-sample randomized controlled test (establishing a causal connection, given specific conditions)? Or, finally, is it a well-established scientific law that we know how to apply in a wide range of conditions?”

- Gary Gutting

"The starting point is a snow-covered mountainside that looks solid"

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:00:09 -0400

“Nothing looked more impervious to revolutionary change than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in 1980, yet just over a decade later it was gone. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in Ireland looked unshakable in 1990, but two decades later it was gone. Lehman Brothers seemed a good option for top graduates in 2007. Just a year later, it too was gone.”

MOOCs, massive open online courses, have the potential to transform higher education. They provide a mechanism to deliver something traditional universities do rather poorly, large lecture sections, and do it probably as well over the internet for free. I’ve speculated previously on the effects of MOOCs on a big university like mine but in their recent report Barber, Donnerly and Rivzi go much further. They argue that a modern university is a set of people (students, administrators, faculty), doing a set of things and generating a set of outputs. They then systematically go through each of these and argue they could be done. Perhaps better, by other institutions, for example:

“Big” research done by private institutions like Merck or the Institute for Genomic Research.
Students and faculty members need no longer be physically present in the same place. While on sabbatical I have taught a class and given PhD exams from the other side of the Atlantic.
Companies specializing in student assessment already exist (e.g., College Board)
Universities still enjoy a legally protected monopoly on awarding degrees but other institutions (like Pearson, the textbook publisher and employer of the authors of the report) are building a case that they too deserve that privilege.

So what remains? What is it that cannot be replaced is “a fascinating truth about the traditional 20th century university, which is this: above all, it is a place, a collection of buildings.” Building and maintaining buildings is an obsession of university administrators but they are surely a means rather than the end?

Universities had traditionally regarded other universities as their main competitors – if a prospective grad student accepted a place at Ohio State or a star faculty member was poached by Berkley we felt we had somehow lost. What this report shows is many, many other types of organization can now compete for parts of our business and consequently the enterprise of higher education is becoming unbundled. What we recognize a university is open for debate.

“It is in the nature of markets in periods of transformation that successful enterprises find themselves competing not just with traditional rivals in their own market, but with entirely new kinds of competitors – as, for example, early 19th century canal owners found when railways developed, or traditional post offices have found with the advent of email and other forms of instant communication.“

Unbundling is clearly disruptive but needn’t be a bad thing. The report offers paths forward for different types of institution but we must be brave enough to define our own mission; at the moment “the vast majority of universities in the US are, from however distant a baseline, seeking to become Harvard.” For Penn State, our mission is grounded in the land grant tradition and the particular needs of the state of Pennsylvania. Different campuses should be free to tailor their definitions of excellence to local need. We should look for ways to better achieve our mission by combining the things we are and do with external MOOCs and other disruptions.

[Image “A bundle of sticks” uploaded by the Flickr user TamnLu Productions]

Pollan on the Moral Nature of Cooking

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:59:00 -0400

I am not a huge fan of Michael Pollan. He says sensible things but mixes in a lot of silliness. In particular I find him too willing to dismiss the advantages of efficiency in a food system and too dismissive of science as a way to evaluate risk and benefit. Having said that, I find this almost-agrarian defense of cooking from his forthcoming book rather wonderful. Although he connects cooking to wider social benefits, his argument is fundamentally a moral one - mindfully performing these actions makes us better people. Forgive the long quotation:

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves — anything, that is, except the work we do “to make a living.” For everything else, we feel like we’ve lost the skills, or that there’s someone who can do it better. (I recently heard about an agency that will dispatch a sympathetic someone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare the time to do it yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.

One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world — a corrective that is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like the product of industry than of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the greens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to grow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

Informed Consent and a Korean Field Trip

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:19:00 -0400

The BBC filmed a documentary in North Korea. To get access they posed as members of a London School of Economics student trip to the country. LSE is furious and demands the programme be withdrawn but the BBC argues the students were informed of the risk and gave their consent (although some students deny this). The reporter justified his actions in terms of the evil of the North Korean regime.

Even accepting the BBC’s story, this is a mockery of “informed consent”. The BBC staff that stood to benefit the most from the trip going ahead were the ones who had to assess and explain the risk. The university itself was not consulted, although any future programs they may run are put in jeopardy. Other academic visitors to the country must now be under greater scrutiny – they were also not consulted.

There are clearly risks and benefits associated with any action but the process for weighing them here was very wrong.

Edit: Comments from the director of the LSE.
Edit: Apparently this wasn’t an “official” LSE trip. That certainly reduces but doesn’t eliminate the university’s interest in the subterfuge. I wonder how clear it was to the students or the North Koreans that this was a private group?

Nutrition, health and evidence

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:28:00 -0400

These radio programs by Ben Goldacre on evidence and nutrition are well worth a listen. I particularly like the way he describes:

The differences between observational and intervention studies and how you weigh evidence from scientific evidence. Doing good interventional trials in nutrition is hard or even impossible and the results we do have are often less convincing than predicted from observational studies.
The media’s (and our) love for detailed prescriptive advice about food and health (“X causes/cures cancer”).
It is easy to do harm while genuinely believing you are doing good, particularly when you are giving advice to a whole population. Dr. Spock recommended babies be put to sleep on their stomachs. We now know, by doing scientific studies, that that is a risk factor for cot death. Gary Taubes has made a similar argument that the drive in the 1970’s to lower fat intake (“what harm could that possibly do?”) could plausibly be related to a rise in carbohydrate consumption and obesity.
The tendency to cherry pick scientific data to support a strongly held belief. The interview with the representative from the British Association of Nutritional Therapists towards the end of the second episode on how she uses science is very telling.

There are clearly relationships between the environment and health and we instinctively want to believe that specific foods will either do us great good or great harm. We use science methods to start to investigate the relationships between food and disease but the experiments are hard and the data is limited. Despite this, our “need to believe” allows food and supplement companies, therapists and the media to make very concrete recommendations wrapped in a veil of sciencyness. The people making the recommendations often passionately believe they are doing good and through the power of placebo they actually can. Their recommendations aren’t scientifically based though, and the series of fads undermines the rather bland nutritional advice given by governments and experts.

“The nutritional therapists are feeding on the detritus that comes from the scientific community” – Tom Sanders, King’s College London.

[Image from flicker user Stephen Burch]

scienceandfooducla: DIY Kitchen Science: Ceviche Through the...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:16:01 -0400

scienceandfooducla:

DIY Kitchen Science: Ceviche

Through the process of cooking, molecular transformations alter the macroscopic properties of our food. Consider what happens when you fry an egg: the transparent, liquid egg whites become an opaque white solid. These striking changes in the egg’s color and texture are a result of protein denaturation. In this recipe for ceviche, we will use an acidic (low pH) marinade to “cook” fish without heat. Read more…

photo courtesy of SocialMediarts.com/Flickr

Food Dispersions 4: Rheology

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:34:14 -0400

Food Dispersions
4: Rheology

Food dispersions3: Stability

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:31:00 -0400

Food dispersions
3: Stability

Food Dispersions2: Surfaces

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:10:00 -0400

Food Dispersions
2: Surfaces

Food Dispersions1: Properties

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:07:00 -0400

Food Dispersions
1: Properties

scienceandfooducla: The 2013 Science & Food lineup is...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:14:01 -0400

scienceandfooducla:

The 2013 Science & Food lineup is here!

Be the first to know when tickets go on sale by following us on Twitter or joining our mailing list.

In the meantime, you can satisfy your science and food cravings by watching last year’s lectures and browsing our blog archives. Over the next couple of months, we will feature exciting new content here on the blog, including chef profiles, recipes, and contests. Don’t miss out! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr to get all the latest Science & Food news.

We can’t wait to see you at the 2013 Science & Food lectures!

check out the 2013 Science & Food lineup…

jtotheizzoe: scienceandfooducla: The Flavor Network Physicist...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:12:37 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

scienceandfooducla:

The Flavor Network

Physicist Albert-László Barabási likes making connections. By studying networks, Barabási and his Northeastern University research group improve our understanding of everything from the internet to human disease.

Now Barabási and colleagues are using networks to learn more about the way we eat. Read more…

This is what everything tastes like. Very cool work.

scienceandfooducla: DIY Kitchen Science: Homemade Ice...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:26:57 -0500

scienceandfooducla:

DIY Kitchen Science: Homemade Ice Cream

Phase transitions—transformations from one state of matter to another—are ubiquitous in food and cooking. Butter’s phase transition from a solid to a liquid results in flaky pie crusts, while water’s phase transition from a liquid to a gas can be used to steam vegetables. There are various ways to manipulate these phase transitions, such as by altering temperature, pressure, or salt content. In this classic home experiment, we will make ice cream by using salt to alter the phase behavior of water. Read more…

photo courtesy of cowbite/Flickr