The story of MSG is a true tragedy. The negativity associated with this delicious amino acid is due to a spurious study from 1968 that linked MSG with the “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” This study connected that gut-bomb feeling you sometimes get after eating Chinese food to MSG, despite the fact that the typically cheap Chinese food prepared in American restaurants is fatty and served in large portions, and (like any restaurant), the food can be spoiled. My mom theorizes that lots of MSG was used to cover up the fact that, say, shrimp was a day past its prime, and that the sick feeling was due to the food but got blamed on the MSG. There’s never been a scientifically rigorous study that’s linked MSG with any negative effects. MSG should be used frequently and added to anything that needs the flavor drawn out, especially soups. But it enhances virtually anything it touches: Once, eating pizza at home, a friend scanned my spice rack and saw a jar with white powder whose label, in my grandfather’s messy scrawl, read what looked like “MS6.” He sprinkled it on his pizza and came to find me, telling me that whatever MS6 was, it was the most amazing thing he’d ever tasted. Yes, MSG makes even pizza better.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
April 5, 2019
QotD: Debunking the “MSG is harmful” myth
April 3, 2019
QotD: Veganism has its drawbacks
Evangelical vegans will tell you that following a purely ‘plant-based’ diet is not only morally commendable, it’s also much better for your health. But if my experience is anything to go by, the opposite is true.
I felt absolutely fine for the first few days. I didn’t miss meat at all, certainly not in terms of taste or flavour. The only thing I really felt an absence of was eggs. Since I embarked on my mammoth weight-loss project, eggs have become a dietary staple for me: nothing fills me up as well or gives me quite as much long-lasting energy as an egg.
I also found I had to eat larger portions to feel full — and I felt hungry again after a shorter period of time. But even that didn’t bother me, since what I was eating was so wholesome.
No, the real issue became apparent after the third or fourth day. Not to put too fine a point on it: wind.
My stomach was, quite literally, in ferment. All those legumes and pulses and generalised vegetable matter appeared to have turned into a giant internal compost heap. It wasn’t too bad in the mornings; but by early afternoon I was like a cow who had overdosed on clover.
At first, I palmed the outcome off on our three dogs. But after a while the problem became so severe that even they could not be expected to account for the frequency and potency of aromas emerging from my lower digestive tract.
One of the key arguments of vegans against livestock farming is the harm animals cause to the planet through the amount of methane they produce; if my experience was anything to go by, a vegan human is capable of producing just as much, if not more. I was a one-woman global warming hazard.
My children, of course, thought it was hilarious. But from my point of view, it was not only unpleasant and occasionally embarrassing, it was also incredibly uncomfortable. I felt bloated, soggy and sluggish, and began to dread meal times.
Following the advice of the nutritionist, I took to soaking nuts, oats and seeds overnight. But it made no difference. If anything, the problem began to get worse. The more healthy vegan food I put into my body, the worse my stomach problems became.
As for the much-vaunted ‘vegan glow’, no sign. Instead, my skin felt dry and dehydrated, and there was a distinctly greyish tinge to my complexion. But still, I persisted.
Sarah Vine, “Going vegan sent me off my trolley! Exhausted, irritable and don’t even start of the tummy troubles – SARAH VINE’s bid to join the health revolution left her VERY green around the gills”, Daily Mail, 2019-02-22.
March 31, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – Lies – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 30 Mar 2019Writer Rob Rath talks about all the cool stories and facts we didn’t get to cover in the Irish Potato Famine series.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
1 day agoRecommended reading:
The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, by John Kelly
Podcast: Irish History PodcastSay hi to Rob’s newest family member!
4:43 – what exactly was the blight?
7:35 – flags, flags, flags
9:20 – difference between “British” and “English”
10:26 – the psychology behind low-balling numbers
18:52 – we couldn’t do an episode on the Battle of Mrs. McCormick’s Cabbage Patch 🙁
22:57 – what’s next on Extra History!
23:27 – Walpole fact!
March 30, 2019
QotD: Organic spices are a racket
There’s a whole other piece to be written about organic spices, but the short version is that demanding organic spices is never going to be good for the farmers growing them. The U.S. standards for organic products amounts to ridiculously expensive and oftentimes unnecessary practices for small farmers who just don’t have the resources to do it. There are plenty of ways to arrive at ethical treatment of animals and land that are not part of our complicated organic laws. And that’s not to mention the people who demand organic products but will also freak out at the sight of a bug or won’t buy something that’s even a little bit misshapen or with a tiny brown spot on it. You can have pesticides or you can have pests.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
March 26, 2019
Food Rationing – How to Make Woolton Pie – WW2 Homefront 001 – April 1940
World War Two
Published on 24 Mar 2019Rationing of goods in Europe started immediately when the war broke out. Lord Woolton, British Minister of Food came up with one of the first substitute dishes… a vegetable pie that was promptly named after him. Our team chef Joram shows you how to do it. To find out how it tasted go here: https://youtu.be/quB0yH8Qhlo
Recipe can be found here: https://the1940sexperiment.com/2016/0…
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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvHosted by Joram Appel and created by Wieke Kapteijns
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
In about a month’s time (yes, I have my 1:00am and 2:00am posts lined up that far in advance), there’s an eight-part video series from Ian at InRangeTV on British rationing in WW2 that includes a slightly different Woolton Pie recipe.
QotD: Salt
My grandfather used to say this all the time, and it’s true. Salt brings out the flavor of the food, full stop. There are a great variety of salts, but the reality is they’re all the same mineral. Coloration in salt comes from the minerals near the salt as it forms. There’s nothing inherently better about colored salts, but the marketers selling you that stuff will try to convince you otherwise. I’ve seen pink salt promoted as an “alternative” salt that doesn’t cause blood pressure issues. That’s a lie. My advice is to buy kosher salt or the chunkier white salt if you like the crunchiness. If you really like the mild flavoring of gray salt, that’s fine, just know that it’s sold at a higher cost for what comes down to the same thing as my box of salt I can get for a couple bucks. And one more thing: All salt is sea salt.
Salt grinders are bullshit
I’m not done with salt yet: Don’t put your salt in a grinder. All you’re doing is making your salt smaller than it was before. Unlike pepper, which is actually processed in the grinder, salt does not need to be ground and is not fresher after coming out of a grinder. It’s just smaller. Use a shaker.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
March 21, 2019
QotD: Pie language
Even in their early days, pies served different purposes for the rich and poor: as show-off delicacies for the former and portable food for the latter. So while wealthy feasts might include pies containing anything from game birds to mussels, the less well-off used simpler pies as a way to have food while doing outdoor work or travelling – the crust both carried and preserved the tasty filling.
Take, for example, the Bedfordshire Clanger: a British classic which cleverly combines main course and dessert, with savoury ingredients like pork at one end and sweet ingredients like pear at the other. The name comes from a local slang word, “clang”, which means to eat voraciously. However, cramming two courses into a pie makes a clanger rather unwieldy – and all too easy to drop, inspiring the English phrase “dropping a clanger” for a careless mistake.
Pies have been adding rich flavour to the English language for centuries. Even Shakespeare got in on the act, writing in his 1613 play Henry VIII that “No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger”, giving English the phrase “a finger in every pie”.
Meanwhile, the description of a drunken state as “pie-eyed” likely takes its cue from someone who, thanks to having over-imbibed, has eyes as wide and blank as the top of a pie. “As easy as pie” – first recorded as “like eating pie” in the horse-racing newspaper Sporting Life in 1886 – springs from pies’ historical role as convenience food.
“Eating humble pie”, meanwhile, comes from medieval deer hunting, when meat from a successful hunt was shared out on the basis of social status. While the finest cuts of venison went to the rich and powerful, the lower orders made do with the “nombles“: a Norman French word for deer offal. Anglicisation saw “nombles” pie become “humble” pie.
Norman Miller, “How a pocket-sized snack changed the English language”, BBC Travel, 2017-03-29.
March 17, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – The Young and the Old – Extra History – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 16 Mar 2019Irish leaders entered the picture when the 1847 Poor Laws backfired, leading landowners to mass-evict their starving tenants. Daniel O’Connell tried to maintain an alliance with the Whigs, and failed. The Young Irelanders split off from the Repeal Association, and as a result, both the rebellious and the moderate minds of the country lost significant traction, unable to fight the famine alone.
March 14, 2019
Tyler Cowen’s tips on visiting India
Although the blog post is nearly a month old, I completely missed it when it was first posted. It’s called “How to travel to India”, but it’s really more about how to get the best of your visit while you’re there. I’ve never been to India (and it seems unlikely I’ll ever get to visit), but from reading the accounts of other visitors, Tyler has some excellent advice here:
4. Every single part of India is interesting and worth visiting, as far as I can tell after five trips. That said, I find Bangalore quite over-visited relative to its level of interest.
5. My favorite places in India are Mumbai, Chennai, Rajasthan, and Kolkaata. Still, I could imagine a rational person with interests broadly similar to my own having a quite different list.
6. India has the best food in the world. It is not only permissible but indeed recommended to take all of your meals in fancy hotel restaurants. Do not eat the street food in India (and I eat it virtually everywhere else). It is also permissible to find two or three very good hotel restaurants — or even one — and simply run through their menus. You won’t be disappointed.
7. Invest in a very, very good hotel. It is affordable, and you will need it, and it will be a special memory all its own.
8. Being driven around in the Indian countryside is terrifying (and I have low standards here, I do this all the time in other non-rich countries). If it were safer, I would see many more parts of India. But it isn’t. So I don’t.
I’ve posted this before, and it doesn’t really relate to Tyler’s travel tips, but I still find it amusing:
March 12, 2019
9 British Dishes Everyone Should Try – Anglophenia Ep 2
Anglophenia
Published on 22 May 2014British food has a bad reputation, but Siobhan Thompson’s here to set the record straight, offering nine tasty U.K. dishes that will quiet the naysayers.
Visit the Anglophenia blog at http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia
Photos via Fotolia.
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Follow Siobhan Thompson on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/vornietom
March 10, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – The American Wake – Extra History – #4
Extra Credits
Published on 9 Mar 2019Not all of the 214,000 Irish immigrants in 1847 made it safely to their new homes — and of those who did, many faced classism and xenophobia and even bullying from the “Ulster Irish” or “Scots-Irish” folks who had previously established themselves. In New York City specifically, the Five Points neighborhood became an infamous center of conflict — while local Irish-American John Joseph Hughes became instrumental in restoring Irish Catholicism.
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March 4, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – Black ’47 – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 2 Mar 2019Watching the Irish suffer from the view of London, Sir Charles Trevelyan believed that the potato famine was part of God’s will. Inspired by the meritocracy-based philosophy of starvation that Thomas Malthus held, Treveylan created a relief plan with the sole goal of protecting the markets, and not the people. Thus the new year of “Black ’47” brought chaos and horror to the Irish people.
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February 26, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – The Corn Laws – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 23 Feb 2019Prime Minister Robert Peel was caught between the political pressures of the Whigs and the Tories. He repealed the corn laws in Britain to keep food prices low in Britain, with the secondary goal of famine relief for Ireland, but that bureaucratic multi-tasking would not help the Irish very much…
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February 23, 2019
How a statistical error became the key argument in the “everyone must turn vegan” movement
At The Conversation, Frank M. Mitloehner explains how a flawed statistic — comparing numbers derived from non-parallel bases — evolved into one of the most widely quoted arguments for governments forcing people to give up meat in their diet:
As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.
A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change.
[…]
Global livestock production by region (milk and eggs expressed in protein terms).
Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.Setting the record straight on meat and greenhouse gases
A healthy portion of meat’s bad rap centers on the assertion that livestock is the largest source of greenhouse gases worldwide. For example, a 2009 analysis published by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute asserted that 51 percent of global GHG emissions come from rearing and processing livestock.According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest sources of U.S. GHG emissions in 2016 were electricity production (28 percent of total emissions), transportation (28 percent) and industry (22 percent). All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s very different from claiming livestock represents as much or more than transportation.
Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined.
This latter claim was wrong, and has since been corrected by Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author. The problem was that FAO analysts used a comprehensive life-cycle assessment to study the climate impact of livestock, but a different method when they analyzed transportation.
For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.
However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted.
February 21, 2019
Food rituals and observances among the very woke
Americans in the 21st century are far less religious than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, at least as far as formal, organized, traditional religion is concerned. In the place of old-fashioned religion, many have adopted a replacement that functions very much as religion used to:
Muslims eat halal. Jews eat kosher. Devout Catholics and Orthodox Christians abstain from meat on Friday and certain holy days. Hindus are vegetarian. But you will never see food practices take on religious intensity like they do in the more politically blue/left-wing bastions of the United States. This food intensity has been a gold mine of joke material for comedians like JP Sears.
Spend some time with vegan, gluten-free, and paleo devotees and you will realize that a fish filet on Friday can never match the cultlike seriousness these food fads take on. (And if you should ever be trapped at a restaurant table with somebody who is both vegan and gluten-free, run like the wind.)
Studies show left-leaning individuals are less likely to identify themselves as religious. But the truth is they have merely replaced well-known western religious traditions with more rigid ones. If you move to a politically blue part of the country, you will experience the cultural shift the minute your kids enter preschool. School picnics, snack time and birthday parties can become an anxiety-inducing strain as you try to determine what you can bring that all the children can eat. The parents are generally nice people who would never expect you to consider their dietary rules, but you will nonetheless feel a twinge of guilt if you bring that batch of traditionally-made cupcakes and accidentally feed it to a kid who is not allowed to experience it.
[…]
The popular food fetishes of these cultural enclaves often go hand-in-glove with a neo-pagan mishmash of Gaia-worship, 4th century Gnosticism, and rejuvenated new age/occult practices. Every religion has its food rituals. The left is no exception.
Now I know there are valid reasons to be concerned with the mistreatment of animals on factory farms and there are legitimate medical reasons that some must reduce gluten. Paleo eaters can have points about unnecessary additives in contemporary foods. But the reality remains that the food habits of contemporary leftists have the ritualistic feel of dogma, with many of its followers being far more rigid than the most fundamentalist religious believer.
We tend to have a lot of gluten-free meals here, but it’s a medical necessity, not a food-religion observance, as two of the three of us suffer from gluten-intolerance. One outcome of the “fashionability” of gluten-free dining, there has been a substantial increase in the availability of gluten-free foods which has been welcome. Unfortunately, as a lot of the demand has been due to fashion rather than necessity, some restaurants have been remarkably casual when gluten-free dishes are ordered, where the main dish may be safe, but it’s been covered with a sauce or glaze that isn’t gluten-free.
