BBC Earth Lab
Published on 24 Aug 2017Greg Foot explains why some food is spicy!
May 9, 2018
What Makes Spicy Foods Spicy | Earth Lab
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April 28, 2018
Lab-Grown Meat Is Coming to Your Supermarket. Ranchers Are Fighting Back.
ReasonTV
Published on 26 Apr 2018The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association petitioned the USDA to declare that “meat” and “beef” exclude products not “slaughtered in the traditional manner.”
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April 22, 2018
Hunting – Dreyfuss Affair – Equipment Modifications I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 21 Apr 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
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March 28, 2018
QotD: Rent-seeking through “health concern” trolling
Producers too often shamelessly use whatever excuses are at hand to justify their prodding the state to prevent consumers from patronizing rival producers. Trumped-up health ‘concerns’ are a prominent set of easy excuses when the good in question is food or drink. “Those foods offered by our rivals are likely to kill or injure our beloved consumers!” cry rent-seeking producers, feigning an overriding concern for the health of the public. “For the health of our citizens, our rival producers must be stopped from selling their foul foods in our market!” Conveniently, of course, when such restrictions are implemented the favored producers no longer must compete as vigorously for consumers’ patronage. (Question: What does diminished competition do to producers’ incentives to maintain the safety of the foods they sell to the public?)
Anyway, here’s a history lesson: today’s expressed concerns about the safety of genetically modified foods and the calls for governments to restrict consumers’ freedom to buy these foods are, in their essence, nothing new. In the late-19th century similar ‘concerns’ over the safety of American beef and pork were used by some beef and pork producers to sic state restriction on rival beef and pork producers. European ranchers and farmers, disliking the competition from American ranchers and farmers, played the safety card as means of securing protection from their American rivals. Likewise within the U.S.: local butchers and local slaughterhouses throughout the U.S. played the same safety card as a means of securing protection from the upstart and wildly successful Chicago meatpackers such as Swift and Armour. That this safety card was illegitimate – that is, that charges of unsafe beef and pork were unwarranted – doesn’t matter if enough people believe the charges. The widely believed myth of dangerous foods enables the state to protect powerful producers from competition.
Cronyism and rent-seeking are nothing new. But they are perhaps becoming more widespread as the scope of state involvement in private affairs expands.
Don Boudreaux, “If Only We Could Be Protected From the Disease of Rent-Seeking”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-14.
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March 22, 2018
QotD: “Sustainability”
Today on the radio I heard an ad for a DC-area supermarket chain that boasts that it now has on sale – as in, selling for a reduced price – “sustainably farmed fish.”
I really dislike the word “sustainable” (and all of its variations) as used today to signal holier-than-thou environmental ‘awareness.’ As Robert Solow said about this concept,
It is very hard to be against sustainability. In fact, the less you know about it, the better it sounds.
But advertising “sustainably farmed fish” – implying, as it does (rather bizarrely), that unsustainably farmed fish are common – is especially annoying. While the absence of property rights in oceans and other large bodies of water, and in uncaught fish, might well lead to overfishing (that is, to a genuinely unsustainable manner of acquiring fish for human consumption), the very essence of a fish farm implies property rights in the fish stocks. And where there are property rights there is sustainability. A fish farmer is no more likely to allow his stock of fish to be depleted than is the owner of Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh to allow his horse to be slaughtered for sport, or than are you to allow the cost of motor oil to prevent you from ever changing the oil in your car.
[…]
It’s depressing that those people who today are most likely to worry about resources being “unsustainable” – people who are most likely to prattle publicly about “sustainability” – are those people who also are most likely to disparage private property rights and to argue for government policies that weaken and attenuate such rights. Such people are those who are most likely to wish to further collectivize the provision not only of environmental amenities such as park space and animal conservation, but also of health care, of education, of housing, and of a host of other private goods and services. Such people also are those who are most likely to protest prices made higher by market forces, and to applaud rent-control and other government-imposed price ceilings on a variety of consumer goods and services.
In short, the people who today howl most frequently and loudly for “sustainability” are those who most frequently and loudly oppose the legal and economic institutions – private property and market-determined prices – that alone reliably promote genuine sustainability.
Don Boudreaux, “‘Sustainability’ is Fishy”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-26.
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March 12, 2018
How to Make Mead at Home
This Old House
Published on 22 Jan 2017Ask This Old House host Kevin O’Connor learns about the centuries-old art of making mead.
Time: A few hours of work, 1 year of aging
Cost: under $100
Tools:
FunnelShopping List:
Yeast
2x One-gallon jug
3 pounds of honey
Air lock cap
Marbles
Siphon tube
Home brewing sanitizerSteps:
1. Before beginning the home brew process, ensure the gallon jug, funnel, and siphon tube have been properly sanitized.
2. Fill up the gallon jug about a third of the way up with either tap or bottled water (don’t use distilled water).
3. Add 3 pounds of honey, then cap the solution and mix it up by shaking the jug.
4. Heat up water to 104 degrees in a pan and add yeast to dissolve it.
5. While the yeast is dissolving, you can add optional yeast nutrients to get a cleaner ferment.
6. Once the yeast is dissolved, use a funnel to pour the yeast solution into the jug.
7. Pour more water into the jug and top it off until you reach the neck of the jug.
8. Place air lock cap on top of the jug and pour a little bit of water into it to form a seal. This will prevent oxygen from getting in but will allow carbon dioxide to escape.
9. After a several weeks, once carbon dioxide has stopped releasing from the jug and fermentation is complete, it’s time to siphon the solution into a new, clean jug.
10. Ensure the siphon tub and second jug have been properly sanitized, then place the older jug higher than the new jug. Fill the siphon tube with water and gravity will pull the mead from one jug to the next. Ensure you only siphon liquid, leaving behind any solids at the bottom of the jug.
11. To fill up the void left behind from one jug to the next and limit exposure to oxygen, place a number of sanitized marbles into the new jug.
12. Place the air lock on the new jug. Leave that on for about a month and then place a regular cap onto the jug once bubbles no longer appear.
13. Leave the solution in a dark spot, like the basement for about a year for the mead to age properly.
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March 4, 2018
The dirty secret of a lot of “traditional” family recipes
At Atlas Obscura, Alex Mayyasi spills the beans about a lot of secret family recipes:
When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on the menu: his grandmother’s secret potato salad recipe.
“I told the chef, ‘My very favorite potato salad in the world was the one my grandmother made,’” Meyer recalls.
That’s a big statement coming from Meyer, a successful restaurateur who has earned Michelin Stars and founded the fast-casual chain Shake Shack. At the time, his grandmother had already passed away, but Meyer remembered that she kept recipes on three by five index cards. After a search, he found the right card and handed it to the restaurant’s chef, who invited Meyer to try it in the Blue Smoke kitchen.
When Meyer arrived, the sous chefs had a big bowl of potato salad that brought back memories of his grandmother. He tried it, smiled, and told the chefs, “That’s exactly right.” They grinned back at him mischievously. Eventually, Meyer broke and asked, “What’s so funny?” A chef pulled out a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise and placed it on the table. Meyer looked at it, then realized that the secret recipe his grandmother had hoarded for years was on the jar. It was the official Hellman’s recipe for potato salad.
This actually seems to be a common phenomenon. The television show Friends even features a similar discovery, when one character, Phoebe, realizes that her grandmother’s “famous” chocolate chip cookie recipe came from a bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips.
Two months ago, we asked Gastro Obscura readers to send in accounts of their own discoveries. We promised a (loving) investigation of grandparents lying about family recipes. But instead we got a delightful look at the power of imagination, the limitations of originality, and the halo effect of eating a dish or dessert made by family.
February 22, 2018
Dieting and mental health
Kaitlin Ugolik discusses her own recent experience of trying a new diet:
We don’t often discuss the mental impact of restrictive diets like Whole30 (no “inflammatory” foods), keto (low carb, high fat) or paleo (foods supposedly eaten during the Paleolithic era). People like to tout the weight loss and mood-boosting effects of these diets, but experts say they can push some of us toward disordered eating.
I tried Whole30 this January, and at first I kind of enjoyed it. I tend to get overwhelmed by options and confused about what’s the latest “right” thing to eat for breakfast, so it was nice to have guidelines. It gave me an excuse to make smoothies and try some new dinner recipes, too.
A few days in, though, I started noticing some disconcerting thoughts. I was reading the labels on everything and starting to think of anything that had any kind of processed sugar — cane sugar, brown rice syrup, anything — as “bad.” I also noticed that some of Whole 30’s carceral language was starting to stick in my head. Foods are labeled as “compliant” or “non-compliant,” for example. Knowing several people who have struggled with eating disorders, I wondered if diets like this, that say you can’t even eat beans or quinoa, might be a gateway to disordered eating for some people. The consensus among the experts I spoke to is that they are.
“All weight-loss diets work against learning to eat ‘normally’ according to appetite cues, which is also called intuitive eating,” said Karen Koenig, a Florida-based social worker who counsels people with eating disorders. “The more we restrict eating—by food type, weighing food, or by counting calories or fat grams—the more we ignore and override our body’s signals for hunger, satisfaction and fullness.”
While some people do benefit from restrictive diets because of their choice-limiting nature, like I did at the beginning, many have a hard time not taking it to the extreme. Most people are taking part in these diets as part of some kind of goal, whether it’s to lose weight, clear up their skin, or just feel better. If (and more likely when) it doesn’t work, it’s normal for anyone to get frustrated. But for people who are already prone to anxiety and obsessive thinking (*raises hand*) or those who have “addictive personalities,” a detox or diet can actually lead to something much more dangerous.
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February 21, 2018
British KFC outlets fall fowl of distribution fustercluck
The BBC reports on recent supply disruptions that have forced the majority of British KFC restaurants to close or run reduced hours:
KFC says some of the outlets which had to close when delivery problems meant they ran out of chicken have reopened.
Latest figures show that 470 of the fast-food chain’s 900 outlets in its UK-based division were shut as of 13:00 on Tuesday.
That compares with 575 that were closed at 21:00 on Monday.
Last week, the fried chicken chain switched its delivery contract to DHL, which has blamed “operational issues” for the supply disruption.
Earlier a KFC spokesperson said: “We anticipate the number of closures will reduce today [Tuesday] and over the coming days as our teams work flat out all hours to clear the backlog.
“Each day more deliveries are being made, however, we expect the disruption to some restaurants to continue over the remainder of the week, meaning some will be closed and others operating with a reduced menu or shortened hours.”
[…]
Until 13 February, KFC’s chicken was delivered by specialist food distribution group Bidvest.
But after the contract switched to DHL, many of the food giant’s outlets began running out of chicken products.
The GMB union said it had tried to warn KFC that switching from Bidvest to DHL was a mistake. The change led to 255 job losses and the closure of a Bidvest depot, said Mick Rix, GMB national officer.
He said: “Bidvest are specialists – a food distribution firm with years of experience. DHL are scratching around for any work they can get, and undercut them.
“KFC are left with hundreds of restaurants closed while DHL try and run the whole operation out of one distribution centre. Three weeks ago, KFC knew they had made a terrible mistake, but by then it was too late.”
Signs posted in a KFC store window in Nottingham
Photo from the Nottingham Post (click image to read their article)
H/T to Jim Guthrie, who said “I suspect that this will be a ‘how not to do it’ example in delivery logistics for years to come.”
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February 12, 2018
Australia’s unique contribution to hamburger culture – beetroot
On one of my mailing lists, an Australian member made a bit of a to-do about the only “proper” burger having “beetroot” on it, along with other (one assumes lesser) condiments. Having been pranked more than once by Aussie friends, I was sure he was just doing his bit to wind up the American burger purists on the list. Yet, a very cursory search produced this article from back in 2014 that appears to fully back the original assertion:
Australian hamburger sightings started during the ’30s: a by-product, no doubt, of our blossoming post-first world war relationship with America, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that beetroot began regularly appearing alongside tomato, lettuce and onion on burgers. That was thanks largely to the openings of the Edgell and Golden Circle canneries in 1926 and 1947 respectively – but one of the more interesting theories, however, suggests the trend has its origins in pranking US troops ashore on R&R.
“Maybe it was our desire not to be Americanised?” ponders Warren Fahey, Australian folklore collector and author of Australian food history compendium, Tucker Track. “For some reason the idea of hamburger wrapping stained by beetroot juice was accepted as the sign of a great hamburger. People get quite emotional over the subject of Australian hamburgers. Some say a real hamburger must have slices of canned beetroot and others still declare its inclusion as a travesty.”
According to Fahey, beetroot on burgers had its heyday in the ’50s and ’60s. Following the simultaneous 1971 arrival of fast food’s big two – the first McDonald’s opened in the Sydney suburb of Yagoona, while Hungry Jacks, the Aussie nom de plume of Burger King, began its Aussie campaign in Innaloo, just north of Perth – the combination’s popularity began to wane, as did that of milk bars, beachside kiosks and other traditional hamburger vendors.
Despite the sustained growth of American franchises, however, Australia’s burger-with-beetroot population remains stable. Even once the big players pull their seasonal go-Aussie burgers after 26 January, the odds of finding a beetroot-enriched specimen at a neighbourhood lunch bar or new-wave “gourmet” hamburger chain remain good.
[…] the country’s last Australian-owned cannery shut in 2013. Fortunately, the signs are promising that farmers in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley might soon have a processing facility to call their own. It’s a cause we can all get behind, not just for the sake of a rural Australian community, but in the name of national pride: an Aussie hamburger made using beetroot processed overseas just doesn’t seem fair dinkum.
A New Zealand member of the list also chimed in, saying that beetroot was an essential component of Kiwi hamburgers as well. While it might sound weird, it’s probably no more so than pickles or relish as a burger topping, once you get used to it.
Update: In 2017, New Zealand McDonald’s re-introduced the Kiwiburger, including beetroot:
So, you can get your beetroot burger fix in both Australia and New Zealand (for a limited time, anyway).
February 11, 2018
Bay area food entrepreneurs shut down by local health authorities
In Reason, Baylen Linnekin recounts the rise and fall of Josephine, an online operation intended to connect home cooks with willing buyers:
A dozen or so years ago, as my friend Dave was planning a move from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia, he used the need to clean out his fridge before the move as an excuse to offer a half-empty jar of homemade kimchi for sale on Craigslist. While I don’t think the kimchi sold, Dave’s effort opened my eyes to the seemingly limitless possibilities of homemade online food sales.
The truth is that while those possibilities are limited theoretically only by imagination, they very often bump up in the real world against — to paraphrase Waylon Jennings — the limits of what the law will allow.
That truth was evident last week, when Bay Area food startup Josephine announced it will close its doors in March.
As I described in a Sacramento Bee op-ed in support of Josephine last year, the company launched nearly four years ago with a mission to provide cooks who are typically underrepresented in restaurant leadership — including women and immigrants — with a platform by which to sell home-cooked meals with their neighbors.
It’s a cool idea. And it worked quite well for a time. That is, as I noted, until local health officials “sent cease-and-desist letters to several Josephine cooks.”
Josephine responded by trying to work with lawmakers and regulators, pushing a bill in the state legislature that would provide some legal avenue for its cooks. Despite the fact that the bill is now moving through the California legislature, the company decided its passage would be too late for Josephine and its funders.
Josephine didn’t have to die. The regulations that have made it impossible for the company to operate should have died instead. But its fate mimics that of other similar home-food startups. A similar New York-based startup, Umi Kitchen, flamed out last year after just four months of operations. I wrote an appreciation of Forage Underground Market, the inventive San Francisco food swap that was shuttered by California state and local health authorities, way back in 2012. And I predicted at the time the food underground movement was just beginning to blossom.
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Sriracha Sauce and the Surprisingly Heartwarming Story Behind It
Today I Found Out
Published on 18 Jan 2018In this video:
The genesis of Sriracha hot sauce (pronounced sir-ah-cha, contrary to what many think) becoming the condiment staple it is today can be traced back to 1975 and an unassuming Vietnamese refuge called David Tran – the founder and current CEO of Huy Fong Foods.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
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January 27, 2018
Burger King swings and misses in their first attempt at entering political discussions
Tho Bishop explains why the second-rate burger business fails to convince:
For one, Burger King does not have a “Whopper neutrality” policy – and for good reason. If a family of five places a large order, while the next customer simply orders an ice cream cone, most Burger King employees will not refuse to serve up the dessert until after they fulfill the first order. The aim is to serve as many customers, as quickly as possible.
Similarly, a Whopper meal comes in various sizes – all with different prices – all so that customers have more flexibility based on having their food desires met. Imagine if a government regulator decided that since Americans have a right to have their thirst quenched – no matter its size – all fast food restaurants had to price all drink sizes the same? The result would be the prices for small drinks going up, while restaurants having to submit to occasional inspections by government agents to make sure no one was violating beverage neutrality laws. (This of course would still manage to not be the worst soda-related policy that’s been proposed.)
Additionally, Burger King certainly has the right to not prioritize delivering their customers food in a timely matter, just as customers have a right to avoid their services as a result. Whether or not the customers in the video were authentic or not, their reaction to the absurd fictional policy is how you’d expect someone to act. The video suggests that none of them would be excited about returning to Burger King if this had become actual franchise operating procedure. Once again, the market has its own ways of punishing bad actors.
Which is precisely why I will be avoiding Whoppers myself for the foreseeable future.
At Reason, Nick Gillespie comments on the video:
The joke in the video is that customers must pay $26 to get a Whopper “hyperfast.” If they go with the standard price, it takes forever. Because you know, Net Neutrality rules that were formalized in 2015 somehow magically altered the way internet service providers (ISPs) delivered data to their customers. Before 2015, the internet was a morass of shakedown artists who forced all of us to pay extra for this or that site. And now that Net Neutrality has been repealed, the ‘net has reverted to a Hobbesian world in which access is nasty, brutish, and metered.
Oh wait, in fact, the average speed and number of internet connections kept growing regardless of the regulatory regime. The FCC’s most recent Internet Access Services Report counted 104 million fixed internet connections, a new high. That number doesn’t count mobile or satellite connections. Eighty percent of census tracts had at three or more ISPs offering connections of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and another 17 percent had two ISPs doing the same (figure 4). So 97 percent of America can go elsewhere when it comes to basic internet connections that allow the sort of streaming, surfing, and gaming we want. Just as customers do with Burger King, we can say, “Screw it, I’m going to McDonald’s.” In 2016, 56 million residential connections offered at least 25 Mbps upstream speeds. That’s up from about 22 million in 2013 (figure 8). How did that progress happen before the 2015 open internet order?
Watching the responses by customers helps explain why Net Neutrality rules as mandated by the FCC under Tom Wheeler were unnecessary. After all, for all the hysteria kicked up around the need for such rules, proponents went begging for examples of ISPs throttlng traffic or blocking sites in systematic ways. ISPs don’t actually enjoy pure-monopoly conditions, but even if they did, customers would raise holy hell if they were treated as poorly as Burger King acts in this video.
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January 13, 2018
Fast Food – Would You Like Capitalism With That? I THE COLD WAR
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 8 Jul 2015A city that is not plastered with branches of US Fast Food chains is a rare sight nowadays. That wasn’t always the case. Fast Food, as we know it today, is a child of the economic boom after World War 2. Taking your new car for a ride to the Drive-In restaurant and getting a fresh burger; that’s the American Dream right there. Ultimately the concept of identical taste and identical manufacturing steps is one thing: pure capitalism. Food chains keep wages and costs as low as possible and that is why Fast Food is not nearly as glamorous today as it once was. So put down that Hamburger and find out all about the history of Fast Food with Guy on IT’S HISTORY.
Big Mac Index: http://bit.ly/TheBIGMACIndex
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December 31, 2017
Who Invented Hawaiian Pizza?
Today I Found Out
Published on 4 Dec 2017In this video:
On June 8, 2017, Greek-born, Canadian-bred pizza maker Sam Panopoulos died. His career slinging pies was rather unremarkable save for one notable thing – he was the inventor of the popular, yet infamous pineapple-topped “Hawaiian Pizza,” named as such because of the brand of canned fruit he used. Loved by some and hated by others, the sweet and salty pizza is so controversial that it once triggered an argument between friendly nations. While such arguments rage on both sides of it being a delicacy or an abomination, the fact is that the Hawaiian pizza is actually not Hawaiian – it’s Canadian. Here now is the story of pizza and the man who decided to add pineapples to it.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
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