How To Make The Perfect French Fry

adria.richards/Flickr

From Popular Mechanics:

For fare that looks so effortlessly prepared by millions of restaurant chains and festivals all over America, fried foods undergo a harrowing series of chemical reactions before they end up on your plate. Take the common French fry. Copying the magic of even a simple oil-cooked potato at home requires diligence, resources and certain flirtation with danger. Here is the food science you need to know to fry.

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Health Checkup: Who Needs Organic Food?

Foodpix / Getty Images
Organic food comes with real health benefits and significant costs. TIME looks at both sides of the debate

From Time Magazine:

Looking for a quick way to feel lousy about yourself? Then forget the idea of a healthy diet and just eat what your body wants you to eat. Your body wants meat; your body wants fat; your body wants salt and sugar. Your body will put up with fruits and vegetables if it must, but only after all the meat, fat, salt and sugar are gone. And as for the question of where your food comes from — whether it's locally grown, sustainably raised, grass-fed, free range or pesticide-free? Your body doesn't give a hoot.

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Why Food Is Costing Us The Earth

Coffee prices have risen sharply Photo: SIMON RAWLES

From The Telegraph:

The fight is on over how to solve our food crisis, but if we choose the wrong food policy at this juncture there could be no going back, says Rose Prince.

Hardly a morning passes without food making the headlines. This week has brought us the burger that thinks it's a pizza and news that eating asparagus makes you stay slim (fingers crossed it's the type covered in melted butter). And we heard that, if you eat pickled squid guts and single cream together, it tastes like strawberry shortcake.

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The Secret To The Immortality Of McDonald's Food

Salon/iStockphoto/xxxnake

From Salon:

The chain's burgers can resist rot for years. Scientists explain why they have the shelf life of the undead.

Ever since Morgan Spurlock held up that jar of mysteriously well-preserved fries in "Super Size Me," the list of exhibits in the McDonald’s museum of food-that-refuses-go-bad has grown exponentially. The latest entrant is the Happy Meal Project, a burger and a packet of fries that have soldiered on undecayed for 143 days.

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My Comment: I have a confession .... I am addicted to sausage egg McMuffins. Don't know why .... just need a fix once in a while.

Doctors Urge Choking Warning Labels For Food

The American Academy of Pediatrics says the food industry should avoid shapes and sizes that pose choking risks. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

Although federal law requires choking warning labels on certain toys, no mandate exists for food.

* Choking kills more than 100 U.S. children 14 years or younger each year.
* Food, including candy and gum, is among the leading culprits, along with items like coins and balloons.
* Federal law requires choking warning labels on certain toys, but no mandate exists for food.

When 4-year-old Eric Stavros Adler choked to death on a piece of hot dog, his anguished mother never dreamed that the popular kids' food could be so dangerous.

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Chocolate Bar That Can Be Eaten During Lent

Experts said the breakthrough could help tackle Britain?s obesity crisis by producing a 'new generation of low-fat foods'. Photo: Cathal McNaughton

From The Telegraph:

A "healthy" chocolate bar which can be eaten during Lent has been invented by scientists who replaced the fat with water.

The low-fat chocolate containing almost two thirds water is said to taste identical to regular bars and could pave the way for a new generation of “healthy” foods.

Researchers are also developing a low-fat mayonnaise and porridge which prevents people from feeling hungry by staying in their stomach longer.

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A Menu For Feeding 9 Billion

From New York Times:

Science Magazine has removed the pay wall from “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People.” The paper concludes, as many have before, that keeping up with humanity’s needs as numbers and appetites crest toward mid-century poses big challenges. But it expresses optimism that a sustained focus on efficiency, technology and policy innovations can do the trick. (The images above, from the paper, show how investments in water storage and other measures helped restore vegetation in a dry region in Niger.) Here’s the summary:

Continuing population and consumption growth will mean that the global demand for food will increase for at least another 40 years. Growing competition for land, water, and energy, in addition to the overexploitation of fisheries, will affect our ability to produce food, as will the urgent requirement to reduce the impact of the food system on the environment. The effects of climate change are a further threat. But the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security, different components of which are explored here.

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Heinz' New Ketchup Packet Dips, Squeezes And Scores (With Video!)

From Popular Mechanics:

You know the fast food driving drill: Heading down the Interstate, you carefully unfold the wrapper to your burger and make a place on your lap. You reach for the french fries and follow one of two strategies—take them from the box, one-by-one and paint them with ketchup from the packet, quickly running out of your supply; or squeeze a puddle of Heinz on the wrapper for dipping, risking stained pants and messy hands. Isn't there a better way?

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Diet Demystified: Why We Overeat

From Live Science:

As Americans begin the process of breaking their New Year's resolutions — sure, one king-sized Kit Kat won’t hurt anyone — they can forgive themselves with a consolation: Hormones may be to blame.

In a new study, which was published online Dec 24 in the journal in the future] published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers have found that the hormone ghrelin causes mice to search out food — even when they weren’t hungry.

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Why Some Continue To Eat When Full: Researchers Find Clues

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 28, 2009) — The premise that hunger makes food look more appealing is a widely held belief -- just ask those who cruise grocery store aisles on an empty stomach, only to go home with a full basket and an empty wallet.

Prior research studies have suggested that the so-called hunger hormone ghrelin, which the body produces when it's hungry, might act on the brain to trigger this behavior. New research in mice by UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists suggest that ghrelin might also work in the brain to make some people keep eating "pleasurable" foods when they're already full.

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Cooking Is What Made Us Human

From New Scientist:

What was the central mystery of human evolution that you were trying to solve?

I was sitting next to the fire in my living room and I started asking the question, when did our ancestors last live without fire? Out of this came a paradox: it seemed to me that no human with our body form could have lived without it.

Why can't a human exist on the same diet as a chimpanzee?

A chimpanzee's diet is like eating crab apples and rose hips. Just go into the woods and find some fruits, and see if you can come back with a full stomach. The answer is you can't. The big difficulty is that the nutrient density is not very high. This is problematic for humans because we have a very small gut, about 60 per cent of the volume it would be if we were one of the other great apes. We don't have enough intestine to keep low-quality food in our gut long enough to digest it.

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New Weapon In Battle Of The Bulge: Food Releases Anti-Hunger Aromas During Chewing

A real possibility does exist for developing a new generation of foods that make people feel full by releasing anti-hunger aromas during chewing. (Credit: iStockphoto/Jan Couver)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 17, 2009) — A real possibility does exist for developing a new generation of foods that make people feel full by releasing anti-hunger aromas during chewing, scientists in the Netherlands are reporting after a review of research on that topic. Such foods would fight the global epidemic of obesity with aromas that quench hunger and prevent people from overeating. Their article appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

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Nanoparticle Protects Oil In Foods From Oxidation, Spoilage

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 9, 2009) — Using a nanoparticle from corn, a Purdue University scientist has found a way to lengthen the shelf life of many food products and sustain their health benefits.

Yuan Yao, an assistant professor of food science, has successfully modified the phytoglycogen nanoparticle, a starchlike substance that makes up nearly 30 percent of the dry mass of some sweet corn. The modification allows the nanoparticle to attach to oils and emulsify them while also acting as a barrier to oxidation, which causes food to become rancid. His findings were published in the early online version of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

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Do Hot, Dry Conditions Cause More African Civil Wars?

From Discover Magazine:

We’ve covered industries and species that climate change will affect, but is more war the next side effect of a warming world? A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ties warmer temperatures to higher incidence of civil wars in Africa. The scientists warn that the continent could see 54 percent more armed conflict—and almost 400,000 more war deaths—by 2030 if climate projections prove true.

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15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee

CSN Editor: The following site has a great graphic that describes and explains all that there is to know about coffee. The link is HERE.

The Science And Magic Of Breadmaking

Use your loaf: Making bread was surely one of humankind's first chemistry experiments.
Graham Turner/Guardian

From The Guardian:

As winter sets in, warm your senses by baking your own fresh bread. Andy Connelly guides you through the magical process that turns flour and water into heavenly food.

When I think of bread my mind goes back to cold Saturday mornings with ice on the inside of the patio doors and cartoons blazing on the television. My dad would get up early and, after eating his porridge, would begin to make bread.

He would mix all the ingredients in a large ceramic bowl that was crystal-white on the inside and biscuit-brown on the outside. I would watch as the flour became dough and the dough grew and grew in the warm kitchen. I would linger near the oven to smell the earthy fresh bread as it baked, waiting for the treat of eating the crusty end slice of the loaf with a thick slab of butter.

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Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food

From Live Science:

While many Americans feast on turkey and all the fixings today, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.

The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.

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Industrial Thanksgiving: Science Takes Mom’s Recipes to the Assembly-Line

From Wired Science:

Thanksgiving is about eating, and though local, organic food might be what the cool kids are eating, most people are still eating products of the industrial food system.

Whether you’re talking turkey, cranberries or potatoes, industrial-scale processes have been developed to drive down food costs, drive up corporate profits and feed America’s incredible hunger for novel food items.

But most consumers of these manufactured meals have little or no knowledge of the machines and methods used to freeze turkeys, turn potatoes into fake potatoes, and cranberries into TV-dinner cranberry sauce. It’s not always pretty, but food scientists’ epic battle to scale up your mom’s recipes without making them taste nasty is worth examining, if not giving thanks for.

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Sushi Often Not What You Think

Giant Atlantic bluefin tuna from Prince Edward Island, Canada. Credit: Jay R. Rooker

From Live Science:

That tuna in your sushi might be an endangered species, a new study finds.

Some genetic detective work by scientists has shown that bluefin tuna, an endangered fish, regularly gets put on the plates of sushi eaters in New York and Colorado.

"When you eat sushi, you can unknowingly get a critically endangered species on your plate," said Jacob Lowenstein, a graduate student affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Columbia University. "But with an increasingly popular technique, DNA barcoding, it is a simple process for researchers to see just what species are eaten at a sushi bar."

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Mad Science? Growing Meat Without Animals

From Live Science:

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.

Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

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