Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day everyone... why not celebrate with some Pi pies?

Need a recipe? How about one from a woman who I pretty much view as the queen of pie?

(Image: Pie for Pi Day, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 image from djwtwo's photo stream)

The Compartmentalization of Violence

Over at BoingBoing, there is a very thought-provoking interview with Timothy Pachirat, who has written a book after going "undercover" at a slaughterhouse in Nebraska entitled Every Twelve Seconds. Rather than the usual expose, his writing addresses how the violence inherent in killing animals for our food on an industrial level is compartmentalized and shielded from society. Although this work is more related to food philosophy than food science, I think it's important enough an issue to think about that I'm blogging about it here.

Pachirat discusses how the actual work of killing cattle at slaughterhouses is broken down into specific tasks, and how the individuals that do each task are separated from each other and the outside world, physically and mentally, using walls, ideology, and language. This separates humans from the violence that is occurring, allowing consumers and even slaughterhouse employees to effectively ignore or believe that they are not responsible for the act of killing. This happens within the slaughterhouse, and, on a larger scale, outside the slaughterhouse where society in general is separated from the nasty work, done mostly by immigrants behind closed doors that few, if any of us, get a glimpse behind.

The issues discussed in this interview and in Pachirat's book raise quite a few uncomfortable questions about industrial meat production. Who is responsible? Is the act of placing responsibility another way to compartmentalize violence perpetrated by an entire society? How does this relate to other acts of violence that occur behind closed doors in order for us to remain "civilized," like torture, inprisonment, and execution? As a consumer of meat myself, I think that it is the responsibility of humans to ask questions about where their food comes from. We must make educated, informed, and well-thought-out decisions about what is okay to eat, and by extension what processes in which we are willing to be complicit. 

(image via BoingBoing)

What Color is Your Cheese?

You've heard the saying that a diner eats first with her eyes, meaning that the way things look can influence our perception and enjoyment of food. Over at The Kitchn, the resident Cheesemonger Nora Singley wrote a post about the origins of the different colors of cheese and what they can indicate about the type of cheese you're looking at.

Here's the shorthand:
Orange: artificially colored cheese, including cheddar and processed cheese
Yellow: Grass-fed cows' milk
White: Goat
Blue: Contains mold

What I found most interesting was that, while cows' milk contains beta carotene, goats' milk does not. That means that if a cow consumes more beta carotine in its diet, its milk will contain more beta carotine and cheese made from this milk will be more yellow. On the other hand, no matter how much grass a goat eats, its milk and cheese will be perfectly white. Some food historians believe that the reason people began dyeing cheese orange was to mimic the yellow color of cows' milk cheeses from the spring and summer, times of the year that the cows' normally would be eating more grass and also times of the year when the milk was full of fat and flavor.

(Image: Blue Cheese, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 image from Liz Davenport's photo stream)

Homemade Astronaut Ice Cream

One small step for man...

As a kid, after visiting almost any natural history or science museum, a package of freeze-dried "astronaut" ice cream was one of my favorite treats. I still like it today, actually, even though I think it's mostly the nostalgia and not the taste. Via BoingBoing, I found these instructions for making your own, homemade freeze-dried ice cream, assuming you have access to a vacuum pump and some laboratory glassware. Although it seems like a bit of work, the limitless flavor possibilities are intriguing. Also, I suppose you could use this setup to freeze-dry all sorts of foods, not just ice cream. Tasty.

(Image: astronaut ice cream, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 image from Rakka's photostream)

Pizza is still a vegetable.

Today the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) introduced new guidelines for school lunches, intended to make the lunches healthier. These new guidelines, including limiting the caloric range for school lunches and requiring that each lunch have at least two servings of vegetables, seem like a step in the right direction. Despite all of the general pats on the back I see going around the internet, however, the guidelines are still far from perfect. Thanks to agri-business lobbies in congress, the tomato paste in pizza is still counted as a vegetable, and the proposal to limit servings of french fries (another "vegetable") did not make the cut. Baby steps, congress, baby steps...

Science of Beating Eggs

My friend Lynn tipped me off to a neat story on the NPR website about the science of beating eggs. Read it if you'd like to get some pro-tips (from a real chef!) on beating egg whites into a foam for use in a souffle (or other whipped-egg-white application, such as meringue).

The first trick is to separate your eggs (that is, separate the yolks from the whites) without letting any of the egg yolks contaminate your whites. This is important because, while the egg white is entirely made of protein, the yolk contains some fat. When you whip the egg whites, you denature some of the proteins, which unfold and expose some hydrophobic areas. These hydrophobic areas would rather stick to each other than to the surrounding water, so the proteins stick together, creating a sort of net that can surround air bubbles, creating a foam. This foam is what makes whipped egg whites fluffy. If you contaminate your whites with the fat from the egg yolks, the hydrophobic areas of the egg white proteins will interact with the fat from the yolks instead of each other, leaving you with no net of denatured protein in which to catch bubbles. No bubbles means no foam.

Another note: if you over-beat the egg whites, continuing to beat them after a proper foam has formed, the egg white proteins will coagulate completely, sticking together so strongly that they force out all of the liquid between them, leaving you with a clumpy, separated, egg white mess.

If you're more of a visual learner and are interested in learning this useful kitchen technique, check out this how-to slideshow from Serious Eats or this excellent segment on souffle from the ever-informative Alton Brown from Good Eats.

Related: The Science Behind Poaching an Egg

(Image: Soufflé, a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 image from David_Turner's photostream)

Growing Vegetables In the Cloud

Artists rendering of the new Nikkei vegetable growing system from Panasonic.

(Image via TechCrunch)

It seems that lately food trends have been moving in the low-tech direction. Slow food, local, organic, grass-fed, heritage, biodynamic - all sorts of words describing us basically getting back to our roots with regards to growing produce and farming animals. Mostly I'm inclined to think this is a good thing. There is all sorts of evidence to show that many aspects of the modern industrial-agricultural complex are harming our environment and hurting our bodies. However, we can't go back to the way we farmed food 100 years ago without creating a shortage of food for our current ever-increasing population. What's the fix?

One way could be to blend modern technology with old farming practices. For example, growing organic heritage greens in a high-tech rooftop garden. I discovered one company, Gotham Greens, doing something similar. This company is growing local vegetables and herbs for restaurants and consumers in Brooklyn, New York City, in a high-tech hydroponic rooftop garden set up in an abandoned bowling alley. Also recently, Panasonic introduced a new product for people who desire to grow vegetables, indoors or our, at home with a super high-tech system that allows users to monitor vegetable growth and manage the garden using a cloud-based computing system. Right now the system is prohibitively expensive for most people at around $8000, but if there is enough demand for this type of technology, every home could soon have its own high-tech victory garden, helping the effort in the war on carbon-footprints and fossil fuel dependence.