Tag: The Things that we Eat

This essay is sort of a prequel to two that I am scheduled to write for What’s for Dinner, posted at Dailykos.com (and here) Saturday evenings around 7:30 Eastern.  Next Saturday I am writing rather long one about jellies (and related items) with lots of technical information and pictures of the process from start to finish.  On 05 December I return to write about my favorite holiday goodies.

This got me to thinking that some of those goodies need background preparation before cooking them.  Tonight we will discuss several key ingredients in some of my favorites, and some of the biology and natural history about them.  Some things, like preparing nuts and persimmons, HAVE to be done in advance for various reasons, and some can be done in advance to ease the workload during the busy holiday season.

Preserving food by drying it is prehistoric.  Humans have dried food for millenia, and it works as well now as it did way back when.  In this sense, I am not talking about grains and seeds that naturally dry on the plant, with no interaction from humans, but rather foods that need a bit of help to dry without going bad.

Let us take, for example, apples.  Dried apples are wonderful, but leave that apple of the tree and it falls to the ground, and just rots.  Apples are too moist in their prime state to dry whole, especially if nature is all that is working for one.

Enter mankind to make a better process.  We have learnt to peel and slice the apples, and then put them into a place where the water is lost rather quickly, before bacteria and molds can grow.  Please read further.

Food preservation is as old as humankind, and actually predates us.  Animals are known to preserve food in a crude fashion, from dogs burying bones to squirrels stashing away nuts and acorns for later consumption.  Strictly speaking, that is not really food preservation but rather food stockpiling, but the two are extensively connected.

Our hunter/gatherer ancestors began to preserve food with the discovery and taming of fire.  The mere act of cooking meat has a preservative effect, especially when the meat is cooked to near dryness.  Drying food in the sun was also certainly practiced in warmer climates, and freezing food for later use was and still is done by nomads in the Arctic regions.

With the advent of agriculture the need for preservation of food on a large scale became essential to provide sustenance during times of crop failure, especially for grain crops.  Grains are fairly easy to preserve since they are dry, so keeping them dry and vermin out of them are the keys.  It is thought that the cat became domesticated around this time.

This series will examine various food preservation methods from the ancient to the modern, including an extensive installment on chemical preservatives.  Some of these have gotten bad press undeservedly, and some are not as safe as commonly thought.

This is the second of two installments on non-nutritive sweeteners.  This time we will talk about one very ancient one, the new ultra sweet aspartame analogue, and a couple of natural products, one of which is gaining popularity these days.

Non-nutritive sweeteners probably have value in managing conditions such as diabetes and obesity where caloric intake, particularly from simple carbohydrates, needs to be restricted.  However, these materials are not panaceas and other dietary measures are essential to control either of those conditions.  Some studies also are consistent with the premise that the mere sensation of sweetness can cause a rise in blood glucose in non-diabetic people, thus making these agents act like sugar even though they contain no calories.  These interpretations are controversial, though.

Hello, folks.  Here is another installment regarding the things that we eat.  Remember, I am a trained expert in the field (I used to head one the few “Megalabs” for FDA) so I know of what I speak.  This time we will talk about non-nutritive sweeteners since we all use them from time to time, even if we do not know it.

I was going to talk about the drugs that Michael Jackson took before he died a short time ago, but the information is still dribbling out from the Coroner’s office, and I want the whole story before I add my opinion about it.  But be assured that I will weigh in when the story is out in the open.

Milk, in its human form, has  been the foundation of nutrition for hominid infants for millions of years.  In the past few millenia, animals have been domesticated for milk and meat.  Many of them are ruminants, but not all are.  The camel and the horse are notable exceptions, highly regarded in several cultures for their milk.

In the western world, kine (aka cattle), (Bos) are almost exclusively used for providing milk in useful quantities.  As a matter of fact, in the United States this is such an important agricultural industry that entire sets of laws and price supports have been enacted.

This essay looks into the the issue of milk that is produced with Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), (also called Bovine Somatotropin (BST))and will likely prove to be controversial.  This is an important issue, and I will attempt to give it a fair treatment, but remember that many folks have already made up their minds without considering the actual data, and it is difficult to make folks who have already made decisions based on emotion to see logic.  With that said, here we go.