Articulatory Loop

As a food geek, I have been watching Bravo's Top Chef with ... eternal optimism. The entire concept of the show guarantees disappointment, I think, because ultimately the viewer can't taste the food. With Project Runway, you can see the clothes and at least make some kind of judgment on their relative merits; not so on Top Chef.

Iron Chef manages to be more interesting, I find, because it at least focuses the viewer on things that a spectator can judge - technique, presentation, how the food is getting made and the ideas that go in to making it. Top Chef started out doing a good bit of that, but increasingly the focus has been on the canned Reality TV Melodrama of the contestants' fights and whining and pontificating, mostly about topics only tangentially related to food.

It's too bad, and a part of why I dislike the whole chef-as-celebrity thing that has gained so much momentum since Wolfgang Puck (at least). That is that the food ends up getting second place to a cult of personality. And I think that detracts not only from the ability of many proper chefs (the kind who aren't photogenic enough to go on TV, for instance) to make a living, but also from the quality possible from those who do Make It Big On TV. The culinary world should take a caution from the auto industry - Lee Iacocca was brilliant at making cars, until he started being a celebrity too. And then he became a celebrity who also made cars. He retired rich, but do you have any idea how many transmissions my old Caravan went thru??

So yeah. My feelings on Top Chef and other things. Now back to my thesis.

Labels: Bravo, celebrity, cooking, food, rant, reality TV, stupidity, top chef

So a quick look at my referral logs suggests that there are a lot of people, all over the world, looking here for information about geoducks. It's been well over two years since I mentioned those phallic clams, but all of a sudden all this interest.

Background: The geoduck is a giant clam, it can live more than 150 years and lay billions of eggs. It's also supposed to be really, really tasty. So, all you googlers, who wants to make me some geoduck???

Labels: blogging, cuisine, food, geoduck, internet, links, phallic, random

At the Atlanta International Farmers Market. They also have instant coffee from other countries (i.e., that doesn't taste like crap), and awesome lentil samosas to eat while shopping. Because shopping there when hungry would be an expensive mistake.

Labels: cheap, farmers market, food, fun, onions

A study published in the Lancet suggests that the common food preservative, sodium benzoate, may be causing or exacerbating kids hyperactivity. That this kind of chemical has harmful effects should surprise no one, but they do highlight how important it is to watch what your kids (and you, since it's likely to have some effect in adults too) eat.

Diacetyl, another problematic food additive which has spawned numerous lawsuits, also still remains on the market. Previously, it was thought only to be dangerous to people working in manufacture (thus the whole remaining on the market bit...don't you miss effective labor unions?), but now doctors report a case of a consumer with bronchiolitis obliterans. He really liked microwave popcorn, and would inhale its delicious fumes a few times a day. Now he has a fatal lung disease. There's a lesson here, somewhere.

A chemical that people take more intentionally is Viagra; recreational use of the drug is as prominent as on-label treatment. Now it seems that this may come with a hilariously ironic side effect: all that rampant sex seems to carry with it the thing playing men fear most - LOVE! It appears that Viagra (and similar drugs) increase oxytocin, known for its role in social bonding. This makes me very happy.

And finally, speaking of love and sex, why are we gays fighting so hard to get married again? Live-in boyfriends do more housework than husbands. Another reason not to fully commit!!

Labels: additives, ADHD, artifical ingredients, drugs, food, gay marriage, health, kids, oxytocin, science, sex, Viagra

I assume what their products all come from the same factory. Or at least from petrol, in the more basic sense.

Labels: CVS, DC, drugs, food, gross, McDonalds

I went out with a guy once who had a nut allergy (including coconut), and aside from all of his other issues, I realized that there was no way it'd work for that reason alone: no Thai food, no Indian food, no German Chocolate Cake, no PBJ picnics. And now, I'm guessing, no vacations to Papua New Guinea! The PNG island of Bougainville is working to replace diesel fuel with coconut oil, and thus become independent of the expensive imported former source of energy. That's really cool, and even if it's not a global or long-term solution to our energy crisis, it's gotta smell nice!

Speaking of, uhm, nuts, yet another US study has found that, despite what the wingnuts constantly claim, getting kids to use condoms doesn't make them more promiscuous: the UW study found that kids who reported using condoms their first time having sex had the same average number of partners as those who didn't use, and were less likely to have contracted an STI. So as usual, when the fundies scream about not wanting kids to have sex, what they really mean is that they don't want them to have sex without getting gonorrhea.

There's a bit on the other kind of nuts - crazy people - sitting here as well, but I want to think more about it (since it's really cool) before I blog it, so that'll come up later today.

In the meantime, we go to crazy hippies and their meditating ways (kinda). It seems that intensive mental training, by way of Vipassana meditation, improves people's ability to discriminate and attend to temporally close stimuli. Basically, the researchers found that intensively-trained participants had significant reductions in their 'attentional blink' time relative to baseline and more reduction than did a less-intensively trained group. The study was small, and I think the controls were perhaps lacking (groups were not randomized, and the intensive-group were people already signed up for the program -- selection bias?, etc.), but it's an interesting starting point for more research.

Labels: attention, chlamydia, coconuts, condoms, energy, food, fuel, gonorrhea, jailbait, kids, learning, meditation, neuroscience, nuts, sex, STI, Vipassana

A large survey of American households found that in states with higher gun homicide rates, household gun ownership was higher. Or, possibly, the other way around. As much as I personally believe that allowing people to own guns is just begging for homicides, the data in this study (despite what the media are reporting) do not indicate that guns 'cause' violence. Only that, in places where guns are more readily available, they are more likely to be used in homicides.

I don't really see what use causation is in this case...removing guns would almost certainly lower the homicide rate. Another thing that can kill you is germs, and you can get those from your kitchen sponges. How do you avoid killing yourself from doing the dishes? Well, you could microwave your sponges and rags - two to four minutes on 'high' will kill most of that nasties in them!

Speaking of side effects, it seems that our old friends, the SSRIs, are prone to yet another: osteoporosis. A study indicates that seniors taking the antidepressants had lower bone density than did controls, putting them at risk for severe breaks and decreased motility. These findings are concerning, to say the least, considering how antidepressants get prescribed like candy in the US.

And finally, you know what would make me happy? Free gourmet food at work every day. I wanna work for Google!!! (admittedly, I wanted that before I knew about the food, but hey, every little bit helps!)

Labels: disinfection, elderly, food, google, guns, homicide, microwave, osteoporosis, sponges, SSRI

Multiple Sclerosis is a degenerative autoimmune disease, causing severe pain and disability in its victims. Like other autoimmune conditions, its causes are unknown and treatments are scarce. Argentine researchers are reporting the results of a small cohort of MS patients (24), some of whom showed sign of parasitic infection and some of whom did not. The parasite hosts had much less severe MS symptoms and fewer relapses than did non-hosts. Similar to previous findings that intestinal parasites relieved Crohn's, this result is in support of a 'hygiene hypothesis' of autoimmune disorders: relatively unchallenged by our germ-free modern environment, our immune systems have started 'looking' for things to attack. Such as ourselves.

On a different (and mysterious) causal chain, a large sample study has found that men with gum disease are 63% more likely to suffer hard-to-treat pancreatic cancers. One idea is that this could be due to the inflammation of gum disease 'spreading' to other parts of the body, but that seems a bit far-fetched to me, in terms of cancer. The findings are really fascinating, but I can't help but wonder if there's not a confounding factor in the mix.

In to good news: Canadian researchers have found that the old, apparently safe, off-label (read: cheap) drug dichloroacetate (DCA) may be a potent cancer killer. The compound acts by reactivating cancer cells' mitochondria, which are normally shut off in favor of cellular metabolism glycolysis in cancer cells, and which subsequently initiate apoptosis of the unhealthy cells.

Business, union, and retiree leaders in one room, agreeing on something?!?! It seems so. The group met in Washington to send a message to the politicians: the time has come for universal health care. This needs to happen, and it needs to be done right (or it'll be a disaster akin to what we have now, only even harder to fix), and it needs to be done now. Neither side of the aisle in Congress or the White House has been really willing to step up yet, but hopefully this meeting will prompt them to do so.

Finally, everything you didn't want to know about molecular gastronomy cooking-using-funny-tools-and-ingredients. I've never been to any of the places mentioned, but I get the idea, and am pretty much already bored with it. Like avant-garde art, there comes a point when you're just doing to be shocking, or contrary, or because you can.

For some I guess this is part of the fun, but for me I think it ends up detracting from the actual flavor of the food. Butterscotch bacon? Sounds awesome. Edible menus? Once, cool, twice, yawwwnnn. Soup in a pipette? No thanks.

Labels: autoimmune, bladder cancer, food, gum disease, health care, hygiene, molecular gastronomy, MS, parasites, politics, science

So, when the Wingnut Daily claimed that soy was the devil's food, I think they were forgetting these guys. I picked four of them up at my local Asian grocery today, because (a) all the grannies were a-twitter about their arrival, and (b) they look bloody cool. They were labeled "Black Chestnuts," but I can find no reference to such things on Google.

Anyone have any idea what to do with them??

Labels: chestnut, devil, food, photo, wingnuts