Tag: food

Restaurants hate 1st dates

Your awkward first date can amuse restaurant staff. But other patrons may not be that delighted. And because every seat is a piece of money-making real estate, the 10s of dates you’ve gone on this year may also be affecting many businesses’ bottom line. Particularly when daters stare into their phones for 30 minutes without ordering, waiting for their match to turn up. And when they spend another 2 hours talking about their childhood and lactose intolerance while nursing a single, happy-hour-priced beer.

Vegan Scam

“I worked hard, this was my passion. This was all I ever wanted. Why would I throw it up in flames? I have nothing now. I have no apartment. I have no money. Why would I torture myself like that? Talk to my friends. They will tell you this is not me.” Her carefully cultivated public persona hid some deeper demons. “She’s thrown stools, grapefruits and phones at me. She would leave cryptic notes with big kitchen knives stuck into vegetables. She punched me in the head and cut me with her ring.”

Barano

Start with hand-pulled mozzarella in several varieties, including salted, smoked, and stracciatella. The cheese is served with accoutrements — grilled scallions, eggplant, Lucky’s tomatoes and more — and makes an excellent addition to other starters like meatballs with sheep’s milk ricotta and octopus with farro, celery, pickled radish, pine nuts and mint pesto. House made pastas range from bucatini with rabbit ragu (shown above) to tagliatelle “arrabbiata” with lobster, tomato and stracciatella. Wood-fired pizzas include sauces red to white, but don’t miss the wood-fired mains — especially the spit-roasted lamb leg with carrots, watercress, pine nut and raisin panzanella. End your meal with ice cream from OddFellows Ice Cream Co.

Ramen Bloggers

Ramen bloggers aren’t just passive observers of the noodle soup phenomenon: to be a ramen writer of Kamimura’s stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5m along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s 4 main islands, is home to 2000 ramen shops, representing Japan’s densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city; it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses. Tare is the flavour base that anchors each bowl, that special potion – usually just 30 ml of concentrated liquid – that bends ramen into 1 camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you’ll find tare made with up to 24 ingredients, an apothecary’s stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.

Gout returns

These dietary problems are translating to a resurgence of a handful of preventable diseases. In the U.K., 3m people are malnourished, and malnutrition-related hospitalizations spiked by 50%. 100k patients were hospitalized with gout. Gout—typically related to a buildup of uric acid due to over-consuming alcohol and rich foods—is a problem in the US, as well. The prevalence of gout in the US has steadily risen over the past 20 years, affecting more than 8m Americans in 2011.

Cambodian iron fish hack

interventions like these are crucial to make the world smarter.

In 2008, Christopher Charles was thinking about anemia. Anemia is often caused by an iron deficiency. It makes you tired and weak. It makes you have trouble thinking clearly. Almost 50% of Cambodia’s population suffers from this disease! Over 3.5b people on our planet have anemia, a $50b drain on global GDP. You can cure anemia with iron supplements – but they taste bad, and they often cause stomach pains, constipation, and even more disgusting problems. So Charles had another idea: give villagers little blocks of iron to drop into their cooking pots. The iron gets released slowly as the water boils. But at first, people hated them. They thought the iron blocks where ugly. They thought the iron blocks would scratch their pots. So they turned them into doorstops. He kept trying. Eventually he came up with a second idea, that could make the first idea work.

He realized that in rural Cambodia almost everything revolves around fish. People earn money fishing, they’re a big part of the Khmer diet and their folklore. So, he made iron into “lucky fish”. And people are now happy to put one into the pot when cooking.

1 of those who has been using the fish is Sot Mot, a 60-year-old grandmother who lives just outside Phnom Penh. She drops the fish into boiling water as she chops up garlic, ginger and lemongrass for Khmer chicken soup. “Before, I felt tired and lazy and my chest shook when I was tired. But after I use the fish, I have strength and energy to work and I sleep well, too.”

1 of her granddaughters seems to be improving, too. “Before, when I went to school I felt tired, and I didn’t do well at math, maybe the 6th in the class. Now, I’m No. 1.”

2023-09-13: And sometimes you have to take something out, like lead

Last year in Get the Lead Out of Turmeric! I reported that adulteration of turmeric was a major source of lead exposure among residents of rural Bangladesh. Well there is good news: the lead is gone! Wudan Yan at UnDark reports the remarkable story of academic research quickly being translated into political action that improves lives.

Crappy hipster chocolate

bros will be bros

In the chocolate community, the suspicions of remelting began early. The Mast Brothers’ original bars had a taste and texture that was too much like the palate-friendly kind available at the drugstore to be truly “bean to bar,” Scott explains in his first post. Bean-to-bar chocolate has a distinctive taste that, like wine, ties it to its origin, and craft chocolate makers use minimal processing to retain that taste.

Interspecies friendships

Animals in captivity have their food presented to them; they don’t need to worry about marking their territory or looking for mates the way an animal in the wild would. All those activities take time and energy, and if those needs are removed, the animals get bored. A playmate—even an unorthodox one—can be more satisfying than a meal. The animal’s motivation to engage socially and playfully maybe was higher in its need hierarchy than eating. There’s an 85% chance that Amur will end up eating his new friend.