nyc food blog posts, mapped
Tag: food
NYC Bar and Subway Map
Life Extension
In a series of experiments on earthworms, scientists have identified PHA-4, which plays a critical role in prolonging life without tapping into insulin-regulating neural pathways that also control the aging process.
I bet they are partying over at SENS.
2007-08-13: The baby boomers don’t want to die, like all prior generations. but unlike them, they have the financial means to massively fund anti-aging research like SENS. This is only the very beginning.
2008-01-09: I wonder whether CR is compatible with evolutionary fitness.
2008-05-26: Intrinsic Pluripotency
We show that extrinsic stimuli are dispensable for the derivation, propagation and pluripotency of ES cells. The discovery has major implications for large scale production of specialized cells, such as brain, heart muscle and insulin producing cells, for future therapeutic use.
2011-03-08: Telomere shortening
Prematurely aged (shortened) telomeres appears to be a common feature of iPS cells created by current pluripotency protocols. However, the spontaneous appearance of lines that express sufficient telomerase activity to extend telomere length may allow the reversal of developmental aging in human cells for use in regenerative medicine.
Injecting pluripotent cells into your blood stream can reverse aging effects.
2013-09-18: Google used to say, cheekily, that making search faster times billions of users saves lives, so doing anti aging seems like the logical next step. I also like this because it couldn’t be further from all the web 2.0 incrementalist nonsense most startups limit themselves to.
2014-06-13: Stem cell pills
I started taking Stem Cell 100 back in 2011. It is $60 for a 1 month supply. There is now Stem Cell 100+ [$75 for a 1 month supply]. They added more ingredients and the testimonials are that it acts faster and is more powerful and more people have noticeable positive changes.
2015-06-18: Aging as a disease
Let’s face it – any other syndrome that caused the sorts of effects that age does on our bodies would be considered a plague. But we’re used to it, and it happens to everyone, and it happens slowly. Does it have to be that way? The history of medicine is a refusal to play the cards that we’ve been dealt, and there’s no reason to stop now.
2015-08-04: Young blood
the age of an organism, or an organ like the brain, is not written in stone. It is malleable. You can move it in 1 direction or the other. It’s almost mythological that something in young organisms can maintain youthfulness, and it’s probably true.
2015-08-09: Youthful telomeres
children of centenarians, who have a good chance of becoming centenarians themselves, maintained their telomeres at a “youthful” level corresponding to 60 years of age — even when they became 80 or older. Centenarian offspring also maintained lower levels of markers for chronic inflammation.
2015-12-28: Aging and excercise
Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.
2016-10-07: Rapamycin
Nearly 10 years of research showing that Rapamycin makes mice live up to 60% longer, scientists are trying it out as an anti-aging drug in dogs and humans. Researchers gave rapamycin to 16 dogs and imaged their hearts. “It started to function better. It started to look like a more youthful heart”. Those dogs took rapamycin for only 10 weeks.
2017-03-27: NMN
The scientists identified that the metabolite NAD+, which is naturally present in every cell of our body, has a key role as a regulator in protein-to-protein interactions that control DNA repair. Treating mice with a NAD+ precursor, or “booster,” called NMN improved their cells’ ability to repair DNA damage caused by radiation exposure or old age. “The cells of the old mice were indistinguishable from the young mice, after just 1 week of treatment”. Human trials of NMN therapy will begin within 6 months. “This is the closest we are to a safe and effective anti-aging drug that’s perhaps only 3 to 5 years away from being on the market if the trials go well”
2017-06-07: SENS progress
There is much to be optimistic about and the ideas proposed by SENS over 10 years ago and widely criticized are now being eagerly explored by researchers as it becomes ever more apparent that the aging processes are amenable to intervention. What was mocked just over 10 years ago is now becoming an accepted approach to treating age-related diseases as the result continue to mount up in support of a repair based approach to aging. However we still lack complete knowledge on several age-related damages to progress to clinical trials in humans.
2017-11-03: Dietary supplements
Targeting multiple aging pathways has the potential to significantly reduce blood pressure and stress, while significantly increasing HDL Cholesterol levels and lung capacity. Targeting multiple critical aging pathways with a single dietary supplement is a novel alternative strategy to promote overall health.
2018-05-10: Pets as platforms
“We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans”. The US pet industry is a $72B-a-year market.
The prolongation of human lifespan is “the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st century. It’s going to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.”
Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command to look into “enhancement” of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic means of aging control in species including the “cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc.”
The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it’s possible to increase longevity in humans would take too long. “You don’t want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years. They’d say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data’”.
2018-08-14: investable SENS
Aubrey De Grey discusses how all of the aspects of fighting the damage of aging have reached an investable stage. 10 years ago only stem cells were investable. Now companies have been formed to attempt to counter all of the types of aging damage.
2018-09-12: Rejuvenate Bio
George Church talks about reversing human aging and claims they made mice live 2x as long. Organ longevity has also been done successfully with entire mice. If the body still did not get rid of the substandard cells then work at Oisin Biotechnology and others would enable bad cells to be cleared. Oisin is extending the life of mice and has proven safety and improvement in monkeys. They will start human clinical trials in 2019. Rejuvenate Bio has 60 aging reversal gene therapies. They have mentioned but not yet published eye popping results in mice. They are testing aging reversal in dogs in 2018-2019. Human treatments could be available on a general basis by 2025.
2018-10-31: Antiaging funding levels
There is increasing of pharmaceutical company engagement via disease-focused proof of concept trials. Curing all cancers would add 3.5 years to average human lifespan. If anti-aging could delay the start of aging disease from 50 or 60 by 20 or 30 years then this could be 10x better than curing cancer. $50b per year is spent on curing cancer. If medical research was allocated based upon potential impact then anti-aging should be at a funding level of $500 billion per year.
2019-01-31: NMN
His anti aging regimen is to activate pathways to improve the body’s defenses against aging. He is testing NMN on human subjects. He describes NMN is fuel for sirtuins. NMN is related to NR. NR increases the levels of NAD. Sirtuins need NAD to work. We lose NAD as we age. We have half of the NAD by the time we are 50. He takes a gram of NMN (Nicotinamide MonoNucleotide) and takes half a gram resveratrol in the morning with yogurt. He is personally taking 1 gram of Metformin once a day at night.
2019-12-12: Caloric Restriction
the evidence as it stands weakly supports the conclusion that CR modestly extends human life. We expect that an individual engaging in 20-30% CR versus a normative, non-obesogenic diet without malnutrition might enjoy a 10%-20% increase in longevity. A 10%-15% CR relative to a normative diet may increase lifespan by perhaps 5-10%.
2019-12-31: State of antiaging
Progress towards the implementation of rejuvenation therapies is accelerating dramatically, ever faster with each passing year. While far from everyone is convinced that near term progress in addressing human aging is plausible, it is undeniable that we are far further ahead than even a few years ago. Even the public at large is beginning to catch on. While more foresightful individuals of past generations could do little more than predict a future of rejuvenation and extended healthy lives, we are in a position to make it happen.
2020-03-26: Age reversal in human cells
The treated cells appeared to be ~3 years younger on average than untreated cells from elderly people, with peaks of 3 years (in skin cells) and 7 years (in cells that line blood vessels).
2020-12-03: Epigenetic clocks
Sinclair’s focus in on analog information loss, the epigenetic noise that accumulates in the methylation patterns running along our DNA and disturbing its expression. This degradation is a biological clock of aging, and today’s results “tell us the clock doesn’t just represent time—it is time. If you wind the hands of the clock back, time also goes backward.”
“Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function. The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression
2020-12-04: Most brain aging decline can be fixed overnight
Common signs of neuronal aging disappeared literally overnight: neurons’ electrical activity became more sprightly and responsive to stimulation, and cells showed more robust connectivity with cells around them while also showing an ability to form stable connections with one another usually only seen in younger mice.
2022-12-02: Why do birds live so long?
Avian longevity may be linked to special adaptations in the biology of birds—including proteins to operate their highly efficient metabolisms and their remarkable ways of processing oxygen—that prevent tissue damage commonly associated with old age. In many animals, high body temperature, metabolic rates, and blood glucose levels indicate a shorter lifespan because these systems damage DNA in the mitochondria. But compared to other animals, birds are very good at protecting their mitochondrial DNA from the cellular damage associated with aging, which could contribute to their extensive lifespans. Studying birds could enhance our understanding of aging in humans, too, leading to advances in human health. “We want to know how nature has constructed things that resist aging better than we do. Otherwise, we’re left to our own ingenuity.”
2023-01-29: Epigenetic clocks have become more accurate and more universal
“A pan-tissue clock was paradoxical because methylation is supposed to control cell identity,” and remains fixed through adulthood. When Horvath and his colleagues established that epigenetic clocks counted time at the same pace across all tissues, whether that was quickly dividing blood cells or notoriously slow and highly differentiated brain neurons, the race was on to understand the fabric of time that the clocks are measuring. The universal clock, the key finding of Horvath’s 2022 paper, takes the pan-tissue clock one step further. It chimed the final stroke that unequivocally showed a predictable pattern to aging not only within the body of a single organism, but across mammals. These are clocks that hopefully are comprised of cytosines that truly have a causative role in the aging process. Of particular interest are “enhancer” regions of the genome, which exaggerate the role of certain genes by activating them to exorbitant levels.
Recipe Microformat
heh, i was just about to propose a recipe microformat
History of mealtimes
In the 1790s the upper class was rising from bed around noon, and then eating breakfast at an hour when their grandparents had eaten dinner. They then went for “morning walks” in the afternoon and greeted each other with “Good morning” until they ate their dinner at 18:00. Then it was “afternoon” until evening came with supper, sometime between 21:00 and 2:00 The rich, famous and fashionable did not go to bed until dawn. With their wealth and social standing, they were able to change the day to suit themselves. The hours they kept differentiated them from the middle and lower classes as surely as did their clothes, servants and mansions.
redeemed 🙂
Reservations Arbitrage
Primetimetables.com books tables at top Manhattan restaurants and resells them. Buyers pay a $450 annual membership fee plus about $30 per reservation.
Spiga
But Spiga, a little neighborhood restaurant that opened just a month ago on the Upper West Side, has mastered the art of offering flavors associated with sweetness — cocoa, honey, even licorice — without the sweetness itself.
looks like a nice place to try
Vertical Farms
Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. 150 such buildings could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.
So when does this go live? This would be useful to kick the agro lobby in the groin, of which more later.
2008-07-21: Land still too expensive for vertical farms in Manhattan
Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.
2014-05-18: LED lights can be tuned to the optimal wavelength for plant growth, lowering excess heat. 22h of light / day halves the time to maturity, and the indoor environment avoids pests and bad weather. This is probably the future of our agriculture. It allows to bring fresh produce into cities and lowers the huge footprint agriculture has on the planet. we lost 3x the size of the us since 1700 due to depleted soil, and agriculture is the #2 greenhouse factor.
2016-06-09: Newark may have better economics than Manhattan
Newark, NJ-based AeroFarms, the largest vertical farm in the world, employs aeroponics and LED lights to grow indoors all year round. Aside from aeroponics using 95% less water than soil farming and zero pesticides, we are able to grow locally, cutting out a very complex supply chain and enhancing shelf life versus products typically grown in California. We’re 75% more productive annually than the average farm because we bypass the complexity of it.
2017-01-09: It’s time to replace most agriculture around the world with this. Traditional agriculture has a huge water / co2 footprint, uses up a lot of land, and food is grown far away from where it is consumed. This uses 10% of the water.
Ed Harwood’s original prototype mini-farm still produces crops 6x every school year. The invention sits in a corner of the cafeteria by the round lunch tables and the molded black plastic cafeteria chairs, an improbable-looking teaching tool. Examining it, you feel a mystified wonder, and perhaps a slight misgiving about the inventor’s soundness of mind, remembering what happened to Wile E. Coyote. For concentrated ingenuity and handcrafted uniqueness, its closest simile is the Wright brothers’ first biplane, the Flyer, now on display in the National Air and Space Museum, in Washington. Like the Flyer, and like many other great inventions, Harwood’s prototype is also an objet d’art. Its dimensions are 1.5m wide by 3.6m long by 2m high. Essentially, it consists of 2 horizontal trays of thick plastic, both 25cm deep, 1 above the other, suspended in a strong but minimal framework of aluminum. Below the trays, at floor level, a plastic tank holds 1000 liters of water. The cloth is attached to the frame by snaps. On small pipes running along the inside bottom of the tray, Harwood’s special nozzles emit a constant, sputtering spray of water at a downward angle. The spray hits the bottom of the tray and bounces up, and some of it becomes the mist that nourishes the roots growing through the cloths. Eventually, most of the water drains down and returns to the tank to be reused.
2017-05-03: Different types of vertical farming
There are a lot of ways to farm indoors and below are 3 different soilless processes. Done properly at various scales, they’re as effective as at growing crops in skyscrapers as they are in studio apartments:
Hydroponics
One of the oldest and most common methods of vertical farming, hydroponics includes growing plants without soil and in a water solvent containing mineral nutrients. The simplest hydroponic method (called the floating raft system) suspends the plants in soilless raft like a polystyrene sheet and lets the roots hang to absorb the oxygen-aerated solution. Another common method is the nutrient film technique, which is popular for growing lettuce. Here, a stream of the nutrient-dissolved solution is pumped into an angled channel, typically a plastic pipe, containing the plants. This runs past the plants’ root mat and can then be recirculated for continuous use. New York’s Gotham Greens and Square Roots use hydroponics.
Aeroponics
It’s no surprise that NASA has been backing research on aeroponic growth for the past 20 years as it’s free-floating-roots aesthetic is typically used in futuristic scifi movies. With aeroponics, the dangling roots absorb a fine mist comprised of an atomized version of the nutrient solution sprayed directly onto the roots by a pump. Although aeroponics enables plants to grow much more quickly than hydroponics, it requires more solution and therefore is more costly. Newark’s Aerofarms uses aeroponics.
Aquaponics
Like hydroponic systems, an aquaponic system contains a soil-free plant bed suspended over a body of water containing nutrients necessary for plant growth. But within the body of water is a population of fish (typically herbivores) that produce waste that function as fertilizer for the plants. In turn, the plants help purify the water to make the water suitable for the fish.
Given that a balance must be achieved to ensure the system of both life forms, aquaponics requires greater attention than hydroponics or aeroponics although filtration and aeration systems can help manage these complications. Furthermore, the types of plants one can grow are much more limited as the necessary plant nutrients must be compatible with those necessary for the fish. Brooklyn’s Edenworks and Oko Farms use aquaponics.
2018-06-01: The economics are starting to work, even in NYC
Gotham Greens’ prices are competitive with local and organic lettuce brands, about $3.99 for a 4.5-ounce container. Still, the company is a small-scale producer vying for consumers faced with a financial decision: pay the price for local organic, save 50 cents by purchasing a well-known organic brand, or a whole $ for conventional greens from California or Arizona. “There is always a consumer who will pay for value. Gotham may be in a good position because they’ve got loyal regional markets, but replacing lower-cost producers will be tough.”
2021-08-27: Farmscrapers
Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a project dubbed “the world’s first farmscraper,” to be built in Shenzhen, China. The 218-meter-high, 51-story Jian Mu Tower will contain a large-scale farm system with the ability to produce crops to feed 40k people per year, as well as offices, a supermarket, and a food court.

2023-07-29: Hydroponics comes to subsistence farming. Hardware costs are still too high and it needs a water solution for arid climates.
And the solution is replicable beyond India. Pastoralism is practiced in arid and semi-arid climates across South Asia, East Asia and Africa. Kamath has received inquiries from Bangladesh to Nepal, Bhutan to Kenya. “Many times I get asked how many fodder stations can be set up. Scaling up is very hard for hardware-based solutions”.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is the up-front cost –– setting up a hydroponic station costs $30k. “It takes 3 years to break even”. Even though Bahula invested in setting up the station on Palu’s land, she has to pay $20 each week to arrange water for irrigation, which is delivered by truck. “While the cost of the water is recovered from fodder sales, we do not make enough to cover labor costs”.

2023-09-16: The economics remain terrible
Vertical farming writ large is having a tough time. AeroFarms entered bankruptcy in July and Kentucky-based AppHarvest filed a notice of default in June. IronOx laid off staff at the end of last year. Dreyfus acknowledges the difficulties the industry is facing, but compares vertical farming’s progress to the early and much less profitable days of the solar industry, which once routinely lost money but has become more stable. “So many crops that were not profitable are going to become profitable” as more time is spent perfecting the technology and understanding the business.
Gobo
fine vegetarian dining, greenwich village
Waffle House cheat sheet

The photographs indicate the way in which a cook marks his orders. These secret plate markers allow a Waffle House cook to simultaneously prepare multiple customer orders at once. Let me give you an example. If I were to order 3 scrambled eggs, dry wheat toast, and hash browns, the waitress would face the grill and yell out loud – “Mark: Triple scrambled dry wheat plate.” The cook would then quickly take a large dinner plate, turn it sideways, and place a tub of jelly upside down at the 6 o’clock position. The 6 o’clock position indicates scrambled eggs, and the jelly upside down means wheat toast. I am not sure how to mark “dry” for the toast, or how to indicate hash browns versus grits.


