You have likely heard about the hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) shenanigans afoot. A company that makes HVP – Basic Food Flavors – found that its product was contaminated with the pathogen Salmonella Tennessee (thats a specific flavor of salmonella easily ID’d by genetics and the SAME strain that was involved in a similarly ethically challenged...

[Follow this link for a recipe for Whole Wheat Cheddar Cheese Kefir Irish Soda Bread] St. Patrick’s day is almost here and I feel like I am getting whiplash with how fast this year is passing already! The stores put out St Patrick’s day decorations right after Christmas so by now, all that Chinese import...

I had the most brilliant Sunday at the Canning-Across-America Canvolution event with a group of people who were so fantastic and so interesting I didn’t want to leave. But we worked so hard canning so many things and the kitchen was such a BEAST that by the time that things were winding down, I was...

Melamine is the scourge that was completely optional; it really didn’t have to happen. It’s all about greed and industrial food gone wholly amok. Melamine poisoning spans animal feeds, pet foods, milk, baby formula, fish, wheat gluten, and now EGGS. Wheat gluten, eggs and milk are everywhere. If you think you can protect yourself from...

(This is what you are really getting with conventional and Big Ag Organic food – depleted foods) Who has not stood before a pile of organic vegetables or fruits and compared their price to the price of the conventionally grown ones next to it? Who has not asked, on some level, is there some real...

Map of human chromosomes I am going to take a break today from food porn and food photography and not even talk about molecular gastronomy as you have read me do before (Essentialism and Authenticity in Food: Molecular Pablum, Molecular Gastronomy 101: Part 2 – The Nose and receptors, Molecular Gastronomy 101: Biology Basics – Part...

(Erlenmeyer flasks from the Argonne National Laboratory glass blowing shop. source) Today’s article, “The Essence of Nearly Anything, Drop by Limpid Drop“, by Harold McGee in The New York Times, has me thinking on what what we might call “real food“, authenticity, essentialism, and molecular gastronomy. You likely know that Harold McGee is a food science...

Make no mistake, this post is absolutely for the beef lover and especially the connoisseur of the highest quality aged beef. Most of us know what non-aged beef tastes like, somewhat homogeneous or one dimensional in it’s flavor. Some people experience non-aged beef as slightly metallic in flavor (the iron in the hemoglobin?), not a very...

(Glucose: Wikipedia source – public domain) If you choose to read The Glycemic Index site, you may briefly run across something called the Second Meal Effect (SME). As I understand it and in short, if one eats a low GI food at one meal, there is a carry over effect to the next meal in terms of...

There are only a few foods that I crave. Crave, in my case, is not a constant background desire but rather a sudden basic need. If you have ever been pregnant, you likely know what that feeling is, its very hard to articulate. I do not crave chocolate although I adore it. ...