food (Page 12)

UPDATE – Dogs recently became sick (and some died) after eating dog food containing a toxic substance called melamine, which was imported from China. Now CNN reports that the Food and Drug Administration says that the same toxic substance may be in chicken and pork produced here in the US. The FDA has discovered that the contaminated wheat gluten, corn gluten, cornmeal, rice bran and other toxic ingredients, which ended up in the dog food and also in animal feed used for pigs and chickens, all came from the same distributor in China. UPDATE: In USA Today, Calum MacLeod writes: "Chinese authorities acknowledged for the first time that ingredients exported to make pet food contained a prohibited chemical, melamine, which is also used to make plastic."
read more

Scientific studies of why broccoli and Brussels sprouts taste too bitter to some people but are liked by others have revealed that it’s all in our genes: being wary of bitterness enabled the ancestors of some of us to survive.

Researcher Stephen Wooding says that the ability to taste or not taste bitter foods might have played a role in human evolution and may today account for such health-related behaviors as smoking and vegetable consumption. He studied bitter-taste receptors, the tiny receptacles on the tongue that intercept harsh-tasting chemicals from food. Each of the genes for these receptors comes in several forms, and the forms you carry help determine how you perceive bitter-tasting foods.
read more

Our government pushes certain foods, even if they’re not the ones we should be eating. Does “Got Milk?” sound familiar? How about “Pork. The other white meat?” These advertising campaigns are the result of government-sanctioned promotion programs. It doesn’t mean that these foods are necessarily good for you (although they may be). What it means is that, thanks to farm subsidies, we have TOO MUCH of them!

These campaigns try to increase consumption of commodities such as dairy, beef, and pork. According to nutritionist Parke Wilde, the messages sent out by these advertising campaigns are inconsistent with the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
read more

We recently wrote about how some people taste their words. The French, however, are concerned that diners no longer adequately taste their food, so they have invented a restaurant in which patron eat in the dark, in order to block out all the other distracting senses, where complete strangers share the same table, where they don’t know what they will be served, except that it will be delivered by blind waiters.
read more