Letters Remain

Tag: food

  • China, Cement, and the Great Wall’s Sticky Rice Mortar

    I’m fascinated by the scale of concrete usage in modern China, and some of the facts can be difficult to fathom on face value. For instance: Now I’ve just read about sticky rice mortar. As Liam said: “The Great Wall of China is held together with sticky rice” sounds like the kind of lie a…

  • Cooking for Engineers, Geeks, and the Impatient

    The vast majority of new and original cooking content feels like it comes from YouTube, with few original developments happening on independent sites (although I’ll happily be corrected here, as Wadsworth Constant certainly applies to the vast majority of cooking videos, too). Meanwhile, the long-running joke of a rambling, sombre life story complementing a simple…

  • Italian food and the ‘Invented Designation of Origin’

    Alberto Grandi is an Italian academic and food expert. He’s also, unsurprisingly, an oft maligned and despised figure across Italy. This is because Grandi exposes the myths surrounding Italy’s famous culinary traditions. From panettone’s industrial invention to carbonara’s American roots, and why if you want “real” Parmesan you should head to Wisconsin. In an interview…

  • Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Tips and Rules: An Economist’s Take on Eating Out

    When it comes to finding, ordering, and eating at ethnic restaurants there’s only one place to look for advice: economist Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide. I’ve mentioned Cowen’s guide before (if only in passing), but it’s time I dedicated a post to this treasure trove of dining advice and, especially, the tips from Cowen’s General…

  • Misunderstood Salt: The Facts About Limiting Intake

    For decades we have been told, with certainty, to limit our salt intake or risk heart disease and high blood pressure—but is this advice based on sound scientific findings? The short answer is No. The evidence is inconsistent, inconclusive and contradictory, says prominent cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler (who used to be an advocate for the eat-less-salt…

  • The Licensing Effect and the Unhealthy Habit of Vitamin Supplements

    The licensing effect is the phenomenon whereby positive actions or decisions taken now increase negative or unethical decisions taken later. I’ve written about this previously, before I was aware of a general effect: Just considering ordering a salad at a restaurant increases unhealthy orders. Purchasing ‘green’ products increases unethical behaviour such as cheating and stealing.…

  • Common Cooking Mistakes

    We all make mistakes when cooking, right? Cooking Light says that “the creative cook can often cook her way out of a kitchen error, but the smart cook aims to prevent such creativity from being necessary”. In order to help you along your way to “smart cook” status, Cooking Light compiled a list of forty-three common…

  • Bribing and Restaurant Seating

    Does bribing your way into a busy restaurant work as well as it seems to in movies? Is it even possible? Bruce Feiler decided to find out by visiting some of New York’s most overbooked restaurants with nothing more than a pocketful of money (i.e. no reservations). His results were not quite as expected, finding that bribing hosts…

  • Optimal Caffeine Consumption

    Whether caffeine serves any purpose other than removing withdrawal symptoms is a topic of study with conflicting results, but if you’re an optimist as well as a fan of caffeine in any of it’s many forms you’re most likely consuming it sub-optimally. Why not improve your caffeine knowledge and learning about the optimal way of…

  • How Sounds and Words Affect Taste

    Background noises greatly affect how we taste food. I wrote about this earlier in the year — pointing out that this is the probable cause of bland in-flight meals — but how else can background noise affect our perception of taste, and can our non-gustatory senses affect how we taste, too? To test this, molecular…