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Wings are in high demand this weekend. Image: Rick Audet/Flickr

Statistically speaking, Super Bowl Sunday occupies only 0.27 percent of any given year. And yet about 5 percent of the nation’s chicken wings are eaten on that day – the product of a staggering 300 million chickens, according to figures released by the National Chicken Council.

Try one and you’ll see why they’re the perfect Super Bowl food. They’re crispy, greasy, slathered in sauce, and piping hot. They require no utensils and can be dunked into blue cheese dressing without letting go of your beer or – if the odd drip on the carpet doesn’t bother you – without even looking away from the TV. And they contain so little actual food that practiced snackers can eat dozens of them before their stomachs begin to notice.

And yet this year we coast into the big weekend under the shadow of a chicken wing shortage. Chicken wing prices are up more than 25 percent, and some chicken fryers say they simply can’t afford to serve them. All signs point to the twin scapegoats of the economic downturn and the spike in gas (and grain) prices. Some farmers this summer simply couldn’t afford to raise chickens, and a major chicken supplier in Texas filed for bankruptcy in December.

But here at Food & Think, we don’t just report mildly alarmist news about junk-food shortages. We look for whatever scientific tidbits might lurk behind those stories. And you know what? The odd plate of crispy fried wings has indeed advanced the cause of science a time or two. In 2007, Chinese researchers discovered a way to help rid deep-fried foods of a toxic frying byproduct using a bamboo extract. They tested it with chicken wings.

It turns out that heating food in vats of oil sooner or later produces a substance called acrylamide that causes cancer in laboratory animals and can damage human nervous systems. The chemical causes its damage by oxidizing important parts of cells, including your DNA. That’s one reason why foods containing antioxidants are thought to be so healthy. They stop the actions of molecules like acrylamide before they get rolling.

The Chinese researchers knew that bamboo leaves contain antioxidants, so they ran some tests. Tests involving five kinds of chicken wings and a spice mix I’d like to try, consisting of flour, pepper, sesame, sugar, salt, ginseng, Chinese wolfberry, and the enigmatic “chicken essence.”

To this mixture they added a sprinkling of bamboo extract (0.05 percent of the spice weight proved most effective), then fried the wings. In subsequent tests, acrylamide levels in the chicken wings had dropped by more than half in the wings treated with bamboo compared with untreated wings. Happier still, after volunteers ate the wings they reported no difference in appearance or taste of the bamboo-enhanced recipe. The authors couldn’t resist a little pride in their article abstract, writing

This study could be regarded as a pioneer contribution to the reduction of acrylamide in various foods by natural antioxidants.

As an aside, the researchers noted that most of the acrylamide formed on the batter, not on the chicken itself. So if you don’t have any bamboo extract on hand, you still have a couple of ways to safeguard your health: Either don’t deep-fry your wings, or don’t batter them. For the first option, I might be tempted by these oven-baked Panko-Crusted Pepper-Parmesan Wings.

For the second, you could try my own top-secret invention, Buffalo Soldier Wings. This never-before-revealed recipe involves briefly marinating the wings in a lime-yogurt sauce that has been mixed with spicy curried onions and parsley, then grilling the whole lot for 25 minutes or until delicious. No dip required. In fact, you don’t even really need a Superbowl.

Looking for more last-minute wing ideas? Find more recipes here.

Our new president even graced a pizza - in Australia. Thanks to Lorraine, of Not Quite Nigella

Just about a year ago, Slate.com came out with an Encyclopedia Baracktannica widget. It was a collection of tongue-in-cheek puns dreamed up by the editors in response to what we know now was just the first trickle of Obama wordplay.

As the campaign went on, the punning inventions – I like to call them “neobamalogisms” – gained force and flooded the driest reaches of the political vocabarackulary. Then came the election – and now the inauguration – ushering in at least four more years of grafting one or another of the man’s funny-sounding names onto places they don’t really fit. Foodies, it turns out, are as eager as anyone to jump on the barackwagon.

Need proof? How about 80-proof, as in Hennessy’s limited edition “44″ cognac in honor of the 44th president? Or, swallow the cold hard truth over at Ben & Jerry’s, with their Yes Pecan! limited edition ice cream. The list goes on, I’m afraid… all the way to hot sauce.

Did you hear about InagurAle? It’s a new batch of Audacity of Hops, a beer first brewed for election night by homebrewer Sam Chapple-Sokol. The bloggers at Internet Food Association have a review for you. They were kind in a shocked sort of way: The beer was way more coffeeish than they were expecting, but they did allow that you can barely tell it’s homebrew. (Coincidentally, a Colorado brewery has used the Audacity of Hops name on its own beer – see their inspirational poster.)

Plenty of other breweries saw puns in their future, too. But owing to beer’s occasionally seedy image and our country’s Puritan streak there’s actually an agency that protects presidents from being, er, plastered onto beer labels, according to beernews.com. The Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has already nixed some good ones, the site reports, including names like Baracktoberfest and Mavericks Obama.

You know your new president has hit the big time when his inauguration inspires not one but two international art pizzas. First there was this version of the Obamas on the big day. The Napolitano chef used considerable skill, not to mention eggplant, to get the color of Michelle’s outfit just right.

And then there was Australian food blog Not Quite Nigella’s frankly astounding take on the Hope poster [hat tip to Serious Eats].

Gourmet played it pretty straight with their coverage of the top five tastes of inauguration weekend. Perhaps it’s harder to come up with puns when the dishes start off unpronounceable (Bottarga at Zaytinya, anyone?). The most familiar item I saw was chestnut pancakes, and even they wound up underneath some caviar.

It is with some dismay that I direct you to Obama’s own chili recipe, as cooked by Hopie’s Kitchen. It pains me to think that our president could be facing such hard times without a decent chili recipe to fortify himself and his cabinet. Clue #1: no self-respecting chili recipe should contain green peppers. Neither should it contain kidney beans or the flageolet Hopie used. The name of the game is pinto, pinto, pinto.***

Yamahomo, over at Umami Mart, celebrated the inauguration Japanese style, with some homemade mochi. Did you know you can buy an appliance that will make this sticky rice dough for you? It’s kind of a cross between a rice steamer and a bread maker, and apparently you can fit one under your desk. Suddenly I want one.

So how did I do? How many Obama foodie puns—either real or dying to be made real—did I miss in my quick survey? At any rate, they’re inescapable, and you can rest assured that more will have been invented by tomorrow. So here’s one last link to keep an eye on: Obamorama Obamafoodorama, a blog devoted to food in the Obama administration. It’s funny, serious, current, and totally worth reading. I’d call it baracktically indispensable.

***Yes, I am hereby offering my services to cook up some proper chili for the Obamas should the state of the world someday demand it

Hot Fudge Sundaes ...could they be contaminated with mercury? Courtesy of Flickr user peppysis

Most of us know by now that eating mercury is bad for you, and we know that mercury contamination is a risk in certain types of fish. But did you know this neurologically damaging heavy metal could also be lurking in everything from cereal to ketchup?

A new pilot study, led by a scientist who was then at the FDA, reports that mercury contamination may be disturbingly prevalent in high-fructose corn syrup, potentially adding up to 28 micrograms of mercury to the average American’s daily diet. Read more details in the latest issue of Environmental Health.

It’s not clear how much mercury it takes to cause harm, but experts warn that children and fetuses are particularly susceptible to damage from mercury-contaminated fish. The main point we should take away from the Environmental Health study is that consumers deserve more information. The researchers sum it up well:

..this potential source of mercury may exceed other major sources of mercury, especially in high-end consumers of beverages sweetened with HFCS [high fructose corn syrup]. Food products that contain a significant amount of HFCS should be tested for mercury contamination in the end product and the public should be informed of any detections. Clearly, more research is needed to determine the extent of mercury exposure in children from mercury contaminated HFCS in food products.

Another study, by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, detected mercury in 31 percent of popular food and beverage products packed with high-fructose corn syrup, including Quaker instant oatmeal, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, Nutri-Grain bars and classic Coke. (Complete list here, though you should take it with a grain of salt since the IATP is an advocacy group and this was not peer-reviewed.)

One of the ingredients used to make America’s favorite sweetener is something called caustic soda (it separates the corn starch from the kernel). But caustic soda comes from industrial chlorine (chlor-alkali) plants—and in the United States, several of those plants still rely on mercury cells in their manufacturing process even though cleaner alternatives exist.

The obvious solution is to phase out mercury-cell manufacturing, something President Obama tried to do when he was still a senator from Illinois. (Europe is already doing it.) But I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try phasing high-fructose corn syrup out of our diets, either, since it can lead to obesity and a higher risk of diabetes.

For more on this, including some more opinionated views, check out Tom Philpott at The Gristmill, Janet Majure at The Ethicurean, and Leslie Hatfield at The Green Fork.

A colleague just dropped an academic article titled “Ancient beer and modern brewers” on my desk, culled from a recent issue of Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. (I love working with nerds…I mean, people who are far more well-read than myself!)

The article focuses on the production of chicha, a beer-like beverage typically made from maize, in both prehispanic and modern Andean cultures. To be honest, it’s not terribly interesting to a layperson like myself. But the abstract begins: “Archaeological studies of alcohol have tended to focus on consumption...” which sent me off on a tangent. Are there a lot of archaeological studies of alcohol, I wondered?

Well, more than I thought. A bit of online excavation led me to articles about how so-called molecular archaeologists have linked chocolate to alcohol, traced wine back as far as the Stone Age, and even tried to recreate ancient beers for modern breweries. (Actually, all three of those studies involve the same guy, Patrick McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania. So apparently the field is rather small.)

There’s at least one book on this topic: Frederick H. Smith’s The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking, published last year by University Press of Florida.

Helpfully, Smith’s introduction sums up the history of “alcohol studies,” explaining that there is a lot of “scholarly ambivalence” about the topic, reflecting the general love-hate relationship humans have long had with intoxicating substances (remember Prohibition?). In archaeological research, Smith writes, “investigations of alcohol are typically serendipitous by-products of fieldwork that had other emphases.” Which, he argues, shouldn’t be the case, since the world’s most widely used drug “provides a prism through which to view life over the past five centuries.”

The New York Times has picked up on this alcohol-as-prism idea with a blog called Proof: Alcohol and American Life. It’s a fascinating concoction of personal essays that range from AA-style confessionals to nostalgia-tinted tales about the best bars of yesteryear. Some posts have elicited more than 500 comments, so clearly readers connect to the subject. Alcohol may represent celebration, sickness, consolation, temptation, or something else entirely to any given individual, but it’s rarely neutral.

It’s interesting to consider what future generations of archaeologists and anthropologists might infer about the role of alcohol in early 21st-century societies. The swizzle stick from last night’s cocktail could be considered a valuable artifact someday. (Though I hope artifacts like these beer helmets will get lost in the sands of time.)

The specks that look like pepper flakes are H. pylori bacteria. Image: Y. Tsutsumi/Wikipedia

Parting is such sweet sorrow, as the saying goes. But apparently that sweetness doesn’t include relief from stomach pain, and leaving town doesn’t rid you of your ulcers. But that’s good news for scientists trying to piece together the story of where we all came from.

In a new study in Science magazine, a team of researchers used DNA from ulcer-causing bacteria to trace early human pathways across Asia and into Australia and Polynesia. Their results show two waves of movement from Asia into present-day Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia some 30,000 years ago, as well as a much more recent wave from Taiwan into the Philippines (5,000 years ago), to the Melanesian islands, and then to New Zealand and the Pacific islands.

The responsible bacteria are called Helicobacter pylori. (After centuries of doctors blaming ulcers on everything from spicy food to chewing gum, two Australians confirmed that ulcers arise from a bacterial infection in our guts. Proving it involved drinking a cupful of infected stomach juices – and won the pair a Nobel prize – but that’s another story.)

Helicobacter pylori are exquisitely adapted to live inside our stomachs (about half the world’s people are infected, though 80 percent never show symptoms). Since the bacteria don’t live outside our bodies, that means two things: first, they go where we go, and second, they evolve as we evolve. That’s pretty useful if you’re studying ancient human migrations, because people today are still carrying around H. pylori strains descended from the bacteria of their ancestors.

The advantage of using H. pylori DNA instead of simply looking at human DNA is that there are fewer strains of it than there are mixtures of human genes, so patterns show up more clearly. When natives of Indonesia develop ulcers, most are suffering from just one single strain of H. pylori – and it’s different from the strain that gives ulcers to mainland Asians, or Australians, or the Maori of New Zealand, all of whom have their own unique strain.

To retrace the steps of early colonizers, researchers looked at how these strains were related to each other, and then connected the most similar ones with lines on a map. Those related strains marked where a people had arrived, paused a while as if on a stepping stone, and then moved on, carrying a slightly altered H. pylori with them. Australian H. pylori is different from New Guinea H. pylori – the two have been separate for some 25,000 years. But those two strains are far more similar to each other than they are to Maori H. pylori of New Zealand. And that, say the researchers, is because the Maori are descended from seafaring Taiwanese tribes who hopscotched to New Zealand from the Philippines just 5,000 years ago, carrying a brand of H. pylori far more closely related to the East Asian variety.

Who knew that the road to civilization could be signposted with stomach bacteria? But don’t let the thought of all this moving around stress you out. Our species has survived countless abrupt moves already. And now you know the stress won’t give you ulcers, either.