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Corn stalk, courtesy of Flickr user Chris Bartnik Photography

The first decade of the millennium may have been a good one for cuisine, but it was a mixed bag in terms of food-related news. At the same time that Americans were expanding and refining their culinary repertoires, nearly every week they were getting new reasons to be fearful about what they ate—whether it was safe, whether it was healthy, and whether it would continue to be available at all. Here’s a look back at some of the biggest food news stories of the decade.

Total Recall: Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that many types of food-borne illness actually declined from the mid-1990s to 2004, you wouldn’t know it by watching the news. A series of high-profile contaminatinos by salmonella and other pathogens—in beef, spinach, peanut butter, tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, and cookie dough, to name a few—had people questioning the effectiveness of our food inspection system. And if that wasn’t bad enough, even pets and babies weren’t safe from dangerous substances in their food, although the latter case turned out to be due to a particularly nasty form of human greed.

Corn will save us all! Corn will spell our doom!: Probably no other food has had a more turbulent decade than corn. It started the millennium with many touting its use in corn-based ethanol as the fuel of the future, an environmentally friendlier alternative to fossil fuels that would decrease our dependence on foreign oil. No sooner had it begun to be regularly added to gasoline, though, than controversy ensued. Criticism of corn ethanol came from all sides: that it is driving up the prices of other crops, that it is making less farmland available for food, that it is not really that environmentally friendly after all, and that it reduces vehicle mileage, among other things. The debate continues.

Corn is making our children fat!: Corn also developed a bad reputation in the area of nutrition and public health, this time in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. The ubiquitous sweetener was demonized as one of the causes of our rising childhood obesity problem (another of the biggest stories of the decade) and increased incidence of type-2 diabetes. In response to the backlash, some food companies began producing versions of their products using cane sugar. Although some people prefer the flavor, sugar is sugar when it comes to calories and weight, as nutrition expert Marion Nestle has pointed out. Sugary soft drinks (whether made with high-fructose corn syrup or not) were removed from public schools in 2006.

Our food is disappearing!: From overfishing and pollution endangering the world’s seafood supply, to the mysterious colony collapse disorder that killed off honeybees starting in 2006, to concerns over how global warming could affect agriculture and biodiversity, insecurity over future food abundance was one of the decade’s most troubling themes.

Of course, the aughts weren’t entirely about doom and gloom. As Abby reported yesterday, people have become more conscious about their food choices and how they affect their health and the environment. And any decade that saw an explosion in popularity of both cupcakes and bacon (and, I’m sure, somewhere, a combination of the two) is okay by me.

Happy 2010!

Shad roe, pineapple foam, cucumber sauce, coriander bubbles, courtesy of Flickr user santheo

We’re jumping on the end-of-the-year-list bandwagon at Food & Think. Today we have an offering of some of the biggest food trends of the decade. This was the decade in which organic became a household name, chefs became celebrities and exotic ingredients became ordinary.

Organic: Perhaps the decade’s biggest culinary buzzword was organic. The concept is nothing new: before the introduction of chemicals into agriculture, all farming could have been considered organic. Nevertheless, organic became big business with stores like Whole Foods leading the way. In 2002, The USDA released its national standards for organic products, officially bringing the movement into the mainstream. In the first half of the decade, organic food sales grew by 17 to 20 percent a year, while conventional food sales grew by about 2 to 3 percent a year. By 2003, organic foods were available in about 20,000 natural food stores and 73 percent of conventional grocery stores in the United States.

Locavore: Another success was the locavore trend. The word itself was created by Jessica Prentice in 2005 and seen in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. Prentice came up with the word to describe those who eat food from within a 100-mile radius of where they live. The concept has taken on a more broad meaning now, but eating more food that traveled fewer miles is still a key point. The trend has traveled to the restaurant scene as well, with some menus going so far as to lists where the specific ingredient came from. In 2007, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” the word of the year.

Molecular Gastronomy: A trend that stayed mostly in restaurants, save for the occasional adventurous home chef, molecular gastronomy is an oft-used but poorly understood term. Technically the term refers to studying the physical and chemical processes that occur while cooking and discovering the best way to prepare a certain food. (Think: 6 minute egg.) But the term is also applied to cooking using those techniques. (Think: Infused foam.) Ferran Adriá, famed Catalan chef at El Bulli in Barcelona, is one of the best-known chefs said to be working within this movement. The menu at his restaurant features such concoctions as tapioca of Iberian ham, spherical egg of white asparagus with false truffle and frozen gnocchi. Heston Blumenthal, a British chef at The Fat Duck in Bray in Berkshire, U.K., is another chef famous for his scientific approach to food. His menu includes snail porridge, sardine on toast sorbet and salmon poached with liquorice.

Obscure Cocktails: Remember when ordering a martini was simple and didn’t involve a menu of dozens of fruity creations? Another trend that took off this decade was the inventive cocktails. While the decade started with simple fruit flavors, cocktails with more exotic ingredients such as bacon and wasabi were featured as well.

Small Plates: While the dishes in fine dining restaurants have always been on the skimpy side, small plates made for sharing became popular in the past 10 years. The concept has been around in other cultures for centuries—tapas in Spain, dim sum in China, mezze in Greece and sakana in Japan. But the small plate idea idea has extended past the traditional Spanish and Chinese joints. This trend has been popular with diners as well as restaurateurs, who can earn a hefty profit from serving multiple smaller courses.

Offal: We saw a movement away from the New York Strip steak and pork tenderloin this decade. The less-often-used parts of the animals made a comeback. Tongue, livers, sweatbreads and headcheese made their return to the plate. While these traditional foods have been eaten for centuries, Americans diners tended to stay away from the more exotic bits of meat. This one might be with us into the new decade; it made an appearance in the food trend predictions for 2010. (I challenged my palate by eating the “Pig Plate” at New York City’s The Spotted Pig.)

Candy for your cravings? Courtesy of Flickr user Chapendra

The link between marijuana and an increased appetite has been well documented by both scientific and casual researchers. Even before states began passing medical marijuana laws, some doctors were quietly recommending the drug to cancer, AIDS and other patients with nausea and poor appetite.

New findings from the Monell Chemical Senses Center and Kyushu University in Japan suggest that marijuana may enhance the sweet taste of foods by acting directly on taste receptors, rather than just in the brain, as had previously been shown. The work enhances scientists’ understanding of how THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, acts on the appetite, and could eventually lead to treatments for obesity or lack of appetite.

Fourteen states currently have medical marijuana laws, even though the drug is still illegal under federal law, and some legislators are pushing to legalize it outright. In parts of California, the first state to pass a medical marijuana law, in 1996, marijuana dispensaries have become nearly as common as liquor stores.

But what is it about marijuana that causes “the munchies”—not so much actual hunger as an intense craving for food, especially of the sweet, salty or fatty variety? The new findings from Monell report that endocannabanoids, compounds that are structurally similar to the cannabinoids found in cannabis sativa (marijuana) but occur naturally in the body, act directly on the tongue’s taste receptors to enhance the perception of sweetness.

Previously, scientists had believed that cannabinoids regulated appetite mainly by bonding to specific receptors in the brain. As explained in a 2001 article in Nature, researchers found that they could depress appetite in mice by genetically modifying them to be deficient in cannabinoid receptors. Later studies have led to greater understanding of the relationship between the brain’s cannabinoid receptors and the hormone leptin, which was found to inhibit hunger.

The Monell study involved a series of experiments on mice to determine their behavioral, cellular and neural responses to sweet taste stimuli before and after the administration of endocannabinoids. In every case, the mice went coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs (well, technically, their “sweet taste responses were enhanced by endocannabinoids”). Interestingly, the effect was not observed with sour, salty, bitter or umami taste stimuli.

The press release from Monell notes that, “sweet taste receptors are also found in the intestine and the pancreas, where they help regulate nutrient absorption, insulin secretion and energy metabolism. If endocannabinoids also modulate the responses of pancreatic and intestinal sweet receptors, the findings may open doors to the development of novel therapeutic compounds to combat metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes.”

Last year, another study found that THC induced cancer cells to kill themselves through autophagy, or self-digestion. As more than one commenter gleefully observed, marijuana gives even cancer the munchies.

Ever wondered what astronauts might be eating for Christmas dinner? I found out recently when I had the chance to speak with NASA’s Vickie Kloeris, who manages the food system for the International Space Station.

Q: What goes into managing the space station’s food system?

A: We have a food lab here on site (Johnson Space Center, in Houston) that serves as the primary provisioning lab for all the space station food. We do a lot of freeze drying here. We also have a facility up at Texas A&M that processes canned foods—not metal cans but pouches, flexible cans. The military developed the “retort pouch” many years ago to replace metal cans because it is lighter in weight and more efficient to stow.

Q: Do you take requests from the astronauts? For holidays, or just in general?

A: We can. For every month that the crewmember is in orbit they get what’s called a bonus container and they can make special requests, if they have a special candy or cracker or cookie they want to take. But our standard menu includes a lot of traditional holiday foods. Smoked turkey, candied yams, green beans, freeze dried cornbread dressing. The Russian side has really good mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce. So there are foods available for them to make a holiday menu, and if they know they’re going to be in orbit at Christmas time they can take related things in a bonus box. And there might be a crew care package from families, too. Things like a certain kind of nut or hard candy that are part of their tradition on the ground.

Q: Here’s a question from a reader: Do astronauts still drink a lot of Tang?

A: We still have several flavors of Tang in the menu, some that you can’t purchase in the U.S. like mango or pineapple. The orange we typically have here; grape we often have. Cookies, crackers, nuts, those kinds of things we use off the shelf and repackage.

Q: How do you decide what kind of cookies to buy, for example?

A: This program has developed over 30 years. During Apollo and Mercury and Gemini, they had a highly customized food system and discovered that that cost a boatload of money. So going into the shuttle program, they determined that they would use as many commercial products as they could. When I came in 1985 they were using mostly commercial items and MREs. Over the years we’ve added stuff in. And then when we knew our crew members were going to be in orbit for months at a time, we knew we needed to have more variety, more thermostabilized products, and we started developing more products.

When we look at a commercial cookie we’ll look at shelf life, how many crumbs it’s going to make—typically we want something bite-sized. A big cookie or cracker would create an awful lot of crumbs. There’s a certain amount of crumbing that occurs anyway. It’s a real nuisance in orbit.

Q: Is there anything they can’t have, even on Christmas?

A: Well, they can’t have anything that requires refrigeration. There’s no way to refrigerate on the trip up and then on station there’s no dedicated refrigerators for food, although they do have a small chiller now for beverages, to cool after preparing. They only have warm water and hot water, otherwise.

Q: Could they have soda?

A: Carbonated beverages, no, the only way you can have that in microgravity is in a pressurized container because the carbonation would not stay distributed. So you’re talking about a $2,000 can of soda.

Q: What about caffeine or alcohol?

A: There’s an awful lot of caffeine consumed on station. We’ve got a lot of heavy duty coffee drinkers! Alcohol? No. We don’t do alcohol. It’s considered by NASA to be a huge safety hazard.

Q: Nutritionally, do they need different things?

A: NASA has been studying nutrition in space for a long time. Overall there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of difference, but there are a few things—for example you don’t need as much iron in microgravity because you’re not turning over red blood cells as fast. There’s a few things like that, slight differences.
Salt is an issue. I mean, people on the ground eat too much salt–the typical American diet is somewhere between 5 and 10 milligrams a day, way above the RDA. And for astronauts one of the problems too much salt can be cause in microgravity is bone loss. They have bone loss anyway in microgravity. So we try to limit sodium.

Q: Do they really eat that freeze-dried ice cream sold in science gift shops as “astronaut ice cream”?

A: No, we don’t fly that, because they don’t ask for it. Kids like it but it doesn’t really appeal to adults. It’s more like hard cotton candy than real ice cream.

Q: Fruitcake?

A: We don’t get any requests for that but it has a very long shelf life, so yes, I guess we could do that.

Q: Do tastes differ in space?

A: We have a lot of anecdotal evidence from astronauts that their tastebuds are affected in microgravity. It’s very probably related to the fact that when they’re in microgravity their ability to smell the food is compromised. Think about when you’re on the ground and you have a cold and your nose is stopped up—the food tastes different.
When they first go into orbit the fluid shift makes them very congested and that interferes with smell.

They’re also in a confined environment, so any competing odors are going to interfere with their ability to smell the food. Plus they’re eating out of packages, and convection doesn’t work the same, so smells don’t rise up. So it makes sense that they perceive that their tastebuds are somewhat dulled. So they go for salt, sauces and hot sauce. They use a lot of condiments.

Q: I imagine it’s hard for astronauts to be away from family on the holidays. Is there any upside to spending holidays in space?

A: The great thing about being on station is you can celebrate Christmas twice because the Russians celebrate orthodox Christmas in January. They get the day off so typically they will plan a special meal, pull out some of the special foods. In talking to some crew members, they say the socializing around the meal is a big part of holiday, just like on the ground.

The housing market is still in the tank in many parts of the country, but only if you fail to take into account the gingerbread sector, where things have really been picking up lately.

For Exhibit A, look no further than the White House, where pastry chef Bill Yosses constructed a 400-plus-pound replica of the presidential abode out of gingerbread, marzipan and white chocolate. Another D.C. landmark, the Smithsonian Castle, got a similar treatment (with a mere 100 pounds of gingerbread and 50 pounds of icing) from Charles Froke, a Four Seasons pastry chef. Click here to see a video about this feat of confectionary construction on our sister blog, Around the Mall.

S.F. Weekly compiled a list of the most elaborate gingerbread houses in the country. Aside from the White House, it showcased several competition entries, and a couple of life-size versions—including one at a hotel at Disney World in Florida that took 400 hours to bake, 160 hours to decorate, and has its own bake shop inside.

Impressive, but personally, I find the classic Hansel-and-Gretel-style cottage covered with swirls of icing and gumdrop accents to be far more charming. In real-estate speak, they have curb appeal. King Arthur Flour has a helpful online instruction booklet for constructing the basic sugar dream home—one that’s reassuringly within nearly everyone’s reach and can’t be foreclosed (it is susceptible to natural disasters, however, especially of the sweet-toothed-child variety).

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the White House, the cutest version of the gingerbread house has got to be these miniature ones by Not Martha, meant to be hung on the side of a mug of hot chocolate. Adorable.

My vote for most creative gingerbread house goes to the Australian food blogger (via the Atlantic Food Channel) who devised a replica of a cave from the set of the movie Where the Wild Things Are. Constructing a sphere from tiny gingerbread bricks turned out to be more of a project than the blogger had anticipated, but even the half-finished structure looked pretty cool. I applaud the effort. He includes instructions for those who dare to attempt a similar feat.

If you’re the type who wants your pastry construction to be structurally sound enough to meet the local building code, check out the tool suggestions from This Old House. Rarely does the home chef find a need for a band saw or a Dremel rotary tool, but, as the article points out, how else are you going to carve an iceberg out of sugar?