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Emergency food pack, courtesy of Flickr user earthworm

Judging by my Twitter feed this morning, the only people not enthralled by a certain extravagant British wedding were protesters in Uganda and Syria, people across the South affected by yesterday’s terrible and deadly tornadoes and me. If you were hoping for an in-depth report on royal canapés, sorry to disappoint. You’ll have to look elsewhere—or read Abigail Tucker’s fascinating history of wedding cakes.

The tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters that have been punctuating news reports between birth conspiracy theories and nuptial to-dos in recent months are a good reminder that it’s wise to keep an emergency supply of food and water on hand. Even if you don’t live in earthquake or tornado country, floods, snowstorms, power outages or space alien invasions could disrupt supplies or leave you stranded. OK, probably not that last one—although, now that SETI suspended its search for alien signals, who knows if we’ll be caught unawares?

So, what should be in this emergency cache, and how much of it? At the very least you should have about three days’ supply of water and food per person in your household, recommends the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). These should be kept in a “grab and go” container—one for home, work and car—in case you need to evacuate quickly. Each kit should contain at least a half-gallon of water per person per day. You might also consider buying water purification tablets or another water sterilizer from a camping goods store (you can also boil water to purify it, but it’s good to have a back-up in case you don’t have power or a gas stove).

FEMA also suggests keeping a two-week supply of food and water at home for “sheltering needs.” These foods should, obviously, be nonperishable: canned goods, dry mixes, cereals. Try to avoid foods that will make you thirsty or that require a lot of water or special preparation. Don’t forget a manual can opener. If the power is out and your appliances are electric, you may be able to cook on a camp stove, barbecue, fireplace or solar oven, but consider storing foods that don’t require cooking.

Even nonperishable foods need to be replenished periodically. According to a FEMA chart, dried fruit, crackers and powdered milk will last about six months. Most canned foods, peanut butter, jelly, cereals, hard candy and vitamins will keep for a year (but check expiration dates on packaging). Stored properly, wheat, dried corn, rice, dry pasta, vegetable oils, baking soda, salt, instant coffee or tea, and bouillon will keep indefinitely.

Finally, don’t forget your pets. Fido and Mr. Bojangles need food and water, too!

Asparagus. Image courtesy of Flickr user jonathan_moreau.

In Swann’s Way, French novelist Marcel Proust penned something of a breathless love letter to asparagus, offering the following reflection as he ponders a decked-out dinner table:

“[W]hat fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume.”

He put it as politely as anyone could. For many diners, the love affair with asparagus ends when we get to the “bower of aromatic perfume” bit while making that after dinner pit-stop. The asparagus itself, though quite tasty, later confronts you with an unpleasant smell of sulfur—that unique and cruel trick this herbaceous vegetable likes to play on our urinary system. But not everyone experiences the phenomenon. What’s the deal here?

Despite several studies on the subject, no definitive evidence pinpoints which odor-causing molecules create the post-digestive asparagus smell. The most probable candidates are a few volatile chemical compounds: the colorless gas methanethiol; sulfur compounds dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, dimethyl sulfoxide and dimethyl sulfone; and bis(methylthio)methane, which contributes to truffles’ distinctive aroma and flavor. These substances are drawn out by cooking and by human metabolism and are excreted smelling a lot less like a bouquet of roses.

Curiouser still is that this trait is not universal among people. A 2010 study found that genetic factors come into play in two ways. People differ in whether and how much of the distinctive asparagus smell they produce, and people also differ in whether or not they sense the odor. Since we don’t know the exact cause, figuring out who produces the smell and who doesn’t remains something of a mystery—but it is surely something that will continue to inspire self-reflection and debate.

And if the above hasn’t completely turned you off enjoying asparagus, we’ve got five ways you can prepare the stuff. What happens afterwards is your business and yours alone.

“Great news, Mom and Dad—Matt and I are having a cucumber plant! And some peas, and tomatoes, and beets, too. I know we should wait to tell people until we’re certain they’ve germinated, and there’s a long way to go before they actually fruit, but we just planted the seeds yesterday and we couldn’t be more excited. Matt already built the (raised) beds.”

Somehow, I don’t think this imaginary conversation with my parents would cause quite as much commotion as a similar announcement my brother and his wife made nine years ago. Theirs was accompanied by a picture of their first daughter’s ultrasound. Even though most embryos look pretty similar at that stage, it’s always awe-inspiring to see a brand-new person forming in the womb (and I can only imagine the awe is increased a hundredfold if the womb is your own). There is the head with beginnings of eyes, the tiny appendages that will someday turn into limbs with fingers and toes.

What I never realized was that a similar process happens in the plant kingdom. Inside every seed are the basic parts of a fully formed plant: immature roots and tiny leaves curled up like a vegetal embryo. As it turns out, they’re even called embryos. Within the seed’s protective wall is also a food called endosperm that nourishes the embryonic plant as it starts growing into a seedling.

Friends who have had children in recent years signed up for daily emails telling them what was happening to their fetus at that point in its development. As a novice gardener starting my first vegetable garden, I have a similar curiosity (obviously, on a far less emotional scale) about what’s going on just under the surface of my newly planted raised beds. If things are going well, three days after sowing, my little ones should be in the early stages of germination.

First tomato seedlings, courtesy of Flickr user amandabhslater

I got a preview of how this happens when I tried sprouting radish seeds a couple of months ago. The seeds were soaked in water, then rinsed twice daily to keep them moist. This, plus sufficient warmth, was enough to make the seed coating break down, which released enzymes that caused the embryo to grow into a sprout, or the beginning of a plant—though they wouldn’t ever reach full “planthood” without soil and sun.

The same thing is (I hope) happening under the soil with my vegetable seeds, although the required conditions vary slightly for different seeds. Some need warm soil, some need cooler temperatures, and a few require some light to properly germinate (all of which are helpfully spelled out on the seed packets). Larger seeds contain more endosperm, meaning they can be planted deeper into the soil and be nourished as they grow roots and shoots. I enjoyed seeing all the different shapes and sizes of the seeds—beets were knobby and irregular; lettuce, tiny, smooth and lozenge shaped; peas were, well, peas.

This Discovery Channel video explains the germination process in simple terms: After the seed coating breaks apart, the first root, called the radicle, starts to grow downward in search of nutrients. Then another shoot, called a plumule, grows up in search of light. With the help of nutrients from the soil, plus water and light, it will continue to grow to maturity.

The best part of all? No need to save for their college tuition. Although, between seeds and materials and tools, I could see how gardening could become an expensive hobby.

"Today's Menu." Image courtesy of Flickr user Neo.

Some readers out there may wonder how libraries kept track of all their goodies before the advent of computerized catalogs. You had one of two options: You could either consult a giant wood cabinet with drawers jam-packed with little 3 x 5 cards or, better yet, you could consult a reference librarian who could lead you to treasure troves of information. Cultural institutions now make their collections available digitally for people who are unable to do on-site research; however, for those places that have been building up resources for a century or more, digitizing their holdings is an overwhelming game of catch-up that requires time and money.

Such is the case with the New York Public Library’s menu collection, which contains approximately 26,000 pieces, about 10,000 of which have been digitally scanned. Specializing in the period between 1890 and 1920, the menus are especially useful to historians or chefs or authors—anyone trying to capture an era down to the dining details. One problem, however, is that it’s difficult to present the digital images in such a way that people can do searches across the entire collection. Searches are an easy way to look at trends in dining, which food fell in—and out—of favor, price fluctuations and other information of that ilk. And it sure beats flipping through the collection menu by menu if there’s only a nugget of information you’re after.

Some purveyors of digital information—like Google books—use optical character recognition software to convert the printed page into digital, searchable text. But many of the Library’s menus are handwritten or use ornamental typefaces that can’t be easily read by computers. And really, when it comes to dining, presentation is everything—even when it comes to menu typography.

Flesh and blood transcribers really are the best way to get the job done, and now anyone with an internet connection can lend the library a helping hand. If you’d like to lend your services, and get a taste—intellectually speaking—of American cuisine from a bygone era and enjoy some really stunning works of art, go to the project’s main site, select a menu that grabs you and dig in!

Tim Burton's "Batman: The Cereal." Image courtesy of Flickr user everyplace.

For last month’s Inviting Writing series, we asked you to recall the most memorable meal of your life. For this go ’round, dig into your memory banks once again for traces of lost foods—products that are no longer on the market, perhaps, or foods that you once loved but can’t seem to enjoy anymore. Or foods that were once-in-a-lifetime taste opportunities.

If you’re feeling creative and want to describe an experience that somehow fits this theme, please send your true, original personal essays to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Lost Foods” in the subject line by Friday, April 29. We’ll read them all and post our favorites on subsequent Mondays. Remember to include your full name and a biographical detail or two (your city and/or profession; a link to your own blog if you’d like that included). I’ll take a first crack with the following memory of a childhood food product that (thankfully) is no longer on the market.

Holy Batman Breakfast Cereal
By Jesse Rhodes

Aside from cartoons, much of the fun of the Saturday morning entertainment of my childhood came from television spots for toys, upcoming movies and, yes, food. I hope that whoever wrote the catchy jingles to sell those goods was handsomely compensated, because twenty years later, the ditties for Ring Pops and Tootsie Rolls are still fresh in my head. And then there were the spots for breakfast cereal—notably one for a cereal spinoff of Tim Burton’s Batman.

The television commercial was, in my humble opinion at the time, pretty spectacular. It was perfectly clear that this wasn’t just any cereal—it was a cereal that promised bowlfuls of corn-puffed adventure. And the corn puffs were bright yellow bats! The mere shape of the stuff transcended the alphabet letters and spheres that held the prefab morning food market in its mundane grip. Of course I was going to beg my mother for this stuff.

But my mother, before she was my mother, was a similarly minded child who knew all the tricks to get Trix and Froot Loops and Lucky Charms out of her mother. My mother was very well aware of the sugary nutritional wasteland that was being attractively packaged and hawked to wide-eyed children watching Saturday morning television. So by and large, she kept only things like Rice Krispies and Cheerios in stock. But eventually—and I wish I could remember if I used a more clever ploy than the whine/beg one-two punch, though that’s doubtful—she picked up a box on the condition that I had to eat it.

And oh, the box. The packaging itself was so adult. Sleek black, gold accents—none of those tired, overdone Technicolor tones on those children’s cereals. Surely playboy/crime-fighter Bruce Wayne would have approved. The excitement was too much as my first bowl of Batman was poured and set before me.

The cereal was too sweet, even for my five-year-old tongue. The concept was—and still is—absolutely inconceivable. It was like sugar-fortified Karo syrup puffs baked into unnaturally yellow hulls that collapsed into a lumpy, mealy mess once it hit your mouth. And the milk took on the flavor of the corn puff bats, so there was no escaping. While stomaching that first bowl, I had to consider the unfortunate truth that I was technically obligated to finish the whole box, and pondering the proportion of a child’s size cereal bowl to the size of a cereal box made this prospect all the more disconcerting.

Of course I was going to beg my mother to not make me eat it. But working my way out of a verbal agreement required tact and subtlety—and making funny, contorted faces is about as subtle as a preschooler gets. To my credit, I put a small dent in the cereal supply—maybe a quarter, certainly no more than half the box was consumed—before it got tossed. I don’t know if the garbage man made a slip or if there was a tear in the plastic trash bag, but a bunch of the bats spilled out into the street, serving as as some tragicomic reminder of my deflated hopes and expectations. It was weeks before they were all crushed by passing cars and washed away. And, like all movie tie-in merchandising, the cereal in turn disappeared from store shelves.