Great news about nut butter stirring technology! Courtesy of Flickr user viZZZual.com

It’s with a heavy heart today that I announce my temporary retirement from Food & Think. Don’t worry–I’ll be back.

But major looming deadlines at my “real job” are–for the time being–making it very difficult for me to bring you pressing news about 5,000-year-old intestinal contents and why your stomach makes those funny noises. Particularly if you want your pressing news to contain things like punctuation and facts. So, much as I enjoy both food and the intriguing thoughts I think while eating, I must put a stop to it for a few months.

At first I thought a hunger strike would be a fitting way to raise awareness about the plight of overworked writers everywhere. But I cast the idea aside once I realized a hunger strike would mean an end to French fries and, in all likelihood, most kinds of cake, at least the good ones. Also beer, since it contains calories, would be difficult to work into the protest.

Far easier, then, to go on a thinking strike. It’s like a hunger strike, only I don’t get so hungry. Also, because I’m not thinking as much I can eat more things in the “stupid” food group, like chicken wings. Frankly, it’s been a win-win so far.

I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my co-Food & Thinker, Amanda Bensen, who shows no signs of slowing down. She recently tackled an entire week of chocolate and, undaunted, started this week by heroically tasting some 20 wines and then discovering sweet potatoes in space. Go Amanda!

There’s just one last thing I have to tell you about before I officially stop thinking. It’s the Witmer peanut butter mixer– the one invention you never realized how much you needed.

I’m assuming you’re all fans of natural peanut butter. (I favor Adams for its perfect balance of roast, coarseness of grind, and saltiness.) It’s far better than those homogenized, hydrogenated, sugar-spackled major brands. (By the way, most grocery store brands of peanut butter are safe from the recent salmonella outbreak; you can check them at this FDA website.)

The only catch is that the oil separates from natural peanut butters, and the first thing you have to do on opening a new jar is to mix it back in–a tedious process that invariably spills a bunch of the precious peanut oil. It’s also tiring–as one reviewer on Amazon noted:

You stick a knife in and stir and stir and stir. In about a minute your hand starts to cramp so you try to use more of your arm. That’s when you get clumsy and the oil starts to spill over the sides. The jar gets slippery making it difficult to grab onto its side; plus you’ve left a mess on the countertop.

(Incidentally, 40 separate people have taken the time to review this product on Amazon. I find that amazing. There are even separate comment threads started for some of the individual reviews. That’s how much this peanut butter stirrer has touched people’s lives.)

The mixer fits over a standard screw-top glass jar (it comes in several sizes to match whatever volume of peanut butter you typically buy). A sturdy wire arc fits through a hole in the cap, allowing you to mix the peanut butter while keeping the lid firmly closed.

Of course, any great invention must have an unexpected bonus feature to make it revolutionary and not just pretty good. With the ginsu knife it was the ability to slice through those pesky tin cans on your cutting board. With this peanut butter mixer, it’s the squeegee seal on the little hole where you poke the stirrer into the jar. It’s such a tight fit that the stirrer comes back out of the jar spotless and gleaming. If you hadn’t just stirred the peanut butter yourself, you might not be sure it had ever been in the jar.

I’m not kidding. It’s miraculous. I might just agree with another of the Amazon reviewers, who claimed the peanut butter was so well mixed it actually tasted better. There just aren’t many better ways to spend 10 bucks.

And with that, I’ll see you in April. Thanks for reading.

Emma Darwin in 1840, a year after she married Charles. George Richmond/Wikipedia

It’s Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday next Thursday, and the books are streaming out of publishing houses like so many startled pigeons. Nestled in among all the Beagles, giant tortoises, finches, vegetable mould, and barnacles arrives a volume seemingly written with the Food&Thinker in mind, a book that nails the sweet spot between supper and science. And we have Emma Darwin to thank for it.

Charles’s devoted wife collected recipes throughout their marriage, and the dishes she served as he formulated the theory of evolution have just been turned into a cookbook. Two historian-foodies, Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway, studied Emma’s writings and adapted her recipes for modern kitchens and ingredients. It’s for a good cause, too: the book project raises money for continued research into Charles Darwin’s papers.

The New York TImes‘s Paper Cuts blog mentioned the book a few days ago, though I regret to say their coverage offered little more than a warmed-over joke about English cooking. Bad blogger! No Ovaltine!

Fortunately for all concerned, the Arts and Culture section over at a place called Smithsonian offers not only a real review by someone who actually read the book, but also reproduces some of Emma’s dessert recipes along with delectable photos of the dishes as recreated by the cookbook’s authors. (The food history blog Gherkins & Tomatoes also has a fine review.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to make some Nesselrode Pudding just as soon as I can lay my hands on some heavy cream, brandy, ground almonds, and an ice cream maker all at the same time. Till then I’ll have to make do with Burnt Cream—an endearing name straight out of the honest tradition of English cooking. And you can rest assured it tastes just as good as its French translation, crème brûlée.

By the way, you can read Emma’s recipes—from Scotch Woodcock to the intriguing Pudding in Haste—all in her own handwriting at Cambridge University’s Darwin-online site. They also offer quite a bit of work by her husband.

Read more articles about Charles Darwin and his legacy in Smithsonian’s online special feature and in this month’s print magazine.

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

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.

National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2009 ready for the inaugural luncheon immediately following the swearing-in ceremonies. Image courtesy of the U.S. Senate

If you haven’t already heard about Obama’s first lunch as president, and how it’s an homage to Lincoln’s comfort foods, from the stewed oysters right down to the apple cinnamon cake, the details are here. (Kindly provided by the Joint Congressional Commission on Inaugural Ceremonies, who’ve been so thoughtful as to provide the recipes [as PDF files], too.)

You may have read plenty about the historical precedents for all these inaugural ceremonies, luncheons, and balls, but how much video have you seen from them? The Inaugural Commission’s website gives you a fascinating peek back through time, from George W. Bush’s two lunches all the way back to newsreel-style narrated footage of JFK sitting down with senators and poets. They may not reveal a wealth of culinary secrets, but they are morsels of history, wrapped up in the details, distractions, and conventions of their own time.

Looking back at George W. Bush on January 20, 2001 – when he was freer with that sideways smile and thanking his mother in his opening remarks – it’s clear just how much we all lost eight months later, that September.

At Clinton’s second inauguration, then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich adopts a gracious air but taunted the President about the recent election anyway. The Democrats still have the White House, he said, eyebrows jumping up and down, but let’s not forget which party controls both houses of Congress.

Inaugural lunch, a la 1961/ Joint Congressional Commission on Inaugural Ceremonies

Reagan’s 1985 inauguration featured a similar bit of ribbing. Fresh off the Gipper’s drubbing of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket, the master of ceremonies offers to omit the reading of the electoral college score, to save Speaker Tip O’Neill from the heartache of hearing it again.

Footage of Richard Nixon’s 1973 inauguration luncheon is notable perhaps for its lack of voiceover – a “no comment” from the producers? The previous June, five men had broken into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate office complex, but the world didn’t know about it yet.

In many of these decades-old pieces it’s shocking, by today’s showbiz-saturated standards, to see how little attention went to stage managing. Back before 24-hour news, image building, and gaffe-hunting, a luncheon was mostly just lunch. At JFK’s, the food was served buffet style. Senators and vice presidents – and Robert Frost, too – walked down a line of fold-up tables, plate in hand, waiting for a guy in a white hat to carve off a hunk of prime rib. Everyone sat in low-backed folding chairs, the kind you might find packed in a community center closet in between bingo nights.

Amid all this historical reverie, I found one last sign of the times truly inspiring. It’s a brief appearance, when a server darts into the frame to hand plates to a chef. He was the only African-American I saw in all that 1961 footage.

This time around, it’s different. And that’s change you can sink your fork into. Bon appetit, Mr. President!

Esculent Swallow and Nest by John Latham, 1831/Wikipedia

Up there on the weirdest-things-you-can-eat list has to be bird’s nest soup. It would be weird enough just to eat your standard twiggy-grassy robin’s nest, but this predominantly Chinese delicacy is made almost entirely from the goopy spit of a southeast Asian bird called a swiftlet (check out a couple of close-up nest photos over at EatingAsia). The birds glue their nests hundreds of feet high on sheer cave walls. When cooked, they yield a slick, nearly flavorless broth that’s prized for such medicinal chestnuts as increased longevity and, you guessed it, libido.

Unfortunately, swiftlets are not an invasive species we can proudly devour. To the contrary, growing demand from a prosperous China is compromising the birds’ ability to continue, uh, spitting out the nests. It doesn’t help that the sticky nests are the devil to clean, so collectors take the nests before they’ve been used to raise any young swiftlets. And in a weird double-twist, an unlikely solution—farming the nests—has increased supply and at the same time endangered some wild populations.

The monetary incentive is tremendous: swiftlet nests can sell for more than $1,200 per pound and fuel a multi-million dollar trade that can rival the fishing returns of poor regions. One Web site offers an 8-ounce “family pack” for about $600 (five percent discount on orders over $1,000).

In traditional harvesting, extremely daring men scale teetering bamboo poles to reach the nests, then scrape them from the cave walls. If you’ve ever shinnied up a flagpole with a basket and stick slung over your back and then performed your favorite yoga poses at the top, you may have some idea how dangerous this is. (Rock climbers tend to be fascinated; one has even made a documentary.)

A low-tech alternative—constructing artificial caves to farm the nests—has proved both successful and popular in Indonesia, where multistory buildings are erected in the middle of towns (sometimes even with a shop or apartment on the ground floor). The upper stories feature generous entrance holes, swiftlet songs play at the entrance to set a welcoming mood, and owners can add insect attractants and a swiftlet-pleasing scent, as chronicled in the World of Swiftlet Farming blog.

The set-up appeals to enough swiftlets that Indonesian production of the nests is booming (up to 280 tons, valued at more than $800 million, according to a 2004 source). Unfortunately, the high prices encourage wild-nest collectors to redouble their efforts. The toll is felt most keenly on islands, where nest farming is limited and so is the ability of swiftlets to recover from raids. In a 2001 study in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, swiftlet populations had declined 83% in 10 years.

Overharvesting was a clear cause, with declines recorded in 366 of 385 known nesting caves. Of 6,031 nests surveyed, only two had been left alone long enough for swiftlet chicks to have hatched. Harvesting was so devastating that the authors urged the islands’ governments to encourage nest farming as the swiftlets’ only chance for survival. (Though nest farming still involves destroying nests, the damage is counterbalanced by the increased nesting opportunities provided by the farms. Farmers typically allow late-nesting swiftlets to raise young, and even captively raise swiftlets in the nests of other birds to keep numbers up.)

National parks in India, Thailand, and other countries typically ban wild nest harvesting. But restrictions have yet to be enacted on a comprehensive, international scale – partly because farming has been so successful and global numbers are fairly high. Swiftlets are not listed as endangered by CITES or the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

I’m fascinated by the good-news bad-news saga of farming. Since its inception 10,000 years ago, farming has been our solution to the difficulty and unpredictability of securing animal food. By all accounts it’s been a huge success, but never a complete one. Disappearing swiftlets are just another curve ball in a world tainted by the likes of mad cow disease, brucellosis, and avian flu. Farmed salmon, anyone?

The good guys: the English red squirrel. Image courtesy of Friends of the Anglesey Red Squirrels webcam

Don’t eat the red ones. That could be the rallying cry in Britain’s coming squirrel wars. The U.K.’s adorable but endangered red squirrel is under siege from the American gray squirrel, and a last-ditch method of dealing with the invader has suddenly become popular: eating them.

The gray squirrel was introduced to the British Isles more than a century ago. It’s innocuous here in the states, but in Britain is an invasive species that outnumbers the native red squirrel by nearly 20 to 1. The situation has become so dire that red squirrels are now missing from much of the nation and remain on only a few islands and in the north of the country (you can glimpse them on this webcam from Anglesey, North Wales).

In 2006 a British lord urged celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to spearhead a squirrel-meat-popularization program. One way or another, by this year English butchers were having trouble keeping the 1-pound rodents in stock. Gourmets compared their taste to delicacies from duck to lamb to wild boar. One company started selling gray squirrel paté and another recently introduced Cajun-style squirrel-flavored potato chips.

Involving as it does a certain degree of revenge, eating invasive species must feel good—even if it is more of a gesture than an actual solution to the global problem of invasive species. After all, one typical trait of an invasive species is extremely high reproductive capacity. You just can’t eat them fast enough. Particularly in the case of squirrels, which have the problems of being hard to shoot (use a rifle; shotguns tend to ruin the meat), hard to skin (“like pulliing the waterlogged wellies off a toddler“), and hard to make look good on a plate, judging by some well-meaning but bizarre how-to videos on YouTube.

This is the sort of news that pleads for people to tell their weirdest-thing-I-ever-ate stories. The best I can offer beyond the occasional goat vindaloo or, let’s face it, calamari, is some beer my entomology professor used to brew, using yeasts isolated from her favorite beetle species. But eating invasive species sounds like a hobby I could get behind. From zebra mussels to blue-lined snapper to the bullfrogs wreaking havoc in California marshes, I’m picturing a nearly inexhaustible menu. What other species would you add to it?

Sugarcanes are 90% juice, and almost one-fifth of the juice is straight sucrose. Image: R. Uribe/Wikipedia

Should sugar be a controlled substance? For the love of honey, no! Dietitians can take away my trans fats and feed me one percent milk, but show mercy and leave me my sugar. Sugar is the most basic food there is. As a molecule, it’s one of the world’s most fundamental. It’s the first incarnation of any organic substance, born inside a leaf from carbon dioxide, sunlight, and water. During digestion, it’s also the final incarnation of our food (no matter what we had for supper) before our cells burn it for energy.

But if sugar is so simple, why are Twinkie packages so hard to read? Why are snacks, desserts, condiments, and TV dinners stuffed with so many sweetening agents? For that matter, why do those health-store, honey-sweetened cookies have that thin, slightly tinny taste that sugary cookies lack?

The answer, of course, is that sugars come in many varieties. The variations are minute—look at a molecular diagram and you’d be hard pressed to pick one from another—but they impart stark differences in taste and cooking behavior. That’s why we need just the right combination to get that Twinkie to taste right.

So here’s a breakdown of the common sugars and where you might find them. Use it for reference, or for sweet reflection (many thanks to Harold McGee and Alan Davidson):

Glucose (also called dextrose): The simplest sugar (but weirdly one of the least sweet), this is what your cells burn for energy. When plants or animals need to store glucose, they stack the molecules into long chains to make starch. Like all sugars, glucose contains only carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Glucose is shaped more or less like a single hexagonal ring, so it’s called a monosaccharide.

Fructose has exactly the same number and type of atoms as glucose, just arranged differently. This slight change makes fructose about twice as sweet as glucose. Fructose is the main sugar you find in honey, giving it its almost jarring sweetness. Some clever people have realized that baking with doubly sweet fructose means you can make treats with half the sugar calories of glucose. Remarkably, though, fructose molecules change shape and lose much of their sweetness when they are hot, so this trick doesn’t work in sweetening tea or coffee.

Sucrose is the most common sugar made by plants, and it’s the molecule we extract from sugarcane or sugar beets and turn into table sugar. It consists of one fructose molecule joined to one glucose molecule. That’s two rings, so sucrose is referred to as a disaccharide. We all love sucrose (if not quite as much as John Travolta did when he played that annoying angel in Michael). And conveniently for our tongues if not our waistlines, it remains delicious even at very high concentrations.

Maltose, found in malt extract, and lactose, found in milk, are two more disaccharides that are much less sweet than sucrose or fructose.

High fructose corn syrup is what we get when we cook down the starches from corn kernels to liberate the sugars they contain. About 75 percent fructose and the rest glucose, it’s about as sweet as table sugar. And because American corn is so cheap (artificially, as Michael Pollan has pointed out), it has become ubiquitous as an industrial-scale food sweetener.

Maltodextrin is another variety of processed corn syrup—in some respects another way to sneak sugar onto a wrapper’s ingredient list without raising a consumer’s eyebrows. A combination of glucose and maltose, maltodextrin is chewy and not particularly sweet.

Oligosaccharides are sugars consisting of more than two hexagonal rings, found in beans and other seeds. The neat thing about oligosaccharides is that animals can’t digest them, but the bacteria in our intestines often can—leading to those remarkable intestinal chemistry experiments that sometimes happen after a meal of legumes.

This list doesn’t touch the artificial sweeteners—like the Stevia Amanda wrote about. They all contain some non-sugar substance that tricks our tongues into registering sweetness. Other tricksters include artichokes, which briefly disable our sweet receptors so whatever we eat next seems sweet, as well as the really weird miracle berry, which can discombobulate your tongue for a few hours at a time.

Artificial sweeteners promise the impossible: they’re hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose but contain negligible calories. If only taste were that simple. I’ve never had a zero-calorie dessert that could compare to the simple sucrose rush of chewing on a stalk of sugarcane. I’m supporting freedom for sugar in 2009!

(Note to Amanda: a cwt seems to be short for a hundredweight. Which is 100 pounds in the U.S. and 112 pounds in Britain. Can the “c” really be a holdover from the Roman numeral 100? Good old imperial measurement system.)

Dive into your beer with our year-end review. Image courtesy Flickr user Atilla1000

I’ll say it. The best beers in the world today are being made in the U.S. Let foreigners joke about our watery “macrobrews,” but meanwhile our craft-brewing tradition has gathered steam the way all endeavors do in our young country: with enthusiasm, ingenuity, and heaps of technology. Give us a thumbnail sketch and a couple of engineering degrees and we can found a tradition in anything you want.

And it pays to try them all. Beer is inherently unstable (unlike wine, its flavors start to get musky after a few months in the bottle), so there’s no real reason to hold a blind allegiance to the beers you’re comfortable with—they have likely only been getting worse on their long journey from the brewery. Why not try a beer from just down the block? With some 1,500 smaller names scattered around the country, finding great new beers is just one more benefit of traveling.

So here’s my personal month-by-month review of the top 12 beers of 2008. That’s 12 down, 1,488 breweries left to try. At this rate, my beer-tasting career should last me until the year 2132. It’s shaping up to be a tasty century.

January: I emerged into 2008 on the South Island of New Zealand, fresh from a nearly beer-free month in Antarctica. I wound up in Riverton, along a lonely stretch of coast beaten by the mighty Southern Ocean. The only open restaurant turned out to be closed when I walked in, but they invited me for “staffies” anyway, serving up three foamy, deep-yellow Speight’s Gold Medal Ales in succession and refusing payment. It was the perfect accompaniment to stories of gales, fish tales, and what climate change is doing to the local paua (abalone) crop.

February was deadline month, and my deadline beer is the Lost Coast Brewery’s Indica Pale Ale, brewed deep in Northern California’s “Humboldt Nation” (a county infamous for a certain controversial medicinal herb). The beer’s name is a rather adolescent pun, but as an India pale ale it’s straightforward and serious. Bitter hops explode from it, perfuming your mouth and nose in little aromatic puffs.

March is the month for Lost Coast’s Eight-Ball Stout, a beer so good I started calling my surfboard after it. Springtime in northern California sees the year’s coldest water temps. As you emerge from 50-degree water, wetsuit dripping, clambering over mussel-pocked rocks and holding a slender fiberglass plank in one raw pink hand, it helps to have something to look forward to. If it’s a thick, toasted, molassesy oatmeal stout dark enough to blot out the gorgeous California sunset, so much the better.

April saw visits to the Koreatown of San Jose, California, where I investigated the ultra-fresh Korean fried-chicken fad. You eat popcorn while the chef fries the drumsticks from scratch. When it arrives, the crispy skin is an airlock holding back scalding, partially vaporized chicken juice. The only solution is a giant bottle of OB Blue shared in small glasses with everyone at the table. Served extremely cold as damage control for the impatient eater, it’s exactly right.

In May I was involved in a neat project using technology to save whales from ship traffic off Boston (the Boston Globe described it here). Parts of Boston resemble a far-western county of Ireland, and one upshot is you can walk into any bar and get the world’s most famous stout, Guinness. Fizzed with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide, the bubbles are tiny and soft, yielding a creamy taste rather than a carbonated sting. This beer is much milder (and lower in alcohol) than its reputation. Order it on a whim.

By June I was ensconced in an upstate New York lifestyle complete with a backyard vegetable garden and nonstop bicycling. During those sweltering months two brews from the Ithaca Brewery kept me alive: the fearsomely hopped Cascazilla Ale and its only slightly less wanton sibling, Flower Power India Pale Ale. Cold, fruity in the throat, and searingly carbonated.

A return to the West Coast over July 4th brought me back inside the blessed distribution halo of the Deschutes Brewery. If it’s hot, you drink Mirror Pond Pale Ale. If it’s cold and damp, Black Butte Porter. And if night is falling and your time out West is nearly over, you spend all your energy drinking Obsidian Stout. Many people fault this beer for being too complex for a stout. It’s smoky, peaty to the point of whiskeyness, with a sweetness that vanishes halfway through the sip. My longtime favorite beer, it’s like drinking mouthfuls of the winter solstice.

The highlight of August was a friend’s wedding, and with it the opportunity to drink from a keg of authentic, locally brewed root beer. If you haven’t done this recently, give it a try. Good root beer (non-alcoholic, of course) is sweet, rich, and caramel, with that woodsy taste of birch twigs and fragrant roots, reminding me of damp Appalachian hollows and fallen leaves.

In September my carefully planned birthday weekend on Martha’s Vineyard coincided with a drive-by drenching from Hurricane Kyle. Under the circumstances, huddling in the Offshore Ale Company in Oak Bluffs was a good way to spend the afternoon. I drank the Steeprock Stout and shelled peanuts as rain poured down in torrents through our car’s sunroof.

October. Foolish brewery names are a constant risk in an industry dominated by young guys who spend a lot of time drinking. But don’t write off Smuttynose Brewery just yet. (It’s actually the name of a quaint island off New Hampshire.) One way or another, their Robust Porter gets the name exactly right. Great beers should evoke tastes rather than ladle them onto your tongue, and that’s the way this beer treats its dark sugars and woody bitterness.

In November I discovered Butternuts brewery’s Moo Thunder canned stout. It’s a good, Guinness-like stout that gets extra points for delivery. Aluminum takes much less energy to recycle than glass, so putting beer back into cans, and keeping the flavor intact, strikes a blow for the environment. Pour it into a glass and feel virtuous while you watch the head develop.

I’m still auditioning brews for the role of “beer of December”, and I have high hopes of encountering some promising newcomer as I head out on a holiday-season road trip. Surely someone out there can offer a suggestion or two?

On your tongue, the glutamate molecule would sit right in the pink part. Image by Flickr user Robyn Gallagher

It’s called the “fifth taste,” and it’s loved, feared, and innocently sprinkled on food the world over, even though many people believe it’s a peculiarity of Asian food. I’m talking about umami, the savory essence of seaweed, dried fish, mushrooms, yeast, meat, cheese, tomatoes, and many other tastes.

And yet, ubiquitous as it is, it took until the early twentieth century for a Japanese chemist to isolate umami and recognize it as the fifth fundamental human taste—joining the select company of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. In an endearing bit of science history, the discoverer, Kikunae Ikeda, named the substance umami—Japanese for “yummy.”

You may know the flavor better as monosodium glutamate (MSG), the infamous synthetic form of glutamate, the chemical largely responsible for umami taste. Glutamate is an amino acid that occurs as a building block in many proteins (it’s actually one of the most common neurotransmitters in the human body). But it only triggers the umami taste when it reaches the tongue in a free state, unbound to other molecules.

This week, scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have puzzled apart the way glutamate activates nerves on the tongue. The findings help explain why umami taste can be accentuated by the addition of either of two other compounds: inosinate (found in meat) or guanylate (found in mushrooms).

Scientists call what happens during umami tasting a “Venus flytrap” mechanism: Glutamate lands on your tongue and nestles into a glutamate-shaped depression on an umami receptor. Upon contact, the receptor—an enormous, folded protein—changes shape and grasps the glutamate. That shape change also activates the neuron that tells your brain you are tasting umami.

The scientists also learned that inosinate and guanylate can bind to a separate part of the umami receptor. Once bound, they tighten the receptor’s grip on glutamate, increasing its ability to “taste” glutamate by up to 15-fold before the receptor relaxes its grip. The finding explains, perhaps, why a good Japanese broth contains both glutamate-rich seaweed and inosinate-rich dried fish flakes.

MSG—and by extension, umami—has gotten a bad rap over reports of people getting headaches or tingling sensations in the head and neck after eating foods containing the additive. But the FDA has not been able to identify MSG as the cause of such symptoms (so-called “Chinese restaurant syndrome”).

Even more reassuring than the FDA’s pile of inconclusive medical studies are the legions of people who blithely eat glutamates every day, the world over, in the form of hydrolized soy protein and yeast extracts. As a properly raised half-English kid, I spread glutamates on my toast every time I enjoy some delicious Marmite. When I settle in to watch Doctor Who reruns, the savory-cheesy nutritional yeast I sprinkle on my popcorn is glutamate central.

And it’s not just niche foods. Ever wonder what compels you to eat an entire bag of Doritos all by yourself? They may not contain MSG, but they’re packed with five separate sources of glutamate.

Head over to Umami Mart for more examples of this great flavor. (Star UM-er Kayoko has been on an umami binge in Japan for several weeks now, and I’m getting to the point where I’m too envious to keep reading her posts.)

Fewer wines wind up in barrels than you might think. Image: Wikipedia

With the holidays in full swing, it’s time to get serious about wine — something I regard as recompense for spending ages indoors with people I love dearly but who live in inconvenient parts of the country and tend to have very enthusiastic dogs.

And yet I’m hopeless at it. My experience with wine involves tiptoeing through rack upon rack of confusingly organized bottles, praying that my bag doesn’t knock over anything behind me while I look for some ideal intersection of price, label artwork, and name unpronounceability.

I used to read the descriptions printed on little squares of paper and taped to the shelves. But after several years I realized that all wines score between 87 and 92, and that pretty much any flavor is desirable as long as it isn’t grape. The less edible-sounding, the better: Bring on the vanilla, earth, leather, oak, pepper, orange peel, menthol, musk, and—no, I’m not kidding—farm yard.

So imagine my surprise to learn that many of these flavors come not from the pressed grapes but from the barrels they were stored in before bottling. And that owing to the high price of barrels, many high-volume winemakers skip the barrel altogether, opting instead to dunk bags of oak chips into their stainless-steel vats.

What sounds at first like an unconscionable shortcut starts to make sense when you look at the numbers. A prized, 60-gallon French-oak barrel can run winemakers $1,000. Do the math: the American wine industry produced 3 billion liters, or 13 million barrels’ worth, this year. Worse, the best barrels are made from oaks more than a century old (according to Jancis Robinson), and lose much of their flavor after their first use.

Good oak barrels affect wine in a few crucial ways. They help moderate the tannins that make wine astringent, reduce the taste of grapes, and intensify the color. They let in oxygen, which helps stabilize the wine while it’s young (even though oxygen destroys wine once it’s bottled). And they impart many of those unexpected flavors you read about in tasting notes. Some (vanilla and coconut, for example) come straight from the oak. Caramelized flavors come from the inside surface of the barrel, which is burned or “toasted” during building. Still other flavors appear when molecules from the oak react with complex sugars from the grapes to produce new aromatic compounds.

Industrial-scale winemakers realized they could do much the same thing by suspending bits of oak in their wine as it ferments. It’s cheaper as well as faster. Instead of keeping wine in a barrel for a year while it develops, oak chips can infuse a wine with the same compounds in a matter of weeks. And presumably, winemakers can now tinker with their oak-chip concoctions to get the flavors they most want.

I understand the rationale, and yet now I have this disturbing mental image of my wine being invaded by those bags of potpourri that perfume the bathrooms of my excessively neat relatives. Is that how all of these $12 wines come to be bursting with vanilla and leather? Is my favorite bottle of red, at heart, any different from a Yankee Candle? I think I’m being cultured, but am I really drinking some overspiced, oenological version of instant ramen soup?

Note: This post was written with the aid of a lovely 2004 Côte du Rhône syrah-grenache. The E.U. only began allowing so-called “oak alternatives” in 2006, so presumably this one had actually spent some time in a barrel.

Pacay leaves and pod, courtesy Anya Hinkle/UC Berkeley

Close on the heels of news about Ötzi the iceman’s final meals come revelations about a diet even more ancient. New findings show that about 8,000 years ago, the inhabitants of the Nanchoc Valley in the lower Peruvian Andes were eating beans, peanuts, domesticated squash, and a fruit pod called pacay, whose sweet white lining Peruvians still enjoy today.

That comes as surprising news for anthropologists. Eight thousand years ago is back in the hazy dawn (or at least early morning) of agriculture, when people around the globe were just starting to figure out how to cultivate plants. Before the publication of this new evidence (last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) researchers thought agriculture had taken another 2,000 years to develop in Peru.

How do you find out exactly when a people started eating peanuts and squash? If you’re Dolores Piperno, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and Tom Dillehay, of Vanderbilt University, you look at their teeth. Specifically at the calculus, which is that hardened plaque around your gumline that your dentist is always scolding you about. Tiny bits of food get caught up in that calcified bacterial sludge, where they can remain for millennia without disintegrating. And people like Dolores Piperno can identify them.

Piperno examined 39 teeth that date from a 1,000-year period at a Nanchoc archaeological site Dillehay had been working on. Her identification methods consisted of patiently training her microscope on grains of starch caught in the calculus. Despite being less than one-twentieth of a millimeter across, many of these grains were distinctive enough for Piperno to identify them to species. (It’s not unlike the idea of using feather fragments to ID python meals: sounds logical but unimaginably hard.) Piperno could even tell that some of the food, particularly the beans, had been cooked before it was eaten. The cooked grains were gelatinous and matched the appearance of bean starch she had cooked in her laboratory for comparison.

Earlier archaeological work in the Nanchoc Valley had turned up evidence of people cultivating plants, but scientists weren’t sure whether they had been used for food or other purposes. For instance, a squash plant might have been just as useful for gourds as for making baked squash for supper. The new work establishes that people had been eating their crops, and provides evidence that they already had a fairly diverse set of plants to cook with.

I like thinking of ancient people sitting around the Nanchoc Valley enjoying a stew of beans and peanuts and soft chunks of squash. Too often when I imagine early meals, it’s depressing: grimy, shivering figures gnawing at barely warmed flesh, cracking their teeth on nuts or patiently chomping some gritty tuber into submission.

There’s something comforting, too, about the thought that we’re still enjoying these same plants today. I had a great lamb stew recently, with beans and potatoes stewed until they were creamy and infused with flavor. It’s tempting to think the Nanchoc people ate something similar, perhaps watching the evening sun light up the Andes peaks and looking forward to a sweet dessert of pacay, nibbled from a pod and passed around the family circle.

Idyllic as it all sounds, there’s one last lesson here: the importance of brushing your teeth. It’s bad enough to walk around with bits of your last meal stuck in your teeth. You don’t want to broadcast your lunch to people 8,000 years in the future, do you?

Edible guitar cake, courtesy of Flickr user Omar de Armas

Over at Hungry Magazine there’s a fun review of Lost in the Supermarket, a valiant attempt by two writers to shed some light on the cuisine of the rock star.

It’s a great idea. Rock life can’t run entirely on gin, cigarettes and Cheez-Its, can it? Surely, every once in a while there must be something solid—something that starts out as a mere ingredient, or at least gets unwrapped, covered in cheese, and stuck into a toaster oven? And there you have it—preparation plus augmentation: the humble beginnings of a cuisine.

As it turns out, some bands can do considerably better than that. The Scottish band Belle and Sebastian roll out a veggie Thai red curry soup (though if you ask me the authors should have demanded haggis). Sonic Youth, who rarely sound as if they’ve had time to tune their guitars, can apparently make a mean Italian wedding soup. And the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players (featuring a drummer who’s younger than some bottles of Scotch) have developed opinions on both salsa and homemade bread.

If the book has a fault, according to Hungry, it’s the authors’ unwavering focus on indie bands. Perhaps going for the arty and literate types was based on a hunch that they’d show the most promise in the kitchen. But when the recipes falter, it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for three separate chili recipes by people you’ve never heard of. If, say, Elton John or David Byrne were wielding the spice rack, I might read out of sheer curiosity. The guys of Dirty Excuse, not so much.

And then, of course, there’s the danger of overingesting that hipster-band mainstay, irony. Exhibit A: a band called Japanther’s hot dog recipe, made with peanut butter and banana.

Still it’s an idea I wish I’d had first (such a good idea, it turns out, that this isn’t even the only book on the subject).

So if you could ask any band in the world, who would you ask, and what would you ask for? After brief discussion, here’s my top 10:

10. The Beatles’ “Honey Pie” (closely followed by marmalade skies)
9. The B-52s’ “Rock Lobster” bisque
8. Spinal Tap’s miniature luncheon-meat sandwiches
7. The Smiths’ recipe for veggie lasagna
6. Something weird by Cibo Matto – either the Sci-Fi Wasabi or the White Pepper Ice Cream
5. Whatever Bob Dylan served that time he had a job in the great north woods, working as a cook for a spell
4. Oasis’s mimosa (preferably non-supernova)
3. U2’s humble pie
2. Meat Loaf‘s meatloaf
1. Abba’s cheese fondue

The song might remain the same, but the list can go on and on – please add your own most-wanted recipes in the comments section!

A carpet of moss, courtesy of Flickr user Morning Glory

Possibly the world’s most ancient celebrity has now had his dinner described down to the very last fibrils of moss. Or mosses, to be exact. Scientists have found six species in the intestinal tract of Ötzi, the 5,200-year-old “iceman” who was discovered frozen into a glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991.

Even in mummy terms, 52 centuries is old. Ötzi is as old or older than the famous Egyptian mummies, despite having been preserved by little more than coincidence and cold weather. He was found half-encased in ice at 11,000 feet elevation, still dressed in grasses and furs and carrying an axe of nearly pure copper. This man was alive before bronze was invented.

His incredible degree of preservation has allowed scientists to follow Ötzi’s prehistoric lifestyle like a gang of paparazzi. The forensic techniques they’ve brought to bear hint at bizarre CSI storylines yet to be scripted. From bone details, pollen grains, DNA molecules, isotopes in his teeth, and an ominous arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, we know that Ötzi grew up about 35 miles south of where he died, at 46, probably herded sheep in the high country, was a better hiker than his contemporaries, got into a serious fight with some tribesmen, fled through forests of hornbeam, died from his wounds, and ultimately left no descendants in modern Europe.

As someone who is often at a loss when confronted by tracks in new-fallen snow, I just love to read about people who can see this kind of detail across five millennia.

And then of course there’s the part we’re interested in on this blog: the iceman’s food. From the new research, it looks like you won’t need to add mosses to your favorite Copper Age recipes. Mosses have nearly zero nutritive value, don’t taste of much, and are nearly universally ignored as people food. Ötzi probably consumed them incidentally. But how?

In those days before water filters, several species probably came from the water he drank. But two species are more tantalizing. One type was probably used to wrap food, as kind of an ancient sandwich baggie. Researchers found bits of it throughout Ötzi’s intestine; in the wild it forms mats on rocks, seemingly perfect for making wrapping material. The other species, a type of peat moss, is acidic enough to have been useful as a traditional medicinal compress to fight infections. Ötzi probably spent his last desperate hours clutching the moss to his arrow wound – and not bothering to scrub his hands clean when he ate.

The mosses are actually the last of the iceman’s gut contents to be analyzed by researchers – previous work had already divined the main ingredients of the man’s last two meals. The food included a primitive kind of wheat (possibly made into bread), plum-like fruits called sloes, two kinds of red meat (ibex and red deer), and copious amounts of charcoal indicating he’d cooked over open flame. Which means, I guess, that now we know what Ötzi’s answer to Amanda’s question would have been.