An abstract image of an egg. Photo adapted from Flickr user davidex

A quiet whisper contains less than a nanowatt of power. A human shout is a little more than a microwatt, and when you get 68,000 screaming fans inside Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium—one of the NFL’s louder indoor stadiums—the Super Bowl represents a big game and an incredible source of sound. And all those shouts add up to real power.

In Sound and Sources of Sound, Anne P. Dowling writes: “The total energy radiated by the combined shouts of the Wembley cup final crowd during an exciting game being about that required to fry one egg!” Really? Well, American football fans probably outdo British soccer fans; anecdotal reports suggest that indoor stadiums can reach up to 117 decibels. Still, the question remains: Does the Super Bowl create enough power to fry up a dozen eggs?

I called Mark Sheplak at the University of Florida. He’s a mechanical engineer who has modeled how much power could be harvested from the acoustic liner of an airplane engine. (He’s found that the take-off of many commercial flights can generate the same amount of noise as roughly equal all the human shouts in the world, and this intense concentration of waste noise can be enough to power on-board acoustic monitoring systems.) “I don’t know if there would be enough sound in a stadium to get anything,” he says. “It would have to be really, really loud.”

Before we go much further, it’s also worth pointing out that an egg is a heterogeneous substance. “The various kinds of proteins do not all coagulate at the same temperature,” Herve This writes in Kitchen Mysteries. “One forms at 61°C another at 70°C, and so on….” The combination of cook time and temperature ultimately yields different textures and viscosities (which César Vega writes about extensively in the new book The Kitchen as Laboratory). For the sake of simplicity, let’s forget about any energy lost in cooking—heating a pan or allowing flames to escape around a pan—and take a wild guess at the power required to heat the yolk of a chicken egg to 85°C at sea level. (Engineers and food scientists, please feel free to weigh in). Let’s call it 30 watts to fry an egg: Five minutes of intense screaming.

The bigger problem here is that all these screaming fans are spread out over 1.8 million square feet and, to cook an egg, you would need to concentrate and harvest those sounds and convert them to heat. “You’re usually not terribly efficient,” Sheplak told me, “usually less than one percent efficiency of harvesting that energy. You need to be in a situation where it’s really loud. You can’t have a perpetual motion machine.”

So what might sound like a deafening cacophony during Sunday’s game might actually amount to only a single fried egg, if that. Perhaps thinking about how sports fans might actually cook an egg with their vocal cords demonstrates something else entirely: the pervasive use of the “fried egg” as a scientific analogy.

"Frito Favorites," circa 1954/Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press and Frito-Lay North America, Inc.

The curvy chips crinkle and crunch. Top the salty, golden corn chips with chili and you’ve got yourself a Frito pie, sometimes portioned out right inside the silvery, single-serving bag. The Frito pie is also known as a “walking taco,” “pepperbellies,” “Petro’s,” “jailhouse tacos,” or officially—under Frito-Lay North America, Inc.’s trademarked “packaged meal combination consisting primarily of chili or snack food dips containing meat or cheese corn-based snack foods, namely, corn chips”—the Fritos Chili Pie®. Call it what you will. It’s a soupy, creamy street food that’s recently entered the realm of haute cuisine.

Fritos got their start in Texas with the “Tom Edison of snack food.” The legend goes something like this, as Betty Fussell writes in The Story of Corn: “In San Antonio in 1932, a man named [Charles] Elmer Doolin bought a five-cent package of corn chips at a small café, liked what he ate and tracked down the Mexican who made them.” In another version of the story, Clementine Paddleford writes:

The flavor tickled his fancy, it lingered in memory. He found the maker was a San Antonian of Mexican extraction who claimed to be the originator of the thin ribbons of corn. The Mexican, he learned, was tired of frying the chips; he wanted to go home to Mexico and would be glad to sell out.

The café was more likely an icehouse, and the man who made the corn chip was named Gustavo Olquin, according to C.E. Doolin’s daughter Kaleta, who wrote a 2011 book Fritos Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More. She says her father worked briefly as a fry cook for Olquin and paid Olquin and his unnamed business partner $100 for a customized, hand-operated potato ricer, their 19 business accounts and the recipe for fritos—the patentable Anglo re-branding of Mexican fritas, or “little fried things.” Doolin borrowed $20 from the business partner; the rest came from his mother, Daisy Dean Doolin, who hocked her wedding ring for $80.

C. E. Doolin tinkered around with the recipe, mechanized the chipping process, and, in 1933, patented a “Dough Dispensing and Cutting Device” and trademarked the Fritos name. He worked on breeding custom varieties of hybrid corn. Doolin invented a “Bag Rack” and adopted the now-familiar practice of deliberately misspelling products to draw attention—“Krisp Tender Golden Bits of Corn Goodness.”

Rack header/Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press and Frito-Lay North America, Inc.

Whether fritas become fritos as an accidental Anglofication or as a deliberate “sensational spelling”—in the vein of Dunkin’ Donuts, Froot Loops, Rice Krispies—remains something of an open question. Prior to Doolin’s trademark, though, fritos does not appear to have referred to fried corn chips in Mexican Spanish. Either way, snack foods with distinctive, masculine “Os” persevered: Doolin would go on to create Cheetos and Fritatos; the company he founded would introduce Doritos and Tostitos.

What’s remarkable in retrospect is that he appears to have intended Fritos as a side dish or even an ingredient. In fact, the first recipe Daisy Dean Doolin came up with in 1932 was a “Fritos Fruit Cake”; its ingredients include candied fruits, pecans and crushed Fritos. Another early recipe for a company contest submitted by the woman who would later became C.E. Doolin’s wife, Mary Kathryn Coleman, described a “Fritoque Pie,” a chicken casserole with crushed Fritos. Her prize: $1. (This recipe has been lost and the lack of documentation probably contributes to competing claims about Frito pie’s origins at a New Mexico Woolworth’s in the 1960s.)

Pies aside, the fried corn chips became a pantry staple and an easy-to-use replacement for cornmeal, salt, and oil. Their versatility was practically unlimited. Advertisements from the 1940s said, “They’re good for breakfast, lunch, snack-time and dinner.”

Even more surprising for a man who revolutionized American corn chips and presaged the meteoric rise of the “Anglo corn chip,” which firmly cemented itself when Frito-Lay’s unveiled Doritos in 1966: Doolin did not eat meat or salt. He was a devoted follower of Herbert Shelton, a Texas healer, who ran for president on the American Vegetarian Party ticket.

I thought this transformation of Fritos loosely mirrored that of the Graham cracker, a whole-wheat health food that evolved into a sugary snack. I called his daughter, Kaleta Doolin, and asked about the apparent disconnect. “Fritos have always been a salty snack,” she said, “unless you’re at the factory and take them off the assembly line before they go through the salter, which is what we did.”

Rack header/Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press and Frito-Lay North

As much scorn and derision as today’s leading nutritional gurus heap onto processed foods, it’s worth noting that Fritos arrived here by way of a Mesoamerican staple and their invention and flavor owes a debt to one of the greatest food processing technologies ever invented: nixtamalization. The 3,000-year-old tradition adding calcium hydroxide—wood ash or lime—so greatly enriches the available amino acids in masa corn that Sophie Coe writes in America’s First Cuisines that the process underlies “the rise of Mesoamerican civilization.” Lacking this technology, early Europeans and Americans (who considered corn fit for slaves and swine) learned that eating a diet exclusively based on unprocessed corn led to pellagra, a debilitating niacin deficiency causing dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death.

As we approach one of the biggest snack days of the year and as “Anglo corn chips” continue to make up an increasing percentage of the snack foods market, perhaps it’s also worth celebration the incredible corn processing technology that brought us masa, tortillas fritas, Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger-flavored Doritos and, of course, the Frito pie.

Leaf plates. Images courtesy of VerTerra

The first single-use food service item was the paper plate, invented in 1904. Paper cups followed soon after. Over the next century, disposable cups, utensils and plates were developed in increasingly durable—and environmentally unfriendly—materials. The low point, as far as the planet’s health is concerned, was probably the original Styrofoam cup. It was durable, lightweight and kept people from burning their hands while holding a hot cup of coffee, but it was also made using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which break down ozone in the atmosphere. CFCs were phased out in the late 1980s, but that didn’t eliminate the problem of polystyrene, like other plastics, hanging around landfills for centuries after being used just once.

According to Time magazine, Americans throw away an estimated trillion disposable plates and utensils per year. The best option, of course, would be if everyone stopped using disposable products altogether. That’s probably never going to happen—it’s just too convenient to be able to grab a cup of coffee on your way to work. But some ingenious new products have come out in recent years that might be able to reduce the damage, including disposable cups and utensils made from a material derived from corn. They look just like plastic, but can be composted by a commercial composter so they don’t end up in landfills. Even more interesting—not to mention seasonally appropriate—is a line of plates made from fallen leaves, which can be naturally home-composted after use.

In the natural order of things, leaves fall from trees and eventually disintegrate, their nutrients enriching the soil to help the next generation of leaves and other plants grow. If those leaves happen to be in someone’s yard or a public place, they are usually picked up. Gardeners and other environmentally conscious people will add the leaves to a compost pile to become a natural fertilizer. But more often than not, the fallen leaves are incinerated or taken to the dump, where they will still disintegrate over time, but the plastic bags that were used to collect them will stick around for a good, long while.

VerTerra, a company founded in 2007, just adds another step to the leaves’ natural life cycle: dinner. The idea for plates made from fallen leaves came to VerTerra founder and CEO, Michael Dwork, when he was traveling in rural India. He saw a woman soaking palm leaves and then pressing them in a kind of waffle iron. She then served food on the pressed leaves. When he returned to the United States and business school, he experimented with adapting this simple and resourceful concept to make a line of attractive, durable and environmentally friendly single-use plates and bowls. (Not as cheap as paper or plastic, though; they can cost up to about a dollar per piece.) After they’re used, they can be thrown in the compost pile, where they will naturally compost within two months. The company website even includes a tutorial on composting at home, whether you live in the country or in a tiny apartment.

According to the company, the plates are made from leaves in India because no American leaves would produce the right effect. Only fallen leaves are used; steam, heat and pressure are applied to form the plates. Since nothing but leaves and water are added, they’re nontoxic and can be safely added to the compost pile.

That means the plate you eat your food on can help grow your next meal. Pretty cool.

As long as you're careful not to spill, the computer can get you a great culinary education. Image courtesy of Flickr user Travelin' Librarian

Whether for career development or their own edification, the culinarily curious can gorge on all kinds of food knowledge online. Here are a few of the offerings:

Sharpen your cooking skills. Everything from nifty tips on peeling garlic to full-fledged cooking shows are available online. Saveur (source of the amazing garlic video), Epicurious, Chow and Cook’s Illustrated (for subscribers only) are good sites to check for short technique and recipe demonstrations. The Culinary Institute of America’s ciaprochef.com is full of recipes and videos. And a number of YouTube cooking shows have gained a loyal following, including Show Me the Curry, where Hetal and Anuja help you navigate South Asian and occasionally other cuisines; Great Depression Cooking, starring 96-year-old Clara; and the amusingly enigmatic Cooking with Dog (tagline: It’s not what you think…), where you can learn to make all kinds of Japanese dishes while the host’s coiffed poodle looks serenely on.

Get a culinary degree. Until someone figures out how to transport food via the Internet, you can’t actually attend cooking school online. But you can earn an online degree in a culinary-related subject that doesn’t involve cooking. Le Cordon Bleu USA offers a bachelor of arts in culinary management and an associate of occupational studies in hospitality and restaurant management. If you can’t move to Vermont (which you should consider, because it really is lovely), the New England Culinary Institute offers an online bachelor of arts in hospitality and restaurant management. And Virginia College Online’s culinary arts associate’s degree  is designed for those who have already completed cooking school elsewhere.

Feed your inner geek. One of the greatest developments in recent years for people like me who love to learn but live far from a big university is iTunes U. Institutions like Oxford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the National Portrait Gallery upload audio and video of lectures—and most of them are free to download from iTunes. A few of the foodie offerings are Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Science’s public lecture series on science and cooking, with demonstrations from top chefs like Wylie Dufresne, on meat glue (transglutaminase), and José Andrés, on gelation; the University of Warwick on how to build a chocolate-powered race car; and culinary historian Jessica Harris speaking at the Library of Congress National Book Festival.

Learn how to write about food. If you already know plenty about food and want to share your knowledge with the world, online food-writing classes can help tune up your presentation. Indian cookbook author Monica Bhide offers occasional e-courses covering everything from recipe writing to food memoir. The latest class started in September, but check her site for upcoming dates. Gotham Writers’ Workshop’s next 11-week course, which includes a Q&A session with a New York Times food editor, begins October 4.

Farming and new media are not mutually exclusive. Image courtesy of Flickr user IRRI Images

Conscientious eaters want to know all about where their food came from, how it was grown and who grew it. Part of the appeal of farmers’ markets is getting face time with those who spend their days with their hands in the dirt. Suddenly, consumers want to have a “relationship” with their small-scale farmers, ranchers and cheese makers — people who once toiled in obscurity. (This is still usually the case in the larger agricultural industry, where the vast majority of our food comes from.)

One unintended consequence is that, now, personality counts. A grower with a winning smile or the gift of the gab may get the sale even when the wares at the next table are just as fresh and succulent-looking. There’s a pair of young, attractive male farmers in my area whose tent always seems to be crowded with female customers.

Now, technology that wasn’t around a decade ago—blogs, smartphones, Facebook and Twitter—is taking the farmer-consumer relationship to another level. It’s how CSA members can find out what’s likely to be in their share soon, get recipes for what to do with bok choy or celeriac, and read cute little stories about how the farm animals are doing. The farmer gets to communicate with current and potential customers, and office-bound readers get to live vicariously through their computer or phone screens.

Ree Drummond, who has parlayed her rural life as the wife of a cattle rancher into a wildly successful site called The Pioneer Woman, gives a glimpse of the possibilities for savvy online self-marketing. She doesn’t quite qualify as a rancher herself—although she often rides along and helps out with the chores, she seems to usually have a camera in hand—but her gorgeous photographs and folksy anecdotes about life on the range are about as good an advertisement as any for making a living off the land.

Most farmer blogs are far simpler (and, some might argue, more authentic). The Dairyman’s Blog, written by a young Alabama dairy farmer, offers “MooTube” videos of life on the farm. Self-described farm wife Jill Heemstra focuses on the funny side of farming at Fence Post Diaries, with blog titles like “You Might Be a Farmer’s Wife If…” (example: “…you use the phrase ‘semen tank’ in casual conversation”).

Blogs and tweets are also providing a new platform for farmers of all stripes to express their views on agriculture and politics. Missouri hog farmer Chris Chinn advocates on her blog for fewer government regulations and conventional farm practices that she feels have gotten a bad rap, while small-scale farmer Gavin Venn tweets as @morethanorganic with his thoughts on animal welfare and genetically modified foods.

Social media has become a stand-in for the kind of conversations farmers have always had in person, about the weather, what’s growing, advice and opinions. The Twitter hashtag #agchat encompasses discussions of parenting on the farm, venting about too much or too little rain, links to agriculture news and just about everything else of interest to the ag-minded.

But tweeting from the tractor has its perils. As Stewart Skinner, a Canadian pig farmer with the Twitter handle @ModernFarmer tweeted recently about his gadget, “The blackberry can’t stand up to the rigors of the barn. RIM needs to come up with a smartphone for farmers.”

The increasingly popular SodaStream. Image courtesy of Flickr user greychr

For the past year or so I’ve been hearing people rave about this amazing new contraption that magically turns your tap water into seltzer or, with the addition of flavor concentrates, soft drinks. As someone who goes through a 12-pack a week of lime seltzer, this struck me as a brilliant idea—a way to save money and send fewer cans to the recycling center—but I never got around to buying one.

Last week I finally got to try one of these SodaStream gadgets at a friend’s house, and it worked as promised. I was completely sold.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it didn’t occur to me until I mentioned it to my editor that do-it-yourself seltzer is hardly a new concept. Seltzer bottles—also known as soda siphons—have been bringing the fizz to the table for centuries, and in snazzier style.

SodaStream works the same way as those old-fashioned seltzer bottles, by infusing water with pressurized carbon dioxide.

Even SodaStream itself is just an update of a product that’s been around for years. The company’s roots go back to 1903, when Guy Gilbey (a surname familiar to gin drinkers) invented the first home carbonation machine, in the United Kingdom. A smaller version of the machine was popular in Europe and elsewhere for decades, but it wasn’t until 2009, after a global brand revamping, that the product became widely available in the United States.

A recent article in Slate points out how successful the retooling has been: Worldwide sales climbed from 730,000 units in 2007 to nearly 2 million in 2010. The gadget’s entry into the U.S. market seems to have come at just the right moment, when a perfect storm of economic, environmental and health concerns about sugary sodas have converged with an increased interest in do-it-yourself everything, including food and drink. There’s also a nostalgia factor—not for the modern-looking device, but for the old-time soda fountain treats like phosphates and egg creams that the seltzer recalls. Last week the New York Times highlighted a new crop of soda jerks around the country who are bringing fizzy back.

Customization at home is one of the SodaStream’s selling points: It allows you to adjust the amount of fizziness and flavor syrup (and hence, sweetness) in your drink. It’s also possible to make your own creations. During maple-tapping season in the Northeast, Kristin Kimball, farmer and author of The Dirty Life, tweeted her recipe for “Essex Farm soda”—carbonated maple sap with a splash of vanilla. Blogger Andrew Wilder wrote about the SodaStream bar he set up at a party, which led to some creative mock- and cocktails—the Cucumberist, with cucumber and mint, sounds right up my alley. Even better, the blog Former Chef gives a recipe for a spicy-sounding homemade ginger syrup that includes cardamom, allspice, black pepper and star anise.

Suddenly my old standby, lime seltzer, is looking a little vanilla. It may be time to experiment. But I haven’t decided which home carbonation system to buy: Those vintage soda siphons would look great with my other retro barware, though they may or may not work well anymore. New versions, like the sleek aluminum seltzer bottles made by iSi, are also an option. Or, of course, there’s the SodaStream.

One thing is clear: My 12-pack-toting days are numbered.

You are never too old to play with your food. Image courtesy of Flickr user nigel_appleton

When a new parent is trying to get a toddler to eat, playing the spoon-swooping game of “here comes the airplane” or “here comes the train” may very well do the trick. (And, for those who remember the dinner scene in A Christmas Story, a round of “Show me how the piggies eat” turns out to be another successful stratagem a mother uses to get her picky child to clean his plate.) But as kids get older, that game gets tired and they demand more sophisticated ways to, well, play with their food. Some toys, such as the Easy Bake Oven, are miniaturized versions of home appliances meant to prep the young, aspiring chef for cooking in a real kitchen. But then there are foodie playthings that veer off into sheer ridiculousness when it comes to interacting with what’s on our plate. Here are a handful of notables:

Ice Bird: This 1970s-era toy from Kenner invites kids to crack out a bright orange duck that will shave a block of ice for the purpose of making ice-cold sno cones. With flavor packets, two cups and a bucket for freezing water in, it’s not a bad toy for summertime entertaining. (And when it’s 90 degrees out, who does tea parties?) Certainly there were other toy sno cone machines on the market at that time, but Ice Bird has an awesome jingle and its unabashedly exposed grating plane is a wicked reminder that our toys did not always intend for us to survive childhood without a few nicks and dings.

Happy Hot Dog Man: This “As Seen on TV” offering is a specialized plastic slicing device that turns a plain old hot dog into a smiling stick of mystery meat with whimsically wiggling arms and legs you can dress up with pickles and condiments. I am also a fan of the octo-dog, where you can use the knives already in your kitchen to create hot dog octopi that can be eaten alone or used to dress up other dishes.

Build a Meal Plates: With cranes and buckets installed in the plate that encourage kids to construct their meals, you can give your kids an early sign that an adult’s kitchen can be like a construction zone.

Lightsaber Chopsticks: My chopsticks skills are very hit and miss—but the Force may be with me if I try plying these puppies. (Sure, these are cool for the kids too.) And how could you pass up an opportunity to make all the appropriate lightsaber sound effects as you ingest your meal? (Just make sure you’re among fellow Star Wars fans before you do.)

This list is by no means comprehensive. If you know of more strange and funny food toys aimed at kids, share your memories in the comments section below.

Full-color vending machine. Image courtesy of Flickr user Straws pulled at random.

The old method of getting goodies from a vending machine is being revamped by the Pepsi Corporation with its new Social Vending System. Dispensing with clunky slots for coins and bills in favor of a touchscreen that allows you to look at the nutritional information of the products therein, this new species of machine is also hopping on the social networking bandwagon: people can use the machines to send drinks to friends, complete with personalized text and video messages. (The recipient gets a message on a cell phone and they have to go to a Social Vending Machine and enter a code to redeem the gift.) But because you have to enter telephone numbers to use the social features of the machine, questions arise about how personal data is stored and used, an issue inherent in all social media. At this time, Pepsi says that personal data will not be stored unless the user grants permission.

Is this the next logical step in our ongoing quest for convenience or does it make accessing foodstuffs more complicated than it should be? Corporate efforts to create glowing vending-machine eye candy have a long and sometimes ridiculous history. (If you have the patience, this mid-century video walks you through the ins and outs of vending machine salesmanship.) Would you go to a machine for any of the following things?

1. Lobster

This variation on the claw machine arcade game may very well be the greatest visual pun in food marketing. That’s right: you use your gaming skills to catch your own live lobster; however, if you are fortunate enough to nab one of the skittering crustaceans, you may find yourself in a bit of a pickle. Apparently takeaway bags aren’t a standard part of the machine rig, so you may need to bring your own.

2. Eggs

Farmers who sell their eggs directly to consumers can pop a vending machine at the entrance of their property and passersby can drop in their money and walk away with a tray of farm fresh goods. Some famers have even noticed an increased demand for their products since installing the machine. The German branch of PETA offered its own variation, placing live hens in the machine to make a statement about the living conditions of these animals on farms.

3. Wine

In 2010, Pennsylvania unveiled two wine vending machines—however, users have to swipe their ID and pass a breathalyzer test before they can lay their hands on a bottle of vino. And if you have wine aficionados for friends, would you ever tell them that you’re serving them something that came from a vending machine?

4. Pecan Pie

The Bedroll Pecan Farm, Candy and Gift Company in Cedar Creek, Texas offers its wares via a vending machine, from a 9″ Pecan pie to pecan brittle.

5. An entire mini grocery run

The Shop 2000 allows users to buy toiletries, milk, snack items and other convenience store fare. In 2002, one of these machines was installed in D.C. near the intersection of 18th St. NW and California St. under the name Tik Tok Easy Shop. (It no longer existed as of 2003)

And for more on unique vending machines, check out Around the Mall blogger Megan Gambino’s piece on the Art-o-Mat, which sells you works of art out of a revamped and refurbished cigarette machines.

"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!

Kindle in kitchen in zip-top bag. Image courtesy of Flickr user jimmiehomeschoolmom.

Whenever a new cookbook comes into my possession, the first thing I do is sit down, scan through the recipes and use Post-Its to flag the things I might actually take the time to make, paying attention to ingredients and the time required to pull a dish together. It makes for easy referencing, especially if I need to break from the same tired old meals and learn to make something new. However, it seems that the digital powers that be are trying to make this facet of my analog life obsolete. Will websites and e-readers ultimately replace the tried-and-true hard copy cookbook?

New York Times tech blogger Sam Grobart fired a few warning shots in his recent piece about which technological gadgets to keep and which ones to toss. While he positions himself as a supporter of books, he points out some new apps on the market that may make cookbooks obsolete. They’re geared to making life in the kitchen easier with instructional videos, built-in timers and the ability to email oneself a list of ingredients when making a run to the grocery store. There’s also the added benefit of having color photographs for every recipe—which is a luxury in printed cookbooks.

But as he also points out in his piece, books are generally not that expensive; if something happens to one, it’s not the end of the world. If something happens to your e-reader, that’s a huge chunk of change gone down the drain. And need I remind anyone of how hopelessly messy a kitchen can be? Although there are preventative measures you can take to protect your investment, the stuff that can gunk up and ruin an electronic device are easily wiped off from a book. Furthermore, if you need to adjust recipes to suit your personal taste, it’s not that inconvenient to find a pencil and mark your amendments in a book’s margins.

Google also threw a jab at the traditional cookbook format with its new online recipe search, allowing amateur cooks to refine a search by ingredients, calorie count and cooking time. Offhand, this sounds pretty handy—but is something lost in the ongoing quest for convenience? New York Times Cookbook editor and blogger Amanda Hesser has her reservations:

Google’s search engine gives vast advantage to the largest recipe websites with the resources to input all this metadata, and particularly those who home in on “quick and easy” and low calorie dishes (which, by the way, doesn’t mean the recipes are actually healthy). In so doing, Google unwittingly—but damagingly—promotes a cooking culture focused on speed and diets.

I gave the search a quick try and, personally, I see this as a fine way to make use of odds-and-ends ingredients lurking in the pantry. For example, I was readily able to find a recipe that could make use of leftover pearl barley and lentils—ingredients I bought for recipes I didn’t especially enjoy, and I didn’t know how to use those ingredients outside of those dishes. Nevertheless, I would never use it as a primary meal planning resource. There’s much fun to be had flipping through a cookbook and stumbling on recipes where the author pairs ingredients in ways that wouldn’t have occurred to you. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not opposed to new technologies. It is a question of form and function, and as far as I’m concerned, physical cookbooks are more practical for primary cooking references.

Do you think the latest technologies will make you stop buying cookbooks? Continue the discussion in the comments area below.

Easy Bake Oven. Image courtesy of Flickr user Barbour.

The common incandescent light bulb will soon become a lot less common. In an effort to reduce energy waste and greenhouse gas emissions, the provisions laid out in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (pdf) stipulate that manufacture of the classic 100 watt bulb will cease in 2012, with lower wattage bulbs being phased out by 2014. And considering that the majority of the energy consumed by regular light bulbs goes into producing heat, incandescents are ridiculously inefficient at what they were designed to do. What does this mean in terms of food? It means the end of the Easy-Bake Oven as we now know it.

It wasn’t the first electric toy oven. Lionel, in a departure from its popular line of trains, came out with an electric range in 1930, and in the 1950s products such as the Little Lady Range were encouraging aspiring homemakers to try their hands at baking. However, these toys were scaled-down versions of real appliances, which meant lots of exposed heating elements that could potentially burn little hands. The Easy-Bake Oven designers, on the other hand, took a cue from street vendors’ pretzel ovens to create a modified oven where you slide bakeware full of batter or dough through the oven to cook and cool. The other design innovation was the use of two 100 watt lightbulbs, safely concealed within the toy, to heat the oven. In light of the impending bulb ban, Hasbro will be rolling out what is presently dubbed the Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven, which will feature as-yet-unknown heating element. However, this is not the first time the toy has had a makeover. Since it first hit toy store shelves in 1963, has updated its look 11 times to keep up with aesthetic trends—like an avocado green model that emerged in the 1970s—as well as changes in the American kitchen. (Though it once resembled a range, the toy was redesigned in the early 1980s to look like a microwave and it has since maintained that look.)

In keeping with traditional gender stereotypes, the toy was marketed exclusively to girls. Even when boys would appear in television spots for the toy, they were almost always just there to observe and enjoy the hard work their little female companion put into making Easy-Bake treats. Perhaps the closest male equivalent was Creepy Crawlers, where you used a lightbulb to cook off molded plastic insects; although in the early 2000s, an Easy-Bake variant called the Queasy Bake Cookerator briefly entered the market, encouraging boys to make food that resembled bugs, dirt and dog drool.

Nevertheless, the toy has endured as a quintessential teaching tool, a set of homemaking training wheels—even though the notion of just adding water to prefab mixes gives an oversimplified vision of what it’s like to work in a real kitchen. The Easy-Bake Oven has also served as an inspiration to  professional chefs, who transcended the prepackaged mixes and created a cookbook full of gourmet recipes that will work in the oven. And what little kid wouldn’t want to serve wild mushroom flan and roasted quail breast at their next tea party or Tonka truck rally?

Once upon a time, groceries made the journey between stores and consumers’ cupboards wearing little more than a paper bag. But as packaging technology has taken off in the past 50 years, our food and beverage products have gained an extensive wardrobe—so extensive, it can get a little crazy.

According to this article about food packaging trends:

“Today’s consumers want to access the Internet while ordering lattes, call their physicians while taking public transportation, send text messages while crossing intersections, and watch the latest film release on DVD while driving to grandma and grandpa’s house…shop for clothing and interact with friends over the Web while dining on 7-minute Asian cuisine that tastes great and is safe for consumption.”

Yikes. Today’s consumers sound like brats. The article says we also desire “active” and “intelligent” food packaging, which can control and monitor things like temperature, oxygen and moisture levels to preserve the artifacts—I mean, products—longer. But we also want creativity, convenience and novelty, which has resulted in some unusual packages.

Here’s a few examples:

The Col-Pop container combines a cup of soda with a chicken nugget container. Courtesy of Flickr user Roboppy

1. Cascadian Farm, which sells things like jam and frozen vegetables, hides tiny human faces amid the digital images of foods like broccoli and grapes on their packages. The astute Bread and Honey blogger pointed this out a few years ago. Like she said, it’s wacky but “pretty darn funny.”

2. Gross or brilliant? Well, it’s an efficient use of space, anyway. The Col-Pop package combines a soda cup and chicken nugget container, freeing up the hands of “today’s consumer” so they can drive…or text-message through the next intersection. Ugh.

3. Definitely gross: beer bottles made from taxidermied squirrels. (I know, you want one, but they’re SOLD OUT.) And on a similar who-the-heck-buys-this-stuff note…I present Bling bottled water, decorated with Swarovski crystals. (Only $2,600 for the fully-encrusted bottle!)

4. Would we all be more likely to eat healthy foods if they looked unhealthy? Baby carrots packaged like junk food, or celery sticks in a french-fry container, for example?

5. Here’s a nifty milk carton that really spells out its purpose. But why do we even bother with cartons or jugs? I like the way Canadians (and folks in several other countries) buy milk in bags.

6. Many fruit juices are mostly sugar and water—but hey, at least these juice boxes look and feel like real fruit.

7. Would you drink from a battery? How about a hand grenade? None for me, thanks…but I might like to decorate my own bottle of soda.

8. It’s not fun when your meal “talks back to you” after you eat it…but how about before? Interactive packages are all the rage these days, from talking pizza boxes to chatty wine labels.

9.  We might be able to eat our yogurt containers or frozen pizza wrappers someday, according to this article. Why would we want to? Well, that’s a good question.

10. Here’s something this consumer does want: food safety. And since you can’t have safety without accountability, traceable produce makes sense. A system called HarvestMark gives an individual barcode to each piece of produce sold by participating farms. Consumers can scan that code with their smartphones and find out where and when a particular watermelon was grown, for example, and if it is subject to any recalls.

I just read an interesting article in the Washington Post’s travel section about traveling with no guidebooks, advance planning or reservations—just a wallet and an iPhone. The author used applications, or apps, to find everything from a parking spot to a hotel room, with only a few minor glitches. Since he also used it to find local restaurants and navigate their menus, it got me thinking about food-related apps. (I don’t have an iPhone, but my iPod Touch functions similarly when in range of a wireless network.)

Here are a few food-related apps I’ve tried and liked; most of them are free. All are available from Apple; several can also be downloaded for other kinds of smartphones (BlackBerry, Android, Nokia, Palm) from the developer’s websites. Feel free to chime in with your own recommendations!

Courtesy Flickr user bump

Eating Out

1. Urban Spoon. The shakeable slot machine gimmick is part of the fun with this one, but it’s also a reliable source of user-generated restaurant reviews. Handy when you can’t decide exactly where to go, but have a general price range, cuisine or neighborhood in mind.

2. Open Table. This is an easy, free way to make a reservation at some 13,000 restaurants in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and I like the bonus of accruing rewards points which can be redeemed toward the cost of future dining.

Cooking

3. Whole Foods Recipes. A fairly small database, but useful because all the recipes show nutrition information and are based on fresh, natural ingredients. I like being able to search for recipes by specific ingredient (or a combination of up to 3 ingredients). Let’s say you have beets on hand, for example—you can choose from recipes ranging from borscht to roasted beet and fennel salad, then make a shopping list to e-mail to yourself. And, of course, it’ll point you to the closest Whole Foods store.

4. Big Oven. This is a massive database of over 170,000 recipes, which means there’s bound to be some mediocre ones in there, but there are also plenty of reliable classics. You can base your search on ingredients you have on hand, exclude specific ingredients, or let the app pick a recipe at random. You can even see what other people are cooking in your geographic area—which I don’t really care about, to be honest, unless they’re going to invite me over!

5. Epicurious. My favorite recipe tool, because it includes the archives from Gourmet and Bon Appetit. I recognize many of the dishes as things I bookmarked and never remembered to return to among the stacks of magazines on the coffee table; this makes them easy to find again and save as favorites. It’s well-organized into a range of categories that include specific occasions (Fourth of July), times of day (weeknight dinners) and dietary considerations (low-fat).

Grocery Shopping

6. Grocery IQ. There are shopping-list functions included in most of the recipe apps, but this is worth getting separately if you’re into particular brands and/or coupons. Notice one morning that you’re running low on Cheerios? Hold your phone’s camera up to the barcode on the cereal box, and that specific product will be added to your shopping list. Then you can search to see if there are any coupons available for Cheerios (or cereals in general), and send them to your inbox or printer.

7. ShopShop. If you just want to write down a basic shopping list but have a tendency to lose little slips of paper, this is perfect. No bells and whistles.

8. Seafood Watch Guide. Keeping track of what’s being overfished or mismanaged can be confusing for consumers, but this tool breaks down the issues into a format you can access quickly while perusing the specials of the day at the fish counter. King crab may be on sale, for example, but is it sustainable? Depends whether it’s imported (on the “avoid” list) or from the U.S. (a “good alternative”). But don’t hide behind technology too much—simply talking to the fishmonger could be your best source of information.

Fugu nigiri, courtesy of Flickr user selva

Aside from foraging wild mushrooms without a good guide book, or having tea with a former Russian spy, one of the most potentially dangerous meals you can have is fugu, the highly toxic puffer fish that can cause paralysis or death but is considered a delicacy in Japan. There, specialized restaurants employ licensed chefs who have undergone years of training in how to prepare the fish and remove the poison. Still, a few people die every year from fugu poisoning, mostly at the hands of inexperienced cooks.

The 18th-century Pacific explorer Captain James Cook described the effects of what is believed to be mild fugu poisoning in his journals. Also in the 1700s, the Japanese poet Yosa Buson wrote a haiku about heartbreak that is sort of the Asian version of the kids’ song about eating worms:

I cannot see her tonight.
I have to give her up
So I will eat fugu.

It is believed that the fish’s poison comes from the accumulation of the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin in the bacteria and smaller sea life it ingests. The toxin is concentrated mostly in the liver, gonads and skin. The level of toxicity is seasonal, so fugu is traditionally served in Japan only from October to March. As little as one to two milligrams of the toxin can be fatal. The first symptoms of poisoning can begin anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours after ingestion. Numbness begins in the lips and tongue, followed by nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, then spreading paralysis and a complete shutdown of the central nervous system. There is no known antidote, and death—which is the final result in about half of all fugu poisoning cases—usually occurs within four to six hours.

Sounds delicious, right? Well, to some people, that lethal potential, however slight, is part of the fish’s allure.

But now the thrill may be gone. In 2004, researchers at Nagasaki University succeeded in breeding non-toxic puffer fish by separating them from other marine life and feeding them a purified diet. And Optima Foods, in the Ehime prefecture of Japan, has recently begun selling farmed non-poisonous fugu to restaurants. Already an expensive fish, the safer version is even pricier because of the work- and technology-intensive farming process; the fish are raised inland, in fresh water with salt and minerals added.

All this is great for diners, like me, who consider a delicious meal thrilling enough. But it doesn’t look like the certified fugu chefs will be out of a job anytime soon. As one Japanese chef told the Telegraph, “It’s obviously more than a little exciting to go to a restaurant knowing that it might be the last meal that you ever eat. Where is the enjoyment in eating something that has no risk in it?”

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.