From the category archives:

Food

Sacred Cows – Organic food

March 21, 2011 Food

This is a guest post from Terrie Torgersen Peterson, the Anthropologist Underground. She is at home raising two laughing children and likes to write about her life as ethnography. Organic food is one of my sacred cows: (Wikipedia): “[...] an object or practice which is considered immune from criticism, especially unreasonably so.” It seems to [...]

Is a Vegetarian diet healthier?

February 14, 2011 Food

A couple of ground rules first. Here I am only talking about science, not ethics. I know a lot of people choose to be vegetarian for ethical reasons. While science can help inform ethical questions, only your own conscience can decide where you stand, so good luck with that. Secondly, this is not about the [...]

Kitchen Problem Solving

January 21, 2011 Activities

Science is really all about solving problems. It’s a set of techniques to try to make sure that the solution you come up with will work all or most of the time, rather than hoping to be lucky. But problem solving is the basis of science. Tonight we were supposed to be making pancakes. But [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Ginger Christmas Balls

December 1, 2010 Activities

I haven’t made rum balls since I was a kid, and I usually find them bitter from the cocoa or boring in the children’s rum-free version (I LOVE them with rum!). So we thought we’d experiment ( ) with gingernut biscuits instead of plain. I purposely went with the simplest recipe I could find so [...]

Dihydrogen Monoxide

November 9, 2010 Babies

This is not a repeat of the long-running prank but I couldn’t resist. Dihydrogen Monoxide or DHMO is the sciencey tongue in cheek name for water, which is a molecule with two hydrogens bonded to an oxygen atom. So with that out of the way, on with the post. Water is, of course, essential for [...]

Mushrooms and the Immune System

August 30, 2010 Food

I have a guest poster today looking at some of the science backing up nutritional recommendations. This is a little more speculative than I usually deal with – it’s a long way from cell-culture studies to real life – however I like it for two reasons. Firstly, it fits within what is already known about [...]