The food might taste great, but fancy restaurants generally use tricks to prepare meals perfectly with surprisingly little effort. Perhaps the most storied of these devices is the sous vide, a glorified immersion heater that keeps water at a precise temperature in order to evenly cook foods, usually meats in…
It’s hard to define “meat.” The word comes from the Old English “mete,” for food—but what is it today? Can flesh grown from animal cells in a bioreactor be called meat? On Tuesday, Missouri became the first U.S. state to prohibit the use of the word “meat” for any product “not derived from harvested production…
For one brave man, eating one of the hottest peppers in the world came with an unexpected side effect: Days of splitting headaches that prompted a trip to the emergency room.
Can you eat yourself to death on one occasion of very excessive eating? We know that America’s eating problem is bad, albeit gradual: No one’s ever died from eating three Big Macs, but plenty of people may have died from eating three Big Macs twice a week for thirty years (some, miraculously, have managed to avoid…
Love is infamously hard to define. But according to the man, it is absolutely not an ingredient.
Have you ever had gluten-free bread? It’s terrible. That’s because what makes bread delicious is gluten, a protein found in wheat that helps to give bread the firm but light texture and structure that makes carbs so irresistible. Now, though, science may have a fix. Scientists have engineered new strains of wheat that…
Odds are pretty good that you have consumed a food or beverage item in the past 24 hours containing some sort of “natural flavors.” In fact, there’s a non-zero chance you are ingesting one right now. The term is a catch-all for an enormous number of different ingredients, but the ambiguity of the label does not make…
There’s some crazy meat industry propaganda video waiting to be made where an All-American jock takes a bite out of a hamburger served by a polite waiter, who then rips off a mask to reveal the demented face of someone from the mushroom industry shouting “that burger is 50 percent mushrooms,” after which the customer…
Coffee seems to be the most overstudied beverage; seemingly every day we’re bombarded with another study about it causing or curing cancer. But surprisingly, there are plenty of scientists who don’t really understand its many effects. In fact, it may even be changing the way we taste all the other things we eat in a…
Researchers at MIT have developed deep-learning algorithm that can compile a list of ingredients and even recommend recipes after looking at photos of food. The artificially intelligent system still needs some fine tuning, but this tool could eventually help us learn to cook, count calories, and track our eating…
Not all hot peppers are created equal, and few are as unequal as the Dragon’s Breath chili—a new breed that may soon find itself atop the “world’s hottest” throne. Forged by Wales horticulturalist Mike Smith, the red-orange, fingernail-sized fruit is the unintentional product of a trial of a new performance-boosting…
Food scientists are already looking to some dramatic-sounding options, from bugs to lab-grown meat to large fish farms, in order to feed a world whose population could approach ten billion humans by 2050. Combined with climate change, the food of the distant future may look very different.
If your culinary philosophy includes the belief that no kitchen is complete without a bamboo matcha whisk or a box of gluten-free pancake mix, then Gwyneth Paltrow is probably the lifestyle guru for you. Along with promoting sex-dust smoothies and $66 jade vagina eggs, Gwyn is of course an avid home cook with a…
April Fools is over so you can believe me when I say: Scientists are trying to see if maple syrup can be used to help fight antibiotic resistance. Sweet.
Two people have died and four others have gotten sick off of soft raw-milk cheese from Vulto Creamery in New York, according to a release from the Centers for Disease Control first reported by Buzzfeed. The company has recalled those cheeses, but is there something about raw milk cheese, soft raw milk cheese in…
There could be a future where we eat incredible, sustainable, engineered foods—3D-printed or lab-grown meals, chemically optimized to unleash the perfect combination of flavor and nutrients to fit our bodies and our tastes. Better tasting hot dogs with harmful fats removed! Healthier snacks with accurate expiration…
For 15 years, pickle makers from across the East Coast have gathered to celebrate brined vegetables at New York City’s Lower East Side Pickle Day. Last year, thirty thousand people squeezed in lines beside white tents that stretched over a quarter mile. A word appeared on some of the sauerkraut tents: “probiotic.”…
When some apocalyptic event in the very near future forces humans scurrying to another planet, we’re probably going to have the same question.
Napoleon Dynamite takes a sip from a tall jar of milk, then sets it down next to two other jars. He points. “The defect in that one is bleach.” “That’s correct,” says a judge from FFA, the agricultural education organization. He sips another. “This tastes like the cow got into an onion patch.”
If you were on social media yesterday, you probably noticed that Nutella has joined the long list of good things that supposedly cause cancer, like alcohol, red meat and maybe coffee. Trouble is, scientists never said that Nutella causes cancer.
