Bittersweet

Cloudless Caramel Coloring (I): When it is perfectly understood that in the manufacture of caramel, sugar is to be deprived of the one molecule of its water of constitution, it will be apparent that heat must not be carried on to the point of carbonization. Cloudy caramel is due to the fact that part of the sugar has been dissociated and reduced to carbon, which is insoluble in water. Hence the cloudiness. Caramel may be made on a small scale in the following manner: Place 4 or 5 ounces of granulated sugar in a shallow porcelain-lined evaporating dish and apply either a direct heat or that of an oil bath, continuing the heat until caramelization takes place or until tumescence ceases and the mass has assumed a dark-brown color. Then carefully add sufficient water to bring the viscid mass to the consistence of a heavy syrup. Extreme care must be taken and the face and hands protected during the addition of the water, owing to the intensity of the heat of the mass, and consequent sputtering.

— Henley's 20th Century Formulas &c, 146 (1914 edition)

Buttressing

Artificial Butter IV: 'Ankara' is a substance which in general appearance resembles a good article of butter, being rather firmer at ordinary temperatures than that substance, approaching the consistency of cocoa butter. It is quite odorless, but in taste it resembles that of a fair article of butter and, what is more, its behavior under heat is very similar to that of butter—it browns and forms a sort of spume like that of fat. Ankara consists of a base of cocoa butter, carrying about 10 per cent of milk, colored with yolk of egg.

— Henley's 20th Century Formulas &c, 142 (1914 edition)

Cheesy Fake

Roquefort, Imitation: The gluten of wheat is kneaded with a little salt and a small portion of a solution of starch, and made up into cheeses. It is said that this mixture soon acquires the taste, smell, and unctuosity of cheese, and when kept a certain time is not to be distinguished from the celebrated Roquefort cheese, of which it possesses all the peculiar pungency. By slightly varying the process other kinds of cheese may be imitated.

— Henley's 20th Century Formulas &c, 177 (1914 edition)

Catechism

Statement: The cat miaouws.

Question: Why does the cat miaouw?

Response: Because he suffers.

Q: Why does the cat suffer?

R: Because he has tasted of heaven, and heaven is fish, and shrimp, and crab, mixed unto a mess of tasty feasting.

Q: But why does the taste of heaven cause him to suffer?

R: Because he no longer tastes it, and it is gone from his presence.

Statement: And if it is gone forever, but he has hope of it, then that is hell.

Three Islands

The first island was of bananas, with salted caramel and banana cake, and the seas around the island crashed against it with breakers of popcorn; and all was well.

And the second island was of coconut mousse, and the growth upon it was of pandan jelly, and in it were beans of scarlet hue, sweetened; and all was well.

And the third island was of biscuit base, and upon it a sponge of macadamias, and crowning the whole a thick layer of lemon cheesecake; and all was well.

And so that all might remain well, there was no fourth island.

Not of Vegetable Origin

My previous post made me think, "What's -not- of vegetable origin, then?" The answer seems obvious, but not entirely so.

Metals are mostly not extracted from plants, although it's possible to do it. Ceramics are mostly aluminosilicate clays; glasses are only of vegetable origin insofar as they contain sodium or potassium carbonate. Other crystalline minerals normally have the vegetable components burnt or reacted out of them during the formation process — sapphire, jade, diamonds and such.

But diamonds were once coal, and coal is of vegetable origin. Marble was once limestone, which was once the exoskeletal remains of shellfish and such — and those, one presume, consumed vegetation at some point. It's hard to escape from plants — they're the main convertors of energy and raw materials into the substances everything else needs.

Vegetable Origin

I often wander around supermarkets looking at product labels. They tell me a lot about how things are sold, and for what most recent and vacuous of reasons.

On this particular day, I was looking a product which claimed to contain only ingredients of vegetable origin. These ingredients included potassium hydroxide (aka 'caustic potash'), polystyrene, and a host of other unlikely substances.

A brief pause for thought, and I realised the claim was perfectly true — all hydrocarbons (many plastics, petroleum, natural gas and so on) are of plant origin. So too are mineral compounds that can be derived from plant ash — sodium and potassium carbonate, bromide salts. And of course, many poisons and harmful and/or addictive drugs.

Indeed, to see a sign saying 'organic', 'of plant origin' or any other sign like that often merely tells the reader that the company producing the stuff is either deluded or thinks you can be too. I had a quick look, and I think that only about 10% of the labels I saw were helpful, healthful and honest.

Impurities (Part 2)

From the universal to the purely (or impurely) human, last post. And here, if humanity is what humanity eats, then we must look at the ingredients of our food.

We've all been taught that major food groups are carbohydrates, fats and proteins. These are no idle assignments, but chemical divisions — carbohydrates, literally carbon-with-water, are sugars and their polymers such as starches; fats are the esters of glycerol, a substance that can add up to three long chains of carbonaceous substance, forming triglycerides; proteins are polymers made by stringing together large numbers of amino acids. Carbohydrates are fuel; fats are complex materials that serve to insulate and protect (and in extremis, be broken down to make more fuel); proteins are the building blocks of most of our working parts.

For bone and our electromechanical systems, we need inorganics with our organics. Mineral matter, the kind of stuff that the crematorium attendant sweeps out into an urn after the black grease of our passing has tainted the air. Without the minerals, we'd be goo, and rather insensate goo at that.

Yes, we are impurities in water, but the water would not have form without the stuff we use to shape it. Our impurities are to water as the structure of a building is to the air and light within it.

And that brings me to the issue of food safety. Food is mostly safe, and in the cases when it is not, we have only ourselves to blame. But the human body and its main metabolic organs — mostly the liver and kidneys — are able to clear most of the unwanted chemicals. The rest, presumably, consists of wanted chemicals.

Of all the carbohydrates, glucose is most prized. Without it, nothing works, since our bodies are designed to store and burn glucose. Of all the fats, animal fats are most prized, since our bodies are most equipped to move it around — after all, our own fat -is- animal fat. And of all the proteins, animal proteins are most prized, for the same reasons. We do not have the mainly-vegetable-diet construction of the ruminants; we can't digest fibre and we find it hard to extract value from plants.

However, the detractors are right to say we should cut down on animal-based food, simply because we eat too much of it. A steak should last for weeks; we shouldn't be eating a steak a week (or worse). Fat is good, but not more than a heavy spoonful a day or so. And if we aren't labourers on a farm or athletes in the Olympics, we don't need 5000-10000 kcal a day. We can get by on 1500 or so.

What I find amusing is the desire to have impure food instead of pure — sea salt instead of pure sodium chloride, honey instead of pure glucose, organic vegetables instead of those grown on ammonium nitrate and carefully-calibrated mineral content. Like the making of steel, pure foods ensure no unpleasant surprises compared to what is expected: no pollen-induced asthmatic attacks, no haemolytic attacks from allergy to added Vitamin K, no bone fractures from drinking too much added calcium and not having enough sunlight and fat.

Not that I mind impure food, perish the thought. It tastes better, even if it's not necessarily healthier.

Doughnuts?

I found myself singing tonight. It was an odd little song:

Doughnuts, doughnuts, all the lovely doughnuts;
Eat them now, eat them now!
Doughnuts, doughnuts, all the lovely doughnuts;
Eat them now, eat them now!

Then I realized this was set to some half-remembered Sunday School song. I also remembered some of those words were not quite the same. Oops.

Faster, Better, Healthier

Fast food is actually healthier than you think. This thought has percolated in my head for about two decades of analysis. Do you know why this is so?

1. It's more highly regulated. McDonald's is probably a safer bet than most restaurants simply because it has fixed standards of preparation and cannot risk harming its customers.
2. It contains standard preservatives — salt, baking soda, sugar and fat. Lots of them.
3. It has lower water content. The higher the water content, the greater a chance of bacteria, mould and other forms of spoilage.

There are certainly other kinds of foods that are much healthier than mass-produced fast food. But as I've pointed out about two years ago here, people should think about food before being alarmist. The human body has a proven ability to deal with many foods, even ones that would kill a cat or dog. In fact, even if a food were deadly to bacteria or other living things does not mean that it would be deadly to humans (major examples: alcohol, coffee, chocolate, honey, celery).

One of the most egregious examples of false reasoning along these lines is the 'food that doesn't spoil' meme. The reasoning seems to be that if food doesn't spoil naturally, it shouldn't be eaten. Madness. Humans don't digest food by spoiling it in their stomachs; humans digest food by mobilising a vast range of otherwise toxic chemicals — acids, bases, enzymes — and applying these in relentless sequence in the chemical factories of the digestive system. It isn't easy to digest food.

Indeed, humans have spent the last few thousand years learning how to prevent food spoilage, so it shouldn't alarm us that Spam™ can last 20 years or more unopened, that modern baked bread (unless one is foolish enough to leave out the calcium propanoate) will last for months or years if kept dry, or that salted food will keep for centuries.

Don't eat fast food (or any kind of food) in huge quantities. Vary your diet, and get yourself a science-based (or at least history-based) education if you want to worry about food.

Fridgies

Those dried-out things which sit and wait endlessly in the corners of the refrigerator when all else is lost or eaten, those are the things I wish I had kept or catalogued or mourned or buried in decent state — such is the fate of the long-preserved but forgotten soldiers of the last evenings and mornings of the world of men.

I have one last wedge of Stilton entombed in rind, an unlabelled liqueur time out of mind, and you my friend — always you were too kind.

Monchies

The attitude some people have to eating odd things amuses me as a chemist. I call it the monchies, the idea that some things are monstrous to eat even in doses that the human organism cannot naturally detect.

Take for example the case of Starbucks and its strawberry frappés. Recently, it was leaked that the pink colour of those frappés came from cochineal, an extract from powdered beetles. This extract is converted to carmine, the aluminium or calcium salt of carminic acid, a completely natural and harmless product to the vast majority of humans (although some, as in the case of nearly everything else, might have dangerous allergic reactions).

Reality check: the deadly impurities in honey can be detected by human taste-buds. People with various sensitivities and allergies can be killed by honey. Honey is far less pure than refined cane sugar, or glucose powder. So why do we insist honey is healthier? Well, it contains trace impurities that would be useful in significant amounts (like if you consumed the whole jar of honey), and it tastes better. Honey is also less concentrated than sugar crystals (duh) being a supersaturated solution of impure sugar (which is why it can blanch or crystallize in the fridge).

Cochineal, however, has no discernible taste or effect on most humans at the concentrations used to colour food. It isn't carcinogenic, teratogenic or mutagenic. It is far less dangerous than honey. The only grouse people have is that it is a beetle product.

I have no idea why there should be biological or ethical considerations against consuming carmine. You can get it from plants and it would be chemically identical, but far more expensive. And beetles don't have the same sensations as higher organisms. They don't feel pain or suffering. They have far less awareness of life and death than lobsters (which don't have much to begin with) — as you can see from watching the many cases where adult male insects continue to fertilise their female counterparts while being eaten by them.

I'd rather eat carmine than soy products, actually. Those soy products are naturally dangerous to men, being full of hormones that make people sprout the wrong secondary sexual characteristics. OK, I'm exaggerating. But I speak nothing but truth when I say that cannabis sativa is the world's second most nutritious crop after soya beans — and what do 'civilised' societies do? They ban it.

Small Pleasures

So there we were, three companions in a little restaurant where once there were pig farms. The restaurant specialised in duck, but we had prawns and mushrooms. It was comfortable. And the best part was that I had only a handful of tiny burdens left to disperse across the wide ocean of all the stars.

Lunchtime

In the rushing of the noonday hour
A fly descends
In hot oil and busy elegance
A meal is served

Hear one moment of silence
Between wingbeat and heartbeat

The sacrament of food
Consumes the moment
Lays it out to later
Autopsy of words

The smoke pours out
The heat returns
The daylight's messy business
Heads to evening's dusty doom

Sad Food

The saddest thing in life is to have food prematurely frozen. Cheeses bleed water and turn stringy; dough develops odd little bumps in texture. Fruit have their cells irreparably ruptured and will decay rapidly when defrosted. I am a victim of the race to freeze food.

Mooncakes

The reason that the moon has cakes more often than the sun is that the moon waxes and wanes much as a cake increases and decreases. Artemis, and her successor Diana of the Ephesians, had sweet cakes dedicated to her. And at this time, the Chinese eat their own such cakes.

Smokin'

I am smoking all-British cheese biscuits. This is because I am what I eat. Today also has brownies, mooncakes, lentils, prawns, flat rice noodles, hot milky tea, black coffee without sugar, and a bowl of cereal. I am smokin'. Or at the very least, steamed.

Hunger

In the day just past, I was extremely hungry. A raisin bun, half a chunk of mozzarella, a Vegemite sandwich, muesli with yoghurt, two coffees, small dumplings, half a plate of vegetables, a bowl of garlic soup, rice... I was still hungry.

In desperation, I jumped up and down. Of course, that didn't help. I drank water. Nope. Two large glasses. Nope. Chinese tea. Argh, worse.

I devoured two books, running to about 800 pages. Brain hurts, hunger remains. Cellulose does not help if you cannot digest it.

The last resort of the unaccountably peckish turned out not to be chocolate (dark, with nice fillings) but... honey-roasted macadamia nuts. The calorific content must be very high.

And so, to bed.

Random Thoughts After Several Interesting Meals

Sometimes after many meals, you sit replete, with the memory of black cod fillet and garlic, or thinly-sliced green apple pie and cinnamon, or a delicate cappucino of mushrooms, in the part of the brain that contains the sensations of your mouth.

And sometimes, your brain rambles on with random words that intersect, dissect or transect the world around you.

If you are singularly fortunate, you end up like James Joyce and 'stream of consciousness' becomes part of the literary vocabulary. If you are singularly unfortunate, people delve into the Greek to describe your output, and find the word logorrhoea. What you might get may also be somewhere in between:

dies irae ides marching on not framed many web pattern man internet camwhore no methodism in madness citadel stalin bathtub shower trotsky escaped mexico this time of reckoning pe teachers and young lambs kids ogles and ogres and vivisection bio chemistry physics you may be asked to go china for your health breaking news like porcelain silk road silk route oh dear inappropriate questions and answers responses like watching a train wreck in slow motion across the deck of the ark royal with no harriers lear had three daughters good one sent away did not betray two favoured but not good old man had so much blood in him most unkindest leather office chairs fish tank tank tank no more programme how to ah the sisters and brothers better get along run along now boys no conspiracy theory the beer was flat what an idiot you must pay bill if you want service well hole in the ground has water needs pail fell down broke crown see what tumblring after this what you get for notchecking this i give tevya this your problem too lazar wolff the butcher take it on the chin doom doom in the depths fly you fools looking for good time in latin

It is all an indigestion and a pain really, especially if you flash back too many years and the forward likewise. Then how do you know what is stream of consciousness and what is merely self-consciousness?

What Humans Should Eat

I've been inundated with dietary data ever since I first took a course in food chemistry about 20 years ago. Back and forth the dieticians go, muttering about what should be low.

But I've noticed some interesting points in all the data.

1. Try to eat food in its natural state; unless the food is bad or is carrying a bacterial load, raw food is fine.
2. Try to eat whole foods. A complete fruit is normally better than an extract from it, even if that extract is Vitamin C.
3. If you feel full or you don't feel like eating anymore, go with the feeling.
4. If the food source looks unnatural compared to natural variants you've seen before, don't eat it.
5. Fat is often better than sugar, just as whole grains are better than wholemeal (or instant cereal, or flour); the slower your body processes energy foods, the better they are.
6. You need a whole lot less protein than you think you do.
7. Leaves and berries are good, so salad leaves and coffee are great.
8. The only treatment that consistently extends life in mammals seems to be calorie reduction.

Afterthought: is it only me, or does nobody notice that besides humans, no other animal in existence likes to eat burnt food?