Rachel Laudan was quoted in Culinary Luddites: "Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror, something to which only the uncivilized, the poor and the starving resorted". But that ignores gourmets. In his new book, “Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy,” Gentilcore traces the tomato from its origins in the New World, where it was domesticated by the Maya, then cultivated by the Aztecs. It likely entered Europe via Spain, after conquistador Hernan Cortes’s conquest of Mexico. When it arrived on the scene in Italy, it was strictly a curiosity for those who studied plants — not something anyone faint of heart would consider eating. In 1628, Paduan physician Giovanni Domenico Sala called tomatoes “strange and horrible things” in a discussion that included the consumption of locusts, crickets, and worms. When people ate tomatoes, it was as a novelty. “People were curious about new foods, the way gourmets are today with new combinations and...

Spam logic. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible. So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives — sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye — to...

It's on. Three years ago, Schatzker (no honorifics; a man who has written a book about steak has to be called by his last, meatiest name) set out to cure his growing disappointment in the corn-fed, feedlot-fattened fare that constitutes that vast majority of steak eaten in North America. To his surprise, no book on the subject existed. “There’s all kinds of cookbooks,” he explains, “but nobody’s ever done a book about steak like this one” – a serious search for flavour that, along the way, delves into cattle breeding, the history of stockyards, marbling and why it’s not the be all and end all, grass versus corn (grass wins), the vast chemistry of flavour (there are 25 different kinds of fat in steak), evolutionary history and its relation to carnivorism, Roland Barthes’s love of meatiness, and the difference between a Beef Loyal eater and a Variety Rotator, which is what Schatzker was afraid he was becoming – to...

Better barley for malting. Some of the team's current research into barley enzymes follows up on studies they reported several years ago. In one investigation, Schmitt found that enzymes called serine-class proteases, which break down proteins in the sprouting grain, can also break down beta-amylase, an important enzyme for converting carbs to simple sugars. The study, a scientific first, was reported in a 2008 issue of the Journal of Cereal Science. The finding might help explain one of the patterns found in an earlier study, published in a 2007 issue of the journal Cereal Chemistry. In that analysis of more than 2,000 North American malting barleys, Schmitt and Budde found that high levels of a desirable, beta-amylase-associated attribute in the barleys correlated to low levels of the serine-class proteases. Better barley can mean better beer, a boon to humanity....

Perhaps this is a good follow on post for the previous which began by discussing eating disorders. The word "flexitarian," meaning someone who mostly eats vegetarian with the occasional cheesesteak thrown in, has been around for a while. But only recently have former vegetarians been so smug about their forays to the dark side. "There is something almost primal about it," writes lapsed vegetarian Tara Austen Weaver, describing her first meat-buying expedition in The Butcher and the Vegetarian. "I haven't actually hunted dinner myself, but I set my sights and claimed the prize I sought." The "primalness" of the meat-eating (or meat-purchasing) experience comes up a lot in these conversion narratives, which inevitably take place at a quaint, family-run butcher shop. Some of these shops are even run by former vegetarians and vegans, such as Fleisher's, the upstate New York store where Julie Powell (of Julie and Julia fame) learned to carve up a steer for her forthcoming Cleaving....