Tag: food

Potato chips, popcorn and pretzels

  The Grey Cup just ended, but the Rose, Cotton, Orange and Super Bowl are still to come. It therefore seems apt to delve into a subject with which I have a great-deal of hands-on experience: the Three Ps of snack food, potato chips, popcorn and pretzels. Potato chips were invented in a Saratoga, New …

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Tea

  I think my first experience with culture shock came as a small boy when, shortly after we moved here from Texas, a woman we were visiting for supper asked me what I wanted to drink and I said, “Tea.” To my horror, she brought me steaming-hot tea in a small china cup, a beverage …

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Cheese

Remember Joey and Scott, the cute little kids in that cheesy old commercial…I mean, that old cheese commercial? In the remake, they should cast me, because I’ve always loved cheese. For good reason: it’s one of the most nutritious foods ever created. Just 100 grams of Cheddar supplies 36 percent of the protein, 80 percent …

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Wheat

The most amazing thing about this week’s topic isn’t the topic itself (though that’s pretty amazing); the amazing thing is that I haven’t written about it before. “It” is wheat, and how I’ve managed to go more than three years without mentioning it I can’t imagine, in view of the fact it’s as inescapable a …

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Taste

  Taste is highly subjective. You may like rhubarb, which I regard as mutated celery. I, on the other hand, like haggis, whereas organ meats ground up with oatmeal and boiled in a sheep’s stomach may not appeal to you. And so on. Yet our tongues both respond to the same four (and only four) …

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Chocolate

North Americans eat 4.5 kilograms of it apiece per year. The Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and others eat even more. And given unlimited resources and no worries about looking like a blimp, I’d be happy to eat even more than that. “It” is chocolate, and most people agree with taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who labelled the cacao …

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Nutrition

Considering the number of books written on the subject, the stacks of pamphlets available at any doctor’s office, and the fact that a column concerning it already appears in weekly newspapers across the province (I used to edit a weekly newspaper, so I know), you could consider it an act of hubris that this week …

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The physics of fizz, the chemistry of cool

Ah, summertime! Time to get away from it all; to sit in the shade with a cold soft drink or a bowl of delicious homemade ice cream (such as the batch I made Saturday). Doesn’t seem very conducive to thinking about science, does it? Think again. Consider that soft drink (or any other bubbling brew) …

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