Tag: Food

[306]

In 1880s, Wilbur Atwater conducted experiments burning food items. A highly simplistic outcome of this experiments was the following equation:
X = 4*Carbohydrates + 9*Fat + 4*Protein
This output is followed the food industry till date.
What is this equation supposed to measure?

Show Answer
Calories in the food (including the number found on the label)
The experiment burned different food stuffs (while subtracting some fudge factors) to calculate the calories in our food. For every gram of Carbohydrates & Protein, 4kcal is released & for every gram of Fat, 9kcal is released. While not being super accurate, these results give a good indication of calories in food.
Watch this great video by Howtown on the subject.

[265]

In 2013, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization released a report “Edible X: Future prospects for food and feed security”.
It talks about X being a very efficient method of turning various forms of vegetable matter into proteins: we do better eating X that has eaten the grass than we would eating the grass directly.
What was the report recommending we eat?

Show Answer
Insects
"Common prejudice against eating insects is not justified from a nutritional point of view," write the authors of a 191-page report. World population is slated to top nine billion by 2050, and seeing as how arable land is being rapidly swallowed by towns and cities, oceans are increasingly overfished, and climate change is disrupting traditional farming, a new United Nations study proposes a twist on Marie Antoinette's dietary advice: let them eat bugs.
Read about Forbes take on the subject.

[110]

What word is used to refer to either:

-a particular cut of meat, usually veal, used in Italian and French cooking, usually cooked in wine or other sauces, or

-a type of bivalve mollusc that is prized both for its meat that is sold as seafood and for its symmetric, fluted, fan-shaped shells?

Show Answer
Scallop.

The cut of meat is known as scallopine in Italy and escalopes or médaillons in France.

Scallop meat is highly sought after by seafood aficionados, and some are farmed in aquaculture. The shells with their radiating, fluted ornamentation have been used since ancient times as motifs in art, architecture, and design.

[100]

In Hawaiian, the word X means “to bake in the ground” – it can also be used to refer to the Hawaiian food (usually containing pork or turkey) cooked in this manner that is often served at feasts and has since become a major tourist attraction.

X is not to be confused with the very similar-sounding but completely unrelated Y, which is a coffee liqueur made from rum, Arabica coffee, and sugar. Y serves as a key ingredient in several cocktails, some more prominent than others.

What are X and Y?

Show Answer

X: Kālua, in which the food is cooked in an underground oven called an imu

Y: Kahlúa, which means "House of the Acolhua People" in Nahuatl, spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, where the drink originated

[82]

1879 turned out to be a damn good year for chocolate, when chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt supposedly (possibly accidentally) left a chocolate mixer running over a weekend and came back to realize he’d created a chocolate that tasted far smoother and richer than ever before, owing to the cocoa butter mixing evenly over granules of cocoa.

What is this process called (and why’s it called that)?

Show Answer
Conching, so called because the rollers in the mixer (known as a conche) were initially shaped like conch shells