How Julia Child Used First Principles Thinking
There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. If you can master the first principles within a domain, you can see much further than those who are just …
Food
Vaclav Smil: Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequence of Modern Carnivory
What can and should be done about human carnivory? Vaclav Smil answers in this adapted excerpt from Should We Eat Meat?: Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory: There is no doubt that human …
America’s Food Crisis: The Omnivore’s Dilemma
As a follow up to the Michael Pollan food as culture post (on his new book Cooked), a reader passed along a link to this video on Pollan’s 2006 classic The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History …
Food As Culture
Food is so much more than a label. Food is cultural. As a culture, we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals. Since the mid-sixties, the amount of time spent preparing meals has fallen …
The Science of Addictive Junk Food
Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times, just wrote a book called Salt Sugar Fat. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese …
What Facts Do We Know About Food?
A summary of a recent talk by Michael Pollan about what we know about food. We are ignoring the elephant in the room when we only talk nutrients — this way of eating is killing us. For example by …
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think will change the way you think about your next meal. According to eating behavior expert Brian Wansink the mind makes food-related decisions, more than …
The Science of Obesity
One thing that has always baffled me is how we get fat. Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes unearths the biological truth around why we’re getting fat. In the process, Taubes dispels many accepted …
Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Toxic?
In Robert Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us. But can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says? Lustig’s argument is that sugar …