Flour and Eggs (Photo Credit: Steven Du) Guest post by Steven Du Paste, the Latin Late antiquity translation for the word Pasta. [3] Eating spaghetti and meatballs today typically involves boiling some dried spaghetti pasta and pouring on some pasta sauce from a jar. But have you ever wondered how to make these golden silky strands of noodles? To start off, we have to sail to China with Marco Polo and learn about the origins of Bing. Bing is Chinese for wheat products and dumplings. [3] The reason we are starting off in China is because noodles originate from China. Despite wheat being grown i ..read more

The highly prized white truffle, Tuber magnatum, can easily cost a fortune. The coveted fungus can run up to $200 per ounce, and in December 2014, a 1.86 kilogram white truffle was sold for $61,000. With skyrocket prices for a small hunk of fungus, cheaper alternatives were developed for obtaining that14 distinct truffle aroma and flavor in foods. However, with consumers demanding the real deal, analytical chemists have had to find ways to detect foods containing real truffle flavor versus foods that have had synthetic truffle flavoring added in. The key lies in the carbon isotopes of the mol ..read more

To keep up with the national demand for apples, apple trees are not grown from apple seeds, but rather, spliced together from different sources onto a dwarf “rootstock”. This enables increased production of more uniform apples, but unfortunately also decreases genetic diversity among apple trees. Vulnerability to any one disease could decimate the entire apple industry. To combat this, apple breeders at Cornell and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are working on introducing genetically different rootstocks resistant to a wide variety of diseases. Moving from the orchard to the kitchen, it i ..read more

With Earth Day coming up on April 22nd, use this time to reflect on how the things we eat, and the choices we make surrounding what we eat, impact the planet. Chew On This for Earth Day: How Our Diets Impact the Planet – NPR: The Salt Sustainable Diets: What You Need to Know In 12 Charts – World Resources Institute ..read more