DailyDirt: No Meatless Mondays For Cavemen...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Modern humans have all sorts of wacky diets that are probably slowly killing us in ways we don't fully recognize, but that doesn't mean we should all start eating the way people did thousands or millions of years ago, either. Drinking a "soylent green" all liquid or all processed diet doesn't sound like an optimal solution, but if grown adults want to eat fancy baby food, let them try that experiment (and I'll volunteer to be in the control group). If you want to know more about pre-historic meals, though, check out a few of these links.

• Early human ancestors ate meat which likely improved brain development, and there's evidence of million-year-old butchery on bone fragments with cuts marks. Eating meat, even today, appears to have cognitive benefits for children -- based on a controlled study of hundreds of school-aged kids in Kenya. A healthy diet doesn't necessarily mean more meat is better, but there is evidence that no meat at all correlates with certain problems. [url]
• Using tools to cut raw meat probably allowed our early ancestors to spend less time chewing -- and more time doing other things. Before anyone cooked anything, we needed larger jaw muscles and bigger teeth to eat a real paleo diet. [url]
• If you ever wondered why prehistoric people didn't need to brush their teeth, the answer is that they ate different foods. Early humans ate more meat and not much in the way of grains and sugars, and the bacteria in our ancestors' mouths were more friendly and less harmful than the mouth microbiomes of today. [url]

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Filed Under: ancestors, butchery, diet, early humans, food, health, meals, meat, microbiome, paleo diet, teeth

DailyDirt: Getting A Caffeine Fix Any Way You Can...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people are seriously addicted to caffeine. Maybe you get headaches if you skip a morning cup of coffee or experience other symptoms of withdrawal, but if you've built up an extreme tolerance, you might need to start incorporating it into other habits. We've mentioned a few other products that come with a dose of caffeine, but here are a few more to try if you're a real caffeine junky.

• If you can't be bothered to brew your own coffee, maybe you'll find chewable coffee snacks more to your liking. Gummy-bear-like chewables called Go Cubes deliver 50 mg of caffeine per cube, and two cubes apparently will give you a caffeinated kick for 4-6 hrs (presumably depending on your tolerance). The taste isn't described like candy, so it's a bitter coffee treat that kids probably won't like too much. [url]
• If you're planning to kill someone with an overdose of caffeine, you might want to buy some caffeinated peanut butter. STEEM Peanut Butter has 170 mg of caffeine per 2 tablespoons, so be careful how you make your PBJ sandwiches. [url]
• Power Energy Toothpaste will make your mornings brighter after a Daylight Savings Time change -- with 80 mg per ml of toothpaste gel. The Indiegogo campaign for Power Toothpaste has been funded, so if you really need a caffeine fix as soon as possible in the morning, you can try this stuff. But maybe you should make sure you don't brush your teeth with it right before you go to sleep at night. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: caffeine, chewables, coffee, food, go cubes, peanut butter, power energy toothpaste, self-medication, toothpaste
Companies: indegogo

DailyDirt: Sealed For Freshness... In Plastic

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

What is a healthy meal? If you look closely enough at almost anything, you'll find it's not as simple as you might expect. Should you eat more fruits and vegetables? Of course you should. But what if the fruit is pre-cut and conveniently packaged (or comes with a free frogurt)? Marketing healthy (or "healthier") foods is making it a bit confusing to know what's really healthy and what's just over-priced and convenient. Yay!

• Whole Foods has apologized for selling peeled tangerines in a plastic containers. Some people complained that pre-peeling tangerines and putting them in plastic was wasteful, but it seems only to apply to single fruits, not when you cut up different fruits and mix them before you sell them in plastic containers. (Or to pre-cut vegetable trays.) [url]
• Selling pre-peeled bananas, though, does seem a bit unnecessary. A few years ago, an Austrian grocery store sold bananas wrapped in clear plastic on a foam tray without banana peels. (At least the argument over which end to start peeling a banana first was neatly avoided.) [url]
• Processed foods are getting a bad reputation, but are Americans really starting to eat fresher foods? The trends point to a "snackification" of food, where people aren't buying sit-down meals as much as pre-portioned snacks. Maybe consumers think they're eating healthier (or trying to), but maybe not. [url]

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Filed Under: fast food, food, fruits, health, marketing, meals, packaging, plastic, snackification, snacks
Companies: whole foods

DailyDirt: Adulteration Of Foods May Not Be What You Expect

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some food additives can be dangerous to public health -- such as adding melamine to infant formula. So understandably, government agencies policing food safety should focus on health issues related to food additives and food poisioning. But there are perfectly safe food additives that are just aimed at increasing the profits of food distributors, and it looks like Americans might want to research their cheese suppliers a bit more closely.

• The FDA found that Castle Cheese Inc wasn't selling 100% real parmesan cheese -- just a lot of fillers (e.g., cellulose) and cheaper cheddar cheese. It's not unsafe to eat, but an estimated 20% of hard Italian cheeses in the US could be deceptively labeled. [url]
• Cellulose is a common food additive, so if you saw headlines of "wood pulp in cheese" -- it's nothing new, really. It's not sawdust, and food scientists have tried to source cellulose from non-wood plants, but it's not as easy to get. Cellulose has been used as an anti-clumping agent in baking, and the food industry claims it provides a healthy source of dietary fiber. [url]
• The adulteration of food stuffs has been a tempting way to increase profits since forever. Olive oil was once the most adulterated agricultural product in the EU in 1997-1998. Olive oil is easy to dilute with cheaper oils and has been tampered with as far back as ancient Greece, and adulteration can be difficult to detect -- even with modern chemistry. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: cellulose, cheese, dietary fiber, fda, food, food additives, food safety, olive oil, parmesan, wood pulp
Companies: castle cheese

DailyDirt: Making Spirits Bright

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There was a time when making your own alcohol wasn't a completely legit thing to do. Sure, now anyone can just go down to a corner store almost any time and pick up a chilled alcoholic beverage, but if you're a real do-it-yourself-er, you won't want to drink just anything that comes in a pretty bottle. Here are a few projects you might want to check out someday when you're not feeling like guzzling something made by Anheuser-Busch-Inbev-SABmiller.

• Folks can brew beer from a lot of unusual stuff, so why not use day-old bread to prevent some food waste? Toast Ale uses surplus bakery bread to make its beer, and it plans to open source its recipe so that more people can find a productive use for baked goods that might otherwise just go in the trash. If you're not a beer drinker, there's also vodka made from potato peels. [url]
• PicoBrew is a way to brew your own beer at home with the convenience of a Keurig coffee maker. So yah, you can make custom craft beer at home, and you just need to buy these fairly sizable packages of pre-measured hops and grains -- then voila, you'll have fresh beer in about a week. [url]
• If you'd like to try to make your own moonshine, but you don't really want to go out into the woods and find a source of running water -- just get a tabletop still for your kitchen. It doesn't even require running water, and it'll make about a half gallon of booze on demand (if you're patient). And maybe make sure to discard the first few drops to make sure you're not drinking too much methanol. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: alcohol, beer, beverages, booze, bread, distillation, drinks, food, food waste, moonshine, picobrew, vodka
Companies: anheuser-busch, kickstarter, sabmiller

When You Crack Open The Surveillance Door, The Food Police Will Want Your Metadata

from the food-for-thought dept

As you may recall, late last year Australia put into effect a wonderfully ambitious data retention law that required ISPs in the country to do... well... something involving data retention. The problems began immediately, with ISPs unsure of exactly when they were supposed to start collecting all of this data, as the law allowed for some to petition to delay implementing the data collection, but the government hadn't bothered to get back to many of them. Never mind what would happen once this same inept government actually received the mountains of data it had requested.

But those concerns are all about the practical utility of such a law, not the larger concerns over whether this kind of data collection ought to be happening to begin with. To see an example of why a free people shouldn't allow the government to crack open this door, however, one needs only look again at the law in Australia. What was supposed to be collection chiefly to combat major criminal actions is now a collection that even the food police are trying to get in on. And, yes, I really do mean the food police.

If you are in the business of selling lamb chops, make sure you are weighing them properly: the National Measurement Institute wants warrantless access to Australians’ metadata to help them hunt down supermarkets skimping on portions. The NMI is one of 61 agencies that has applied to the attorney general, George Brandis, to be classed as a “criminal law-enforcement agency” in order to gain warrantless access to telecommunications data.

As part of the government’s assurances that there would be sufficient privacy safeguards, it reduced the number of agencies that could access the data. But agencies could reapply, with the permission of the attorney general, if they were involved in enforcing “serious contraventions” of criminal laws.

Now, this is still in the application phase, so the NMI, a government group tasked with investigating retailers to make sure they're packaging their goods properly, doesn't yet have access to Australian's metadata, but its petition did have to be approved by the attorney general as being relevant to even get that far. This is what happens when you crack open the door: the bulk of government will try to force its way in. Keep in mind that the efficacy of bulk collection practices for combating even terrorism and serious criminal actions is debatable, but now we're dealing with the food and retail packaging police wanting in on the action? This really should tell you everything you need to know.

Greens senator Scott Ludlam said: “The only saving grace the government was able to claim when they passed it was that they were narrowing the range of agencies that could access the data. On the face of it that was true, and obviously that’s just been blown to pieces.”

Just because slippery slope arguments are almost always lame, that doesn't mean they don't occasionally apply. It seems on bulk surveillance, they certainly do.

Filed Under: australia, data retention, food, lamb chops, measurements, metadata, surveillance

DailyDirt: Stop! Don't Eat That...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Eating healthier is a common new year's resolution, and it might be good to start simple and stop consuming one unhealthy snack item. However, a completely healthy diet is a totally different task. There are countless fad diets that don't really work or aren't as healthy as they're supposed to be. On top of all that, we should also keep an eye out for the outbreaks of foodborne illnesses and food safety recommendations. Maybe people who drink all their calories aren't totally crazy....

• Fish and other aquatic animals caught from the Passaic River in New Jersey should NOT be eaten -- because toxic waste has been dumped into that waterway for decades and proposed cleanup projects would cost well over a billion dollars (and have not yet started). The Lower Passaic River Study Area Cooperating Parties Group (aka the Lower Passaic CPG is offering a "fish exchange" to swap frozen tilapia for any fish caught from the Passaic. Yum. Three-eyed fish [url]
• California, Oregon and Washington produce the most Dungeness crab in the US, but right now, the ~$60 million industry isn't doing so well. Domoic acid is being measured in marine wildlife along the West coast, caused by a bloom of algae in the Pacific, and levels are decreasing. With justified caution, though, crab catchers are staying away from their usual crop until levels are deemed safe, saying "We are not like the beef industry. We don't do recalls." [url]
• The Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration (a joint effort for the CDC, USDA and Food Safety Inspection Service) published a report on foodborne illness, covering hundreds of outbreaks between 1998 and 2012. If you don't eat beef or any vegetables grown in rows, what's left to eat? [url]

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Filed Under: cdc, diet, domoic acid, dungeness crab, food, food safety, foodborne illness, fsis, health, ifsac, lower passaic river study area cooperating parties group, poison, pollution, seafood, soylent, superfund site, toxic, usda

DailyDirt: Really Expensive (Or Just Time-Consuming) Foods

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Maybe you've heard that the word 'salary' comes from Roman soldiers being paid in salt. That's seems like a fuzzy bit of history, and no one actually knows with certainty how early Roman soldiers were paid, but at some point, they were paid with coinage -- or perhaps with some other kind of allowance to purchase salt. Luckily, most people don't get paid in spices anymore, but there are a few food items that are expensive enough that they could be used as currency. (And if you want to really get off the grid, you might want to know about how much it'll cost to really make everything yourself from scratch.)

• Saffron, by weight, is probably the most expensive spice you'll ever consume. It takes about 85,000-150,000 flowers (just the dried stigmas) to produce 1 kilogram of the spice. About 80-90% (or more?) of the world's supply is grown in Iran, and the industry and enthusiasts may start DNA fingerprinting to crack down on fake or diluted saffron. [url]
• If you want to spend a lot of money on a sandwich, you could order one with foie gras or truffles... or you could make one from scratch yourself. It'll only take you 6 months and about $1,500 to grow all the vegetables -- including the wheat to make bread -- and to raise and slaughter your own chicken. (Or spend a lot more and order lab-grown meat if you don't like killing animals.) [url]
• So you could grow your own saffron, if you really wanted to. When you get good at it, you can probably pick about a thousand flowers an hour, but it'll still take a few more hours to separate out the stigmas and dry them. Not quite a Chia Pet hobby. [url]
• If you want to try something exotic, cook a peacock recipe from 1612. Impress your 17th century spice baron friends, and remember that people used to risk their lives for a few valuable spices. [url]

If you've been thinking about doing other things yourself, like learning how to code, take a look at our Daily Deals for a collection of online courses to help you program and/or master some professional skills.

Filed Under: diy, dna fingerprinting, foie gras, food, peacock, recipe, saffron, salt, spice baron, spices

Fingerprints For Food: Venezuela Shows How Not To Use Biometrics

from the I've-got-a-little-list dept

Biometric scanners are hardly a novelty these days, but how the data they generate can be used is still controversial. Here's a good example from Venezuela of how function creep there has turned fingerprint readers into instruments of pervasive surveillance:

In Caracas or Maracaibo' supermarkets and drugstores, buying a kilogram of grain or a pack of cookies has become a complex procedure: it's required for you to deliver an ID, full name, phone number, address, date of birth and to slide both thumbs in a device: the emblematic "fingerprint scanner"; a device which usage by stores was originally voluntary, but which evolution, months afterwards, is one of omnipresent machinery, kind of a necessary toll for the acquisition of a simple pack of gum in any chain store.

As a post on the Digital Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean blog explains, the Food Safety Biometric System was supposed to be a boon for citizens, ending Venezuela's food and medicine shortage. Not only has it failed to do that, it has helped create one of the world's most complete and intrusive population profile databases:

Along with biometric and personal data requested to the customers at the moment of the purchase, stores are obliged to preserve a great deal of information regarding the transaction, demanded by the government's tax collector. The extend [sic] of the databases that the Venezuelan government possesses regarding their citizens would be heaven for any big data analyst. With enough computer skills, it wouldn't be difficult to establish a detailed profile of every Venezuelan citizen, starting from data such as address, the places where he shops, how much money he expends and the products he acquires. Nevertheless, no one outside of the government possesses the capability to know if ... systems are intertwined, or where this huge quantity of information is stored, much less what's the policy for its retention and storage.

That would be worrying anywhere; in Venezuela, it's doubly so, because of the country's experience with something called the Tascón List:

a list of millions of signatures of Venezuelans who petitioned in 2003 and 2004 for the recall of the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, a petition which ultimately led to the Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004, in which the recall was defeated. The list, published online by National Assembly member Luis Tascón, is used by the Venezuelan government to discriminate against those who have signed against Chávez. The government also claimed some private firms were using the list to discriminate in favour of petitioners.

According to the Digital Rights post, because of the Tascón list, some Venezuelans found themselves shut out from things like mortgage loans, scholarships and job opportunities. The fingerprint scanners of the Food Safety Biometric System are already being used to deny people access to even more essential items -- food and medicine:

those marked by the system shopping in quantities superior to those of their established quotas, go to a blacklist, and are blocked completely from the system. This makes them use the (illegal) black market in order to purchase food, medicines and basic products.

Venezuela is clearly the country to watch if you want to see how not to use biometrics.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: biometrics, food, privacy, surveillance, venezuela

DailyDirt: Fact-Checking Some Christmas Traditions

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've noticed some Christmas dinner traditions that might sound a little strange. But there are some traditions around this time of year that are curious enough to warrant some quick fact-checking. Whatever the case may be, enjoy whatever traditions you follow!

• Is Chinese food really the most popular restaurant choice for Christmas? A quick look at some Google search trends shows that searches for Chinese food spike around the Christmas season. And apparently, a growing number of kosher Chinese restaurants serve 'Jewish Christmas' meals without pork or shellfish. [url]
• The origin of candy canes isn't clear, but they might date back to the 17th century. Candy canes may have started out as straight sticks, and there's little evidence that they're in a J-shape for Jesus. There is a patented candy cane machine that improved the process for making the J-bend without breaking the candy, filed back in 1957. So the "modern" candy cane can be traced back to a Catholic inventor -- Father Gregory Keller. [url]
• During Justice Elena Kagan's 2010 confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, Kagan testified that she was probably at a Chinese restaurant for Christmas. While other kinds of restaurants (besides Chinese) are actually open on Christmas, it seems that Chinese food has evolved to cater to American tastes. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take 10% off any $50+ order from our Daily Deals using the promo code DAILYDIRT.

Filed Under: candy cane, christmas, dinner, elena kagan, food, gregory keller, keller machine, kosher, traditions