What should we have for dinner? When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous...

Throughout history, food has acted as a catalyst of social change, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is a pithy, entertaining account of how a series of changes-caused, enabled, or influenced by food-has helped to shape and transform societies around the world.The first civilizations were built on barley and wheat in the Near East, millet...

In the spring of 1999 the heads of the world's largest processed food companies, from Coca-Cola to Nabisco, gathered at Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to do about it. Increasingly, the salt, sugar, and fat laden foods these companies produced were being linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of...

From an award-winning actor and New York times bestselling author comes a memoir that chronicles a year's worth of meals.

Michael Ruhlman offers incisive commentary on America's relationship with its food and investigates the overlooked source of so much of it--the grocery store. In a culture obsessed with food--how it looks, what it tastes like, where it comes from, what is good for us--there are often more questions than answers. Ruhlman proposes that the best practices for consuming wisely could be hiding in plain sight--in the aisles of your local supermarket. Using...

The last thirty years have seen the establishment of Food Engineering both as an academic discipline and as a profession. Combining scientific depth with practical usefulness, this book serves as a tool for graduate students as well as practicing food engineers, technologists and researchers looking for the latest information on transformation and preservation processes as well as process control and plant hygiene topics. *Strong emphasis on the relationship...

In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances--a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks...

By ensuring customer safety, a food business also protects itself-from bad publicity, sinking profits, and even legal action. This program guides viewers through sanitation tools and procedures that are essential to the management of any food-related enterprise, including both food service outlets and food manufacturing facilities. Incorporating interviews with a cafe chef, a quality manager at a condiment factory, and the manager of a cleaning fluid...

How do you tell if a banana's ripe? Is it OK to buy apples and cut out the bruises? Will a tomato or a pear continue to ripen? Can anyone really pick a ripe watermelon? Should grapes be washed? Different fruits and vegetables need different kinds of selection guidelines and storage procedures. Viewers of this video will learn how to properly select many types of fruits and vegetables; how to determine quality and ripeness; what is and is not acceptable...

Why is chocolate melting on the tongue such a decadent sensation? Why do we love crunching on bacon? Why is fizz-less soda such a disappointment to drink, and why is flat beer so unappealing to the palate? Our sense of taste produces physical and emotional reactions that cannot be explained by chemical components alone. Eating triggers our imagination, draws on our powers of recall, and activates our critical judgment, creating a unique impression...