Food Blog

Sushi and Rev. Moon “How Americans’ growing appetite for sushi is helping to support his controversial church”

‘Captain Scott’s Biscuit‘ “Those who took anything out of any of the huts could excuse themselves in the belief that they were merely saving a relic from gradual climatic destruction. Thus, glibly self-absolved, I approached an open tin of Huntley & Palmers hard-tack biscuit, the hard tack which soldiers from 1914 to 1918 ate in the trenches. I took two thirds of a biscuit as a souvenir. Antarctic explorers, including Scott and his doomed four, subsisted on a diet of this biscuit, often mixed with and softened by water and pemmican, that is, chunks of compacted, dried meat. These staples, hard tack and pemmican, proved an inadequate diet, and helped weaken the young Shackleton to the point that Scott sent him home from the 1901 expedition. Ultimately, the limitations of pemmican and hard tack would stop Shackleton ninety-seven miles from the Pole in 1909, and then destroy Scott himself in 1912.”

Acoustic-Waveguide Sonar Finds Enormous Fish Shoals “Overfishing has devastated the oceans’ stock of fish. Backscattered echoes of low-frequency signals may provide an accurate census of that stock.”

The Cleansing Ale A look inside the Russian microbrewery scene.

All the pleasures of alcohol, with no downsides “Alcohol exerts its effects on the brain mainly by latching onto signalling molecules called GABA-A receptors. There are dozens of subtypes of these, some of which are associated with specific effects of alcohol. Memory loss, for example, seems to occur because alcohol binds to a subtype in the hippocampus called alpha-5. Nutt says it would be possible to design molecules that bind strongly to the good subtypes but more weakly to the bad ones.”