chromedome

Once more, for anyone who hasn't seen the figures yet... https://www.thestar.com/business/2022/04/07/profiting-from-inflation-two-new-reports-show-companies-are-making-billions-by-pushing-prices-higher.html

I suppose "artificial" is fair. Salmon is not innately pink, the pigmentation comes - in the wild - from the shells of the crustaceans they eat. Farmed salmon may be fed on similar crustaceans but that's costly and therefore rare, so the same pigment is drawn from other sources and added to their rations (which, again, vary widely depending on the farm's operator). I'm told that pale-fleshed salmon were not uncommon back in the day, when salmon in general were more plentiful and occupied a broader range of habitats. I've heard a tale - probably apocryphal - that one cannery's brilliant (if unscrupulous) manager hit on the notion of assuring customers right on the label that their product was "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in Can!" Supposedly this led to a brief spike in sales, until rivals took them to court over it.

I eat the greens of my radishes, and in fact I plant radishes at the beginning of the season because they're my second-earliest "cooking greens" (after dandelions). With bog-standard radishes I just separate them and wash them when I harvest the radishes, but with longer-season radishes (or turnips) I harvest them ongoingly on a cut-and-come-again basis.

When I lived in BC I had friends - with gas - who had never, not once, turned on their exhaust fan. "I hate the damned things, they make too much noise" was the rationale. I wonder how they're doing, these days...

I love 'em and plant them every year. So pretty in a salad or anything else. ...oh, and they taste good as well. Let's not forget that.

Interesting, albeit the "language" part is rather a stretch. Underlying study is linked in the article, so you can read it for yourself if you wish. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/06/fungi-electrical-impulses-human-language-study

Apparently the recall of Kinder Surprise eggs has now reached Canada. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-kinder-brand-chocolate-products-recalled-due-possible-salmonella?utm_source=r_listserv

You can add me to the "sympathy" list. Where I live, I only have to endure that kind of heat for a couple of days each summer. And even then, we can get a fog rolling in off the bay on any given day that drops the temperature by about 20 degrees F in a heartbeat. Yesterday was a perfect spring day, sunny and 10 degrees (50 F). Took a nice, long walk around the lake to celebrate.

Tough call. I've joked for years that "I don't want a counter-depth fridge, I want a fridge-depth counter" but it's not easy to balance the esthetics/practicality of a fridge that protrudes into your working spaces. I'm a couple of years away from facing that dilemma myself, but fwiw I'll note that I have a smaller-capacity fridge in my current rental and have a 3.3 cu ft mini fridge nearby for extra storage (and an upright freezer). It's just the two of us, so you'd think even a modest refrigerator would work, but in practice that's not the case.

This skews more to agriculture than food science in the direct sense, but "ag science" is basically food science on a macro scale so I'm putting it here rather than in one of our discussions of how food is grown. Short version is that the OP will be writing regularly about the intersection of agricultural and environmental issues.

Kids do have a way of rearranging one's priorities.

The heart is just a large and tough muscle. You can slow-cook it to tenderness, slice and pound it for schnitzel-y treatment (chicken-fried "steak," I suppose) or slice it very thin while half-frozen and flash-cook it over a smokin' hot grill or in a preheated pan. I'm sure you could SV it to tenderness as well, though I don't SV so I can't really speak to that. As for the kidney (a lifelong favorite of mine) there are lots of recipes available online, with steak & kidney pie being an obvious starting point.

She gets into that in some of the sub-threads, if you follow it through. The gist of it is that the full-time grain traders engage in a fairly standard-issue form of profit-taking and fleecing the rubes, but the big panics happen when mainstream investors (ie, Wall Street) create a self-perpetuating panic that drives investors out of conventional vehicles (in unsettled times) and into commodities. If you follow back through her threads on the subject you'll see a link to a study of this kind of bubble, as it happened in the 2008-2009 meltdown.

One for the ice cream mavens: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/plant-based-nanocrystals-could-be-the-secret-to-preventing-crunchy-ice-cream/

Dr. Taber, my favorite follow on the agricultural side, was on MSNBC last night to address the gap between the grain panic and the reality:

It may be a bit late, and may not contain anything you haven't already learned by now, but I found a link to this pamphlet in the materials I was given while prepping for my own treatments. Eating Well When You Have Cancer

Exsanguination is such a lovely-sounding word for such an inconvenient occurrence. ...and I'll be hearing it all morning, as sung by Carly Simon (to the tune of "Anticipation," of course).

Praise to Anoia!* *For those who haven't read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, his idiosyncratic pantheon includes Anoia, the goddess of stuck drawers.

My GF is currently on medical leave and spends a lot of time scrolling, so I benefit from her as a "research assistant." Some of 'em I find on Twitter while I'm waking up in the mornings.

Stellar Bay oysters are being recalled for norovirus. They've been sold from BC to Quebec and may have been redistributed to other provinces. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/certain-stellar-bay-shellfish-brand-oysters-recalled-due-norovirus?utm_source=r_listserv