Search Results for: food

Other Portland Chefs Want to Make Food Into Art. Micah Camden Makes Money.

Longreads Pick

Portland’s most successful restauranteur sold his Little Big Burger chain for $6.1 million to the company who owns Hooters. It was just one of his many ventures. Sure, the guy who created the Portland mini-chain formula can cook, but Camden’s greatest skill might be his lucrative ability to discern what customers want.

Source: Willamette Week
Published: Oct 24, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,120 words)

Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food

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To early Chinese Communists, if you couldn’t stand spicy food, you weren’t equipped to fight for the revolution. Science suggests this association between strength, risk and Maoists might have to do with the chemical interactions between the chili pepper, culture and certain personality types.

Source: Nautilus
Published: Jul 5, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,073 words)

The Food of My Youth

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“When my media stream fills with the sound of children crying out for their parents, that distinct wail that only a broken-hearted child can make… it’s then that I reach for the food of my youth. Corned-beef hash. Spam. Fried Bologna sandwiches.”

Published: Jul 9, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,750 words)

A Brief History of Soy Milk, the Future Food of Yesterday

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Source: Serious Eats
Published: Jun 21, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,323 words)

NASA is Learning the Best Way to Grow Food in Space

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Sarah Scoles on how learning to grow food in space is a critical milestone to furthering space exploration, because astronauts simply can’t haul all the food they’ll need to thrive during long absences from Earth.

Source: Popular Science
Published: Jun 6, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,951 words)

“Parrot Isn’t Hungry”: On Family, Food, Fasting, and Ramadan

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Living many states away from her parents and much of her extended family during the holy month of Ramadan, writer Gulnaz Saiyed remembers the food and flavors of home.

Source: Catapult
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,864 words)

Great News Everyone, We’ll Never Have Shared Food Experiences Ever Again

a man in a restaurant seen through a window, eating alone. the people and cars of the city are reflected in the window.
Image by Jim Pennucci via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

At The New Food Economy, Nadia Berenstein profiles Jason Cohen, founder of the startup Analytic Flavor Systems. Analytic Flavor Systems wants to make sure you love what you eat: they’ll map you specific taste preferences, and food companies will be able to create tailored offerings that make your particular tastebuds sing.

The point, however, is not macrocosmic trend-tracking, but microcosmic customization: to predictively model the perceptions and preferences of increasingly narrow demographic clusters.  “You can enter in a flavor profile for that latte,” Cohen says, pointing to my half-finished drink, “and the system will spit out an optimization—what to change to make it even better.”  There is no platonic ideal of a latte, of course. There is only your ideal latte: the one optimized to be maximally delicious to your palate. The Gastrograph would not merely suggest that a seltzer be grapefruit flavored, for instance, but how to tweak its floral, fruity, bitter, and sour dimensions to captivate the fancy of Northeastern millennial guys, or German ladies over forty.

Is this a flavor breakthrough, or an unnecessary endeavor based on a fundamental misunderstanding of sensory science? (And if it is a breakthrough, how long until I get my case of Michelle-optimized La Croix?)

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Can A.I. Usher in a New Era of Hyper-Personalized Food?

Longreads Pick
Published: May 14, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,923 words)

I’m a Food Writer—With Some Food Issues

Longreads Pick

For food writers, work is food and food is life, but between social pressures, body image and random comment from strangers, female food writers navigate uniquely difficult terrain.

Source: Food52
Published: May 3, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,060 words)