The New York Times Sunday magazine came out yesterday with it’s 9th annual “Year in Ideas” issue. The Times calls it a collection of “noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity . . .”
Several of those notions involve food and beverage. Though they aren’t Northwest specific, they’re certainly noteworthy.
ILLUSTRATION BY JAN KALLWEJT, NEW YORK TIMES
Cows With Names Make More Milk
“A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March . . . found that cows that have names make, in a given year, about 258 liters more milk per farm than anonymous ones — a bump of about 6 percent . . . ‘The naming,’ says Catherine Douglas, the Newcastle University animal behaviorist behind the research, ‘reflects the humans’ attitudes toward the cows, and therefore how they behave around them.’ Named cows are more often treated nicely, and well-treated, calm and happy cows make more milk. The point, Douglas says, is that it definitely can’t hurt to name your cows.”
Laura Parker, an artist and agricultural activist based in Northern California, is offering what could be described as wine tastings, only with dirt. As the Times says “‘Grassy’ and ‘creamy’ are common terms for wine tasting, but now they’re being used to describe flavors of soil. Parker has held many similar tastings — primarily in art galleries, free to the public — with fresh dirt from local farms. ‘Soil is the basis of everything we eat,’ she says.
After the soil smelling, she pairs the dirt with food from the same farm — collard greens, squash, radishes, even eggs and goat cheese. The tasters are quizzed to see if they can isolate the same flavors they savored in the dirt — earthy, peppery, citrusy — to demonstrate the connection between what people eat and where it’s grown.”
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY REINHARD HUNGER SET DESIGN BY SARAH ILLENBERGER, NEW YORK TIMES
Empty Beer Bottles Make Better Weapons
“[Stephan] Bolliger, who is head of forensic pathology at the University of Bern, went to the store and picked up 10 half-liter bottles of Feldschlösschen Original — his nation’s most popular brew. He emptied six of them, left four full and, using a precisely calibrated energy-measuring device, started dropping a steel ball on the bottles from various heights. Bolliger’s conclusion: Full bottles shatter at 30 joules, empties at 40, meaning both are capable of cracking open your skull. But empties are a third sturdier.”
Kitchen Sink That Puts Out Fires
House fires most commonly start in the kitchen. That’s why Yusuf Muhammad and Paul Thomas, industrial-design students at London’s Royal College of Art decided to build water misting, a firefighting technology used on oil rigs and cruise ships, into the kitchen sink.
“Their patent-pending product, Automist, consists of a ceiling-mounted heat detector that triggers a pump under the sink that sends water to a special unit at the base of the kitchen faucet.
There, six high-pressure nozzles emit jets of mist that rapidly turn to steam, creating an inert atmosphere that starves the fire of oxygen and reduces the heat of the room. “It’s almost like being in a wet sauna,” Muhammad says.
In tests conducted in a roughly 13-feet-by-13-feet space, the duo found the system could contain any type of blaze (including oil fires) in less than five minutes.”
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Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture. |
