Knock yourself out, as far as I am concerned. I don’t like saccharin - tastes bitter to me. I don’t like stevia, tastes sort of licchoricy to me. I don’t like Sunny K [acetasulfamine K] as it tastes like licking a vinyl car seat, a real plasticy aftertaste. I do aspartame and splenda, and if I can afford the carbs sugar and honey. I do have an ideosyncratic reaction to high fructose corn syrup, in me it is a migraine trigger.
I was wondering about paleo - how did a bunch of cavemen extract coconut oils out to cook with? :dubious: It seems it would be a better substitute to swap in lard, tallow or schmaltz for butter/margarine/whatever fat is called for.
My sister once told me that mustard had pig poop in it, and honey was really bee barf. I don’t know if these are true, but it sure did not encourage me to eat mustard!
[paleojack]
Coconut oil need not be very refined (and in fact most health foodies prefer theirs unrefined.) You can extract coconut oil with a couple of knives and some water. Chop up the meat into tiny tiny bits, soak in water, swish it around (filter through cheesecloth if it’s been invented yet) and then let it sit and wait for the oil to come to the top so you can skim it off. It’s way too much freakin’ work for me. But it’s caveperson level technology.
If you’re going to all that work and spending all those calories to make it with nothing but your hands and a flint blade, you can probably chug all the coconut oil you want and not get fat off it! It’s not only that “processed food” isn’t that isn’t great for us because of the over sweetness and under-nutrientness - it’s that we pay someone else and use machines to do the labor, and so we’re not burning off the calories we’re taking in with the gathering and production of our food.
Mustard is primarily ground up mustard seeds, with some vinegar or other acid, and sometimes other spices and sweeteners. No pig poop, unless it’s commonly in one of those other things.
Honey is definitely bee barf…in a manner of speaking.
Honey is made from bees gathering nectar from flowers, then regurgitating it into a honeycomb, then sucking it back up, regurgitating some more, etc…enzymes in their stomach convert sugars in the nectar, and other bees “fanning” the honeycombs with their wings help water to evaporate and concentrate it.
Mustard is ground mustard seed mixed to a paste with water or vinegar. It may be amended with horseradish, honey, artisanal vinegar, or other seasonings. Not pig poop, though.
Honey is made from nectar gathered by bees from flowers. A bee carries nectar back to the hive in its crop (the upper part of its digestive tract), whence it deposits the nectar in a beeswax cell to, um, mature. I suppose in a sense it’s bee barf, but it’s also bee food, since bees eat the honey during the part of the year when nectar is not available.
ETA: **bump **and **bouv **beat me to it. Darn, you guys are fast.
Terms too short to search for, but we had a thread once where a poster said he was a Chinese* cook of long experience and posited the hypothesis that the difference is between pure MSG (i.e., the kind that’s all L-) and impure (part of it is D-).
well, Chinese-American, but he specialized in Chinese food
Experience? Having learned it? The most commonly-fished-and-eaten crab back home is American, which is classified as a pest; it’s a different color, shape and size than the local non-pest varieties. It’s kind of like asking how does someone know the difference between a chihuahua and a St Bernard. (Mind you, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a non-edible species of crab, just of species which are illegal to fish).
That’s in agreement. pH 5 or lower = acid. If one wants to be super-picky, only pH = 7.00000000… is neutral, but nature doesn’t tend to like that much precision and pH = 5 is more of a turning point where organic acid-base reactions are involved (you know all those body milks, shampoos and so forth which say they are “neutral to your skin” or have “the pH of your skin”? They’re around 4.5 - 5)
My grade 4 teacher told us that those fake crunchy reddish “bacon bits” that you used to see in salad bars and on baked potatoes were actually made from insect larva. I have mentioned this several times over the years as evidence that he was crazy.
However, it recently occurred to me that maybe either he was a little confused, or I am misremembering exactly what he said. Either way I bet it has something to do with cochineal.
And all I know is when I used to eat instant ramen, especially if I drank the broth after the noodles were gone, I would wind up with a weird sort of half-headache, half-dizzy kind of feeling an hour or so later, that lasted for a couple of hours. It happened to me several times and it made me stop eating it. I always assumed it was the MSG, but I’ve never noticed that feeling after eating any other foods. So now I’m wondering what it’s from. Is it possible all the sodium was jacking up my blood pressure or something?
Friends have told me a teaspoon of MSG dissolved in a glass of water and drunk before bed will give you absolutely insane dreams. Never tried it.
I find it’s easy to avoid DNA in your food if you don’t antagonize or belittle your server.
It’s the Internet crazy female version of circumcision activists, it seems. I can’t imagine joining a forum that solely exists to talk about your boobs or foreskin, but some people do.
I think taurine exists in some plants, but it is very rare? Meat, sea plants, and the wild Red Bull.
Probably similar to what I said above, especially considering that Argentina is the second or third highest proportion of Italian ancestry.
The Korean-fan death thing is well known enough to have its own Wikipedia page.
Right. And tomatoes run between 3.4 and 4.9. I suppose if you’re trying to cook beans in ONLY tomatoes, you might have an issue. (If you’re that cook, your problem isn’t limited to beans.) Beans in a dish *containing *tomatoes do soften just fine. Perhaps I did overstate it a bit with the final clause, but I thought the general meaning was clear enough.
Somehow I really do not see paleo humans taking the time and effort to do something like that to a food that can be eaten as is. Olives I can see being turned into oil as without processing they are inedible. [either brine or lye - I can see the lye one happening by someone processing ashes to lye leaving the dugout tub under an olive tree, and olives falling into it. You dump the resulting leftover ashes with ‘stupid olives fell in and look nasty’ onto the ground where rainfall washes off the lye, then some toddler wanders by and eats one and finds it edible. ]
And would early man (maybe post-prehistory) have made some olive oil, with his first impulse to eat it? Or light it on fire and use it for cooking or heat or light? Because EVOO this is not.
If we’re engaging in flights of fancy, I’d imagine that some paleomama was making coconut milk (same first three steps) and was then called away because her husband couldn’t find the banana leaves in the back of the cave. One thing led to another, and when she finally came back to it, the oil was on the top and she realized it was delicious.
Experience? Having learned it? The most commonly-fished-and-eaten crab back home is American, which is classified as a pest; it’s a different color, shape and size than the local non-pest varieties. It’s kind of like asking how does someone know the difference between a chihuahua and a St Bernard. (Mind you, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a non-edible species of crab, just of species which are illegal to fish).