I hear sometimes you can find traces of ricin in stevia.
I guess that’s why you don’t see many Buddhist zombies.
Let’s not forget the horros of aspartame, “the most dangerous substance added to food.” Heath Ledger died of it! Michael J. Fox got it from all that diet Pepsi!
For last year’s Super Bowl party, we got gluten free plates.
A very popular diet idea a while back was protein and carbohydrates should not be eaten together because the human body cannot digest both at the same time. The basis of The Beverly Hills Diet, Fit for Life Diet and Marily Henner’s diet books.
I don’t mean to alarm you, but everyone who has ever ingested aspartame, even once, will die someday!
Isn’t there a historical belief amongst some Buddhists that Sidhartha Gautama died eating pork? So Buddha himself wasn’t vegetarian…
Interesting thread. The Pollan Rules - Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants - seem to make sense in a common-sense sorta way. Getting more obsessively specific seems to be a recipe for woo.
Similar idea with soaking corn kernals in lime (calc) to get nixtamalized corn, which not only makes for great tortillas and related products, but it also increases the nutritional content of the corn, AFAIK.
The same as anyone who has drank Dihydrogen Monoxide.
It’s way worse than aspartame! According to my calculations, I have determined that almost everyone who has ever died has ingested DHMO at least once. Everyone living who has will die. Everyone living who hasn’t will also die (evidence of second hand exposure?). What’s worse, I hear about some people who have it forced on them by their mothers before they can consent, and often before they are even born! Terrible.
Plus DHMO killed the Titanic.
(Seriously though, aspartame can harm you, as well as cause mental retardation in children. But only if you have phenylketonuria, that is.)
If you’ve ever seen what DHMO can do to a simple inorganic electric circuit, you wouldn’t want to imagine what it can do to living systems. :eek:
Hitler drank it every day.
You know what the leading cause of death is?
Birth.
I can’t think of a single meat item a Thai won’t eat. I’ve even seen them eat elephant jerky! Really, although that was only once. (I declined.) This whole Buddhists-as-vegetarians meme is vastly overblown. But then, Thai Christians who have never actually been to a Christian country have some pretty bizarre notions about their religion too, so it evens out.
It isn’t that they are toxic, they are amazingly bitter, sort of like acorns. Both needprocessing to makethem palatable. Now manioc root is toxic until it is processed, and a few other plants, I hate to thinkihow hungry people must have gotten to experiment with poisonous plants.
Actually, it is true that how you measure flour (by volume) can result in different measurements, and thus affect your final cooking result (baking especially turns out better with more accurate measurements). Especially if the flour has settled/compacted in its’ container, then scooping out or packing a cup full of flour will give you a “cup” containing a larger amount of flour. Compared to “fluffing up” or sifting flour, spooning it into the measuring cup lightly, and leveling it will result in a “cup” that has less flour in it.
Different people suggest different ideal ways of measuring flour. Really, the most consistent way is to use a scale and measure by weight. If you don’t have a scale and need to measure by volume, spooning the flour into the measuring cup works better. I don’t think you actually need to sift - most recipes I’ve used that call for sifting are because you’re try to get rid of any clumps of flour.
I googled and found this food blog that did an experiment:
My mom told me once they used to sift flour to get the bugs out of it. I guess that’s a holdover from the days when you kept 100lb of flour in a barrel for the year.
I’m not denying this, but it is very silly to sift flour for everything you use flour for. I was taught it should be sifted for everything - even coating a chicken or fish.
Is there any natural analog to black olives? In other words, can you let them ripen to that point or at least purple (do they get to that point) and be edible? I understand that the ones you buy are artificially treated/blackened.
All untreated olives are unpalatable, whether green or black. You don’t want to pick an olive from a tree and put it right into your mouth, no matter how ripe it is.
Some black olives are actually green olives that have been treated with iron sulfate (the cheap canned black olives you get in the U.S. are like this). Other black olives got that way by ripening (oil-cured olives, for example). Some olives that are called black are actually dark purple, like kalamatas.