Tag: food and drink

How safe is the US food supply?

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Produce has been the source of many foodborne illness outbreaks in the US this year

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Apple sauce containing lead. Onions carrying E. coli. Deli meat spreading listeria. The past year has seen alert after alert from US public health officials warning of contamination in the food supply, both in packaged and prepared foods. Going to the grocery store – or even out to eat – has seemingly become a real gamble.

But lately, much of the public worry over food safety has been hijacked by Robert…

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November 26, 2024
The 6 Best Apps to Find Bars and Restaurants While Traveling

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Upon arrival in a new city or country, that first drink or meal is always important. More often than not, travelers have excitedly hurried to a trendy neighborhood or must-see landmark without really thinking of where they should go for food or a beer.

Then when they feel that first pang of hunger or desire for booze, they look around to see a variety of restaurants and bars, all of which look like tourist traps they’d immediately regret entering. With appetites growing, the pressure to find food can quickly intensify. The decision has to be right, too, as this is the meal that the rest of your food will then be judged against.

The internet is here to help.

There are now a number of apps that give visitors the definitive lowdown on where they should go. Which ones are worthy of being downloaded? Take a look below at the six best apps to find bars and restaurants while traveling, all of which will ensure that you make the best culinary and nightlife decisions while you’re away.

World of Mouth

World of Mouth might not give users every restaurant that’s available in their vicinity, but it will let you know the most acclaimed. Described as the ultimate insider’s guide to the world’s best restaurants, its list of more than 20,000 recommendations in 4,500 destinations has been curated by renowned chefs, cuisine critics, and food lovers from across the globe. More than that, they have specific lists that reveal the best pizza to try in New York, ramen to slurp in Tokyo, and tacos to consume in Mexico City. Rather than give each place a score that’ll help you speedily decide the best restaurant to gorge at, Word of Mouth’s experts provide precise and vivid descriptions of what you can get and why you should go. New aficionados are also being added on a daily basis, as its eclectic and all-knowing community keeps on growing. [iOS, Google Play]

Untappd

Untappd is the definitive app for beer lovers. Not only does it point drinkers in the direction of bars, pubs, and breweries with extensive beer collections from 75 countries worldwide, it also allows them to search through drinks and read descriptions so they can pick the best one to gulp. This also makes it a good app for locals to have at their disposal, as they can keep an eye on the beers they’ve already drunk and what they want to try next. Its review system can be a tad unreliable and hard to navigate, but its map feature and beer lists ensure you’re able to pick and choose which bars and breweries best suit you. [iOS, Google Play]

Mapstr

People who love to plan every minute of their travels in the weeks leading up their holidays will adore Mapstr. It allows users to save the places they want to visit to their own unique map, and lets them label and organize those locations with specific tags and colors so they know which days to go, which places, and how vital it is that they go there. Mapstr’s maps are also accessible offline, a bonus for international travelers looking to save on cellular data usage. Plus, it includes reviews from only its users—some 4 million users in 90 countries—which ensures their ratings haven’t been faked. Mapstr makes it easy to share your list of saved places with friends and family, so you can show off where you went and let them know that you basically became a local. Then, when you want to be transported back to your travels, you can go back to the map and relive your experiences all over again. [iOS, Google Play]

HappyCow

If you thought things were tough for travelers without dietary restrictions, spare a thought for people who are vegan or vegetarian, or who have to learn how to say “gluten-free” in various different languages. For them, HappyCow is a must-have travel app that has been providing a list of vegan and vegetarian restaurants the world over for 25 years. While it might cost people $3.99 to use, its huge list of more than 220,000 listings in 185 countries includes bakeries, food trucks, hotels, farmers markets, and juice bars. Plus you can filter and organize them by price, cuisine, vegetarian friendliness, and popularity. Its community section also allows you to connect and communicate with fellow users and easily check out their recommendations. [iOS, Google Play]

Pao

Pao is described as the best app to discover hidden gems in the world’s biggest and best cities. Its 100,000 users have uploaded more than 60,000 local places in 500 cities, each of which inform people where they can eat, drink, stay, and play. Pao helps travelers discover not only the hippest bars and restaurants, but also the go-to music venues, coffee shops, galleries, beaches, and hiking trails. It shows who has been boasting about being in these locations, as well as the information you need to get there. Its quick-finds menu also gives recommendations to indecisive travelers, letting them know there are speakeasies, museums, ice cream spots, and other surprises nearby. Unfortunately the app is available for iPhone only. [iOS]

Yelp

There’s a very good reason why Yelp is one of the top choices for finding out what’s nearby. It has a very easy-to-use interface, which allows you to define your options based on cost, reviews, location, and your specific desires. Sure, the customer reviews can sometimes be a little unpredictable, as people find the oddest reasons to hate a place. But there’s usually enough description, pictures, and information for people to make an informed decision. While at this point it really feels like it should be in more than 219 cities and 35 countries, it’s at its most comprehensive when used in the United States. Tripadvisor’s app can be a good alternative when you’re abroad, but its frustrating map and even more unreliable reviews mean you need to be extra diligent when using it. [iOS, Google Play]

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November 24, 2024
The 7 Best Milk Frothers for Your Home Espresso Setup (2024)

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Cortado. Caffe Latte. Caccionis. Affogato. Hot Wet. Flat White.

Two of those six drinks are fake, but that shouldn’t stop you from ordering one and expecting the barista to nod politely and whip something on the fly to avoid coming off as behind the times. Cafés in touristy regions of Italy began adding milk to coffee to make it more palatable for normies more than three centuries ago, and simple lattes and cappuccinos have been staples at American coffee shops since the late ’80s. Yet the obsession with tinkering and renaming subtle variations on this winning formula scans as a very third-wave development that feels less like innovation and more like beleaguered “riffing” for riffing’s sake.

The market for electric milk frothers is abuzz. A mechanized pitcher that automatically heats and froths milk is not a new concept, but a recent spate of boutique options that claim they can create the type of microfoam needed to pour latte with little effort is an exciting development. To borrow an aphorism my local barista rattles off daily while pouring flawless rosettas without batting an eye, “Big if true!”

Across the span of a month, I tried out eight milk frothers to see whether any of them could turn a cup of whole milk into that silky smooth microfoam that glistens under the ceiling lights before you knock it on the counter, swish it around, and pour it over a shot of espresso. This turned out to be a near-impossible task, but a few pleasant surprises gave me hope that a milk frother may one day be an indispensable part of my at-home coffee kit. Nouveau riche cortado junkies won’t find much to love in this list, but Gen Xers who pine for the days of cozy second-wave shops that serve foam-heaped cappuccinos in soup bowls while an Ani DiFranco clone sings slam poetry in the corner will be absolutely stoked on almost every item here. Busy moms with a brood of cocoa-slurping kiddos will find a worthy addition to their Christmas list too, which is not nothing!

To further hone your home espresso artistry, check out our guides to the Best Espresso Machines, Best Latte and Cappuccino Machines, Best Coffee Grinders, and Best Nut Milk Makers.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that’s too important to ignore for just ~~$2.50~~ $1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe Today.

With each unit I used 8 ounces of organic whole milk that was pulled from the fridge at 45 degrees Fahrenheit. I did not test any nondairy milks because of the wild variance in fat and sugar content, viscosity, and availability of each. Besides, we’ll probably be done with the hip alternative milk of the hour by the time this is published, rendering my extensive testing with fair-trade bird-safe macadamia milk useless.

I followed the instructions or quick-start guides that materialized after shaking out the box, and aimed for “wet froth” or a “flat white” if the instructions explicitly offered a process oriented toward that outcome. I swooshed the milk around in the frothing pitcher to get a better sense of the froth texture, decanted it into a Brewista Precision Frothing pitcher, and attempted to pour an 8-ounce cappuccino with latte art. I did this three times with each frother and made note of the average time of its frothing cycle, the final temperature of the milk, and the consistency and texture of the frothed milk.

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November 15, 2024
Does this high-tech lettuce hold the answer to the global food crisis?

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Bathed in a ghostly purple-red light, these floating lettuces are barely distinguishable from those grown outdoors, but require one-tenth as much land. The high-tech greenhouse where they live, in Maasbree in the Netherlands, is one possible remedy for a global food industry in crisis, facing a shortage of land due to climate change and conflict.

In his new book, Food for Thought, photographer Kadir van Lohuizen captures the food industry’s struggle with these challenges, taking a whistlestop world tour of how the sausage, quite literally, gets made.

While high-tech solutions like the lettuce farm, pictured above, and Plenty’s vertical farm in Compton, California, shown below, promise to deliver us from food apocalypse, van Lohuizen doesn’t shy away from the low-tech dystopia of much of the world’s food production as it is.

Plenty is a new vertical farm located in Compton, Los Angeles

Kadir van Lohuizen/NOOR

He hopes that giving an insight into the size of the industry might make it easier to answer questions such as: how will it change in a rapidly warming climate, and which solutions are feasible? His Food for Thought exhibition, featuring video, photography and sound, is at the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam until 5 January 2025.

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November 13, 2024
Sweeter tomatoes are coming soon thanks to CRISPR gene editing

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Gene editing can make larger tomato varieties sweeter

Paul Maguire/Shutterstock

If you like your tomatoes sweet, the smaller cherry tomato varieties are currently the ones to go for. But bigger tomato varieties could soon get a sweetness boost with the help of CRISPR gene editing.

The bigger a tomato is, the lower its sugar content usually is, says Jinzhe Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. Efforts to boost the sweetness of larger varieties have had downsides such as lowering yields.

So Zhang and colleagues compared different varieties to identify genetic variants that affect sweetness. They found that two closely related genes called SlCDPK27 and SlCDPK26 are more active in large varieties. These genes code for proteins that lower the levels of an enzyme that produces sugars.

When the team used CRISPR gene editing to disable these genes in a variety called Moneymaker, the levels of glucose and fructose in the fruits increased by up to 30 per cent with no decrease in yield. The fruits were also rated as sweeter in a taste test. The only other effect was fewer and smaller seeds, which consumers may prefer.

“We are working with some companies to develop some commercial varieties by knocking out these genes,” says Zhang. “It is still at the beginning stages.”

Besides tasting sweeter, another potential benefit is that fewer tomatoes will be needed to make tomato ketchup with the same sweetness level.

The gene-edited Moneymaker tomatoes aren’t as sweet as cherry varieties such as Sungold, but it should be possible to boost sweetness even further, says Zhang. “There are still many important genes that regulate sugar waiting to be discovered.”

A CRISPR-edited tomato that has high levels of a beneficial nutrient called GABA is already being sold in Japan – the first CRISPR food to go on sale – as well as being given away as seedlings.

The first ever genetically modified food to be sold commercially was also a tomato. Called Flavr Savr, it was sold in the US in paste form from 1994, but was later discontinued. Since last year, a purple GM tomato high in anthocyanins has been available in the US in fruit and seedling form.

Several countries, including Japan and China, have regulations that make it easier for gene-edited crops to get approval compared with other forms of genetic modification, not counting conventional breeding. China approved its first gene-edited crop last year, a soya bean with raised levels of oleic acid.

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November 13, 2024
The complete guide to cooking oils and how they affect your health

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Whether you are roasting a chicken in the oven, browning onions in a frying pan or choosing a spread for your toast, oils are at the heart of our culinary activity.

We have a dizzying array of choice. From sunflower to flaxseed, avocado to coconut, around 30 varieties of oil are now used for cooking. Your decision on which to use could have a profound effect on your health, with consequences for your cholesterol, blood pressure and risk of cardiovascular disease.

If you believe the headlines, then palm oil is out, sunflower oil is on shaky ground and there seems no end to the benefits that extra virgin olive oil brings to the table. But are these claims backed up by solid science? And how do the health effects of these products weigh up against their environmental costs?

Saturated or unsaturated?

First, some chemistry. Cooking oils contain fats, which are made from long chains of carbon atoms linked together. Saturated fats, found in red meat and dairy, are so named because each carbon atom is linked to the next by a single bond. The remaining electrons of each carbon atom are then available to form bonds with hydrogen atoms – making the molecule fully “saturated” with this element. This structure makes these fats very rigid and stable, which is why butter and lard are solid at room temperature.

Unsaturated fats, commonly present in plants and oily fish, have at least one double bond between neighbouring carbon atoms, which reduces the number of bonds that can be…

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November 4, 2024
Best 5 Soda Makers for Sparkling Water (2024)

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The carbonation renaissance is upon us. Whether it’s the obsession with hard seltzers like White Claw and its endless copycats or “better-for-you” sodas like Poppi and Olipop, people are craving that crisp, bubbly feeling in every corner of their palates. I’m one of them—simply addicted to bubbles. I try to keep it as healthy as possible by minimizing sugary sodas. I mainly just like simple seltzers or sparkling water.

But “healthy,” for me at least, is more than just watching sugar in my drinks. Lots of these sparkling beverages contain “forever” chemicals known as PFAS. As seen in a Consumer Reports study from 2020, the amount of carbonated water products with high amounts of PFAS is much greater than still water products. Some of these are very popular brands with an ingredients list displaying nothing but carbonated water—so you’d never know unless you were otherwise aware of PFAS. Making bubbles in your own home is a good way to remedy this.

Is It Cheaper to Make Your Own Soda?

Bubbling up your own water is obviously the more sustainable route than buying countless bottles of the stuff, even if it’s in glass—it still creates avoidable waste. The primary drawback with carbonators is that you need to continue to replenish your CO₂ canisters. Generally, they run about $17 to $30 each (depending on brand) for a 60-liter canister, which adds up, so you’re not necessarily saving money. Some brands also have recycling programs where you send in your empty canister and get it replaced with a full one so that you don’t just toss out the metal canisters. These recycling programs were included in my testing.

Carbonators are a relatively simple technology. Generally, the gadgets just need a CO₂ source and a means of pumping the gas into some water. I tested these first by using filtered water through a Zero Water filter. I was mainly looking for simplicity and something easy to use that makes a crispy, bubbly product. For the most part, all of these gave me a nice fizzy water. But some of them were a bit more complicated to use than others, mainly in terms of inserting the canister of CO₂ as well as inputting the bottle. Others were as simple and smooth as could possibly be.

Check out some of our other beverage-related guides, including Best Nonalcoholic Wines, Best Energy Drinks, Best Juicers, and Best Nut Milk Makers.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that’s too important to ignore for just ~~$2.50~~ $1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe Today.

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November 2, 2024
War-era sugar rationing boosted health of UK people conceived in 1940s

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The UK was forced to ration sugar during the second world war

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Sugar rationing during and after the second world war seems to have improved the health of people conceived in the UK at the time, cutting their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure decades later. This suggests that consuming less sugar in early life could boost health in adulthood.

Exposure to a high-sugar diet in the womb has previously been linked to a raised risk of obesity, which is known to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, or hypertension. Whether this is a causal link is unclear, however, and investigations into such questions are hampered by it being hard, or even unethical, for researchers to force people to follow specific diets.

The same isn’t true of wartime governments though, which is why Tadeja Gracner at the University of Southern California and her colleagues decided to make use of a situation in the second world war that acted like a natural diet experiment. In January 1940, a few months into the war, the UK government began rationing food. This included limiting adults to around 40 grams of sugar per day. Over a decade later, in September of 1953, rationing ended, and people rapidly increased their sugar consumption to roughly twice as much.

Gracner’s team analysed the health records of more than 38,000 people who were surveyed as part of the UK Biobank project between 2006 and 2019. All were aged between 51 and 66 at the time of the surveys and conceived within a few years before rationing ended, meaning they were exposed to limited sugar intake in the womb and early life. The researchers also looked at the same data from 22,000 people conceived a year or so after rationing ended. The two groups had a similar composition in terms of sex and race, and had a similar family history of diabetes, to enable comparisons between them.

Across both groups, there were more than 3900 people diagnosed with diabetes, and 19,600 were diagnosed with hypertension, but the prevalence of both conditions was much lower for those conceived during rationing. Members of this group had a 35 per cent lower chance of developing type 2 diabetes by their mid-60s, and those who did develop the condition did so on average four years later than those conceived after rationing ended. For hypertension, those in the group exposed to rationing were 20 per cent less likely to have the condition by their mid-60s, and again saw an average delay in developing it, this time of two years.

Crucially, while rationing saw many changes in the diets of people in the UK, it appears that cutting down on sugar made a big difference. Despite the changes in what food was available, average diets during rationing contained similar levels of other food types, such as fats, meat, dairy, cereal and fruit, as afterwards. One explanation might be that increased early exposure to sugar sets up a preference for eating sweet things throughout life, says Gracner. It could also lead to epigenetic changes that reduce how well people control blood sugar levels, raising the risk of type 2 diabetes and hypertension, she says.

Alternatively, it may be that generally lower calorie consumption as a result of eating less sugar could explain the improved health of those conceived during rationing, says Scott Montgomery at Örebro University in Sweden, rather than lower sugar intake per se. During rationing, people ate around 100 fewer calories a day, and people conceived during rationing had a 30 per cent lower risk of developing obesity than those conceived later, suggesting this calorie reduction played a role. “It may not be the exposure necessarily to high sugar levels, it could be something else” says Montgomery.

In any case, while the the UK’s recommended dietary guidelines for sugar intake today are similar to the amount eaten during rationing, actual consumption is far higher. The results show there are clear benefits in cutting down, says Montgomery. “People should be reducing sugar intake to the recommended levels.”

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October 31, 2024
Is personalised nutrition better than one-size-fits-all diet advice?

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Each of us has a different metabolic response to eating the same bread

Matthew Ashmore/Alamy

Consider two slices of bread, one from an artisanal sourdough boule, the other from a cheap, mass-produced white loaf. Which do you think is healthier?

The correct answer is that you don’t know until you try. Some people will have an unhealthy reaction to the cheap stuff, with surging blood sugar levels. But others won’t, and instead have a sharp rise in blood sugar after the sourdough. Some will surge on both, others barely at all.

This article is part of a series on nutrition that delves into some of the hottest trends of the moment. Read more here.

The same is true for other foods and other nutrients, especially fats, which can also surge dangerously in the bloodstream after eating. How our metabolisms respond to food is highly idiosyncratic, a shock discovery that is upending decades of nutritional orthodoxy and promising to finally answer that surprisingly knotty question: what should we eat to stay healthy?

Increases in blood glucose and lipids are quite normal after eating, but if they go too high too quickly – called spiking – they can cause trouble. Frequent spikes in glucose and a type of fat called triglyceride are associated with the risk of developing diabetes, obesity and heart disease. For decades, nutrition researchers assumed that all humans responded to a given food in roughly the same way, with uniform increases in blood sugar and fats.

Glycaemic index

Under that assumption, dietary advice was simple and one-size-fits-all. Reduce consumption of the foods that cause spikes. Unsurprisingly, those were mostly…

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October 30, 2024
Fibre: The surprisingly simple supernutrient with far-reaching health benefits

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New studies are showing ever more reasons to eat up your greens

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When it comes to our diet, there is an ever-changing list of things touted as the key to better health: cutting out carbs, eating like a caveman or dosing up on supposed superfoods such as turmeric. Most fail to live up to the hype – but there is one supernutrient that bucks this trend.

It is common knowledge that dietary fibre is good for you, but few of us appreciate just how far-reaching its health benefits go. Being in the know is worth your while, though, especially given that the diets common in high-income nations mean it is all too easy to miss out.

This article is part of a series on nutrition that delves into some of the hottest trends of the moment. Read more here.

Many of us will have experienced first hand the effects of dietary fibre on our body. Sometimes dubbed “nature’s laxative”, a lack of it can cause constipation. But there is much more to fibre than bowel movements. Diets high in this constituent are associated with reduced risks of many health conditions, including cancers and heart disease. This is because fibre isn’t just cardboardy filler, it is also food for the microorganisms in our gut. That means its effects can be felt throughout your body, as this microbiome influences the health of our immune system, brain and more, via the chemicals it produces.

“Fibre is the part of our diet that we cannot digest. Most comes from plant cell walls,” says Petra Louis at the University of Aberdeen…

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October 30, 2024