Tag Archives: food

Every diet has a body-count: in the garden with the vegetarian killing snails.

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When the demand of my job and my family life allow, I try to take advantage of the fact that I live in California by maintaining a vegetable garden. One of the less pleasant aspects of vegetable gardening is that, every winter and spring, it requires me to embark on a program of snail and slug eradication — which is to say, I hunt for snails and slugs in my garden and I kill them.

As it happens, I’m a vegetarian and an ethicist. I’m not sure I’d describe myself as an “ethical vegetarian” — that suggests that one’s primary reason for eating a vegetarian diet is a concern with animal suffering, and while I do care about animal suffering, my diet has as much to do with broader environmental concerns (and not wanting to use more resources than needed to be fed, especially when others are going hungry) and aesthetics (I never liked the taste of meat). Still, given my diet and my profession, one might well ask, how ethical is it for me to be killing the slugs and snails in my garden?

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Environmental impacts of what we eat: the difficulty of apples-to-apples comparisons.

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When we think about food, how often do we think about what it’s going to do for us (in terms of nutrition, taste, satiety), and how often do we focus on what was required to get it to our tables?

Back when I was a wee chemistry student learning how to solve problems in thermodynamics, my teachers described the importance for any given problem of identifying the system and the surroundings. The system was the piece of the world that was the focus of the the problem to be solved — on the page or the chalkboard (I’m old), it was everything inside the dotted line you drew to enclose it. The surroundings were outside that dotted line — everything else.

Those dotted lines we drew were very effective in separating the components that would get our attention from everything else — exactly what we needed to do in order to get our homework problems done on a deadline. But it strikes me that sometimes we can forget that what we’ve relegated to surroundings still exists out there in the world, and indeed might be really important for other questions that matter, too.

In recent years, there seems to be growing public awareness of food as something that doesn’t magically pop into existence at the supermarket or the restaurant kitchen. People now seem to recall that there are agricultural processes that produce food — and to have some understanding that these processes have impacts on other pieces of the world. The environmental impacts, especially, are on our minds. However, figuring out just what the impacts are is challenging, and this makes it hard for us to evaluate our choices with comparisons that are really apples-to-apples.
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Doing fun chemistry.

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You may have noticed by now that the Scientific American Blog Network is having something of a Chemistry Day.

Reading about chemistry is fun, but I reckon it’s even more fun to do some chemistry. So, if you find yourself with a few moments and the need to fill them with chemical fun, here are a few ideas:

Make your own acid-base indicator:

With red cabbage and hot water, you can make a solution that will let you tell acids, bases, and neutral-pH substances apart.

Spend the afternoon classifying the substances in your refrigerator or pantry! Audition alternatives to vinegar and baking soda for your papier mache volcano!

Dye some eggs:

Gather up some plant matter and see what colors you can develop on eggshells.

One interesting thing you might observe is that empty eggshells and eggshells with eggs in them interact differently with the plant pigments. Ponder the chemistry behind this difference … perhaps with the aid of some cabbage-water indicator.

Play around with paper chromatography:

Grab some markers (black and brown markers work especially well), lay down some filter paper (or a paper towel or a piece of a coffee filter), and just add water to observe the pretty effects created when some components of ink preferentially interact with water while others preferentially interact with the paper.

If you like, play around with other solvents (like alcohol, or oil) and see what happens.

Make some mayonnaise:

Even just making canonical mayonnaise is a matter of getting oil and water to play well together, making use of an emulsifier.

But things get interesting when you change up the components, substituting non-traditional sources of oil or of emulsifier. What happens, for example, when an avocado gets in on the action?

Try your hand at spherifying a potable:

Molecular gastronomy isn’t just for TV chefs anymore. If you have a decent kitchen scale and food-grade chemicals (which you can find from a number of online sources), you can turn potables into edibles by way of reactions that create a “shell” of a membrane.

Sometimes you can control the mixture well enough to create little spherical coffee caviar or berry-juice beads. Sometimes you end up with V-8 vermicelli. Either way, it’s chemistry that you can eat.