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This chapter explains why certain varieties of cheese make better grilled cheese sandwiches. Melt is the ideal cheese characteristic needed to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Some cheeses melt better than others, i.e. turn into gooey masses instead of oily lumps, because of the molecular interactions within the cheese, primarily the interactions between the casein proteins and the calcium. The casein proteins are held together in the micelles by calcium bridges, and the number of these bridges is influenced by the acidity of the cheese. As cheeses age their pH decrease and thus become more acidic. This, in turn, causes a decline in the number of calcium bridges within the casein micelles. The loss of the calcium bridges allows for the casein proteins to become more soluble, which also helps to better bind the fat originally trapped in the cheese. Therefore, when the cheese is heated, the protein molecules are able to flow, resulting in a nice even melt. Examples of cheeses with good melting properties include Gruyère, Manchego, and Gouda. These varieties balance the final cheese pH to achieve both soluble calcium and soluble protein, resulting in a cheese mass that melts and flows upon heating while keeping the fat trapped within the matrix.

This chapter focuses on the poetry of Isaac Ibn Kalpon. Isaac came from a North African Jewish family and was born in the middle of the tenth century. He lived a while in Cordoba and spent a great deal of his life wandering from one city to another. His poems are full of complaints against his patrons and contemporaries. However, he had a firm friend in his considerably younger contemporary, Samuel ha-Nagid. The chapter then presents Isaac’s poem A Present of Cheese. The poem talks about a ‘dearest friend’ who gifted the poet ‘a portion of cheese’ At the end, the poet asks ‘And what’s the good of cheese, when I am dry with thirst?’ Isaac died some time after 1020.

This chapter talks about milk and cheeses. The image of milk is naturally associated with infancy, and it is generally rejected as a food for adults. The consumption of milk in adulthood thus became the alimentary characteristic of barbarianism—a notion equivalent to infancy, transposed from the biological to the sociocultural: barbarians who do not yet know “civilization” are to “civilized” man what the infant is to the adult. However, milk still played an important role in the diet of medieval people. Few drank milk, but the practice of turning it into cheese was fairly universal, and it was an excellent means of assuring its long-term durability. But even with regard to cheese, medieval culture remained very doubtful. Aged cheese was the primary object of such negative judgments, and the mysterious mechanisms of coagulation and fermentation were viewed with suspicion by medical science.

This chapter describes how a local health departmentbecame aware of a previously non-reportable serious infectious disease by having a good surveillance system and describes the epidemiologic steps performed necessary to identify the cause. The chapter concludes by illustrating the important role local health departments play in impacting national policies on many different levels.

This chapter presents a personal narrative which explores experiences in an error study. It explains that the study started with a quite narrow and strictly cognitive focus and later included an adequate theory of human skill that accounted for coherent action sequences that deviate from current intentions. In the mid-1980s, the distinction was made between unintended errors and intentional deviations from standard procedures, and by the late 1980s and 1990s, the study focused on organizational accidents and the so-called Swiss cheese model was developed.

Shi'is face an uphill battle in their efforts to justify prohibitions against nearly all foodstuffs associated with all non-Muslims. The Qur'an, after all, distinguishes People of the Book from idolaters, declaring that “the food of those who were given the Book is permitted to you.” This chapter examines the manner in which Shi'i authorities reconcile their positions with those expressed in the Qur'an. The examination provides the opportunity to reflect on the use of scripture within Jewish and Christian discourse about foreign food restrictions as well. Neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament provides evident support for many of the statements articulated by later interpreters of these works. The chapter's final section analyzes Sunni and Shi'i discourse regarding cheese, a borderline case that reveals the affinities between Islamic authorities at loggerheads with one another.

First, I have a confession to make. I am a food scientist. I have spent a large part of my life in a white coat, or working with students in white coats, studying, analyzing, and creating food products, subjecting them to a variety of processes and tests to see what happens, and occasionally, very occasionally, even tasting them. This is my passion, and to me is one of the most exciting types of scientific research in which I could be engaged, where the challenges are complex and really interesting, but in every case relate in some way to something central to everyday life. Food science is probably the only field in which a scientific experiment can lead to a change that can have a measurable impact you can point to on a shelf or plate within a matter of days. Also, it is great to work in a field of science where sometimes, if your experiment doesn’t work, you can at least eat it! However, I accept that, for many people, this is not food. Food comes on a plate. Food is an art. Food is an experience. Food is pleasure. Food is life. Food is not something to handle with a white coat on, not something to deconstruct in test tubes, and certainly not anything to do with chemicals. Definitely not anything to do with chemicals. Food is not science; food is art. People today know what they want from the food they buy. They want a wide variety of safe, natural, convenient, nutritious, great-tasting food. They likewise know what they do not want. They don’t want processed food, they don’t want chemicals in their food, they don’t want preservatives. This presents those who provide that food with great challenges as, to deliver the things consumers want, they often have to avoid the very tools they have traditionally used to achieve these goals. In this book, I want to explore the contradictions at the heart of our understanding of food, which arise in part from the fact that food is both science and art.

Proteins are, in my view, the most impressive molecules in food. They influence the texture, crunch, chew, flow, color, flavor, and nutritional quality of food. Not only that, but they can radically change their properties and how they behave depending on the environment and, critically for food, in response to processes like heating. Even when broken down into smaller components they are important, for example giving cheese many of its critical flavor notes. Indeed, I would argue that perhaps the most fundamental phenomenon we encounter in cooking or processing food is the denaturation of proteins, as will be explained shortly. Beyond food, the value of proteins and their properties is widespread across biology. Many of the most significant molecules in our body and that of any living organism (including plants and animals) are proteins. These include those that make hair and skin what they are, as well as the hemoglobin that transports oxygen around the body in our blood. Proteins are built from amino acids, a family of 20 closely related small molecules, which all have in chemical terms the same two ends (chemically speaking, an amino end and an acidic end, hence the name) but differ in the middle. This bit in the middle varies from amino acid to amino acid, from simple (a hydrogen atom in the case of glycine, the simplest amino acid) to much more complex structures. Amino acids can link up very neatly, as the amino end of one can form a bond (called a peptide bond) with the acid end of another, and so forth, so that chains of amino acids are formed that, when big enough (more than a few dozen amino acids), we call proteins. Our bodies produce thousands of proteins for different functions, and the instructions for which amino acids combine to make which proteins are essentially what the genetic code encrypted in our DNA specifies. We hear a lot about our genes encoding the secrets of life, but what that code spells is basically P-R-O-T-E-I-N. Yes, these are very important molecules!

Before we move forward from our previous chapters’ exploration of the importance of the microbiology of food from its many different angles to start to focus on how we process food to, among other effects, control that microbiology, we need to consider one more basic constituent of food. This is because, even after several earlier chapters in which the key functions of proteins, sugars, lipids, and other rather high-profile food constituents were discussed, we have yet to discuss explicitly the one that is perhaps the most significant of all. It was mentioned many times of course, lurking in the background like a supporting character actor in a movie who doesn’t dominate the foreground activity but is a key part of the scene. This magically powerful ingredient is water, yes water, that represents the majority of most food products, and without which most of their properties and characteristics would not exist. We have seen already how water can appear in food in many guises, depending on whether it deigns to interact with the other constituents present, leading to apparent logical surprises like the fact that a melon (a solid?) has actually more water per gram of its weight than milk (a liquid?), just because in one case the water is absorbed and robbed of its innate fluidity, while in the other no such restrictions apply. Besides influencing texture in a completely fundamental way, though, water influences behavior of just about every other molecule in food, from the structure of a protein (and hence the texture we perceive) to the suspension of oil droplets in the many food products that are emulsions. As well as this, almost all the dynamic changes we encounter in food, for better or for worse, depend on water. Microbes require water to live, as we can see when we preserve food by removing it (in drying), or else denying it more subtly by adding substances such as sugar or salt, which can suck the very water out of bacterial cells like molecular vampires.

Many studies have reported astonishing statistics about the rate of introduction of new food products globally, with new products appearing probably at least every hour somewhere around the world, if not more frequently. If you could go into a food store anywhere in the world and somehow take a snapshot of the range of products on the shelf, then revisit it five years later and do a comparison of what you find, there would be a huge surprise in terms of the turnover. Many products will have disappeared, and many new ones will have appeared. For those that remain across this time span, there is a very high likelihood that they have changed in less visible ways, in terms of modifications to their formulation, package, or the process by which they are made. Even fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish are likely to have benefited from scientific advances in their production, quality, or transportation in an optimal state of quality and safety. Why is there such a high rate of change? There are two main drivers, one external to those who produce the food and that relates to the highly fluid and some­times unpredictable expectations and demand of consumers, and one more specific to the food producer that relates to new opportunities in technology, formulation, or scientific understanding. For any new product to be successful on the market requires two successful changes in behavior of consumers. The first is that, instead or as well as what they normally purchase, they need to buy to try a new product, and drop it into their basket or cart as a result of a planned or spontaneous decision to do so. To achieve this is primarily the responsibility of experts in marketing, who can divine what consumers want, develop a strategy accordingly, and then deploy the appropriate tools to bring the product to the attention of those who are most likely to buy the product, such as through promotions, advertisements, and probably, in today’s world, social media campaigns.

This chapter proposes how cooks who perform molecular cooking should respond to criticisms that their technique deconstructs traditional cooking. Molecular cooking artificially recreates traditional dishes by making artificial wines, artificial cheeses, and so on. Some people openly welcome this new way of cooking while others find it unacceptable. In cooking, it sometimes happens that people find new combinations of perfectly traditional ingredients shocking just because of their unfamiliarity. Culinary artists performing molecular cooking who grow weary of repeating what has already been done thousands of times before can take heart in knowing that all kinds of art, even ones that were jarring at first, will be accepted in the end.

“American Artisanal” situates artisan cheese and the people who make it in American agricultural and symbolic landscapes. I suggest that artisan cheesemaking signals a new chapter in dominant conceptualizations of rural America, embodying a post-pastoral attitude that seeks collaboration with the organic agencies of “nature.”

“Ecologies of Production” draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a sheep dairy farm to detail what goes into producing cheese and to analyze how cheesemakers draw meaning from that labor. The cheesemakers at Vermont Shepherd have a farm-based ecology of production includes the pasture grasses, sheep, and microorganisms that contribute to the development of the cheese and its sensory qualities. In telling and selling a story of how cheese is made, cheesemakers depict livestock and microorganisms as sorts of co-laborers, a move that reflects an appreciation for their animals and the organic agencies of fermentation and cheese ripening. However, which particular properties of farm-based production should be considered as value-enhancing is a matter of debate carried out over the meaning of “farmstead” cheese.

The Berkshire County in Cheshire, Massachusetts is a community of Baptists and supporters of Democratic Republicans. To demonstrate their political statement, the women of Cheshire prepared a four feet in diameter, eighteen inches tall and 1,200 pounds cheese as a tribute to President Jefferson. Federalists opposing Jefferson satirized Cheshire's gift as the “Mammoth Cheese” in the Federalist literary journal, the Philadelphia Port Folio. This chapter discusses the significance for the cheesemakers' veneration of Jefferson and how the political culture of the Jefferson era gave rise to mass participatory democracy. During this period, there was a surge in voting in the cheese- and word-producing region of Cheshire and Pittsfield, Berkshire County. The Berkshire numbers rose up immediately after the two major local political events of 1800, Jefferson's victory in the national election and the founding of the Sun.

This chapter presents six more insect delicacies. The scale insect cochineal from Peru produces a red dye called carmine, which is used for coloring candies, alcoholic drinks, and surimi (imitation crab). The casu marzu (literally, “rotten cheese”) of Sardinia is made from sheep's milk, and it is left to ripen for so long that it starts to rot and attract cheese flies. The cheese is then eaten with its mold. In Africa and Latin America, palm beetle larvae are panfried or barbecued, just as dragonflies in China are fried and eaten with rice. Meanwhile, tarantulas are eaten in the city of Skuon, about 45 miles from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. Legend has it that during the terrifying Khmer Rouge regime, people were so starved that they started eating spiders. Lastly, in Carnia, Italy, children are known to eat moths during the summer. More specifically, they eat the sweet contents of the crop of Zygaena moths.

Every spring, horses and whiskey meet to celebrate “The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports,” the Kentucky Derby, which is run at Churchill Downs in Louisville on the first Saturday in May. While the horserace itself doesn't last long, it has given rise to what we in Kentucky like to think of as The Greatest Two Weeks in Partying. This chapter describes how to plan and arrange Derby-themed parties.