A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
We are at the edge of pumpkin and pumpkin spice season, with the peak still ahead of us, so I thought it would be fun to run three pumpkin terms through the Ngrams Viewer from Google Books: pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie spice, and pumpkin spice. For those not familiar with the tool, The Ngrams Viewer tool […]
I have been following the field of entomophagy (insects as food) for a while: watching the news, and occasionally writing news roundups or more detailed pieces (see archive section below). So I have been wondering, as news coverage has increased, new products are launched, and companies start scaling up their insect-rearing operations, what is happening […]
Berkeley Bowl Marketplace in Berkeley, California is justly famous for its vast array of produce and their avocado selection is no exception. They sometimes sell five or more different sizes — I have seen pee wee, small, medium, large and extra large. Of course, each size has a different price and they are always sold […]
Let’s face it: a cup of tea can taste great and be a relaxing ritual, but the caffeine might be the biggest attraction. And if you want to get the most (or least) in your cup, scientific articles can be a valuable resource. In particular, some of the papers by a group from the University […]
My recent post on the superfood called moringa got me wondering: has the term “superfood” been used for a long time? Or is it a recent thing? I went to the Google Ngram Viewer to get an answer. Ngram Viewer displays the frequency of use for a word or phrase in Google’s massive collection of […]
The Golden Age of Whaling attracts my interest because it was such a dramatic and absurd undertaking. During its peak years, the industry had a few hundred sailing ships searching vast areas of open ocean for the earth’s largest living creatures so they could kill them and process their carcasses at sea to obtain valuable […]
If you worked on a whaleship during the Golden Age of Whaling (ca. 1820-1860), you wouldn’t have known your salary. From the lowliest “boy” all the way to the captain, the salary wasn’t a fixed daily amount, but something distinctive to the whaling industry known as the “lay.” When you a contract to work on […]
Preface: For various reasons, the images in this post (which are ’embeds’ from Google’s Ngram Viewer) might not going to look quite right — there will be spillover across the right boundary and spacing will be quirky. To see higher quality versions of the charts, click on the chart and it will appear all by […]
(Updated, 3/15/17: new chart) For the last few months, I have been weighing oranges before and after peeling to see what fraction of the orange is edible (by weight). I had done similar work previously to measure the edible percentage of avocados, finding that Haas avocados are roughly 70% edible by weight across a span of 125 […]
I bought some fava beans yesterday to use in a recipe from Elizabeth Andoh’s “Kansha” and decided to pull out my scale to document the tedious bean peeling routine. I started with 552 grams of whole fava bean pods. Pod removal netted me 192 grams of skin-on beans. I blanched the skin-on beans for 1 […]