Portside

Chef Tom Colicchio is dropping the name of his newest Manhattan restaurant, Fowler & Wells, after learning that it has historically racist connotations. It was named for a publishing company and scientific institute that once operated in a building on the same site.The men who started the company were proponents of phrenology, a 19th-century practice used to justify slavery and beliefs in African-American inferiority.

'Jane Austen and tea' is after all, a comely capitalist hustle that has spawned a cottage industry of crockery, tea towels, tea bags, tea rooms and boutique brews. What we get from Austen's novels is the role of this extremely popular national beverage in upper class Regency society. Austen lived at a time when tea, which had become popular in England in the late 1600s, was drunk by everyone, from the elite to the working classes.

In his new book, Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias, the distinguished writer and scholar, Alexander Theroux, discusses some of the current scientific and psychological research into food preferences and aversions

3D printing has started to make its way into the culinary world and a handful of chefs are experimenting with printing beautiful, edible designs, but are we ready for this technology? Is 3D printing poised to revolutionize the way we eat?

According to the findings of the International Food Information Council Foundation’s 12th Annual Food and Health Survey, Americans are consuming food information from more sources than ever before, yet our nutritional literacy is sorely lacking – and our health may be suffering as a result.

Olive oil fraud abounds: some producers blend cheap nut, seed, or other vegetable oils with just enough olive oil to lend the look, taste, and aroma of the real thing. Other perpetrators dilute extra-virgin olive oil with lower-grade olive oil, or mislabel lesser olive oil as extra-virgin. Last, though not nearly as appalling, packers intentionally mislabel the country of origin.

Although you still can’t get a decent sandwich in space (who knew?), plans are underway to develop a special dough for low-crumb bread and an oven in which to bake it on the ISS.

Locol is a response to the challenge of food access in underserved communities in which issues of poverty, hunger and access to nutritious food are exclusively about race. But it is an imagined solution, designed to overcome the wrong threat. It is based on a dangerous minimization of the facts, lacking a larger racial analysis and the admission that racism, not some aberrant market failure, is the culprit in the deprivation of communities of color.

There are at least 200 compounds contributing to the flavor of chiles and they all have a different effect. Capsaicin is the most common, first to be discovered, and hottest of the capsaicinoid family, but every chile contains a somewhat different mix of capsaicin, dihydrocapsaicin, nordihydrocapsaicin, homodihydrocapsaicin, nornordihydrocapsaicin, and quite a few others.

This 13th centure cookbook of Syrian recipes shows us the opulent upper limits of the cuisine from those who cooked and ate it—chefs developing recipes, explorers discovering ingredients, the wealthy elite who demanded luxury and ingenuity.