Portside

The University of Mississippi will commission an outside audit of the Southern Foodways Alliance, looking into its record on diversity, after calls for the group’s white director to resign.

In the book, “Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat,” Marion Nestle, emerita professor of nutrition at New York University, discusses how the unstated goal of most company-sponsored studies is to increase the bottom line.

The recently published Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (“PURE”) study made headlines about the conventional wisdom on fats and carbs, but several methodological problems cast doubt on its conclusions.

Boiled down, there are a few simple rules when it comes to the best way to eat your vegetables. Just as eating a variety of vegetables is a good idea, enjoying them in a variety of ways seems to maximize their health benefits.

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.

Daniel Duane examines how a shy Ph.D. in English literature revolutionized the science of cooking and became revered in the most famous kitchens in the world.

With just three pleasures—nuts, fruit, and dark chocolate—a nutritionist challenges chefs to make dessert more healthful but still a treat.

Recent research at Harvard is just part of an emerging picture of coffee as a potentially powerful elixir against a range of ailments, from cancer to cavities

The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.

Smaller tableware 'could help reduce over-eating and obesity.' Shrinking the size of plates, knives, forks and glasses could go some way towards tackling over-eating and obesity, a study suggests.