Food and cooking 15
From fermentation to cocoa butter, from carbonara to alpine cheeses: the science, with a side of history, of what ends up on the plate. Each Recap takes one piece of the kitchen apart, with verified sources, a map to find your way and a quiz to make it stick.
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Civics
Food Sovereignty: What It Is and Where the Concept Comes From Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to decide for themselves how their food is grown and eaten, using ecologically sound methods that respect local cultures. La Via Campesina, an international network of peasant organizations, coined the term in 1996 and presented it at the World Food Summit in Rome. It is not the same as food security, which the FAO defines as everyone having access to enough safe food without saying who controls how that food is produced. In practice, food sovereignty also depends on local control over seeds and crop varieties, an area where genetic diversity has shrunk dramatically over the past century. -
Science
How Beer Is Made: The Brewing Process, from Barley to Glass Beer comes from four ingredients — water, malted barley, hops and yeast — combined through four main steps: malting, mashing, boiling and fermentation. During malting, barley germinates and is then dried, developing the enzymes that mashing later uses to turn starch into fermentable sugar. Boiling dissolves the hops' alpha acids, which barely dissolve in water on their own, giving beer its characteristic bitterness. The yeast strain and fermentation temperature then determine whether the result is an ale, a lager, or a spontaneously fermented beer like Belgian lambic. -
Science
How Wine Is Made: The Winemaking Process, from Grape to Bottle Wine comes from the alcoholic fermentation of grape must, the process in which yeast converts sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. Before fermentation, grapes are crushed and destemmed to free the juice from the berries and separate it from the stems. For red wine, the must stays in contact with the skins during maceration, which gives it color and tannins; for white wine, the juice is drawn off almost immediately, so the wine stays pale. After fermentation, wine rests in barrels, oak casks or steel tanks to age before it's filtered and bottled. Under the standard set by the OIV, the international body that regulates the industry, a drink can only be called wine once it reaches a minimum alcohol content. -
History
History of Pizza: From Naples to UNESCO Heritage The word "pizza" already appears in a document from 997 written in Gaeta, but the dish as we know it today was born in nineteenth-century Naples, sold cheap as street food and in humble pizzerias. The most famous story, that Queen Margherita gave her name to the pizza with the three colors of the Italian flag in 1889, is actually a popular but historically disputed legend: very similar pizzas were already around decades earlier. In 2017 UNESCO recognized the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo as intangible cultural heritage of humanity. From there pizza spread across the world, spawning thousands of local variants and a few very Neapolitan social customs along the way. -
Technology
How air fryers work (and why they don't really fry anything) An air fryer is, mechanically speaking, a small forced-convection oven: a heating element warms the air, and a powerful fan pushes it around the food at high speed inside a perforated basket. The result mimics deep frying in hot oil, but needs only a light coating of fat instead of full immersion. The browning comes from the same chemical reaction as traditional frying, the Maillard reaction, triggered once the food's surface passes roughly 140-165°C. Compared with deep frying, the appliance cuts fat intake and some unwanted compounds like acrylamide by a wide margin, but it doesn't eliminate them. -
Technology
How microwave ovens work, and why they don't make food radioactive A microwave oven heats food with a component called a magnetron, which generates high-power radio waves strong enough to make water molecules vibrate. That vibration produces heat through friction, not through a flame or a heating element. The effect was discovered by accident in 1945 by Percy Spencer, a Raytheon engineer, after a candy bar melted in his pocket while he stood near a running magnetron. The oven's metal interior walls bounce the microwaves back toward the food like a mirror, while an isolated piece of metal inside can throw off sparks. It isn't a radiation that makes food radioactive, and the most common practical risk isn't the microwaves themselves but the heat, meaning burns from food or liquids that come out hotter than expected. -
Economics
Alpine Pastures: What a Malga Is and How Summer Grazing Works Alpine pastures sit at the heart of summer mountain grazing: the high meadow, the herd that climbs to it, and the rustic building where herders live and turn milk into cheese for the whole season. From late May to mid-September, herds and herders leave the valley floor for altitudes of roughly 1,000 to 2,300-2,500 metres, in a seasonal move called transhumance. Up there, milk still becomes mountain cheese, often under rules written into protected-name production standards. The pastures aren't unclaimed land either: many belong to communities of residents through common land rights, a status recognised by law. And a grazed pasture seems to be good news for the streams running through it too. -
Science
Swimming after eating: is the cramp myth actually true? For generations, parents have warned that swimming right after a meal blocks digestion and triggers cramps severe enough to drown you. The American Red Cross, after reviewing the scientific literature, found no single documented drowning linked to eating beforehand, and the physiology behind the myth runs backwards: resting digestion only shifts blood toward the gut in a mild way. The real, well-documented danger in open water goes by a different name — cold water shock — and it has nothing to do with whether you just ate. -
Science
Arginine: what it is and how it affects nitric oxide, blood pressure, and exercise Arginine is an amino acid the body partly makes on its own and also gets from food, mainly grains, meat and dairy; it's the precursor of nitric oxide, the molecule that relaxes blood vessels. Independent meta-analyses find modest but measurable effects on blood pressure, athletic performance, mild-to-moderate erectile dysfunction and wound healing, often at doses well above what a normal diet provides. The European food safety regulator, EFSA, has nonetheless rejected all the major health claims proposed for arginine, citing the absence of a recognised cause-and-effect relationship at the required standard. There's also a serious, well-documented contraindication: in a clinical trial of patients with a recent heart attack, arginine was linked to significantly higher mortality, serious enough that the trial was stopped early. -
History
The History of Carbonara: True Origins and False Myths Carbonara passes for one of the oldest dishes in the Roman tradition, but it is a twentieth-century dish: classic Roman cookbooks never mention it, and as late as 1949 Ada Boni's famous collection does not record it. The oldest known written trace of the name dates from 23 August 1939, in a Dutch-language newspaper of the Dutch East Indies that mentions a trattoria in Trastevere. The most famous hypothesis has the dish born in September 1944 from the meeting between an Italian cook and Allied army rations, but it remains a hypothesis, and historians still argue about it. The first written recipes, from the 1950s, were very different from today's: the first Italian version, from 1954, called for pancetta, gruyère and garlic. The modern canon — guanciale, pecorino, egg and pepper — only settled in the 1990s. -
Science
Fermentation: What It Is and How It Transforms Food Fermentation is the process by which yeasts, bacteria and even our own muscle cells extract energy from sugars without using oxygen. It yields little, 2 molecules of ATP per glucose against roughly 38 from respiration, but it works wherever oxygen cannot reach. Its waste products, such as alcohol and lactic acid, give food its flavour and protect it from harmful microbes: that is how wine, beer, bread, yogurt and vinegar are born. It was Louis Pasteur who proved, from 1857 onwards, that living microorganisms are behind fermentation. -
Science
Gluten: what it really is and how it works Gluten is not a mysterious additive: it is the set of storage proteins in wheat grain, two families called gliadins and glutenins, which form an elastic net when flour meets water and trap the gases of fermentation. That net is what makes bread rise and pizza dough stretch. In roughly one person in a hundred, though, fragments of these proteins trigger celiac disease, a permanent autoimmune inflammation of the gut. For everyone else, the available research does not show that gluten is harmful in itself, nor that gluten-free products are automatically healthier. -
Science
Leavening: what it is and how it works Leavening is the process that inflates a dough from the inside: a gas (almost always carbon dioxide) forms bubbles that get trapped in the stretchy mesh of gluten. The gas can come from living microorganisms that ferment sugars (baker's yeast, sourdough), from a chemical reaction between baking soda and an acid (baking powder), or simply from steam and air expanding in the oven. During baking the bubbles grow one last time, then the structure sets: that is how bread gets its crumb and cakes get their softness. -
Science
Why does chocolate melt in your mouth? The science of cocoa butter Chocolate melts in your mouth thanks to cocoa butter, the fat that makes up about 30% of a bar and melts at around 34 °C, just below body temperature. Its molecules can stack into six different crystal forms, each with its own melting point, and only form V delivers the gloss, the crisp snap and the perfect melt on the tongue. Chocolatiers get it through tempering, a controlled temperature cycle that steers crystallization. When the structure rearranges on its own, the whitish film of fat bloom appears on the surface. -
Science
Creatine: what it is, how it works, and what the research really shows Creatine is a natural compound the body makes and stores mainly in muscle, where it helps regenerate energy during short, intense effort. Taken as a supplement, usually as creatine monohydrate, it raises muscle stores and in studies improves performance in repeated high-intensity exercise by 10-20%. The available research finds no signal of kidney harm at standard doses in healthy people, while the possible cognitive benefit remains genuinely contested. Roughly a fifth to a third of people respond poorly to a classic loading protocol.