On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

Many plants, perhaps all plants, contain chemicals meant to discourage animals from eating them. The fruits and vegetables that we eat are no exception.

Before photosynthesis, the earth’s atmosphere contained little oxygen, and the sun’s killing ultraviolet rays penetrated all the way to the ground and several feet into the oceans. Living organisms could therefore survive only in deeper waters. When photosynthetic bacteria and early algae burgeoned, they liberated vast quantities of oxygen (O2), wh... See more

And produce is often eaten raw. Salad bars in restaurants and cafeterias can collect and grow bacteria for hours, and have been associated with many outbreaks of food poisoning.

It’s the nature of fruit to taste good, to appeal to our basic biological interests, while vegetables stimulate us to find and create more subtle and diverse pleasures than fruits have to offer.

Each plant part, each fruit and vegetable, has its own characteristic cluster of antioxidants. And each kind of antioxidant generally protects against a certain kind of molecular damage, or helps regenerate certain other protective molecules. No single molecule can protect against all kinds of damage. Unusually high concentrations of single types c... See more

If plants are so well endowed with their own natural pesticides, then why isn’t the world littered with the corpses of their victims? Because animals have learned to recognize and avoid potentially harmful plants with the help of their senses of smell and taste, which can detect chemical compounds in very small concentrations.

The vegetables and water are simmered uncovered (to allow evaporation and concentration) for no more than an hour, after which it’s generally agreed that the stock flavor ceases to improve and even deteriorates. Once the vegetables are strained out, the stock can be concentrated by boiling it down.

In the United States, an estimated 75% of all processed foods now contain genetically modified ingredients. But this remarkable figure is due to just three agricultural commodities—soybean, canola, and corn—all of them modified for improved resistance to insect pests or herbicides.

Among familiar foods, only the potato accumulates potentially troublesome alkaloid levels, which make greened potatoes and potato sprouts bitter and toxic (p. 302).