What if your significant other gifted you baking powder instead of chocolates? What if they invented baking powder? In 1843, British chemist Alfred Bird did just that for his lucky, yeast-allergic,...
One of the questions I’ve been asked recently with increasing frequency is how to avoid exposure to those “forever chemicals” that we are being warned about in numerous newspaper articles, books,...
As strange as it sounds, being allergic to the cold is a real thing, and it’s called “cold urticaria.” Compared with nut or pollen allergies, an allergy to cold temperatures is much less common,...
Red signifies danger in many cultures. From a distance, green is highly visible by day. At night, yellow is easier to see. That briefly explains the choice of colours on every traffic light. But...
One of my favourite Seinfeld episodes is “The Bro.” On discovering that George’s father, Frank, has “man-boobs,” Kramer concocts a male version of a bra, that he calls “The Bro.” Frank, who prefers...
Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants and attacked them. That actually seems rational when compared with the attacks launched by Donald Trump against wind turbines, or “windmills” in Trump-speak...
By 1878, Louis Pasteur had formulated his germ theory of disease and had turned his attention to chicken cholera, a problem that plagued the French poultry industry. He managed to isolate a microbe...
Could you recreate your favourite restaurant meal at home? Imagine the challenge of getting that meal to go and receiving no recipe, no ingredient list; just the final dish that you get to taste,...
A few years ago, I hosted a television documentary on food. One of the episodes focused on milk and so we visited many different farms and witnessed countless herds of cows actually being milked....
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