Picture a perfect dinner party. All the best guests have been invited. The table is set, equipped with elaborate silverware, thick crystal tumblers and plates topped with napkins folded into elegant shapes. Guests recline in velvet chairs as they admire the spread. A platter of red crayfish sits in the center, arranged in a dome and sprinkled with dill, and beside that sits [...]
As a self-proclaimed impulse buyer, I am all too familiar with the trials, tribulations and joys attached to being a consumer. Many of us develop brand preferences and remain loyal to said brands for years. When you’re subconsciously reaching for that specific cereal on a routine grocery trip, do you ever stop to ask yourself what exactly it is about that brand that [...]
It’s an alarming pattern—large percentages of engineering students either drop out or switch to another major.Studies suggest a variety of reasons why this behavior has emerged, including the difficulty of the coursework, feeling isolated by peers who are pursuing non-STEM degrees, a lack of mentors or role models and inadequate preparation in high school. To combat the number of STEM students they’ve seen [...]
Astronauts rejoice: Freeze-dried spaghetti may soon be a thing of the past! Popular spacecraft fare currently consists mainly of rehydrated meals. While this works just fine for a quick jaunt to the moon, it isn’t particularly well suited for longer trips through deep space . . . say to our friendly red neighbor, Mars. In early 2013, NASA awarded Systems and Materials Research Corporation (SMRC) a [...]
I can lose track of time experimenting in the kitchen and changing up old recipes. Since some of my favorite dishes involve hours of prep time, I don’t get to make them as often as I would like. I enjoy cooking almost as much as I love eating, a result of growing up with home cooked meals on the table every night. Since [...]
Have you ever seen someone throw out a dish after eating only half of the food on it? It could be at a restaurant, in the park, or back when you were in school, but I’m sure we’ve all seen it or been a part of it—I know I haven’t always eaten 100 percent of the food in front of me. According to [...]
Have you ever tried “astronaut” ice cream? It’s a freeze-dried treat most commonly found in museum gift shops. However, the name is something of a misnomer. Astronaut ice cream has only flown to space once since its creation, aboard Apollo 7. According to NASA, the foil-wrapped snack is too crumbly to enjoy in zero gravity, so the astronauts never request it! Us earthlings [...]
One day, Jonathan Safran Foer was eating a burrito, yearning for something to read. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but was actually the beginning of a new idea. Foer, most famous for his bestselling novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, contacted Chipotle CEO Steve Ells, partnered up with the restaurant and made his idea of reading while burrito-eating [...]
I don’t think a single person I’ve ever met has loved school cafeteria lunches. In middle school, I saw classmates bounce meatballs off the table, and in high school I stuck to bag lunches—avoiding at all costs the ever-present grease-soaked hamburgers made in the cafeteria—A.K.A. the basement. I had hoped that my college “DH” (dining hall) would be different but sadly it’s not. [...]
Growing up, my parents enforced the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. One reason for that is that it is difficult to perform tasks, both physical and mental, without sufficient energy—which can come in the form of food. Even now, I have difficulty being productive if I have not had enough breakfast. But regardless of breakfast, the human [...]