Xopher -- yeah, but I figured that it might be disingenuous if I didn't describe their functionality. :)

Pollyanna -- the key tradeoff for good food is cost and time. The problem is that too many of the poor have neither, which I admit a better farm policy won't fix.

Kennric -- I see the point. But I'd argue that the two main requirements of commercial food is (A) price, and (B) flavor. (With (C) health in certain applications.) But this is true of restaurants as well; any chef will tell you that they have two secret ingredients: salt and butter, and salt and butter. And shallots.

[F]ood components interact in ways that we don't even dimly understand. Where they exist in food, they seem to work. When removed from food and turned into additives, they sometimes have unpredictable effects.

Now that I can't argue against: fruits and vegetables should be the primary staple on anyone's table. And there's a lot of stuff in commercial food products that folks just shouldn't even consider eating more than a few tablespoons of per month (another poster mentioned Twinkies upthread; I actually don't know what does into them, but I'm assuming that the cream is a fat plus an eulsifier plus flavorings, aerated. Now, I've made a whipped flavored oil foam for poached sablefish, so it's not like I'd never use the technique, but it's a terrible thing for anyone to ingest in quantity).

The key, I think, is to make decent food affordable. There's a tradeoff in cost and nutrition in American food that reminds me too much of that "Haitians forced to eat mud pies" post from last week.

By the way, let me just say that I *do* find dangerous the fact that industrial food formulations are cheaper, dollar-per-calorie, than healthier food. If you're poor in America, then the food you can most easily afford will absolutely not be good for you, whereas the wealthier can buy expensive ingredients and dabble in molecular gastronomy with them.

One thing that we can do as citizens is try to change our purblind food subsidy policies. Subsidizing fruit and vegetable production could help increase supply, driving down prices and bringing healthy, fresh vegetables into lower income brackets. This doesn't solve every issue (for example, cheaper foods are frequently faster to prepare, which is a key issue for many people, especially in lower income levels), but it's one example of policies that could help bring down our national obesity rates.

Suggesting that it might be healthier to eat food than unfood is not luddism.

Okay, that's a valid point. But I take issue that the idea of adding emulsifiers and starch systems to milk and yogurt creates "unfood."

Case in point: with the advent of spring, my wife and I decided that we wanted to create a seasonal dish. She came up with the idea of a sweet pea gnocchi with a cream sauce, Parmesan and prosciutto (or maybe a serrano ham). Sounds very food-ish, right?

But we're not going to get there without science. For example, consider gnocchi: it's basically a formulation of wheat gluten and gelatinized potato starch. The lower gluten content of gnocchi means that it's lighter and fluffier than normal pastas, and the potato starch helps hold everything together. Now, it turns out that peas are going to be a pretty good vegetable to try this with, because they have an exceptionally high amylose content, and amylose is positively correlated in the literature with good organoleptic properties in pasta. However, pea starch is also resistant to gelatinization at lower temperatures, so it'll be important to heat it to around 90 deg C. It's also a fairly high-setback starch, so it'll be important to heat it to gelatinize it, then chill it to create a gel.

So at this point, we'll have a pea-based gel, but that alone won't be sufficient to create gnocchi. I need to add either gluten or a starch system, such as a guar-xanthan system. Of course, then we get into the traditional problem of dispersal, which is where a neutral dispersal agent is usually helpful.

As for the sauce, rather than using a cream-thickened sauce, I'll simply use a reduced-fat milk with another starch system -- arrowroot, which I got off the shelf of my local Penzy's. So there's another bit of science in our food.

The ham and cheese will be off the shelf, but my wife (who grew up making artisanal cheeses before trading it in for software development) can quote chapter and verse on the science of curing and cheesemaking.

With dinner, I may have a handcraft beer that we make in our neighborhood. Luckily, three of our neighbors are also (or have been) lab chemists, which is helpful in beermaking. After all, beer is simply a colloidal suspension of fermentable and nonfermentable sugars along with isomerized acids from the hops, fermented under controlled conditions.

Food *is* science. I don't think it's easy to draw a line and say that one side is food and another "unfood."

Here's a quick trip through some of the ingredients, given my layman's knowledge of industrial food chemistry.

Sucrose, Fructose, Dextrose: Ice cream manufacturers usually have a mixture of sweeteners, since different starch-derived sweeteners have different thermal properties. Contributes flavor and body, affects thermal meltdown of the food system. Almost certainly derived from corn starch.

Maltodextrin: Adds body to low-fat frozen concoctions and limits formation of large ice crystals.

Magnesium Oxide: Used in organic acid-containing materials (like anything with lactic acid) to form a thickened wet slurry. Also a good source of, well, magnesium.

Soy Lecithin: Emulsifier and foam stabilizer. Try liquid lecithin when making a salad dressing, or granular lecithin in any sauce you're heating to around 120-125 deg F. Great for binding fat into sauces, and it's available at health food stores.

Propylene Glycol Esters: Another emulsifier, commonly used in commercial baking. A lot of small-batch European breadmakers use PGE for the same reason you'd use it in a whipped frozen good -- foam stability.

Lactoglycerides: Also an emulsifier used for aeration and foam stability. Getting the idea of just how much engineering goes into any kind of commercial frozen product?

Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate: Give you a hint: it starts with emul- and ends with -sifier. Also adjusts pH levels, protects color, and makes an effective leavening agent. Found in the baking powder sitting on your shelf.

Guar Gum: Starch for product thickening. Commonly used in gluten-free baking. Use in small amounts.

Ascorbic Acid: Commonly-used antioxidant for protection of organoleptic properties.

Tocopherol: Probably used as an antioxidant for the fat component of the product.

Calcium Fumarate: Increases the calcium of the product without significantly affecting pH. Extensively used because of its strong bioavailability.

Look, you can find this stuff in all sorts of "organic" products, especially when you start getting into specialized markets like gluten-free. None of this stuff is going to kill you, and trust me -- the product would be either inedible or crazy expensive without them. So let's hear a little love for the scientists who make this stuff work, mmkay? For a tech-centered blog, this is a bit of luddism that I find disappointing.

A few years ago, the feds reportedly conducted an anthrax-susceptibility test in the north Texas area in which they dumped a microorganism (probably B. subtilis) in local water supplies and tested the treated water for contamination. As it turned out, standard municipal water filtration was effective at removing bacterial contamination, but the tests were (AFAIK) never publicized.

"I don't believe that western civilization has been improved by the collusion (probably unintentional, but nonetheless mutually supportive) of big oil and Islam in keeping the people sitting on huge oil deposits ignorant and powerless."

Hardly unintentional -- Wahabist Islam has been the rhetorical legitimation for the Sa'udi regime since the 1700s. After the founding of the third Sa'udi state, the development of close American ties (which encompasses such touchy subjects as American families and soldiers in the kingdom and American support for Israel), and the notoriously dissolute activities of the royal family, it's been virtually the only legitimating factor. Hence their worldwide da'wa of their peculiar form of Islam, and its pernicious effects.

We encouraged it because we felt that an arch-conservative Islam would create (to use an old phrase from the Carter administration) a "crescent of crisis" that would put pressure on the neighboring provinces of the Soviet Union. Hell, in the 1970s and 1980s, Israel supported Hamas because they thought it would counterbalance Fatah, militarily if not politically.

The old calculation was that revolutionary Islam was a concern to domestic regimes in majority-Muslim countries. It threatened Nasser, which we liked, and the Shah, which we didn't. International violence, in Israel and beyond, was easily explained as the work of state-backed actors like Syria's al-Sa'iqah or Iranian-supported Hizb Allah. And when the evidence began to prove otherwise -- that radicalism had metastasized -- our political leaders decided to ignore it and downgrade Clinton's ad hoc counterterror operations in favor of anti-China alarmists.

Nonetheless, there's a vast difference between radical Islamism, conservative Islam, and the way Islam is practiced in most of the world. The first is a dangerous ideology, if not the threat to civilization it's portrayed as; the second is illiberal and repressive but not destabilizing as the former ideology is; and neither really relates to the way most Muslims live and have lived their lives.

To begin withj: the death sentence for apostasy is completely against liberal norms, and is absolutely unjust.

To be sentenced to death for apostasy, you have to have takfir declared against you. The four Sunni madh'habs generally don't approve of takfir except in the most extreme cases; it's seen as encouraging intra-religious strife (fitna).

Generally speaking, distributing a report criticizing interpretations of Islam would not trigger a declaration of takfir unless (A) it's a local anti-Shi'a impulse, or (B) the judges are hardcore Salafis. Other news reports on this say that several of the accused's classmates said he had openly mocked God and Muhammad, and the report that he distributed was only part of the overall charge. (Another news story says that the report also questioned the validity of the Qur'an.)

This is exceptionally bad, and all the worse in that it's a sentence levied and soon to be carried out by the state we put into power. Now that the Meshrano Jirga has put their stamp on the verdict, I seriously doubt that Karzai is willing to let this guy go free -- he's had enough trouble with Salafists, without adding non-Salafi conservatives to the mix. This kid's a sacrifice to our incompetence and the power-hunger of local clerics.

Makes you wish for the old days of the PDPA. They may have been Commie stooges, but at least the only people they were killing over doctrinal differences were each other.

'Ere we go: good article on the whole ugly business.

This case was broken back in 2006. The former oral surgeon was the ringleader -- he ended up with a Demerol addiction and without his medical license, so he became chief organlegger for RTI, a major tissue bank. (RTI claims they had no idea what he was up to.) Cruceta was the nurse, joining up after his wife lost her job post-9/11. The whole team would take corpses destined for the crematorium and use them for organ donations. Interestingly, one of their, er, donors was Alistair Cooke.

Actually, it's a UNICAT TerraCross, a "world travel" vehicle. Still my first choice for comfortable, zombie-proof postapocalyptic travel, though.