On the day of the big game, Joey Chestnut stepped up to the scale. He weighed in around 214 pounds. Ten minutes and 54 hot dogs later, Chestnut returned to the scales. He had just eaten the volume of a basketball and a third of the weight of a newborn Jersey cow. Doctors have found similar volumes of food in the stomachs of bulimics who ate themselves to death. What made Chestnut’s rapid weight gain so remarkable was not that he kept all 54 hot dogs down, but that he was still standing at all.

Eating competitions have been around since at least 1786—a boiled egg affair in New York—but Nathan’s Famous hot dogs traces the roots of its annual competition to 1916, when, as legend has it, a bunch of U.S. immigrants gobbled wieners in a patriotic showdown. Another 75 years would pass before Chestnut stepped onto the scales. What set the league of modern gurgitators in motion was the formation of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, a promotional organization created by George and Rick Shay 15 years ago. Eating competitions now range from calf brains and matzo balls to pickles and mayonnaise, but the ultimate in peristaltic revelry goes down on the Fourth of July at the Super Bowl of competitive eating at Coney Island. This year, women compete in a league of their own, so there will be not one, but two extreme eating bouts. They'll run back-to-back.

Let’s say you weigh 150 pounds, and you just happen to really like stuffing dozens of tubes of protein and watered-down buns down your esophagus. At some point—probably well before scarfing the week’s worth of calories that Joey Chestnut ate in 2010—you would start to gag. Even if you relaxed and got the dogs down, your stomach would become so acutely distended that it might rupture. If your stomach happened to be really elastic, it would still stretch so much that you’d look as if you were in your third trimester.

We know this because, in 2007, National Geographic produced an investigative special on competitive eating. The show paid Tim Janus, a competitive eater known as “Eater X,” to travel to Philadelphia to test his stomach. Janus was 29 years old and weighed 165 pounds. As a control, they found another guy, a 200-pound 35-year old who claimed to have a hearty appetite. Just for fun, we’ll call this guy Frank.

Dr. Marc Levine, a radiologist, put them both on a fluoroscopy table and asked them to ingest Boras, an effervescent agent, along with some high-density barium—standard procedure for anyone having some upper GI work done. That allowed the show's producers to watch real-time images as the two consumed hot dogs, also coated with barium. Levine admits the coating made the dogs less appetizing, but it was the only way to make them visible in the gut.

Frank submitted himself to examination first. Under the eye of the fluoroscope, Frank ate seven hot dogs. Then, he started feeling like you might feel if you had just scarfed seven hot dogs: He was full. The fluoroscopy confirmed the matter: His stomach was filled up. Janus went in next and started eating. He wasn’t slowing down, which made Levine worried. “We made him stop,” he told me. “We were watching the fluoroscope and we’re like, ‘We’ve seen how this works.’ I said to my colleague, David Metz, ‘If his stomach perforates, we’ll go down in history.’”

Levine has gone down in history—not for rupturing anyone’s stomach, but for publishing the only case study on competitive eating in the Journal of Roentgenology, which still makes his phone ring more than any cancer and diagnostic work he’s ever done. The study suggested that competitive eaters were able to accommodate so many hot dogs by expanding their minds as well as their stomachs. “He was basically able to overcome his satiety reflex,” Levine says. “When you or I eat that much, our brain tells us, ‘If we eat another bite, then we’ll barf it up.’ He told me this had taken a remarkable amount of willpower. It was an ‘athletic achievement.’”

Competitive eating is not a matter of size. It’s a matter of training your stomach to stretch and tricking your brain’s feeding control circuit—the system that sends out hunger signals and satiety signals—to let more stuff in. Normally, food settles in our stomach after a big meal and a couple glasses of wine and sends out chemical signals to the brain that tell us we’re done. As neuroscientist David J. Linden explains in The Compass of Pleasure, the circuit acts like a sort of faucet to control the flow of hunger and fullness.

Gurgitators have to train their brains to become less responsive to these messages, but here’s the thing: The rest of us could be inadvertently numbing our brains in much the same way. Chronic exposure to fatty, sugary foods can rewire the neural circuitry, which is hard to undo, Linden writes. That helps to explain why it’s difficult, if not impossible, to control your weight through willpower alone.

And despite our body’s remarkable ability for stomaching all sorts of things, the long-term consequences of competitive eating might end up looking a lot like end-stage diabetes. “One of the sacrifices you make in becoming a competitive eater is never getting full,” Levine told me. “So what happens when you’re 55, and you have the ability to consume all the ice cream or pizza in the world and never get full? How do you control yourself?”

Clearly, though, eating is about more than just biology—and the annual Fourth of July spectacle reflects some profound cultural truths about the way we consume food. Here's a parade of slender competitors, like Takeru Kobayashi and Sonya Thomas, who eat so much, so fast, and never seem to gain any weight. “There’s no explanation for it,” Adrienne Rose Johnson, a doctorate student at Stanford who’s written one of the few scholarly papers on the subject, collected in the forthcoming Making Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, told me. “It’s like magic—a magical American myth. I think it speaks to people suffering from literal and symbolic consequences of consumerism.”

Whether or not you’ll be participating in the big gorge, it’s worth thinking about how an event that originated as a means for cultural assimilation plays into another enduring fantasy: Consuming without consequence. Frankly, that's just not possible. As Janus’ stomach suggests, the lingering effects of competitive eating lie just below the surface.

First x-ray image above shows an control subject's stomach after rapid ingestion of seven hot dogs. Bottom image shows a speed eater's stomach with 36 hot dogs. Images courtesy of Marc Levine via "Competitive Speed Eating: Truth and Consequences" ©2007 American Roentgen Ray Society.

No, this not an urban legend. But it's a case where artificial food coloring had unintended consequences. And something similar could be happening again—on a much larger scale, in ways that scientists are finding much less discernible.

Only now, there’s hundreds of thousands of gallons of artificial food dyes—particularly Red No. 40—being added to Froot Loops, Bomb Pops, and Big Red chewing gum. Food dyes are added to grapefruit juice, granola bars, and breakfast cereals. Children eat an estimated five times as many food dyes annually as they did fifty years ago. So while case studies about strawberry-colored poop haven’t been showing up in medical literature, researchers suggest the rising tide of food coloring may contribute to another problem: more hyperactive behavior in more children.

Because many artificial colors used in foods are azo compounds that resemble pharmaceutical drugs, these food additives can affect health and behavior. David Schab, a Columbia University psychiatrist, says they disproportionately affect hyperactive children. “The size of the bad effect of these dyes on behavior is about half to one-third the size of the good effect of Ritalin.”

Consequently, the European Parliament requires a warning label for foods with artificial food coloring: Consumption may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children. The European ruling followed a 2009 University of Southampton report, which found an increase in hyperactivity in children who consumed various mixtures of seven different artificial colors and the preservative sodium benzoate. While the report provided a link between synthetic food dyes and behavioral problems—one observed by researchers and not just parents—it did not pinpoint a single synthetic color.

The United States could follow Europe’s lead with a warning label, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will be holding an advisory hearing on behavior and artificial food dyes this week. But, in a draft memo (PDF), the FDA says research doesn't show a clear, conclusive link between a specific food additive and a particular behavior.

[F]or certain susceptible children with ADHD and other problem behaviors, the data suggest that their condition may be exacerbated by exposure to a number of substances in food, including, but not limited to, artificial food colors.

This probably means food manufacturers will continue to do what they’ve been doing. A Mars/Wrigley spokeswoman told me, "Any decisions regarding reformulation or labeling would be based on sound scientific support and regulatory guidance." And no action by the FDA would follow a familiar regulatory trope, where the need for rigorous scientific research trumps the clamor for a precautionary response.

Should the FDA find conclusive evidence, food makers here may eventually shy away from artificial food colorings in favor of annatto, turmeric, red cabbage, algae, and 20 other natural colorants, as some companies are already doing. But "natural" dyes are not necessarily a panacea. For example, at high doses, annatto can also be used as a drug. And, earlier this year, the FDA quietly issued new labeling requirements for carmine, another reddish coloring extracted from fertile female cochineals that feed on cacti (the namesake arthropod in that brightly-colored “bug juice”) to alert those with allergies and to give a heads-up to vegans who don’t want to be eating bugs, even if they’re “natural.”

Still, health advocates say that even if there is little harm in the actual, chemical substance of something like Red No. 40, artificial dyes present a “rainbow of risks.” Because it’s high-calorie, refined foods and not apples that require a little pigmentation pick-me-up, says Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest:

Companies use food coloring to simulate the presence of a fruit or a vegetable. To be honest, they’re used to cheat people—to mislead consumers. It’s cheaper to use these than the real thing.

Food colorings have been used for thousands of years. It’s no secret that the colors of foods and food packaging are designed to elicit emotions—from comfort to alertness—that go beyond basic physiology. The problem is not that we're tricking our brains into intensifying aromas, flavors, or the appeal of a particular brand of orange juice. It's that colors that once signified healthy, safe food can also fool us into thinking that yellow margarine or orange pasteurized processed cheese product tastes richer and fattier. Or that a deeper hue of Kool-Aid indicates a more mature cherry flavor. The trick now is to remake food without making it colorless.

You can search for foods with added colors here. 

Top chart shows the eight most common food dyes as a percentage of the total 15, 016,634 pounds certified by FDA in 2009. Bottom chart shows the pounds of each color certified by the FDA in 2009. Color palette via Sensient.

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have longed to return to a more primitive, simpler way of life. As soon as we had cities, we told stories about escaping them. The concept of the Appalachian Trail, organic agriculture, and Slow Food all arose from a dissatisfaction with technological advances. Now, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the "diseases of affluence"—obesity, diabetes, heart disease—are intrinsically linked to a modern diet and a sedentary way of life, it's time to consider a radical future for food.

What if that future involves going back in time—before the discovery of petroleum, before processed foods, and even before we cultivated starchy carbohydrates in what we now call agriculture? In the decades that followed S. Boyd Eaton's publication of "Paleolithic Nutrition" in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985, the "paleo diet" has been touted as a solution to our modern ills.

Before we turn back the clock, let’s take a look at what it meant to eat like an early hominin. In the two and half million years since the dawn of the Paleolithic period, our ancestors evolved bigger brains, which required dietary changes and probably required cooking, as Richard Wrangham persuasively argues in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Evolution shaped our digestive system: We have a voluminous small intestine and a short lower gut adapted to make better use of meats and cooked or processed grains. Mutations allow us to produce lactase so we can drink mammary fluids (and eat cheeses) beyond infancy. We're more resistant to certain damaging compounds created when food is heated and poorly equipped to resist toxins found in raw meats.

Still, questions remain: Was eating during the Paleolithic period really healthier than the modern human diet? Or is the problem with highly processed, energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods? In other words, is the “paleo diet” especially healthy, or is our current diet just especially bad? To find out, I spoke with four experts for a scholarly, historical taste test of the Paleolithic diet.

Bill Leonard is an anthropologist at Northwestern University who studies physiology and nutrition in ancient humans and traditional cultures alive today. His latest paper looks at evolutionary patterns in diet and activity to understand modern health problems.

Peter Ungar is an evolutionary biologist and paleoanthropoligist at the University of Arkansas who reconstructs ancestral diets using dental morphology and microwear. His latest book is called Mammal Teeth.

Amanda Henry is a paleobiologist studying the evolution of the human diet at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Her latest research examined plant microfossils in Neanderthal teeth for evidence of cooking.

Katharine Milton is a physical anthropologist who studies the dietary ecology of primates at the University of California at Berkeley. She has published numerous papers on modern and ancient human diets.

GOOD: What do you think our ancestors were eating during the Paleolithic period?

Bill Leonard: When you’re talking about any evolutionary-designed human diet, it depends where you look. If you set our ancestral diet as the period of the last common ancestors of humans with apes, you’re going to get a very different perspective than if you set it at the origins of the genus Homo at 1.5 to 2 million years ago.

Peter Ungar: In general, over a long period of time, our ancestors developed an ability to take a broader and broader range of things into the diet. Tools, including fire, gave them access to an unprecedented variety of foods, which meant they could live in more places and find something everywhere they went. That is not true of chimpanzees, our nearest relatives.

Amanda Henry: Although there tends to be this lingering image of Neanderthals as living in the Ice Age, where it was cold and there were no plants, more recent research paints a more complex picture and even suggests that our ancestors predominantly ate plant foods.

Katharine Milton: Do you really think ancestral humans went out and said, “We’re going out to get some French fries today”? No, they said, “With any luck, praying to the sun God, or whomever we revere, we’re hoping to get something to eat.” They don’t care what it is—a lizard, an elephant, a bunch of fruit, roots, a bunch of grubs. The human diet has always been whatever you can get your mitts on that won’t kill you and you can digest. That’s it. Simple as pie.

GOOD: When you look at popular representations of early humans—in the American Museum of Natural History’s diorama of Neanderthals, in Gary Larson’s "The Far Side," or in books advocating a paleo diet—meat often appears central to the diet. How important is meat?

Leonard: Although there’s an extraordinary range of variation, based on the climate and the environment, hunter-gatherers get a fair amount of meat in their diet. We require a diet that is more energy-dense than other primates and historically, we may have reached that point by incorporating more meat. It’s reflected in evolutionary changes in our face, our teeth, and in our gastrointestinal tract. Indeed, the GI tract of modern humans looks more like a carnivore's than a large primate's. Because early humans increasingly used tools to hunt, we don't show the same kinds of dental adaptations as modern carnivores.

Ungar: Two and half million years ago, we see enamel on the teeth of our ancestors get thinner; the teeth become smaller and more crested. The teeth can wear down and you get sharp edges that you didn’t have before. So we start to see ability to shear and slice with early Homo, which could indicate the consumption of some tougher foods such as meat.

Henry: Looking at plant micro-remains—tiny residue of plants—on the mineralized plaque of Neanderthal remains, it appears they were eating date fruits, starchy tubers, and wild relatives of barley. Not only were they eating them, they were cooking them too.

Milton: Humans evolved to eat a high-quality diet, but that doesn’t mean eating a lot of meat—especially today. Even the Eskimos and Inuits don’t eat a lot of meat. They eat marine mammal fat. No one eats a lot of meat. The only people who eat way too much meat are Americans, who are addicted to eating huge steaks, chops, and roasts.

GOOD: How much diversity was there in the diet and how much food processing was involved?

Leonard: There are lots of ways you can improve dietary quality—eating meat, cooking, or processing starchy carbohydrates. These are all human strategies for making food digestible and nutrients more bio-available. To argue that meats are the only strategy is as misguided as thinking that humans were evolved to be folivores, entirely vegetarian.

Ungar: While there’s increasing evidence of meat consumption from the first evidence of butchery 2.5 million years ago to around 1.8 million years ago, when we see sites with lot of bones, we still don’t know how that breaks down in terms of the ratio of meat to plant material. What we do know is that no single food provided a panacea.

Henry: In the early Upper Paleolithic periods, there’s evidence early humans were making flours and pastes. Even earlier, the Neanderthals in the Middle Paleolithic were cooking. That’s some of the oldest cooking—technically, heating in the presence of water—where they were taking a raw starch and turning it into something your body can process.

Milton: No matter where they evolved, our diet changed continuously, just like if you’re a primate living in the tropical forest. Every day a monkey in a tree does not eat the same thing; it may eat four or five kinds of leaves, one or two fruits, maybe some flowers. The next day, there’s 50 to 75 percent turnover in what that same monkey is eating and I assume that Paleolithic humans were the same way. Each day, they need to take in a sufficiency of good quality energetic substrate (sugars and starches) and enough protein—say 70 grams or so—to meet their daily requirements for amino acids.

GOOD: Judging by the proliferation of diet books, we’re really fascinated with the paleo diet. Some people swear by it and say it’s best to eat foods humans evolved to eat. Should I try it?

Leonard: In the modern, industrial world, we have become ever better at creating diets that are dense in calories and don’t require a lot of energy to procure them. No one recommendation is going to fit everybody, so the challenge is to find what works for you individually, and, at the same time, what fits the broad nutritional requirements of our species.

Ungar: There was no single Paleolithic diet. Still, I think these are valuable diets in that they remind us what we shouldn’t be eating. Our ancestors didn’t have the processed foods we have today. To say what we should be eating is more difficult, but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that australopiths did not eat corn dogs and drink milkshakes.

Henry: The diet may be perfectly good, but its theoretical underpinnings are wrong. The Paleolithic period is very long and very varied. Are you talking about the Middle Stone Age of Africa? Or the Upper Paleolithic of Europe. They were eating completely different things. We’re in a quest to understand that, but, to say, this is how you have to eat because this is how our ancestors ate is a fallacy.

Milton: While I don’t know what the paleo diet is, what I do know is that if you’re talking about trying to eat unprocessed foods, a high percentage of fruits and vegetables, and only as much animal source as you need to meet protein and essentially amino acid requirements, then that’s a good diet, especially if you get up and around for an hour each day out in the fresh air.

Top illustration: Sara Saedi/GOOD; Second illustration via Harper's Magazine. Third chart showing monkey via Katharine Milton in Scientific American. 1993:269; Fourth photo of Neanderthal Diorama in the American Museum of Natural History, New York via American Anthropologist ©American Anthropological Association; Fifth illustration of grasses found cave paintings in Parpalió, Spain, Montgaudier, France, and Trilobite, France, via The Nature of Paleolithic Art. Bottom photo (cc) Flickr user Lord Jim.

Imagine being a 300-pound guy, in tights, running around, running into other big guys while wearing 30 pounds of equipment. You’re going to sweat. A dozen Cowboys did so much sweating, they dropped out of the game with heat-induced muscle cramps. All the Eagles stayed in and the team won 41-14. The Eagles’ secret weapon? They fought off cramps with pickle juice.

Pickle juice has long had a reputation for curing hangovers, easing sunburns, or reducing the blisters on Nolan Ryan’s fingertips. But the 2000 game in Dallas really set the ball in motion. Now, there are pickle juice products (sort of the Schlitz of sports drinks) and at least one researcher attempting to unravel the drink's mysterious effects.

Following the "pickle juice game" in Dallas, Kevin C. Miller, then a doctoral student at Brigham Young University, got wind of the story. For his dissertation, he looked into the role that pickle juice can play in muscle cramping. Miller, who’s now a professor at North Dakota State University and the world’s leading expert on pickle juice (perhaps its only expert), performed another experiment in 2009.

He went out to Sam’s Club and bought two big 5-gallon buckets of Vlasic dill pickles. He lugged them back to the lab and drained out all the pickles. (He gives them away to students or fellow faculty). Miller had 12 healthy volunteers pedal for 30 minutes on stationary bicycles. When the riders became measurably dehydrated, he induced muscle cramps in their toes with electrical shocks and administered one of three things: nothing, ionized water, or pickle juice. Riders drank the equivalent of about 1 milliliter for every kilogram of body weight, so a 150-pound guy got about 2 ounces. Last May, he published the study, which showed pickle juice relieved cramps 45 percent faster than drinking nothing and 37 percent faster than water alone.

Here’s the thing: There’s no way the salty, vinegary liquid laced with sodium benzoate could actually reach your big toe or your stomach in 85 seconds, so there’s something else going on.

Miller suspects that the juice (probably the vinegar) triggers a reflex that tells our brains to tell our muscles to relax, something Bob Murray, a former Gatorade researcher who runs the firm Sports Science Insights, confirmed. “Scientists have known for a long time that the mouth has a lot of receptors. When we consume something, it gives the body the first sign of what’s on the way.”

This advances the theory that the limits of the human body—from fatigue to cramping—may have less to do with our muscles and more to do with our mind. Another study found that when cyclists on stationary bikes swished a carbohydrate-laced energy drink in their mouths, they didn’t even need to swallow the mixture—and voila! merely the presence of carbs in the mouth was enough to trick their brain into thinking the body would soon have more energy. One of the authors of that study, David Jones, a professor at the University of Birmingham's School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, says something slightly different appears to be going on with pickle juice.

“When a part of our body is hurting, the natural reaction is to hold or rub that area. However, a similar amount of pain relief can generally be obtained by rubbing other parts of the body and this certainly works as a way of relieving cramps,” he told me. “So I think the pickle juice is providing a bit of a shock to the system and you could probably get the same result by providing a bit of pain elsewhere on the body.”

In other words, drinking pickle juice could be like spraying Icy Hot on your skin, except it's vinegar hitting the back of your throat—temporarily taking your mind off what's the matter with your muscles. Which could also mean that drinking carbonated water or eating wasabi might function the same way. Even if you’re not watching the Super Bowl this weekend, it's worth thinking about how sometimes the strange things we eat and drink can bring a very different kind of relief.

Halftone illustration adapted from a photo (cc) by Dom Dada

It’s now on draft in New York City at places like Peel's and Brooklyn Farmacy. Chez Panisse in Berkeley has offered it since 2007. European cities are dispensing it in an effort to kick the bottled water habit. Venice gave out home carbonation kits to make its so-called “mayor’s water” frizzante and Paris now offers the bubbly—la pétillante—at a public water fountain in Jardin de Reuilly. Could bubbles reinvigorate the campaign for tap water?

“We think it's a terrific approach to delivering safe, affordable water to consumers,” Kate Fried, of Food and Water’s Tap Back the Tap, told me in an email. “We applaud the level of investment in public water infrastructure that it took to launch the [Paris] project. We'd love to see a similar attention to public water systems here in the U.S.”

Bottled carbonated beverages may date to as early as 3150 B.C. in Egypt, Patrick McGovern, author of Ancient Wines and biomolecular archaeologist, told me, but these drinks were without a doubt alcoholic. So aside from naturally occurring carbonated springs, like the one in Vergeze, France where Hannibal is said to found a refreshing drink after crossing the Alps, or the stinky sulfuric mineral baths at health spas, Europeans don’t seem to have been drinking much effervescent water until the 18th century. In 1767, Joseph Priestley developed a way to infuse the effervescence he harvested from beer into other liquids; he did so because he thought (incorrectly) that it could stave off scurvy. Much like today, bubbly then came with an allure of affluence and health.

Now, almost all of the multimillion-dollar bubbly water market is based on bubbles added to water after it’s been pumped out of a well. According to the Food and Drug Adminstration’s rules for water sold in the U.S., only “Sparkling Bottled Water” contains natural carbonation (or, curiously, the same amount of carbon dioxide that the water had at the source.) Perrier was actually forced to remove its “naturally sparkling” label after benzene was found in the company’s bottled water in 1989, apparently because of a manufacturing malfunction, all despite the company’s assertion that it’s bubbles were natural.

So unless you’re drinking Saratoga Springs, imported bubbly, Champagne, or bottle-conditioned beer, chances are your bubbly beverage has been infused with commercial CO2, which is either made by burning liquid petroleum or desulphurised natural gas, or is created as a manufacturing biproduct of ammonia or ethanol. Even with the current obsession with sourcing, it’s hard to image those sources making on the farm-to-table menu.

According to Mark Denny in Froth: The Science of Beer, the world’s total beer manufacturing creates 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 bubbles a year. If these CO2 bubbles sound like a contributor to global warming, consider that even at that astronomical sounding rate, carbonation in beer makes up less than one half of one percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions. If anything, the biggest footprint comes from glass bottles, especially those thick enough to contain the 90 pounds per square inch of pressure inside a bottle of Champagne, shipped halfway around the world.

While there’s still little documented health benefits, the tiny bubbles add a sensory perk to drinking, adding the appearance of acidity and activating our so-called “wasabi receptors.” And whether it’s Perrier’s marketing campaign to yuppies in the mid-1970s or French winemakers in the late 19th century pitching Champagne to noveau riche for the holidays, carbonation still adds one thing: a clean, stylish cachet. Even if it’s just plain old tap.

Will 2011 be the year we finally to tap into bubbly water for the masses? Wait, what if we filled pools with bubbly for the new year? Someone’s already thought of that. As food scientist Dave Arnold told Cabinet magazine:

I’ve always wanted to have a swimming pool filled with seltzer, although it would be quite painful. All your orifices would probably hurt. Imagine opening your mouth and diving into a pool of ice-cold seltzer: for a second, you’d be like, Ahh, and then, Err.

I’ll stick with a glass of bubbly, thanks.

Ahh.

Images of Champagne bubbles from Gérard Liger-Belair, via “Flower-shaped structures around bubbles collapsing in a bubble monolayer.”

“Everyone who eats will benefit from this historic legislation,” Michael F. Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said in a press release. Chris Waldrop, the director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, told the Chicago Tribune, “It's really a paradigm shift. It moves [Food and Drug Administration] from reacting to outbreaks and recalls to preventing them.”

Maybe it’s really only remarkable since the Senate has accomplished so little on immigration and comprehensive energy reform. The food safety bill hardly sounds revolutionary. It’s a list of powers you’d expect the nation’s food safety regulators to have already. The FDA will have the power to issue recalls rather than leaving them up to individual food producers to recall food suspected of contamination voluntarily. It requires food safety plans and a food tracking system to make it easier to find sources of contamination. The bill is also intended to hold imported foods to the same safety standards as domestic foods.

The legislation still has to be reconciled with H.R. 2749, the House bill of food safety (see USA Today’s comparison of the two bills). But since controversial restrictions on Bisphenol-A (introduced by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-California) and a moratorium on earmarks (introduced by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma) were dropped, it’s expected to be resolved and head to Obama’s desk before the end of the year. In short, there’s still a chance it could fail because of concerns about where the estimate $1.6 billion to fund the bill will come. Then, we’ll have to wait another two months for another thousand people to die from food-borne illnesses.

That’s what it took Congress in 1938 with the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act, which passed after a protracted legislative battle—and only passed after the 1937 “Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy,” wherein a Tennessee company sold a badly manufactured medicine that was essentially antifreeze and caused more than 100 deaths.

So it’s hardly the first time the sweeping food safety legislation has stalled for years. The Pure Food and Drugs Act was introduced in 1889, and languished for 17 years until the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle pushed forward the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. While the earlier food safety act might be remembered as the hallmark legislation that ushered in a wave of large-scale, federal food industry regulation, it shuttered small food processing facilities, writes historian Andrew F. Smith in Eating History. “Typically, it was the large processors who opposed the regulation, but then had a much easier time carrying it its requirements, which is still true today.” 

And that’s one issue that contemporary critics have coalesced around, creating an unlikely alliance of Tea Party survivalists and crunchy hippy farmers. They say the bill will "makes it illegal to grow, share, trade, or sell homegrown food." It’s like the Patriot Act of food, “the most dangerous bill in the history of the United States.” Soon the TSA will be touching our tangelos.

“The granolas come at it from a standpoint that they want to eat all natural foods, and drink raw milk because they believe it cures everything from autism to erectile dysfunction,” Bill Marler, an outspoken food safety lawyer who’s been involved in drafting S. 510 told Mother Jones. “Then you have the tea party involved not because they drink raw milk but because they don't want the government involved in any aspect of their lives.”

While opponents continue to assert that the bill imposes a one-size-fits all, the Senate passed a version bill with an amendment from organic farmer Jon Tester (D-Montana) that exempts small farmers, who, Tester said, can’t afford and don’t need the regulation. Food guru Michael Pollan agreed, saying: "S. 510 is the most important food safety legislation in a generation. The Tester amendment will make it even more effective, strengthening food safety rules while protecting small farmers and producers.”

Small may be beautiful and small may eventually lead to a paradigm shift, but the most important thing to remember about any food safety bill is that it should reduce levels of illness and death. To do that, we’ve got to take on the 99 percent of farms and food producers that are causing illnesses and right now, unfortunately, they are not on the fringe. They're consistently the country’s largest food producers. 

Image (cc) by Flickr user misterbisson.

Is it even possible to taste good food in midair, much less make palatable in-flight fare?

November 24 kicks off the busiest travel season of the year. If you’re like 24 million other Americans, you’ll be taking to the skies. At 30,000 feet, airlines whip out a pre-packaged smorgasbord of salty snacks and sodas from a metal cart for a captive audience. Pringles, Munchie Mix, Blue Diamond almonds, salted cashews, or a cardboard box containing a plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich the texture of your passport. If the TSA’s security theater weren’t bad enough, in-flight fodder is another, albeit slight, indignity to endure this Thanksgiving.

While food has become a source of apprehension associated with air travel for years, in-flight meals weren’t always this way. Aeronauts, who made the first human ascent in hydrogen balloons in 1783, brought along bottles of champagne, writes Richard Holmes in The Age of Wonder. The acrobatic balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi lunched on chicken legs as he “rowed” his balloon across the sky, and when Jean Blanchard and John Jeffries flew across the English Channel in 1785, they packed bread, chicken, and brandy (which they later jettisoned to avoid crashing).

With the advent of zeppelins and airplanes in the early 20th century, commercial air transport aspired to become a flying equivalent of lavish ocean liners or luxury railcars—and cold picnics were central to attracting riders. Guillaume de Syon, who wrote a chapter on airline food in Food for Thought, told me, “If airlines wanted to be competitive, they had to have fare that was equivalent to that of a Pullman car. At times, airlines even ordered meals from railway companies.”

As the airline industry took off in the 1930s, some flights offered a nauseating combination of fried chicken, box lunches, and free cigarettes—anything to get your mind off the bumpy, uncomfortable flight itself. While there was a brief period of luxury in-air dining, airlines also set the expectations high, mostly to justify the cost of a $300 ticket. A 1984 Pan Am Worldways flight from New York to San Francisco, for example, served, among other things Lobster Thermidor and yellow rice with almonds and raisins (this is via Northwestern University’s excellent menu collection). Because of this legacy, when we board today, we still hope the food will excel and help to pass the time, to entertain, and, more than anything, to fulfill the ritual of flying. And we still expect a good food despite some very clear technical limitation—and some even clearer economic ones.

Today’s caterers rely on economies of scale and employ the kind of food service technology you’ll find in hospitals and school cafeteria kitchens. The cook-chill systems cook food sous-vide, rapidly chill it, and then reheat it onboard. Earlier this year, USA Today discovered that SG Sky Chefs, Gate Gourmet, and Flying Food Group cut corners and prepared contaminated foods from fly- and roach-infested facilities. But even under optimal conditions, cooked to the exact specifications of the latest celebrity chefs hired to reinvigorate flaccid airline fare, the taste of food changes when you’re inside a parched, hypobaric metal tube that’s vibrating and humming along at 550 miles per hour.

Recently, Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines conducted research inside a stationary Airbus A310 designed to replicate flying conditions. Deutche Welle reported that flyers said their taste buds felt dulled, requiring 20 percent more sugar and salt (explaining the particular appeal of V-8 or a Bloody Mary). In another study published this fall, British and Dutch researchers outfitted volunteers with headphones playing loud background noises and found that the noise made foods appear less salty and sweet. Loud noise did make crunchy foods appear crunchier—more Munchie Mix, anyone?

The studies suggest that in order to make tasty in-flight, you almost have to undermine healthy offerings, leaving little hope for bringing the intense flavors of local, baby carrots or the nuance of regional wines to the skies without completely reengineering airplanes. So why bother? “Airline food is a necessity that we’ve come to expect,” de Syon says. “But we’re not going to discuss it when we come home to our families. ‘Oh the Chablis was so good…’ Still, the fact that airlines keep trying to make it better gives me hope. It’s just we can’t expect much for what little we pay.”

The last time I ate at a McDonald’s was in Detroit, en route to Boston, after having missed a connecting flight home. While the latest Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine report says that Detroit's airport is the only one in the country where every fast food joint has at least one healthy offering, I couldn't help but think about how those early aeronauts and zeppelin passengers were thrilled by the romance of eating while traveling. Even in times of troubling economic times and cutbacks in quality—call me a Romantic if you want—I’m still hoping for an exception to that rule when I’m flying.

Illustrations by Junyi Wu

What happens when you mix caffeine and alcohol? In the case of the energy beer Four Loko, things are getting loco.

Twenty students were hospitalized in New Jersey. Nine freshmen girls in central Washington got sent to the ER. Attackers in a brutal anti-gay gang crime in the Bronx reportedly forced a victim to down four cans of the stuff. Police found a crushed can behind the seat of a man who crashed into car, killing a family of three. And a naked intruder who passed out on a woman’s couch in Florida said the last thing he remembered was drinking one.

There’s no doubt that the energy beer Four Loko packs a punch—it contains 12 percent alcohol and as much caffeine as a weak cup of coffee in every tallboy. While its makers, Phusion Projects LLC, say that’s no different than “having coffee after a meal with a couple of glasses of wine” and should not be inherently linked to risky behavior, the flurry of recent news involving the drink has resurrected the ongoing debate over what the beverage industry calls caffeinated alcoholic beverages, or CABs, and what the rest of us calls alco-speed, alco-crack, or simply “blackout in a can.”

Last November, after receiving complaints from state attorneys general, the Food and Drug Administration told beverage makers that they would have 30 days to prove that combining alcohol and caffeine was not dangerous or the agency would “take appropriate action to ensure that the products are removed from the marketplace.” It’s been nearly a year since the threat—and beverage makers and drinkers alike don’t seem to be slowing down.

While Miller killed their CAB Sparks and Anheuser-Busch agreed to discontinue Tilt and Bud Extra in 2009, shelves has been flooded with similar drinks from small manufacturers. The products have names like Liquid Charge, Joose, Torque, Hard Wired, 24/7, Catalyst, Moonshot, Evil Eye, Mobius Lager, Smirnoff Raw Tea Malt Beverage, Wide Eye, Lotus Vodka, 3AM Vodka, Vicious Vodka with Caffeine, Slingshot Party Gel, and Ithaca Eleven Malt Beverage with Coffee.

Since the 1980s, sweet, fruity alcoholic beverages have become more prevalent. From wine coolers to “malternatives,” like Zima, in the mid-1990s, they’ve become a full-blown market force (think Mike's Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice.) Because the drinks generally have a lower percentage of alcohol than wine or whiskey, they’re subject to lower taxes and, in some states, can be sold at supermarkets. Beverage Retailer magazine told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000 that fruity malted brews had surpassed wine coolers and comprised $90 million in sales annually. By the time Sparks launched in 2002, the idea of combining fruity alcohols with energy drinks (Red Bull vodka, anyone?) hardly seemed out of place.

The Center for Disease Control says scientific research indicates that people who consume both caffeine and alcohol simultaneously may increase their risk of alcohol-related injuries, getting into a car with a drunken driver, or being taken advantage of sexually. But that might not be compelling enough evidence for the FDA to warrant a ban. Either way, the agency would still have no jurisdiction over bars serving Red Bull vodkas or Jägerbombs.

Perhaps what’s at stake are the larger cultural issues around drinking. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, “[Four Loko is] a malt liquor in confectionary drag … serving as the clearest possible reminder that many drinkers aren’t seeking any particular culinary or aesthetic enjoyment. They’re taking a drug. The more festively it’s dressed and the more vacuously it goes down, the better.”

Prohibition came and went for good reason. Still, kids who aren’t exposed to drinking in appropriate and safe settings make mistakes, some of which will make the local police blotter. It’s entirely possible to drink “blackout in a can” in a reasonable and prudent manner, so maybe a ban is not the answer. What is in order? A better conversation about drinking. In an earlier debate over provisional drinking licenses (essentially a learners’ permit for inexperienced drinkers), David J. Hanson offered this bit of advice in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “It's time to open the doors to constructive debate and to teach through trust and potential rather than through blame, accusation, and guilt. It’s time to move beyond the forbidden-fruit syndrome—and its tragic consequences.”

While raw food advocates might not have any conclusive science behind their beliefs, all food lovers should be worried about the government's recent crackdown.

On June 30, armed federal agents stormed Rawesome Foods in Venice, California. Four officers had their handguns drawn, and video of the raid shows them skirting boxes of produce in a warehouse. The alleged perpetrators had put their stash in a back cooler. What was it? Raw milk, straight from the udder, and full of what one Rawesome employee said was vibrational nutrients.

News of the raid spread quickly. Perhaps it came as a particular affront because it happened in California, the front line for alternative healers, meditation gurus, and Juliano, the raw food poster boy and author of The UnCook Book. Or perhaps it was because federal agents had their guns drawn for a seemingly nonviolent raid on a vendor that had been operating without a Los Angeles food license for five years. Even libertarian U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) joined the fray, telling The Colbert Report,“People have a right in a free society to do stupid things.”

The fall-out continued later this summer when the Food and Drug Administration forced Morningstar Farms in Missouri to destroy 50,000 pounds of cheese after California officials reported finding contaminated samples of the farm's raw milk cheese in the Rawesome raid. With apologies to Ron Paul and Stephen Colbert, the latest in an ongoing battle over raw foods doesn't need to turn the country into any more of an idiocy spectacle. If anything, it’s time to reexamine the roots of raw food—and, if nothing else, at least consider how raw milk might lead to a better cheese culture.

Humans have come a long way from our hunting and gathering days, but raw foodists believe that we’ve suffered as a result of eating foods cooked at 104 degrees or higher. The ideology has taken hold among New Age types and Christian evangelists, who tend to frame raw foods as “natural” opposed to contaminated by human culture—recalling the structuralist views of the late anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, who believed raw foods were symbolically closer to nature than are cooked foods. But, as Richard Wrangham argues in Catching Fire, learning to heat is what made us human. And just this week, scientists found evidence that Paleolithic humans in Europe cooked primitive grains, further dismantling the historical basis for a raw Paleo diet.

In fact, there’s little definitive food science that establishes the superiority of raw foods across the board. Food is just not that simple. Kidney beans are toxic when raw. Other foods become more palatable or nutritious. Spinach, for example, contains high amounts of oxalic acid, which can inhibit calcium absorption when eaten raw. All this may be beside the point to raw foodists, who cling to beliefs about the enzymatic and nutritional benefits. While raw-foodists represent an in?nitesimal fraction of Americans, the fad has gained momentum in the last two decades. For example, in 1975, The New York Times reported that only five certified dairies in the United States sold raw fluid milk. Clearly, that’s changed.

Raw milk and raw milk cheese were the focus of this summer’s raid. Each raises separate issues and each deserves more attention. While raw milk can be consumed safely provided proper care and attention is given to the health of a cow, milk can host Listeria, E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Salmonella. Milk once helped transmit typhoid and tuberculosis at the turn of the 20^th century, and mandatory pasteurization was hailed as a major public health victory. Now, almost all milk is cooked (pasteurization heats it to 161 degrees and keeps it there for 15 seconds), and the Food and Drug Administration considers drinking raw milk like “playing Russian roulette with your health.” Although one recent study linked its consumption with lower rates of asthma and allergies, Bruce German, a food chemist at the University of California at Davis, told NPR that the study was far from conclusive, because it didn’t account for factors that could influence a person’s health—say, lifestyles associated with paying $6 a gallon for milk. He told me in an e-mail, “The health risks of raw milk are well documented in the scientific literature and the importance of pasteurization is not a subject of scientific controversy.”

Making cheese out of raw milk is another issue, but the FDA still bans the import and the sale of raw milk cheese less than 60 days old over similar concerns about bacterial pathogens. Given the right combination of salt, acidity, and microbes, these cheeses can be far safer than raw fluid milk and tastier. There’s well-documented body of research to support how this traditional food is essentially made safe by good microbes. Heather Paxson, the author of the scholarly paper “Post-Pasteurian Cultures,” told me there’s a major difference between the microbiological risks associated with raw milk and raw milk cheese. Still, the FDA’s pasteurization mandate persists, rather than considering how we can sort out helpful and harmful microbes and safely produce, packaged, and market raw milk cheeses.

The latest raids may have hit a raw nerve, but maybe not for the right reasons. It’s clear that the federal government should look out for our health, but it’s ludicrous that they went in with guns drawn to an unlicensed food distributor that sold milk to a couple hundred Californians, while two egg manufacturers whose raw eggs sickened 1,600 American never went under the gun. Still, all raw foods are not created equal. If there’s any lesson that comes out of this, let’s hope it’s more attention to delicious Brie, ricotta, or queso fresco, which everyone—raw and cooked food lovers alike—can get behind.

Claus Meyer once started a one-man business delivering lunches around Copenhagen on his Raleigh bicycle. He has since expanded, creating a center for cooking classes, developing cafeterias that serve 13,500 office workers, and opening the restaurant Noma, which was recently ranked as the world's best. He helped write the Manifesto for New Nordic Cuisine, a set of commandments calling for a return to regional and traditional foods endorsed by many Scandinavian chefs. He has a television show, where he bicycles around eating oysters and catching halibut. Behind his house in Copenhagen, he ages his own line of vinegars. All his projects veer towards the quixotic and the genial ambassador of Nordic cuisine can come off a bit like a heady-sounding Werner Herzog of cooking, given to sweeping profundities.

“The New Nordic Cuisine is a certain approach to food, and it’s a revolution that can transform society,” he tells me. “It’s a virus that has been set free that is going to redefine how we think about food. It’s about seizing the moment, getting the best out of nature—both cultivated nature and the wild nature.”

At Noma, which Meyer co-owns with chef Rene Redzepi, that translates into the artful, almost surgical, presentation of local ingredients, like milk ice and barley, celeriac and Icelandic moss, blueshell mussels and angelica. But how does a visionary spirit—understanding the science of carrot genetics, where each ingredient came from and who grew them, along with the knowledge of hundreds of types of rhubarb, 700 apple cultivars, and turnips sweet as pears—translate to the rest of us? Thankfully, the Emeril of Scandinavian TV doesn’t appear to be rolling out a flimsy line of Noma golf towels and Reindeer Bam! B-Q Sauces. Instead, Meyer is diligently working on another project: tackling obesity.

Later this month, he’s coming to Stanford for the Future of Health Innovation with the nutrition researcher Arne Astrup. The two want to build a Nordic version of the Mediterranean diet. And by working with the best Danish chefs and the Ministry of Health in the $18 million Opus Project, they hope to scientifically legitimize a diet of lean meats, root vegetables, whole-grain breads, and regional berries—and implement the idea in schools to address childhood obesity and other health issues. After all, not everyone in Denmark looks like Helena Christensen and May Anderson. Obesity rates hover around 10 percent (about a quarter of those of the United States.).

In other words, Meyer wants to use the brand of the world’s best restaurant to be an instrument of change. It’s a noble goal—one straying slightly from Redzepi’s cooking, which brought Noma to the world’s attention. “I wouldn’t say we’ve taken Rene Redzepi as a hostage, but we’ve used him to create and endorse this—to use the knowledge from great chefs to co-brand healthy food,” Meyer says. “The idea of changing people’s lives was part of the thinking from the very first moment.”

In the end, eating like a Viking will not ultimately be as simple as loading up on herring or a fish oil pill—just as eating a lot of extra virgin olive oil, a hallmark of the Mediterranean Diet, won’t make you live longer. (It’s also about active lifestyles and less stress.) Meyer believes that foods native to every region in the world could carry similar health potential—provided we endorse home cooking—although he still seems partial to the idea of ultra-Slow Foods of northern Europe: slow-growing fish that ply the North Sea or cabbages and cloudberries that ripen slower than Italian tomatoes. “They seem to be extremely healthy from a theoretical point of view.”

Our culture is bent on dieting—from Sylvester Graham’s whole-wheat crackers to the Zone Diet, Atkins Diet, Blood Type Diet, More of Jesus, Less of Me Diet, the Cookie Diet, the Caveman Diet, and the Master Cleanse. Because these fads ignore basic physiology, like hunger and satisfaction, they’re bound to fail. The New Nordic cuisine is not a fad. It’s not exactly the exquisitely prepared seven-course menu you’ll find at Noma or in its glossy new coffee-table book. Still, the model could show the world how haute cuisine, branding, and science can tackle compelling health problems like obesity—and how pioneering chefs could lead the charge for healthier diets without compromising the exacting tastes found on their menus.

Two years ago, Peter Rothbart was riding through Seattle on his bike. He came to a traffic circle. In the center was a 15-by-20-foot patch of soil where the city allows residents to garden. A man was standing there, looking down at a sorry-looking bunch of plants that had been run over and obliterated by a late-night driver. Later that evening, Rothbart went to a barbecue and overheard a woman talking about how she had an expansive lawn that she didn’t have time to take care of. “What if that guy could garden her land?” he said. “It just seemed like a good idea.”

So he started We Patch, one of a dozen new websites designed to connect wannabe gardeners with landowners who have available garden space. Let’s say you have an unused space that might make a good pumpkin patch, you offer it up on the website. If you’re a gardener without a garden, you can find available space—and contact the landowner. Sometimes, it leads to a rendezvous and a handshake agreement. Other times, gardeners and landowners spell out exactly how they’ll share produce and labor from a shared plot of land. It’s like a Craigslist devoted exclusively to gardeners—without the used car parts and hopefully with fewer missed connections.

Since 2007, when Joshua Patterson launched Yardsharing from Portland, Oregon, the concept has grown to at least a dozen websites, each focusing on either a distinctive region or cultivating a certain set of gardening-related skills. Other sites have been springing up, including Hyperlocavore, BKFarmyards in Brooklyn, Urban Garden Share in Seattle, Growfriend in Los Angeles, Yards to Gardens in Minneapolis, SharingBackyards.com in British Columbia, and the nationwide Shared Earth. The trend really took off in 2009 when the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, chef at River Cottage in England and the Jamie Oliver of gardening, aired a TV segment about garden-sharing, which soon spawned Landshare, a high-profile effort that has 55,000 people gardening on about 3,000 acres. And as soon as they find a partner, Landshare will be coming to the United States.

All these garden-sharing sites are designed to put idle resources to good use—to connect the estimated 40 percent of people in the United States without yard space with the 21 million acres of idle, underused space that’s currently being occupied by lawns. At the same time, municipal and community gardens are often overbooked and have yearlong waitlists. In England, the wait time can be as much as 40 years. As Landshare’s Fearnley-Whittingstall told The Times of London, “The danger with waiting is that you lose the urge. If you want to grow vegetables, you want to do it now—it's like falling in love, it starts to consume you.”

But instead of digging in real dirt, our agrarian urges manifest themselves in a game that 90 million Facebook users play: running fake farms on Farmville, growing virtual vegetables that no one can eat, and squandering the equivalent of 78 years every month. What land- and garden-sharing sites offer is the potential to transform that social networking into something like a real-life Farmville.

This whole idea of sharing land isn’t exactly new, and the idea of community—as cliché as it might sound—has been part of the American landscape from early utopian communities to the latest planned cul-de-sac suburb. As Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers write in their new book, What’s Mine is Yours, the increased interest in harnessing the idling capacity of backyards addresses our concern about the environment, the financial recession, the resurgence of community through social networking, and using technology for better efficiency. “When you talk to people, it’s about far more than the food,” Botsman says. “My dad started doing it and he sends me photos all the time. And for the first time in thirteen years, he’s knows his neighbors’ names.”

Garden-sharing remains relatively new but there are signs that it’s becoming more mainstream. The City of Santa Monica recently set up a municipal garden-sharing site in an attempt to alleviate its 200-person long wait list for community gardens. “I don’t know why every city doesn’t implement something like this,” Botsman told me. “It’s a no brainer. It’s low-cost and you can lay it on to any existing social network.”

While urban gardens may not feed the world, gardening has immediate results. It’s highly participatory and, compared to other social reforms like improved housing or schools, it’s relatively inexpensive. If the idea took hold among 10 percent of the land households in New York City, says Nevin Cohen, a professor at the New School Eugene Lang College, the effort might yield close to 113 million pounds of vegetables annually, enough to feed 666,211 people (about 8 percent of the city’s population). In cities with more spare land, like Detroit or New Haven, Connecticut, the harvest could easily double or triple. And just as Wikipedia has shown that large accumulations of small things can add up to an encyclopedic knowledge, garden sharing sites could show how the wisdom of crowds has the potential to share the fruits of farmland—and not just the virtual kind.

Cappelletti, cappellacci, tortelli, lasagna, dischi volanti, alfabeto... Inspired by the 1,200 named pasta shapes, designer Caz Hildebrand and chef Jacob Kenedy created a stylish new cookbook that pairs minimalist black-and-white drawings with recipes from London's Bocca di Lupo. The book hopes to give non-Italians a proficiency in the skill of pairing pasta shape and sauces. When you pick it up in paper, The Geometry of Pasta book jacket doubles as a striking fold-out poster. And its website has recipes and an equally impressive guide to pasta shapes.

Illustrations courtesy of Caz Hildebrand/Here Design

Consider the orange. Citrus sinensis. Its fleshy, segmented fruit has a tight-fitting skin and contains at least 300 different chemicals. It is not easy to grow. It takes about 13 gallons of water. The fruit only ripens on the tree before it’s picked. And since they’re only grown in six states, oranges are either packed and shipped to places where citrus doesn’t grow or processed into one of America’s favorite breakfast drinks: orange juice.

If you’re like me and live in a region ill-adapted for citrus groves, the sustainable orange options are pretty limited. The only way I could grow an orange tree would be to turn my garden into a palace of plastic that might resemble a Christo and Jean Claude sculpture and ask for a huge tax break on my utility bills. But a new website called carbonfoodprint is trying to provide an alternative.

Carbonfoodprint is designed to help you create all-natural alternatives to high carbon-footprint flavors from ingredients right in your backyard. By using knowledge of molecular gastronomy, the theory goes, one can find locally available flavors that, in the right combination, taste like an orange.

I first heard about Bernard Lahousse, the man behind carbonfoodprint (who is also the project manager at The Flemish Primitives and a food scientist at Sense for Taste), from Martin Lersch’s website Khymos. Lahousse has created an online flavor thesaurus that graphs the volatile compounds in foods. One use for this resource is inspiring chefs to play with unusual combinations of foods based on what they have in common at a molecular level. This has meant injecting the scent of a kiwi into oysters (it turns out they both share methyl hexanoate, a chemical with a fruity pineapple-like taste). Or opening up the possibility of substituting coriander, tarragon, clove, and laurel for fresh basil.

While that application of molecular gastronomy veers off into the culinary avant-garde, carbonfoodprint has the potential to change the world. Or at the very least, cut the carbon associated with our oranges.

“Orange is quite difficult to make,” Lahousse told me. “First we said, ‘Which are the flavor components? What are the key odorants? What other products could we use to replace those key odorants? What products do we have locally to recreate the orange?’” This may sound like conceptual cooking, but bioengineering an orange was not a theoretical project. Lahousse says it’s possible to replicate some of the flavor-packing that OJ makers do in the confines of your own home.

Lahousse charted the 10 key components of an orange in a sunburst diagram. Each color stands for a key flavor component and using the right combination of other ingredients, one could create the taste of an orange without actually using an orange. You could use grapes, cucumber, cilantro, tarragon, or a number of other components depending on where you are. “The aim of the project is to inspire people how they can use local products to recreate exotic or high carbon footprint products,” he says. “These flavors are all around.” 

His “orange” recipe (currently the only one available on the site, more are coming soon) calls for:

• 20 grams of groundcherry (also known as husk cherries or Physalis)
• 10 grams of melon
• 5 grams gooseberry
• 3 seeds of coriander
• 1 juniper berry

I was able to find most of these ingredients—all it took was a trip to the coast for some juniper berries and a stop at the farmers’ market. As I weighed them out and blended them together, I realized I had never really noticed the orange-like smell of a melon, but the sweet fruity scent was there. It turns out acetaldehyde is found in both oranges and ripe melons. My end result—an orange juice that actually looked quite green—tasted sweeter and less tart than Minute Maid and more like the orange liquid you get from sucking on a citrus throat lozenge. Call it the power of placebo, but something about making “orange” myself made the drink taste more like orange, a flavor that’s nearly impossible to replicate.

And here’s the thing—to have both your “orange” and your locavore merit badge in much of the world, you may need to have an open mind about molecular science. “If these flavors are connected on a molecular level, they might go well together food-wise. You still need to use skill and knowledge to make it happen,” says H. Alexander Talbot, author of the blog and the forthcoming book Ideas in Food. “It’s not just some miracle donkey dust that you sprinkle on things. The rabbit doesn’t just come out of the hat. There’s a reason it does.”

And maybe that’s the larger message. The public shouldn’t dismiss avant-garde scientific techniques off-hand just because they haven’t heard of them before. Lahousse’s latest project makes it clear that molecular science is not merely smoke and mirrors and frivolous foams. It can also be about the possibility of reinterpreting the lime flavor with cilantro and lemon grass, re-imagining cranberries when a recipe calls for lemons, or unlocking the secret to fried bacon in basmati rice, strawberry, and black tea. For those who want to eat local and seasonal but don't want to give up whole swaths of flavors, food science may have found a solution.

“We are scientists. We want to have the best taste,” Lahousse told me. “Mother Nature is very intelligent. It’s up to science people to understand that intelligence and use it well.”

Illustration by Junyi Wu

They’ve cleaned up brush on a Vanderbilt estate in New York and bushwhacked through Druid Hill Park in Baltimore. Google hired a herd to graze their headquarters and Yahoo! followed suit. They’ve taken down invasive blackberries along the Appalachian Trail, cleared kudzu in the Carolinas, and chowed down on ivy behind Seattle’s Metro bus depot. Goats have been running up and down the fire-prone hillsides of Los Angeles for at least two decades. There’s a smorgasbord for goats almost anywhere—railroad easements, leftover produce, and overgrown lots. That might mean good news for meat lovers concerned about the industrial production of their food.

“Goats are a good ecological alternative to mowing and they’re used all over California for grazing. It’s much less resource intensive than pulling weeds by hand or using pesticides,” says Nicolette Niman, the author of Righteous Pork Chop, who has been developing a goat herd with a cooperative of ranchers over the last two years. “And you can end up with meat, too. I don’t know how many people are producing goat meat this way, but that’s not to say they couldn’t.”

There’s good reason to reconsider the future of red meat, with its heavy environmental tolls. So maybe it’s time to consider eating goat meat. Last month, Grub Street pointed out a proliferation of goat stews and roasts have snuck on to menus at white linen restaurants, with chefs like Chris Cosentino and Zakary Pelaccio giving goat a go. And as the increased popularity of goat cheese, yogurts, and milk climbed over the last decade, it’s resulted in a surfeit of goat meat. As Brad Kessler writes in Goat Song, “You can’t eat an ice cream or drink a latte without killing animals. All those unwanted boy calves, lambs, and kids inevitably end up butchered.” If we’re not eating them, that meat goes to waste.

Although goats first arrived in North America 400 years ago, their meat has hardly become a staple, except in certain ethnic neighborhoods where you might find cabrito, roti, or maraq. Much of this goat meat comes from overseas and many state agriculture officials have been encouraging ranchers to diversify to meet local demand. When I asked Ray Mobley, an organizer of a recent national conference on goat meat, if he thought it was the new beef, he said, “It’s not new. To call it the new beef is simply not true. It’s just the U.S. has not been a leading consumer. Globally, there is more goat meat consumed than any other red meat."

And despite the stereotype, goats don’t really eat garbage, they just graze on marginal land. Carla Brauer at City Grazing in San Francisco, which is owned by Waste Solutions Group and uses goats to clear vegetation around the city, told me they don’t offer kids for sale—in part because meat processing legislation favors feedlots over small producers. “And I don’t know how my boss would feel about slaughtering workshops. He tends to think of goats as pets. At the same time, it’s a really productive thing to raise your own goats for meat.”

If small urban producers can overcome these processing-related hurdles, goats seem well adapted for urban farming. Bill Niman, a pioneer in good meats, and others are now showing that goats can be raised for ecological purposes and for high-quality meat. Goat meat packs all the protein of red meats and, as Mike Canaday at California Grazing told me, “There’s no antibiotics. That’s not the way goats are raised. They’re ninety-eight percent free range. They’re not like chickens or beef, where you can have a huge feedlot.” When he put his on the side of the freeway, they didn’t get sick or eat waste. They did pose another problem—traffic slowed to a standstill from all the rubbernecking.

It might be time to look into goats, the so-called "soccer of meats." As much of the world knows, it can be delicious. “I’m a beef guy,” Canaday says. “But I like goat. A good piece, slow and seasoned—it’s as good as anything else. Sometimes I’ll serve it to friends and they’ll just rave about it. Sometimes I don’t even mention it’s not beef.”

Illustration by Junyi Wu