Personal Science Week - 250109 Cooking

Personal science in the kitchen, plus more updates

To a personal scientist, a simple kitchen is a sophisticated laboratory.

This week we discuss a few ideas related to cooking. What can we learn?

Experiment with flavors

My favorite way to add interesting flavor to any dish is to follow the guidelines in this series of charts from Tim Ferris’s excellent book The 4-Hour Chef. Here’s one sample:

4-Hour-Chef is a great book, but it was written before ChatGPT revolutionized the way many of us put together foods. With a little prompting, I can create a similar chart with more fine-grained regional options:

Try it! The next time you cook something—chicken, tofu, any vegetable—instead of seasoning with plain ole salt and pepper or something simple, just throw a few of these ingredients instead. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to “spice” up an otherwise normal meal.

Another way to simplify healthy cooking comes from Robb Wolf’s Food Matrix. Choose one item from each column — it doesn’t matter which one — and you have a simple, healthy meal:

This is a partial list. Download the whole chart and more instructions at Robwolf.com

How safe is your food?

We all know that meat should be cooked thoroughly before eating, but why? and says who? Part of the reason is flavor and ease of digestion, but every conventional discussion of meat includes the mandatory explanation that cooking is important to prevent disease. Still, animals eat raw meat all the time. We humans eat raw fruits and vegetables. What’s so special about meat that we think it should be cooked?

In fact, the interior of all animals, including that piece of chicken or beef, is sterile. Animal bodies are carefully designed to protect the interior from pathogenic microbes, which even in the tiniest amounts can cause serious illness and even death once they begin multiplying in the warm, well-nourished interior of a living creature. Unfortunately the exterior of an animal is usually loaded with microbes, many of which are pathogenic. When meat is poked or cut, there is a significant risk that some of those external microbes might land on the meat parts that you eat.

When you buy a shrink-wrapped piece of chicken or beef at the supermarket, you’re getting the interior — i.e. sterile — part of the animal. It’s always possible (perhaps likely) that some microbes slipped into the product somewhere in the processing, so maybe that’s the reason you should cook it? But again, isn’t that true of vegetables as well?

Pretty much all pathogenic microbes die at temperatures above 75ºC (165ºF), which is the origin of the better-safe-than-sorry advice you’ll find in cookbooks. But that’s only if you want to be really, really safe. In fact, microbes stop dividing and generally die at much lower temperatures. When the scientists at Nathan Myrhvold’s Modernist Cuisine Lab tested USDA’s claims about microbe survival, they produced this chart:

From Modernist Cuisine, by Myhrvold et al, p 177.

In other words, while it may be technically true that pathogens like Salmonella remain alive at temperatures below 75ºC (165ºF), for all practical purposes they stop reproducing long before that, and are essentially inert by 50ºC (120ºF). Ultimately the most important variable is your health and the health of your family members, so you may decide that even this tiny risk is not worth taking. But many foods taste considerably better when cooked at lower temperatures, so keep the tradeoffs in mind too.

Personal Scientist of the Week

Self-described “vexworker” Aella fed 2 years worth of Oura Ring and other data into Claude and asked how she could improve her mood. The answers are all obvious (“get more sleep”), so she asked a good followup:

i asked it for ways in which my stuff is unusual and it said

1. i do better with later sleep timing

2. i have less bad effects from alcohol

3. i respond much more positively to dancing than it would expect

4. no strong correlation with mood and sleep quality

5. unusually resilient to disruptions in circadian rhythm

6. socialization seems to have stronger positive impact than expected, to the extent it overrides lots of associated negative things (like poor sleep or drug use)

Personal Science Links of Interest

I found Aella via an excellent summary of issues and background of interest to personal science, with original cases studies of her, plus Four Thieves Vinegar, Seeds of Science: Little Science, Big Science, and Beyond: How Amateurs Shape the Scientific Landscape by McLean et al., (2024). https://doi.org/10.55458/neurolibre.00031.

Incidentally, check out that incredible new site Neurolibre.org, run by the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform. It’s a free-to-publish open-access server that bundles “living preprints” with downloadable and reproducible Jupyter code for everything.

And speaking of cooking:

• Modernist Pantry sells personal quantities of food additive ingredients normally available only to big food companies. For example, looking to increase the amount of fiber without affecting the taste? Try Methocel-50, a $15 pack of which will add 50g of fiber to anything.

• The Sourdough Framework is an open-source book, regularly updated by dozens of contributors, that claims to be the ultimate guide for bread-making. Written by a programmer, for programmers, it was widely shared along with other interesting bread-making links at Hacker News.

Finally, after last week’s PSWeek discussion of plastics, loyal reader Conor reminds us to check out Trevor Klee’s excellent Brief Analysis of the PlasticList report.

About Personal Science

Personal science is the process of using the scientific method to solve problems and get better results on an individual, personal level. Following the motto of the Royal Society, established in 1660, nullius in verba, we take nobody’s word for it. We rely on our own observations and make up our own minds.

This newsletter, published every Thursday, is a weekly summary of a few items we think will be interesting to anyone who wants to be a personal scientist. If you have other topics you’d like to discuss, please let us know.