Food Corner

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Imagine wives forcing their husbands’ to taste cocktail and they remain tight lipped? What is the fear? Yes, this can happen as they want only to taste it by adding it only in fruits, turning it healthy.

Now, a fruity cocktail can be more than a fun drink, said US and Thai researchers. The addition of ethanol, a type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits can enhance the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found.

A dash of alcohol can make a coloured food more healthful, the report in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture said. Berries contain compounds known as polyphenols and anthocyanins. People who eat these fruits and vegetables are less prone to cancer, heart and neurological diseases.

Nine MSN

If you are a foodie who doesn’t mind traveling far and wide to experience the magic of food across the borders and India is your next stoppage, then let me tell you that your food expedition cannot be complete without gorging upon the sumptuous biryani from Lucknow.

Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh that’s just an hour away from Delhio by air is world renowned to offer the best of this rice and mutton preparation popularly called Biryani.

Biryani is a simple but delicious meal of tender chunks of gently spiced mutton with moist grains of the finest quality basmati rice

Once in the city Idris Biryaniwala in Patanala Chowk or Mubeen’s restaurant in Akbari Gate can be your stop overs to have the mouthwatering meal at around midday. Discs of bread stained golden yellow with saffron pile up, while pots on hot charcoal are tended by vigilant cooks and there you have piping hot biryani …a treat that’s simply out of this world and worth all that journey.

Professor Tim Lang, winner of OFM’s lifetime achievement award, the man who coined the phrase ‘food miles’.

A foody person like me only can do this blunder of understanding the term Food Miles as the amount of energy provided by the intake of food that help us walk miles. But there is a witty mind with a bigger canvas behind it.

Yes, Professor Tim Lang, the winner of this year’s Observer Food Monthly Hall of Fame award. Not a familiar face among the general public, Lang’s past can be identified as his contribution to food additives, obesity, diet and food policy.

The term “food miles”, coined by him in the early 1990’s is perfect to describe the distance our groceries have to travel to reach us. Now the term enjoys the familiar status even in supermarkets.

He began thinking about the food chain and how industrial societies were severing links with the land and founded a network of NGO’s concerned with the regularity of our food supply. Then his move was setting a commission focusing on additives to food.

Early on the group publicised the fact that many additives were for cosmetic purposes only-brown being added to kippers and green to peas. As a result they were removed. It was 1980’s period when local councils cutting their budgets and nutritional standards falling was witnessed.

Fifteen years later, Jamie Oliver’s plea for better school lunches is still a reaction to that legacy. Lang acknowledges that the growth in local, artisanal farms and markets has been beneficial.

However he warns that “My own view is that we’re still sleepwalking into a shock. I think obesity is the health shock, healthcare costs because of obesity are the economic shock and climate change is the environmental shock. In the next few years the big issue will be food security, how we get what we need to eat. And I don’t think we’re paying anywhere near enough attention to that”.

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