Oddities

This month, let’s have a look at some general day-to-day oddities. After all, there is excitement and controversy to be found in even the kitchen!

MSG

Monosodium glutamate, better known as MSG, is a common chemical used in cooking to enhance flavour. Most foods contain some sort of glutaminic acid, in the same chemical family as MSG. Foods often used for their flavouring qualities, such as tomatoes and mushrooms, have high levels of naturally occurring glutamate. MSG has been used in China for over 1,200 years, in the form of a fermented seaweed soup stock.

MSG is created from fermented and hydrolysed protein, usually from corn, sugar, soy and wheat. Autolyzed yeast, hydrolysed soy protein, and sodium caseinate are examples of names given to hydrolysed proteins on food labels; these are all really a form of MSG. These are often listed as ‘natural food flavourings and additives’. They are often added to ‘low fat’ foods to improve the flavour of these products.

There is conflicting studies as to whether MSG causes allergic reactions in sensitive individuals. My own brother, who suffers from Coeliac Disease and is gluten intolerant, can not ingest large quantities of MSG. But some studies suggest that all human beings are sensitive to MSG on some level…which is difficult to credit, when the chemical is so prevalent in most foodstuffs. I’m afraid there is too much heated discussion on the topic for this writer to make a decision one way or the other.

When you go to a restaurant and ask for ‘no added MSG’, the restaurant will not add any – but it is already present in their ingredients. It is used as a savoury food enhancer; it will have no effect on sweet dishes. Overuse of MSG can have an undesirable effect on the taste of a dish, and it will not make a bad meal taste great. Some scientists believe MSG activates a fifth type of taste bud apart from sweet, sour, bitter and salty, a savoury flavour referred to as ‘unami’ by the Japanese.

Now, if you are gluten intolerant, I would recommend avoiding foods high in MSG – but you usually have to avoid all those foods anyway. Otherwise, it should be personal choice. If you suffer from shortness of breath, headaches, or aches & pains after eating food high in MSG, I would recommend taking a test for Coeliac Disease. There is no actual test for MSG sensitivity.

Camels

I am going to go out on a limb and declare camels to be more highly evolved then human beings. And I will list the reasons to back-up this statement:

These are just some of the adaptations camels have made to survive in an arid, desert environment and these adaptations are unique in the mammal family. So, camels just aren’t a collection of big feet, long eyelashes and a bad temper.

Though they are the pinnacle of adaptation to their environment, camels can survive in other, less challenging environments, such as woodlands and grasslands. Human beings, on the other hand, can survive – with training and tools – in a wider range of ecosystems. We survive in the world’s deserts by taking advantage of camels, and survive within the Artic circle by taming deer and hunting pinnepeds. Humans don’t adapt physically to their environment so much as they develop behavioural strategies to overcome the challenges.

So, we haven’t ‘evolved’ as much as a camel…to our advantage!

Biography – Charles Babbage

Charles Baggage is my personal hero, so it is with enormous pleasure that I present to you ‘The Father of Computing’.

I’m not going to bore you with personal dates and stuff like that. Let’s cut straight to the meat: his Difference Engine and his Analytical Engine. But he also invented the cowcatcher for the front of trains; the dynamometer - a device used to place a load on an engine and measure its performance; the standard British railroad gauge; the rotating occluding lights used for lighthouses; Greenwich Time signals; and the heliograph ophthalmoscope - an instrument for examining the interior structures of the eye, especially the retina, consisting essentially of a mirror that reflects light into the eye and a central hole through which the eye is examined, using sunlight as the light source. He also had an abiding interest in ciphers and lock-picking. (What a man!)

The Difference Engine was a mechanical device intended to automatically compute mathematical tables which, until that time, had been tediously calculated by hand, and so were prone to include human error. Babbage saw the unique opportunity to revolutionize the field, and convinced the British Government to fund his project, but the machine was never completed due to a series of family tragedies, including the death of Mrs Babbage. Still, he wrote and published a paper on his device. On the 13th of July 1823, Babbage received a gold medal from the Astronomical Society for his development of the Difference Engine. The Engine was useable, but a clerk had to write the answers rather than the device printing them automatically.

His next major project was his Analytical Engine. The concept behind the Analytical Engine was basically a design for the world's first computer, and the Analytical Engine introduced a number of computing concepts still in use today. Input and output was provided using punched cards, just the system chosen when computers were first put in use in the Twentieth Century. Sadly, Babbage needed the support of a technology that was yet to existent.

Babbage began his work on the Analytical Engine in 1834. He dreamed of an elegant machine, constructed with brass fittings and powered by steam. It was never built, since the government of the day was unwilling to fund its construction, having already invested 17,000 English pounds into the failed Difference Engine. As well, the machine had engineering requirements that were too sophisticated for the day.

As I have mentioned in a previous Science Page, Babbage was assisted in his endeavours by Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. It was she who developed the punched card program to calculate the Bernoulli numbers.

This work was not wasted, even if the Analytical Engine was never built. Much of the research was used when the technology caught up with the vision.

Concept of the Month
Ruminants and Pseudo-Ruminants

Ruminants utilise fermentation as part of their digestive processes; volatile fatty acids are produced by the process of fermentation in their rumen. Fermentation is a process in which an agent causes an organic substance to break down into simpler substances; especially, but not exclusively, the anaerobic breakdown of sugar into alcohol. Ruminants have a four-chambered stomach for cellulose fermentation. They can take in a lot of food in a short time and digest it later in safety, by chewing their cud (cows, goats). Camels are pseudo-ruminants; the camel does not ferment ingested food before it leaves the stomach, but it does regurgitate food and chew it again before it leaves the stomach.