Culinary Expertise Research Articles

A Culinary Approach to Healthy Menu Items

With the recent obesity epidemic, school foodservice managers and culinary experts are looking for ways to improve adolescents' diets. School lunches provide an ideal opportunity for offering nutritious menu items and encouraging healthy diets. The purpose of this study was to explore (1) whether increase fruit and vegetable menu choices in school lunch increased middle school students' (grades 6-8) overall opinion of school lunch, (2) which factors were used by students in deciding what to eat at school, and (3) which factors affected students' overall opinion of school lunch. Students from five middle schools in one central Kentucky county completed a voluntary questionnaire. A total of 947 middle school students participated for a total response rate of 23%. The variables measured in the study included opinion of school lunch, awareness of healthy menu items, number of healthy menu items tried, number of sampling cart items tried, and decisions factors regarding what to eat at school. Descriptive statistics, ANOVA, and test of proportions were performed. This study found that students who tried the greatest number of healthy menu items found school lunch to be significantly much better. The five most important deciding factors regarding what to eat at school were: food tastes good, food looks good, how hungry the student is, food is healthy, and amount of food. Sixth graders found healthiness of food to be a significantly stronger factor than seventh and eighth graders and were more influenced by what parents wanted them to eat. Our findings encourage school food-service managers and culinary experts to target adolescents early. School foodservice teams should keep foremost in mind that nutritious fruit and vegetable menu items, which taste good, are visually appealing, and satisfy hunger, are important to adolescents.

Commentary and Criticism Is Fat Still a feminist Issue?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Oracle's subject position as an intermediary between the virtually created world we commonly identify as “real” and the “real” world which is on the verge of ecological self-destruction requires that she negotiate territory related to identity formation. This is not unlike the role Mammy plays as an inverted mirror of “ideal” femininity in the creation of white identity. 2. Unlike the traditional image of Mammy, the Oracle is a light-skinned black woman; however, she does conform to the requirement of asexuality as none of the movies in The Matrix trilogy features her with a partner. I should also note that by the third installment in the series, the Oracle changes her appearance because the original actress, Gloria Foster, passed away. The new Oracle in The Matrix Revolutions () is no longer fleshy, but she does, however, remain a black woman, and again she is baking cookies in her kitchen during her introductory scene. Furthermore, she has an orphaned child in her care. 3. See Rafia Zafar's () discussion of how the culinary expertise of African American women has been mystified, dismissing their intellectual capacity to develop outstanding cooking skills and instead inferring that they are “voodoo” chefs who mysteriously happen upon their delicious gastronomic creations. 4. Doris Witt suggests that “[t]he widespread conflation of African American female bodies and fat is, then, surely a function of the psychic needs of the dominant white society” (1999, p. 189) 1. The Chinese characters for weight loss literally means “minus” and “fat.” 2. Up to the point when this paper is written, the trend is still mainly female-oriented. So far I have seen only one particular company advertising its men's department doing similar things. But it might become another trend in the coming years. 3. This can be highlighted by the special names invented and given to different parts of the female body which is considered not appealing: the fat tummy is “piggy stomach,” the flabby arm is “bye-bye-meat,” the fat bottom is “the master ass,” etc. Each undesirable feature gets a special nickname. 4. The official English title of the film is Love on a Diet, but a direct translation of the original Chinese title reads “Slimming Man and Woman,” probably referring to the two protagonists. 5. The female lead is Sammi Cheng, a leading female popular singer in Hong Kong, turning to films with equal success, and also an image representative for a major cosmetic brand. She is a sought-after actress for romantic comedies. The male lead is Andy Lau, one of the entertainment artists in Hong Kong. He started out as a TV actor, branching out to singing and films, and has become one of the most successful actor-singers in the Chinese-speaking world. He has been a star for more than twenty years. Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng have already played against one another in other romantic comedies and their partnership has proved to be very popular. 6. The film proves to be a huge success too. It enjoyed such a commercial and publicity success that many demanded a sequel. 7. Some of the most successful beauty salons make their names by signing middle-aged female artists, or actresses and models who have become recent mothers, or even teenage artists to be their image representatives. The idea is to establish the concept that no matter which age group a woman belongs to, she needs to be, and can be, beautiful through body-sculpturing.

Cooking improved my quality of life as a CKD patient 1,2

Cooking improved my quality of life as a CKD patient 1,2

Tasting Language

While chefs and home cooks have lauded Elizabeth David's culinary expertise since the publication of Mediterranean Food in 1950, scant attention has been paid to the subversive nature of her prose. This paper explores the trangressiveness of David's writing, which arises from its articulation of female pleasure and its celebration of an aesthetic firmly grounded in the senses. While David developed this aesthetic during six years living in the Mediterranean, she learned to fashion it into language upon her return to a war-rationed England in 1946. Driven by the desire to relive the pleasures of her travels, David began to translate her sensory engagement with Mediterranean food into prose. In so doing, she nourished her hunger for another time and place with language. She also fed the imagination of the British public, who once again began to dream about the flavor of fresh ingredients long lost in England's war effort.

Designing a Culinology(r) Based Research and Development Framework for Seafood Products

A trend in new food product development is the growing participation of chefs within an organizational framework known as Culinology(r). Culinology(r) is defined as the fusion of culinary/chef skills and technical/scientific skills. Combining culinary expertise with food science is expected to produce more creative and financially successful products. This concept paper develops ideas for embedding the culinary framework into a broader interdisciplinary and multisector system for designing and developing new food products from publicly managed natural resources. Initial results from implementing the first stage of this framework are provided for West Coast albacore tuna.

Improving the Care of Elderly People with Mental Health Problems – Clinical Audit Project Examples By Kirsty MacLean Steel & Claire Palmer. London: Gaskell. 1999. 65 pp. £15.00 (pb). ISBN 1-901242-38-2

The thing that sells recipe books is probably not so much the list of ingredients for each concoction, but the style in which they are mixed together and the stories and flair demonstrated by the culinary expert. So it is that Delia Smith continues to sell and Mrs Beeton is past her prime. Modern

Industrial Cuisine Revisited

Industrial cuisine is a rationalized system of food production for offering customized products in a cost-effective way. Industrial cuisine combines mass customization, production decoupling, and innovative foodprocessing technologies such as sous vide. At the heart of industrial cuisine is the concept of "mass customization," which combines the positive aspects of mass production and customization by responding to individual customer needs while achieving production efficiencies that enable competitive pricing. For consumers, industrial cuisine-Which ideally also encompasses service elements-can reduce prices, increase consistency, and improve satisfaction. For restaurateurs in all industry segments, it can reduce costs, simplify production, and reduce the level of culinary expertise required at the unit level. Nevertheless, few food-service operators have embraced industrial cuisine completely. A key element is information technology, to capture and manage individual customer preferences and specifications. Other important factors are quality management, process reengineering, organizational development, and superior market research. Regarding food production, industrial cuisine requires innovative and flexible process technology (such as sous vide and robotics) and valuechain reengineering (e.g., production decoupling). In deciding whether an industrial-cuisine strategy is appropriate, a company should assess (1) the degree of customer sensitivity to customization, (2) whether the company can support a mass-customization strategy at an operational level, (3) the competitive environment, and (4) its own readiness.

Nutrition Training for Chefs: Taste as an Essential Determinant of Choice

The primary objective of Project LEAN (Low-fat Eating for Americans Now), a social marketing initiative of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, is to help Americans reduce their fat intake to less than 30% of total energy. In Las Vegas, Nev, one of the 10 community sites selected to implement this goal, Las Vegas LEAN acted to change the food environment for restaurant patrons. This program empowered chefs to use their culinary expertise in developing good-tasting, low-fat menu items. The literature shows that consumers, despite verbalizing health concerns, choose food on the basis of taste. This ambivalence between belief and behavior demonstrates the need for innovative culinary techniques to develop food dishes that consumers will not only accept, but will enjoy and order repeatedly. Entrepreneurial dietitians, thus, have an opportunity to market nutrition skills to restaurants and hotels wishing to implement low-fat cuisine with good taste. Our intervention demonstrated that nutrition education for chefs is the key to long-term and successful menu changes. If taste is what consumers are seeking in low-fat items, and improved taste will finally get ambivalent consumers to change their eating behavior, enlisting the expertise of chefs is key. J Am Diet Assoc. 1995; 95:1418-1421.

"Let them eat soup" - Count Rumford and Napoleon Bonaparte

Count Rumford is famous among modern scientists, but it is forgotten that during his lifetime he was widely recognized as a diplomat, military administrator, inventor, culinary expert, philanthropist and social philosopher, although at the same time he had a well-deserved reputation for being an arrogant, self-serving individual of abrasive character.