Food, Glorious Food!

This week we look at food, glorious food. WARNING: There are some icky images below!

We start with this gem of a paper, which tells you what to do if you are hungry, broke, and only have stale crisps (US: chips) in your office, like me. All you need to do is play crisp noises while you eat. Participants in the study bit into crisps (with their front teeth) and rated their crispness or freshness. Researchers then played crisp-eating sounds as participants bit and found that “perception of both the crispness and staleness was systematically altered by varying the loudness and/or frequency composition of the auditory feedback elicited during the biting action”

Did you ever eat a sharp crisp and hurt your gums? Well think yourself lucky. In the first of many delightful reports from the medical literature, this lady in Korea tucked into her squid dinner only to find a “pricking and foreign-body sensation in the oral cavity.” This was caused by

Twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck in the mucous membrane of the tongue, cheek, and gingiva were completely removed, along with the affected mucosa. On the basis of their morphology and the presence of the sperm bag, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores.

Lovely. And if you must eat seafood, ensure that it is seafood, as opposed to a whole live fish. This medical report from India presents the “first case of accidental entry of a live fish into the throat of a man who was bathing in a pond”.

Figure 1: Fish lodged head-up in the patient’s oro-/nasopharynx.

Figure 2: Fish after removal

In a particularly great line, the authors note that:

While fish bones are common foreign bodies in the throat, a whole live fish in the pharynx is very rare.

You may think this is a gross understatement, but in fact it seems that the swallowing whole of a live fish is surprisingly common.

Ensure you are only using food for nutritional purposes. Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT, inject olive oil into your penis. Also be careful with salami - it is dangerous in the wrong hands.

Sorry for that patch of gruseomeness. Now back to the more light and fluffy side of food with a study on the flavor of popcorn. The lead author: Ron Buttery! Or, even better, a paper on cheesemaking fungi by none other than one Mr. Kevin Cheeseman. You just couldn’t make this stuff up!

Or you could get a self-repleneshing bowls of soup! Again, no joke:

“The bowl would almost imperceptibly refill itself in 20 minutes”

Perhaps they could patent a network of self-repleneshing ramen bowls for #phd offices?

Speaking of Ramen noodles, this kid got into a top university for an essay on our favorite #phdfood:

I think the best I will ever do with ramen noodles is make a bowl out of my beard:

Of course, you could profit from all the free food academia has to offer: