Book Review: Culinary Reactions

The Book

Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking by Simon Quellen Field

The Premise

This books purports to explain the hows and whys of cooking in terms of the chemistry going on. It's geared toward non-scientists as an "easy-to-follow primer."

The Naming of Things

It was clear to me by page 9 that I am absolutely not the audience for this book. The target audience is not expected to have a scientific vocabulary, so many terms are defined and explained in plain English. Generally I applaud such efforts, but the author's expectations for his readers' vocabulary are inconsistent. For example, he defines homogeneous versus heterogeneous mixtures and but doesn't explain what he means by "conjugated" molecules. Anyone who has every purchased homogenized milk could probably take a stab at a working definition of homogeneous, but conjugated? No way.¹ Here's another example (p. 51):

It is viscoelastic like toothpaste, meaning it can liquefy under shear stress and be pumped or extruded easily.

I doubt my non-scientist relatives would be familiar with shear stress and extrusion, even when compared to toothpaste.

The Power of an Editor

I'm not sure if the author had an editor. If he did, that person needed to be more heavy-handed with the red pen. The entire book is a disorganized jumble. There is no flow from chapter to chapter. There doesn't even seem to be much logic to the order of the chapters. Chapter 1 is on measuring and weighing; take a guess what Chapter 2 is.

Heat? No. Acids and bases? No. Nutrition? No. Proteins, fats and sugars? No, no, no.

Chapter is on foams. Heating, meanwhile, is Chapter 11.

I suspect that this book is a reformatted collection of blog posts, but that doesn't excuse the unfocused and meandering writing. (For one thing, The Joy of x was also a collection of blog posts and it was far more coherent than this book.) The disorganization is even reflected in the structure of the chapters themselves, and even individual paragraphs. For example, this is the first paragraph in the Oxidation of Oils and Fats section of Chapter 13 (Oxidation and Reduction, p. 211):

Oils and fats react with oxygen in ways. That are sometimes beneficial and sometimes undesirable. When cooking oils react with oxygen, they can form compounds that taste bad; they're rancid. But when oils react with oxygen and polymerize into rough insoluble films, they're used in paints and coatings for wood products.

Yum! Paint and wood coating! Gosh, I'm glad he included that in a book on food chemistry. It was totally necessary to include that random fact in the main text of the chapter. /sarcasm

Other paragraphs amount to laundry lists of facts. Lists are fine, but when he claims to explain why and how the chemistry works, saying "it works in A, it works in B, it works in C, it works in D“ doesn't answer why or how. When I consider that not a single fact is backed up – no references, no lists of further reading, not even the names of the people who did the research or the institutions where the work was done – I get cranky. Good science writing tells you where you can go to find more of the details. This book doesn't do that.

Bad Science

And now we get to the real kicker: a bunch of the chemistry in this book is just plan wrong. I could overlook a lot of faults if the science were solid, but it's not, and the parts that I know are wrong make me doubt the whole rest of the book. There were several points when I went "That's pretty cool…if it's true." Without references, I can't know if his sources were bad or his understanding is weak. (I suspect both.) And I'll need to do my own search to find out if those cool-if-true statements have any grounding in scientific fact.

Here's one example of bad chemistry (p. 99):

Since carbon dioxide is a gas, there are no bonds holding it together that have to be broken before it can dissolve [into water].

I read that sentence to two chemist friends and thoroughly enjoyed watching their eyes pop out of their faces and their jaws hit the floor.

The Bottom Line

Don't read this book. It's not worth it. If you're looking for a book on the science of food, stick with the classic On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee¹ or read Alton Brown's cookbooks, which are mostly good at explaining the science. This book just does not measure up and threatens instead to undermine facts with misconceptions.

The Silver Lining

You might ask – as my husband did every time I exclaimed "What?!" while reading – why did I bother finishing the book if I found it so awful? Simple: it could be an excellent teaching tool. There are several examples in this book of chemistry misconceptions that my students may have. Not only can I use these as prompts for my own explanations, I am itching to give one or two of these to my students to have them explain what's wrong.

Okay, the 'carbon dioxide is a gas and has no bonds' statement is crap, but why is it crap? How do we know that it's wrong – and what experiments could we do to test it? What misunderstanding of chemistry underlies the statement? How can we change the sentence to get the chemistry right?

By the end of freshman chemistry, my students need to have a thorough enough understanding that hearing such statements makes their eyes bug-out too.

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1: Early in grad school, I heard a physicist give a presentation (to a group of chemists) in which she began explaining conjugation. We (the chemists) told her the explanation wasn't necessary; we were pretty familiar with the term. She said something like "how come you all know this?" But conjugation is a major concept in organic chemistry, which we had all taken and she had not. It was a good reminder to me not to take discipline-specific knowledge for granted.

All of that is to say that if a physics PhD candidate doesn't think of "conjugation" as an everyday term, you can bet that a random science Muggle off the street will have no idea what it means.

2: I admit, I haven't finished On Food and Cooking yet, but as far along as I am, I can assure you the science is more sound than in Culinary Reactions.

Book Review: The Joy of x

The Book

The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity, by Steven Strogatz

The Premise

Steven Strogatz, a mathematics professor at Cornell, had a math blog (On the Elements of Math) at the New York Times for a while in 2010. This is a collection of those blog posts edited into book form.

Fun with math

I read On the Elements of Math when it was new. The topics were varied and interesting,and the writing was clear. It was equally fun to review things I knew (e.g. explaining the Pythagorean theorem by drawing squares on the triangle's sides) and learn about things I hadn't encountered before (e.g. the Hilbert Hotel problem). I enjoyed it and was sorry to see it come to an end.

It has been a few years since then, and I had forgotten the specifics of the blog when I picked up The Joy of x. (It was kind of interesting just to see which parts I recalled versus what felt like new material.) The topics are still interesting, the stories are still chosen well, and the writing is still clear. I think I enjoyed the first few chapters again as much as I had when I'd read them in blog-post form.

But by the fourth or fifth chapter, my enthusiasm started to lag.

The chapters were starting to sound the same. They had essentially the same structure: identify a potential limitation of math, relate anecdote or pop culture reference, explain the problem in the story, end with a punch line. The chapters are short, so it's easy to run through the pattern several times in one sitting, and it gets repetitive quickly.

I set the book aside and read something else. When I did pick it up again, I read only a chapter at a time and found it much improved. It was like returning to the blog: only one post at a time and a break between one and the next. It's a funny way for me to read a book,¹ but it worked.

The Bottom Line

It's a fun survey of mathematics by someone who obviously loves the subject. No math expertise is necessary to follow along. Read it a bit at a time, like it was originally delivered.

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1: I'm a devourer, a binge-reader. I have been known to read lengthy series in a week or weekend and I read the final Harry Potter book in a single sitting the night I bought it. Reading a book in little bites is not like me.

More on career breaks

I have a few more things to say about how taking a break from science/academia could kill a woman's career.

First, the Executive Director of the Elsevier Foundation wrote a letter to the New York Times about retaining women in STEM (emphasis mine):

The work-life balance challenge faced by working women is particularly difficult for those in STEM professions (science, technology, engineering and math). Taking time off the research track can be a potentially career-ending decision for a woman, as she can lose valuable connections and funding.

Career brakes indeed. This letter prompted me to flip the issue and think about it from another side: what if men took more career breaks? The anecdata I have say that paternity leave (or, parental leave, in more generic terms) is becoming more common. Could we make it an expectation that parents will take breaks?

I have heard of a university (but now can't seem to find the article in which I read about it) that stops the tenure clock for new parents automatically. They have to ask for it not to stop, rather than the other way around. This is to encourage people to use the parental leave they have and make using it less stigmatized. It's a simple enough policy that might actually change academic culture. Parental leave is generally a few months, not multiple years, of course, but if we can change the attitudes about short breaks, I think it's possible to make longer breaks more acceptable, too.

Then there's this post at Chronicle Vitae about the proliferation of "quit lit," the genre of essays about leaving academia. I have read a number of quit lit pieces, but what strikes me about the topic this time around is that academia is a place people leave. Not take a break from, but leave for good. In that sense, it's not just women who might be unwelcome to return after time away, though men aren't likely to be accused of "leaning out" in the process.

I have to wonder how much of this attitude is related to the priesthood of science (and academia in general) and the ridiculous notion that "dedicated" scientists are single-minded in the pursuit of their work to the exclusion of other interests or obligations. I'm not sure and have no data to back it up, but I suspect they are linked.

Lastly, here are a few thoughts about working parents, moms in particular.

From an interview with Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo.:

I don't think women can have it all. I just don't think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all. My husband and I have been married for 34 years. And we have two daughters. And every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions. And you have to co-opt a lot of people to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I'm not sure they will say that I've been a good mom. I'm not sure. And I try all kinds of coping mechanisms.

She says "you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother," but is her husband also presented with the same decisions about being a husband or a father? Maybe, but maybe not.

I also feel the need to invoke the Finkbeiner test on her interviewer, even though she's not a scientist.¹ Until men are asked in equal proportion about how they balance family with work, we have got to stop interrogating women about it.

Finally, go read this post by dinahere about being the daughter of a working mother.

For the first 12 years of my life I don’t remember my father being there for my birthdays or attending a school play. He was busy saving lives in the OR, earning his share of the money and my mother was there for all of those occasions. So, why didn’t his absence count while hers did? Why were her absences so glaring while her presence so fading?

You know why. Women will never be able to have it all because what we think ‘all’ refers to has been pre-determined by a society that will always be stacked against us.

We can't keep blaming women when they don't measure up to an unachievable standard. The culture has got to change.

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1: I'll just leave this right here, in case you haven't seen it yet.

What's next

I defended my thesis in April, and turned in my dissertation at the end of May, but I haven't left my grad lab yet. Here's what I've been up to, and what's coming up next.

Wrapping up

First I'm wrapping up some things. I've been revising and polishing two papers (one is done and submitted, the other will follow shortly), doing a few experiments for my last project, and getting things ready to hand off to the next person.

Most of my dissertation work was about watching the motions of one protein, TcpP, that is involved in the pathway for producing cholera toxin in Vibrio cholerae. Cholera toxin is the compound (a protein complex) that makes you so very sick if you contract cholera. TcpP (along with another protein, ToxR) activates the transcription¹ of the toxT gene. The ToxT protein activates transcription of the cholera toxin genes.

Aside from its role in cholera toxin production, TcpP is interesting because it (and ToxR, too) is bound to the inner membrane of the bacterium. In order to activate transcription, TcpP and ToxR must bind to the DNA, but somehow they manage to do this without leaving the membrane. Since DNA tends to be compacted into the center of the cell², it's pretty remarkable that two proteins on the membrane can find a specific region of DNA and bind to it. There aren't many proteins that bind DNA while bound to a cellular membrane, but there are a few besides these two.

To learn more about TcpP and how it pulls off this trick, we labeled it with a fluorescent protein and watched it move around the cell. My part of this project is done. Another grad student will watch ToxR move around to learn more about how these two proteins interact. So I'm updating my index of data files, checking that any protocols I've revised are up to date, and commenting the Matlab code I've written that he might use for analysis.

My other dissertation project was a collaboration with my labmate Jess, who has been studying fluorescence enhancement by plasmonic surfaces. I've been learning about plasmon-enhanced fluorescence for years, and it still seems a little bit sci-fi to me: by shining light on metal nanoparticles, you can create an enhanced electric field that makes fluorescent molecules shine brighter and longer.³ Jess has been enhancing fluorescent proteins using nano-structured gold surfaces. A while back we began pairing my fluorescently labeled bacteria with her plasmonic surfaces, to see if we can get enhancement inside live cells. We had some success [$] with our initial experiments, and the project has grown from there. Just because my dissertation is done doesn't mean this project is, though. I've been busy with experiments and trouble-shooting throughout June, and Jess will carry it on after I leave.

Shipping out

My last week as a Biteen lab member will not be spent in lab, but at the Single-Molecule Approaches to Biology Gordon Research Conference in Italy. I like the GRC conference style, and I can't wait to hear all the latest and greatest research in the field. It doesn't hurt that the conference is at a resort in Tuscany, either.

After the conference, it's time for vacation. My husband will meet me in Italy, and we'll tour parts of Italy and Germany and visit some friends of mine from my time as an exchange student. Then it's back to the States so my husband can get back to work and I can enjoy a couple of weeks of unemployment (and prepare for the next job).

Moving on

Mid-August I start my new job. For the next year, I will be a visiting instructor at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State. (Yes, I'm going to be an adjunct.) I'm excited to move to Briggs: the program is interesting, the faculty I've met have all been delightful people, and this job feels like the right thing for me right now.⁴ Briggs students take science classes that emphasize active learning, and "HPS" courses (history, philosophy and sociology of science) that give them context for science in their lives. As I said to several people while interviewing, Briggs is the kind of place I'd have loved to attend as an undergrad. I'm delighted to teach there. It's gonna be great.

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1: transcription: just like you can talk about transcribing text, i.e. copying words from one place to another, we talk about transcribing genes: copying nucleic acid "words." The nucleic acids are slightly different—DNA is copied into RNA—but both kinds of nucleic acid "words" are the instructions for building proteins.

The process of decoding RNA to protein parts is called "translation." Again, it's just like text, translating from one language (e.g. French, or, in the case of genes, nucleic acids) to another (e.g. English or, for proteins, amino acids). Stitch those translated words together, and you get functional sentences (or proteins!).

2: In eukaryotic cells, such as your own human cells, DNA is stored in the cell nucleus. Bacteria don't have nuclei, but they still keep their DNA kind of bundled up in the middle.

3: It's more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.

4: It's a one-year position, and that suits me fine. My long-term goal is still to get a tenure-track position or a permanent position off the tenure path—I want more certainty in my employment than adjuncting is likely to supply. For the next year, though, I'm very happy to teach at Briggs.

A one-year appointment also means I will go through the whole job application process again this fall. Yay

Career brakes

From SciLogs:

When Adam Spencer asked if female scientists should consider taking an extended break of two or three years, the answer was a resounding “No.” “Science is really a fast-moving world,” [Suzanne] Cory said. “If you get out, even for three years, it becomes very difficult to get back in.

I have heard that position many times from both men and women, and I find it repugnant. It’s a “that’s the way it is” kind of attitude.

My grandmother was a music teacher before she was a mother. She’s told me if she could do it again, she would have become an accountant, but that’s not something girls did in those days. Girls could become teachers, nurses or secretaries. And then they could become mothers. Boys could become accountants or scientists or doctors or lawyers or whatever else they wanted. “That’s the way it is.”

Well that’s not the way it is now, and thank goodness. Thank goodness that somebody stepped up and said “This is what I want to do, and my gender doesn’t matter.” Thank goodness for the women who took the hard path – and the men who helped them – so that I could become a scientist. So that I could be treated as an equal.

Does my expertise have an expiration date? Does leaving the lab for more than a month make me forget how to be a scientist? Will my PhD turn into a pumpkin after midnight? No.

But “science is a fast-moving world” they insist. So what? We all had to learn how to get into that world once, so why can’t someone do it a second time? People also change fields and get into new topics they haven’t studied before. How is that any different from “getting into” the world of science after time away? No, the “fast-moving” argument strikes me as justification to leave things as they are and not bother to make it better.

It galls me to think that women are told that if they leaves, they will not be welcome back—that a career break soon becomes a career brake.

The panel in the article was discussing “possible solutions to fixing this leaky pipeline.” Their conclusion appears to be that women shouldn’t leave in the first place.¹ But why on earth don’t we do something to support the women who want to come back?

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1: Suzanne Cory:

“You are at a crucial age now. Don’t drop off.”

The panelists also said that women need more confidence. Tell me just how much confidence I’ll have after I’ve been told time and again that it’s damn hard to be a woman in science and you can’t leave because then you’ll have let down Womanhood and leaked out of the pipeline, and if you do go you won’t be welcome back because Reasons. And how far will that confidence get me when my words are ignored until spoken by a man? How confident do I need to be to get men to stop patting me on my head? How much confidence will I need to muster to get a seat at the table and be able to keep it?

I have sworn off Women in Science luncheons because I’m sick being told that the solution for the leaky pipeline is “Believe in yourself,” like if I just close my eyes and click my heels together, that will just fix everything.