Thermodynamics of cooking sources

There is obviously a link between food and thermodynamics, and it's not hard to see eating as primarily a means of getting energy into the body. 

In What is Life (the 1944 book by Erwin Schrödinger, not the 1970 George Harrison song), the physicist and theoretical cat-tormentor turned his hand to deep biology. His view seems to have been that the meaning of life is basically beating the second law of thermodynamics by moving energy from the colder bits of the universe into hotter bodies, and beating entropy by promoting some kind of order out of the inevitably increasing chaos.

Schrödinger inspired Watson and Crick in their search for the double helix, and in turn he was standing on the shoulders of Darwin, who had brought the field of biology well into the realm of science from its previous home somewhere down the corridor from stamp collecting.

In terms of evolution, getting energy into the body has been an important part of our development, and the taming of fire was a big breakthrough. Once we applied that to food, we got a double benefit of increasing the number of things we were able to eat, and reducing their volume and the time it took us to eat them. 

Previously I suggested that Watt invented the positive feedback loop that led coal to be used to power pumps that would remove water out of mines and allow more coal to be removed. But perhaps this wasn't really an invention, but simply another application of something humans have been doing for a very long time. 

It's Interesting that calories are now more often seen as enemies, to be scanned on packages, counted, and where possible reduced. Personally I always look at the label when I'm choosing what food to buy, and usually get the food with the largest number of calories since that's what I'm paying for. While some people are desperately trying to reduce the calories in the food, we rarely look at how many calories of energy went into preparation, packaging and transport of the food.

Early attempts at cooking were not so efficient. Wood was most likely the fuel, and little of the heat will have gone into the cooking, so most of the energy was going up in smoke rather than into those hungry human stomachs. 

This discussion on Ask Historians looks at the effects of gas and electric stoves on lifestyle, with many suggesting a revolution in the twentieth century, when cooking stopped being a full time job, and kitchens were no longer dedicated to food preparation, but became integrated into dining rooms. 

Another big innovation has been the microwave oven. Although scorned by a lot of people concerned about health and nutrition, and pining for "real" cooking, microwaves may be more efficient. Of course microwaves do put out radiation, but so do all other cooking appliances. Instead of sending out a broad spectrum of radiation, microwaves focus on frequencies that will excite the water molecules, and however you wrap it up in culinary language, cooking is basically about removing water. Also, you don't need to heat up a heavy metal container to cook what is inside a microwave, so it should be more efficient, but any efficiency is likely to be marginal, and savings will be much less than the energy used to read this.

(Picture stolen from: Green Lifestyle Magazine) 

Prevarication, procrastination and still in the same house at the beginning of another winter

Looking back over the records, the original moving-in date on the architect's schedule was October. That's October, 2010, so we are now a year late. When we finally got a contract with the builder, the finishing date was the end of June. This became September. September became October, and we're now looking at a November completion. The only positive side I can think of is that we can send a change of address notice on our New Year cards, rather than sending out a separate one. 

The reasons for the delays are complex, and I don't want to apportion blame on anyone, but I can't help feeling that if I said I was going to have a lesson from 9am to 10:30 and it didn't start until 4pm, there may be some complaints.

As awkward and indecisive customers, I'm sure we must hold some of the blame. 

For example, we spent about half an hour of the electrician and site foreman's time discussing the position of one socket in the kitchen.

We have a counter running along the back of the kitchen, the far wall in this picture.  The counter is going to be granite, which should be really nice. The sink and cooker are opposite, facing into the room. The cooker is under the duct, that is going to have an extractor fan on it. 

Turning the heat up in the kitchen

I suppose when most people hear about house building, they think about what colour the walls are going to be, and what's going in the kitchen, so I'm pleased to say this post has nothing to do with thermodynamics, lumps of wood or bits of wire. 

We're getting a Toshiba IH cooking top. They seem to have the best design, at least among Japanese models. A lot of cookers seem to have been made by somebody who has never had to clean one. Actually, that's true not just of cookers, but of many appliances here, and even of houses. It may be a sweeping generalisation, and a little sexist, but most architects are men, and most of them don't do any washing up, cleaning or cooking.

A lot of the cookers have edges designed to attract grime, but the Toshiba has a flush top with bevelled edges. A lot of them have a control panel that swings out with lots of buttons and switches on it. When we looked at an earlier model, the Toshiba just had a touch screen as part of the glass top. Unfortunately it looks like the newer model has imitated its rivals with the control panel that swings out. Increasing the number of moving parts doesn't fall into my definition of progress.

Actually AEG and Electrolux had the best design, as the Toshiba has an air vent coming out of the top at the back. Most of the Japanese IH tops have two airvents coming out of the back. One is for the grill, a standard part of a Japanese cooker, while the other is for excess heat coming off the IH parts. The Toshiba just has one for the grill. It seems like a grill is an indispensable part of the kitchen, and it's difficult to find cooking tops which don't have one, but they do seem to take a lot of cleaning. I keep thinking the old-style English gas cooker design, with the grill at the top would suit a Japanese kitchen with limited space. The grill would then be just under the extractor hood, and the heat in the summer, and the fragrance from grilled fish and smoke from burnt toast would go outside much quicker. The extractor hood may need a lot more cleaning though.

The other thing is the oven. We had planned to have an oven under the cooker, but it turns out that Toshiba have stopped making them. Because these kinds of ovens use the same vents as the cooking tops, we can't just stick an oven from another maker underneath. Another problem is that sticking an oven from another maker underneath the cooking top would mean that the controls are very low down. So it's going on the other side of the kitchen, next to the window, where the microwave was going to go. It'll be higher up, so the controls will be easy to get to. Ovens these days can work as microwaves too, but we may put a microwave in the pantry so the little one can heat up cups of milk when something is cooking. I'm sure we'd survive with just one cooking machine though.  Apparently people used to just sit around fires burning wood.