"differences" news and stories

Ever wonder if there was much difference between white meat and dark meat besides the taste? According to Dr. Mercola (a website that is often a little wacky but occasionally has some good info) white meat contains glycogen, which is a type of animal starch. It gets stored in your liver and is then broken down into glucose when it's needed.

Dark meat is that way because those are the muscles that are used more. They are full of myoglobin proteins which are responsible for moving the oxygen into the cells. When the myoglobin proteins are cooked, they turn into metmyoglobins, which contain a lot of iron. Dark meat also has more vitamins, saturated fats and omega oils (both 3 and 6) than white meat.

Source

I've always been intrigued by regional differences in seemingly standard food. The trans-Atlantic variations in Mars bars was not something I'd pondered, however. Until now. According to the folks at U.K.-based Temple of thee Lemur, the Mars bars we have here in the States pale in comparison to the British ones. TotL's The VISIBLE MARS BAR Project aims to educate readers on the differences between American and British Mars bars, with a tasting of Milky Way bars thrown in for good measure. A series of cross-sections of each bar is about as scientific as the analysis gets. One can clearly see that the American version has almonds and the British version does not. Fascinating. TotL's one-man tasting panel rates the British Mars above the American ones, but our Milky Way bars appear to best the U.K. version.

Yesterday there was an Ask Metafilter thread about the differences between regular, kosher and sea salt. Although the thread did, at times, degrade into discussion of surface area and human origins in the sea, it did produce a few useful resources.

Slate ran an extensive review of several types of salt, from Morton to Maldon, last spring. Gourmet Sleuth also has a great rundown of different types of salt, as well as a salt FAQ. In print, there are some good salt discussions in Jeffrey Steingarten's It Must Have Been Something I Ate and Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook. And, of course, here's a transcript of the Good Eats episode about salt.

Perhaps the most definitive and useful thing to come out of the discussion: coarse salt is better for margaritas.