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Showing posts from May, 2018

The Climate of Crops

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INTRODUCTION In the second unit of Food For Thought (Death), we learned about things that have and can lead to the decline of crops. For example, the Irish Potato Famine was caused by a fungal potato infection that wiped out the entire crop. The reason the potato crop had little chance of surviving was because it was a monoculture - a prolonged crop of one specific species of plant. For this action project, I was given a choice of a threat to write about that could affect our global food system. I chose to write about climate change, which, unfortunately, has become a source of many problems across several subjects. Not just from the present, but from the past, as well. Over the course of history, climate change has affected crops. Learn how, over time, natural disasters, such as droughts, rising air temperatures, and flooding, have ruined the agriculture of food. —————— Look out…your food has stopped growing. Cherry trees have been suffering from blooming either too early or

Rise & Shine

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What makes dough rise? When you combine ingredients to make bread, the dough appears to, magically, double in size! How does this happen? Separated, these ingredients aren't very exciting. When combined (with the addition of heat), they transform to create a soft, fluffy, delicious loaf of bread. Yum! According to the Law of Conservation of Mass,  matter can be neither created nor destroyed. In other words, the mass of an object or, in this case, the collection of objects, never changes, no matter how the parts are rearranged ("Conservation of Mass"). Chemical reactions take place and transform the ingredients. In a bread recipe, the active ingredient is the leavening  agent. The leavening agent is what makes your dough expand and 'rise'. In our FOOD course, we have been learning about the science of food. I never really thought of food as science before, but it is. Think about it...growing food is Biology, and cooking food is Chemistry. The main focus of thi