Stories by Kevin Bonham

I suspect that the Venn diagram of Food Matters readers and readers of the journal Cell doesn’t contain a lot in the overlap portion, but this week, that should probably change. Cell is one of the big three in biology science publishing (the other two being Nature and Science), and usually contains predominantly wonky, jargon-laden cutting-edge research on [...]

Food/Ag Feathers, beaver butt excretions and CHEMICALS!! in your food? Yeah, but it’s not what you think. Bill Gates weighs in on GMOs and their potential to feed to world.

In part 1 of this series, I talked about what DNA sequencing is, and why it’s an important tool. In part 2, I explained some of the technologies that scientists are currently using to actually “read” the letters of DNA sequences from organisms.

In Part 1 of this series, I described a bit about why sequencing the DNA of microbes is a useful way to study them An individual microbe is like a single book in a vast library.

Over the next few months, I plan on writing a lot about research on microbial communities. This is somewhat self-serving, as my own research is moving in that direction, but I also happen to think it’s fascinating, and highly relevant to the most current research involving food.

An abbreviated list of cool microbe/food/immune system things I saw last month, but didn’t manage to write about. Microbiology: Audiommunity on a superantigen made by Staphylococcus aureus.

I just finished listening to a pretty great discussion between Jonathan Eisen, whose work I mentioned last month, and Jessica Richman, founder of uBiome (a sort of 23andMe but for the microbiome).

As mammals, I think we sometimes take sex for granted. I’m not talking about the frequently messy act of having sex, or the extensive effort most of us go through in order to have sex.

I’m a strong believer in the notion that science, especially academic science that is performed with public money, should be openly accessible to everyone.

It was a scant blogging year for me, what with defending my PhD thesis, launching a masters program at Harvard and getting married. But I still have a couple of posts I’m proud of: It’s only been a couple of months, but it’s already hard to remember what life was like before my fermentation obsession.

My fermentation obsession has reached new heights – on Christmas day I bottled my first mead, and it was delicious. My wife also gave me a book on mead making, and I’m getting ready to start a wild-ferment mead.

I can’t write an intro better than this: Far more attention has been paid to the microbes in our feces than the microbes in our food.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: microbes are everywhere, and everywhere important. As regular readers will know, I’ve recently become obsessed with cultivating our microbial companions to make delicious foods.

It’s a few days after Thanksgiving, but nevertheless, I’m thankful for sanitation. Here at Food Matters, we spend a lot of time talking about the things that go into our mouths, but throughout the world, the stuff that happens on the other end is almost as important.

There’s something wonderful doing things yourself. This is not just my observation, there’s data on this. For example: people love their Ikea furniture more than any particle-board-glued-to-plastic-wood-patterned furniture has any right to be loved.

It’s been a while since my last post – I was not quite prepared for how busy I would be teaching 3 classes, doing research and planning a wedding would be.

Craft beer is a glorious thing. In 2013, over 15 million barrels (that’s over $14 billion worth) of craft beer were sold in the US, and new breweries are popping up all over the place.

If you ever worry that you’re a bit too optimistic about the future, try reading Maryn McKenna’s posts about the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.

My new lab’s paper is out! I had nothing to do with this work (it was submitted just before I joined), but it’s an incredibly exciting study investigating the diverse microbial communities that grow on cheese rinds.

A couple of years ago, my fiancée and I wanted to try to make some home-made mozzarella cheese, but ran into a problem. In order to turn milk into cheese, you have to add a substance called “rennet,” which causes the milk to coagulate, allowing you to separate the curd (mostly fats and hydrophobic proteins) [...]

Bananas are delicious. Personally, my favorite consumption methods are in oatmeal or cereal, in smoothies, or just on their own (for the record, I peel them the right way, not from the stem like some savage).

Last week was a monumental one for me – I said goodbye to my old lab, where I’ve worked for the past 5 years. It was harder than I thought it would be to leave.

Vox.com is a new news site that aims to do things a bit differently. Led by Ezra Klein, formerly of the Washington Post “Wonk Blog,” news stories at Vox are supposed to rely more on data, and actually provide the data behind stories so that readers can judge for themselves.

One of my favorite parts of graduate school was participating in an outreach-oriented organization called Science in the News. SITN (as we lovingly call it) has a number of great outreach arms, including regular articles about current science topics written by grad students called Signal to Noise (fomerly The Flash), hands-on events like the model [...]