Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Quick Fix Recipe 1: Mushroom + Egg + Onion

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Just like many students, I started cooking in September 2008 when I left India for my studies at Oxford. A few weeks before I left, I tried my hand at cooking simple dishes. It wasn’t that hard. But once you start cooking on your own you may realise that every recipe needs so many things. May be in small amounts but the list of ingredients is so big (especially for Indian food). Although I enjoyed cooking, I hated going to the supermarket in that cold weather just to get garlic paste or lemon juice. I complained about it and in response my mum said, “There is always something you can make from whatever you have in the kitchen.” As a student that statement is quite reassuring. Theoretically speaking, it is possible to make something, but will you that thing taste good enough to eat? Many of us might face this challenge.

In this process of learning how to fix myself a quick meal with as little number of ingredients as possible I have come up with a few recipes that I will share with you. Just to re-iterate, these are the recipes that I found tasted good to me and have been made with whatever I can find in my kitchen. Some of these have been tasted by others and they have seemed to enjoy it too.

Quick Fix Recipe 1: Mushroom + Egg + Onion

Ingredients:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1/2 small onion, sliced (rings or half-rings)
  • 200 g mushroom, sliced
  • 3 eggs
  • 40 g butter
  • salt, garlic paste

Method:

  1. In a pan, pour 1tbsp olive oil and sauté the onions till they are nice and brown.
  2. In a separate pan, do the same to the sliced mushroom. Once the mushroom have absorbed the oil, add 20g butter and mix rapidly so that the butter is spread evenly. Add garlic paste and then keep on mixing for 2-3 mins more till the mushrooms lose a little bit of water. You may add salt or pepper to taste at this point. Add these mushrooms to the onion pan and keep the pan warm at the least level of heat (easy on gas stoves than electric ones!)
  3. Break the 3 eggs in a bowl and whisk them together. You may add salt and chili powder to taste at this point. Pour the mix onto the pan which had the mushrooms on it. Mix vigorously and break any lumps formed (a bit like bhurji). When done, add 20g butter and mix for a little more time. Then add the contents of this pan to the pan that has onions and mushrooms.
  4. Mix them well for the last time. Pour them in a bowl and enjoy this with Toast or Garlic bread or Khakra.

Overall Cooking Time: approx. 15 mins (includes time needed for chopping onions &  mushrooms).

Hope you enjoy this recipe and if you do then don’t forget to subscribe to this blog by email.

Why Exeter must support a meatless day a week?

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Two students from the JCR of Exeter College have proposed to the JCR & MCRthat one day in the college hall should be meatless. Their main argument stems from the UN’s Livestock’s Long Shadow Report. The  400-page report is an in-depth assessment of the significant impact of world’s livestock on the environment. Meat consumption is projected to double by 2050 , ensuingirreversible consequences. The meat industry already contributes to 20% of global emissions.

According to the college chef, we buy (approximately) the following amounts of meat  every week: 150 kg Beef, 150 kg, Diced Chicken, 600 Chicken Breasts, 100 kg Lamb, 60 kg Pork, 30 kg Bacon, 10 kg Sausages. This translates to 16.4 tons of CO2e (see below) every week of which red meat alone contributes 12.8 tons. Considering that the hall is run on full capacity for 30 weeks (3 Terms) in a year and 30% capacity for 15 weeks, it means the hall’s carbon footprint coming from meat consumption is a staggering 566 ton of CO2e per year. A meatless day a week, can reduce that consumption by about 15%, which is 85 ton CO2e. This is equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of eight people in the UK. It’s not just a reduction in the carbon footprint but also our water footprint. (More on that here). The UN report also speaks about the impact of meat on water depletion, water pollution & biodiversity.

However, moving beyond the environmental impact, What other advantages are Exeter students posed to have if the motion is passed? A reduction in the amount of meat bought by the college will decrease the spending of the hall. The money saved can then be utilised to reduce the cost of the food or can be invested into buying healthier foods. Of course, it’s healthy and people who have always had meat will get a chance to explore vegetarian food (I am sure the chefs will do their best to make that an indeed pleasurable experience).

Delving into the counter-perspective. What are things that could go wrong if the motion is passed? Well one possible argument can be that the quality of vegetarian food will go down because people are not given a choice. Not really a thing we cannot handle, isn’t it? I definitely I think thatthe chefs are indeed open to experimenting with recipe suggestions in offering better vegetarian options. Now coming to the choice of day. Which day is the best for doing this? There is a strong argument for Mondays. The points for a Monday are enlisted here. Against? Yes, Exeter has the famous steak night on Mondays. But the catering manager has agreed to make adjustments such that the steak night will still happen on another day of the week. Three Oxford colleges have already passed a motion to have Meat Free Mondays. If not, any other day is fine too. The catering has made it clear that if the motion is passed for any day of the week they are ready to swing things around to suit the best needs and interests of the students.

I hope that these arguments serve to convince you that this is definitely a good idea and makes you come support the motion in the JCR on Sunday the 31st at 8.30 pm.

^ CO2e stands for carbon dioxide equivalent, which is an internationally accepted measure that expresses the amount of global warming from greenhouse gases. CO2e is not limited to carbon dioxide but includes other gases like Methane & Nitrous oxide.

* Calculations of the carbon footprint have been done based on reports published by New Scientist & the Guardian.

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How to stay awake for 22-hours everyday?

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Physicists have not yet found a way to alter the Earth’s speed of rotation to give us a thirty-hour day, but sleep researchers may have found a way to get an eight-hour sleep in just two hours—letting you cram in six more wakeful hours a day. The key to this superhuman ability is polyphasic sleeping, a form of sleeping which was first reported was reported in Time Magazine in 1943. Buckminster Fuller, the great inventor and futurist, trained himself to take a half-hour nap every six hours, a pattern which he maintained for two years. This was the first polyphasic sleep schedule invented, and is known as Dymaxion sleep.

Today, there exist three polyphasic sleep schedules; Everyman, Uberman and Dymaxion in the decreasing order of sleep. Little scientific research has been done to show the safety of such sleep schedules, but enough proof exists for a thriving community of polyphasic sleepers. The longest scientific experiment was performed on a single subject, Francesco, by the founder of the Chronobiology Research Institute, Claudio Stampi. Francesco followed a schedule of sleeping for twenty minutes every four hours, now known as the Uberman sleep schedule. After the 48-day study, Stampi reports in his book, Why we nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep that Francesco’s performance did not seem to suffer as a result of adopting the polyphasic sleeping pattern. The studies showed a change in the brain wave pattern during the short naps. It is only recently that a greater understanding of these brain wave patterns has been developed.

Natural sleep is divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep. In normal sleeping REM sleep is observed only at the end of a 90-minute cycle. REM sleep is associated with dreaming and consolidation of memories. However, when deprived of sleep, as in polyphasic sleeping, subjects fall into REM sleep within minutes of starting a nap. Based on these observations, polyphasic sleepers believe that REM sleep is the most important form of sleep & the brain when deprived of sleep capitalises on any chance to sleep in this mode. The online community of people who adapted themselves to the Uberman schedule reports on the blogosphere that they achieve heightened alertness and concentration when fully adapted. Polyphasic sleeping also seems to induce lucid dreaming, a form of dreaming in which the dreamer can consciously participate in the dream.

These anecdotal theories gained some credence in a study recently published in PNAS, which shows that REM sleep is responsible for improving associative networks in the brain. The study involved 77 young adults who were given a number of creative tasks in the morning. They shown multiple groups of three words (such as: cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to find a fourth word that can be associated to all three words (like sweet). Later in the day, some were allowed a nap, and monitored using brain scans to see what kind of sleep they entered. They were then given the same and new tasks. For the same tasks, the passage of time and sleep allowed them to “incubate” their thoughts and come up with better and more varied solutions. However, for new tasks those participants that entered REM sleep improved by almost 40% over their morning performances.

If these theories are proven on a scientific basis, does it mean that people on polyphasic sleep schedules not only sleep less but are also capable of performing better than normal people? That seems a little counter-intuitive, but a fast growing community of polyphasic sleepers is trying to prove otherwise. More research in this field can lead to development of medically-endorsed techniques which could let to polyphasic sleeping being rolled out to a wider community.

Also published on Cherwell’s Science Blog: Matters Scientific

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