As a scientifically-minded massage therapist, I find myself explaining this to clients a lot - that we know knots happen, and we know what seems to help treat them, but we don’t know why, or even how. A lot of the commonly presented theories have been effectively debunked.

Since discovering how much better my farmer’s market chickens are than the grocery store ones, I’ve started exclusively buying whole chickens. Then if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll roast the whole thing with potatoes and onions; but if I’m a bit more ambitious I’ll cut it into parts and use the legs and thighs (bone-in or…

Haha wow, you’re right - while the article is correct (and excellent), the title (“Vegetables Do Not Have Gender”) is technically wrong - for example, there are male and female asparagus, and male and female spinach, in that each plant has one gender. Of course, the vegetable - that is, the edible part - is identical…

Google Books Ngram search can’t find a single mention of “roiling boil” before 1957, while “rolling boil” was in common usage by 1932 and has been far more common than “roiling” in every year since. And “Roiling boil” doesn’t appear in a single British book in the Google Ngram database. The OED lists “heaving,…

These are great questions, and the answers are surprisingly hard to find. Here’s what I’ve figured out from my own research:

Where the guideline comes from: experiments, in which pathogenic bacteria (Listeria, E. Coli, Salmonella, and others) were put on various foods in various conditions.