Kriek's blog

I grew up in South Africa as a white boy and saw the whole end of apartheid thing. Because of the previous regime a town would generally consist of white suburban neighbourhoods not unlike you'd expect in the US with a commercial centre with malls and whatever, and then just outside of town would be a black 'township' that had dirt roads and most people lived in metal and wooden shacks and basic brick houses and would take the bus or minibus taxi into the main white town if they had work. The town I lived in had a public swimming pool, and as facilities were being opened to all races this was opened too. The white population of the main town was about 8,000 people and the township had about 25,000 people in it. The black kids from the townships were obviously very keen to try out this swimming thing, especially since they had no pool up in the townships. The pool became very busy with lots of black people. None of them had any swimming experience but the...

Anyone who has children probably know a few other parents who claim their children are allergic to certain kinds of foods, including peanuts or nuts. It also seems this is becoming more common. Is this really so? I don't believe so, and I blame the media a bit for making it seem like that. Here are some interesting bits of trivia: 25% of families believe their children have food allergies. 4% of them actually do. Peanuts are legumes and the other tree nuts are dried fruits. Allergies to them are different, but it's not uncommon that a hypersensitive person is allergic to multiple things. About 3-4% of people have reported food allergies. Most of them to certain fruits, then vegetables, then milk, then seafood, then latex, then tree nuts and only 1% of them to peanuts. The most common reaction to a peanut allergy is eczema (40%) hoarseness (37%) , asthma (14%), anaphylaxis (6%), digestive problems (1.4%). According to current statistics about the same amount of people ge...

The E-numbers system is a European system to abbreviate various substances included in food products, and appears on the packaging. It seems like people are naturally suspicious of these codes, probably because they appear to indicate something very artificial and we would rather trust something that's more natural. For some, it's more than just a suspicion, which offers an opportunity to market products as being 'Free from E-numbers'. I suppose the original purpose of E-numbers was to actually allow product manufacturers to use less printing space on their packaging to list the ingredients, and to eliminate ambiguity. This is particularly useful when printing information on small or multi-lingual packaging. Unfortunately it seems like this effort to help the consumer be more informed has backfired. E-numbers are intended to be used to list any ingredient that has an E-number, but commonly used to list additives with long chemical names. Some of these can indeed b...