Word: ferment
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tour her factory today is to witness one of the last food operations in Hong Kong that still follows time-honored methods. Rows of massive ceramic vats command center stage on the factory floor. In them, blackened soybeans, salt and a dash of wheat flour ferment for more than a year before Tsang deems the process complete. The rich, smoky, preservative-free sauce is thicker and less salty than its competitors. Yuan's oyster sauce, which sells for $24 for 250 ml and tastes like a blast of fresh oysters, is even more impressive...
...alcohol from the real thing. Jeff Evans, author of the Good Bottled Beer Guide, says this process often resulted in beers with a distinct "industrial accent." Today, producers like Cobra - sales of its nonalcoholic brand Cobra Zero rose 21% in the U.K. in the year to March - lightly ferment their beer mix, creating only a tiny amount of alcohol. "Beers brewed this way tend to be sweeter and a little fuller-bodied," says Evans, "because nothing has been stripped...
...Niger River, Timbuktu used to be a hectic crossroads where gold traders heading north met herders and salt merchants trekking south across the desert. The city's lucrative trade fueled Mali's empires as well as a rich ethnic blend of black Africans and Mediterranean people, and an intellectual ferment with dozens of Koranic schools. Refugees from the Inquisition in Spain brought their libraries with them, and soon began writing and buying more books. Timbuktu's literary output was enormous, and included works covering the history of Africa and southern Europe, religion, mathematics, medicine and law. There were manuscripts detailing...
...deadliest pandemics in human history - the Black Death of the 14th century, which killed roughly 25 million people in Europe - resulted in massive social dislocation and doubt in an omnipotent God, which some scholars think led to the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance. Cholera, when it came to Europe in the 1830s, led to the overhaul of public health and sanitation. Human vulnerability can paradoxically lead to the triumph of human confidence - the knowledge that progress can survive even the most dreadful diseases...
Waiting for Obama The ferment in the Muslim world has a range of implications for President Barack Obama's outreach to Islam. Gallup polls in Islamic societies show that large majorities both reject militants and have serious reservations about the West. "They're saying, 'There's a plague on both your houses,'" says Richard Burkholder Jr., director of Gallup's international polls. Many young Muslims are angry at the outside world's support of corrupt and autocratic regimes despite pledges to push for democracy after 9/11. "Most of the young feel the West betrayed its promises," says Dhillon...