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The Pros and Cons of Organic Produce
Is buying organic food the best option? It all depends on what you mean by "best" and the result you are looking for. If you want to save money, forget it- organic foods cost a lot more. The other questions are not so clear cut, and neither is the "organic" label, which may mean different things in different countries. Are you looking for food that is more nutritious? Or food that is less toxic? Food that is grown by environmentally-friendly methods? Or do you want to promote a different way of doing agriculture and business? Kurzgesagt takes us through all those questions, and throws in some other factors you haven't even thought of, in the decision on whether to buy organic food instead of conventionally-grown crops. #organic #organicproduce #agriculture #food #Kurzgesagt
Argas brumpti Tick Survived for 8 Years Without Feeding
Living without eating for years is possible– if you’re a tick, at least!An East African species of tick, called Argas brumpti, was able to survive for eight years without eating. Julian Shepherd, an associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University discovered the insect’s abilities after running out of a food source for the said species. After initially receiving these creatures as a gift in 1976, Shepherd was surprised to find out that they survived for a very long time without eating any food. The set of ticks he acquired was composed of six adult females, four adult males, and three nymphs of the species. He fed them lab rabbits, mice, and rats until 1984 when the professor decided to stop feeding them due to a lack of source. The male ticks died four years after they weren’t able to eat. The females survived for 8 years and even managed to reproduce asexually, a behavior Shepherd noticed for the very first time. After 45 years of researching and studying the insects’ behaviors, he published his findings in the Journal of Medical Entomology.Image credit: Jonathan Cohen#food #survivial #animals #insects #ticks #research #Argasbrumpti
Egg White without the Chicken: Trichoderma reesei Fungus Genetically Engineered to Produce Ovalbumin
Chicken egg white powder is a resource that is widely used in the food industry due to its high-quality protein. There is a growing demand for the resource and consumption of egg white. The demand is currently 1.6 million tons and is expected to increase further in the coming years. This has raised questions about its sustainability and ethics. Intensive chicken farming has resulted in outbreaks of different zoonotic diseases, and experts are currently seeking ways to avoid the negative results of producing more egg white powder for the growing market. Researchers from the University of Helsinki and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland discovered a potential alternative to the current method of production, the fungus-produced ovalbumin. According to Dr. Emilia Nordlund, from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, ovalbumin(which is half of the egg white powder) can be produced through a microbial production system. “For example, more than half of the egg white powder protein content is ovalbumin. VTT has succeeded in producing ovalbumin with the help of the filamentous ascomycete fungus Trichoderma reesei. The gene carrying the blueprints for ovalbumin is inserted by modern biotechnological tools into the fungus which then produces and secretes the same protein that chickens produce. The ovalbumin protein is then separated from the cells, concentrated, and dried to create a final functional product,” she said. Image credit: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland#eggwhite #cellularagriculture #science #research #food
BAGO (For Bags to Go): Seatbelt for Bags is a Genius Invention
Have you ever experienced spilling some food from a take-out bag that tipped over on your car as you rode on the way home? If you did, then you're not alone. Dan Stevenson can also relate to that problem, and that is why he made the BAGO — a seatbelt that can hold your paper and plastic bags safely as you travel back home from the drive-through. Installing the seatbelt is very easy. Just put one end in the glove box, close the glove box, and that's it! The BAGO is available for pre-order at Indiegogo at $22 per piece. The product's delivery, however, will be in June. (Image Credit: BAGO - For Bags to Go/ YouTube) #Food #Seatbelt #UsefulProducts #Innovative
Would You Like to Eat Stuffed Duck Neck?
I know that your answer is an immediate and unhesitant “yes”, but I’d still like to tell you about what the waiter is about to bring to your table. The Daily Mail tells us that Westerns Laundry, a restaurant in the Highbury neighborhood of northern London, offers an entire duck neck stuffed with turnips and lentils. The restaurant staff holds that the food industry wastes too much meat and should make full use of a food animal’s body parts. It costs £18, which is about $24.46 USD. Who’s up for a road trip?-via Dave Barry | Photo: Westerns Laundry#duck #food
3D-Printed "Meat Alternative" Made from Plant Cuts Just Like Steak
Does it taste good, though?Meet Redefine Meat, a meat alternative startup from Israel. The company creates a meat alternative for people who avoid meat in their diet with the help of a 3D printer. Redefine Meat’s alternative is a mix of soy and pea protein, chickpeas, beetroot, nutritional yeasts and coconut fat. Where does the 3D printer come in? Well, they employ the device to mold the mixture into steak-like shapes. According to Inside Edition, the startup’s plant steak is designed to act, taste, and cut like the regular meat we all know and love. #meatalternative #plantbasedfood #meat #3dprinting #food
A Blue Whale Eats Between 10 to 20 Tons of Food a Day or About 20 to 50 Million Calories. That's the Equivalent of 80,000 Big Macs!
Baleen whales swallow much more food than was initially thought according to a recent study of filter-feeding whales that shows the importance of their eating habits in nutrient recycling in the ocean. The study shows that the different Baleen whales such as blue, fin, minke, and humpback whales consume at an average of around three times more each year than previous estimates. For instance, a blue whale in the eastern North Pacific can eat between 10 and 20 tons of food each day.”That amount of food is somewhere in the range of 20 to 50 million calories. That is about 70- to 80-thousand Big Macs. Probably decades of our eating is one day for them. So it's pretty remarkable," said Matthew Savoca, a researcher at Stanford University and the lead author of the new study.He added that the only data he could find about how much whales eat "didn't actually come from living, breathing whales in the wild." Researchers had only made extrapolations from the caloric needs of smaller animals or from the stomach contents of hunted whales.To get more accurate estimates, an underwater device was used that can measure the size and density of swarms of shrimp like krill. Krill are the main diet of whales, and the device can measure their number by sending out pulses of sound that bounce off the krill swarms and return. The gathered data of Savoca and colleagues came from more than 300 tagged whales.Image: Duke University Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab#whale #food #krill #BigMacs
Food Compass Ranks the Most to Least Healthy Food
Meet Food Compass, a new nutrient profiling system that can help people choose and produce healthier foods. The tool was developed by a scientific team from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in the last three years. According to a report in Nature Food, the following are the important features of the newest system: - Equally considering healthful vs. harmful factors in foods (many existing systems focus only on harmful factors);- Incorporating cutting-edge science on nutrients, food ingredients, processing characteristics, phytochemicals, and additives (existing systems focus largely on just a few nutrients); and- Objectively scoring all foods, beverages, and even mixed dishes and meals using one consistent score (existing systems subjectively group and score foods differently).The Compass profiles different foods in terms of scores, which are determined by different characteristics selected based on nutritional attributes linked to major chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and cancer, as well as the risk of undernutrition.So what are the most and least healthful food items ranked by the Food Compass? Raw raspberry gets the highest score, whereas instant noodle soup and ready to eat pudding (other than chocolate or fat free ones) tied for being the least healthful things you can eat.#FoodCompass #Nutrition #ProfilingSystem #Foodimage credit: Dan Gold / Unsplash
Now We're Cooking with Lasers: Engineers Cook 3D-Printed Chicken with Multiwavelength Lasers
Columbia engineers have been working on a machine that 3D prints meat and cooks it using lasers. It is said to be a potential personal chef in anyone’s home that only needs a little bit of tapping on its buttons before the food is ready to be made.The team of researchers also hope that in the future people can design and share their own food, similar to sharing music. They call it a ‘Food CAD’ where softwares can be used to tweak their own food according to their own taste.Jonathan Blutinger, a PhD student in Columbia University and the lead author of this study, said, “Food is something that we all interact with and personalize on a daily basis – it seems only natural to infuse software into our cooking to make meal creation more customizable.”Image: Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia University#food #technology #cooking #lasers #engineering
Steak and Coffee Flavored Potato Chips is What Science Comes up with by Analyzing our Taste Buds
This is a full meal in one crunchy bite. How did the manufacturer manage to squeeze two different food items in one? Well, this unusual packet of chips at a Japanese 7-Eleven store successfully did so, with science!The “Oishisa no Kagaku” (“Science of Deliciousness“) combines steak and coffee as chip seasoning, which is both scary and interesting at first glance. According to Yamayoshi Seika, the maker of the chips, the flavors will provide a ‘well-balanced taste sensation.’SoraNews24’s Oona McGee taste tested the unique snack and described the taste as ‘beef consommé with a coffee finish, but the more noticeable aspect was the well-rounded flavour in the snack. Acidity, bitterness, umami and saltiness greets you in every bite, which makes the snacking so much more satisfying!” But where did the steak and coffee combination come from? Seika studied the combination of actual steak and coffee to determine their deliciousness before applying them as flavoring. Image credit: SoraNews24 #SteakAndCoffeChips #OishisaNoKagaku #ScienceOfDeliciousness #WeirdChipFlavors #Japan #Food #Snacks #Chips
How Ancient People Fell in Love with Bread, Beer, and Other Carbs
Conventional wisdom tells us that the world changed at the beginning of the Neolithic period, when people settled in a specific place and developed agriculture. Before that, nomadic bands of hunters survived mostly on meat. That is indeed a big change, but recent research suggests that ancient people ate grains long before they learned to cultivate them. Consider the ruins of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, a settlement dated to 11,600 years ago. The many fossil bones found there led scientists to conclude that it was the site of huge gatherings of hunters who celebrated by eating meat.Now that view is changing, thanks to researchers such as Laura Dietrich at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Over the past four years, Dietrich has discovered that the people who built these ancient structures were fuelled by vat-fulls of porridge and stew, made from grain that the ancient residents had ground and processed on an almost industrial scale1. The clues from Göbekli Tepe reveal that ancient humans relied on grains much earlier than was previously thought — even before there is evidence that these plants were domesticated. And Dietrich’s work is part of a growing movement to take a closer look at the role that grains and other starches had in the diet of people in the past.In fact, there is some evidence of humans eating grains 100,000 years ago! Why are we just now figuring this out? It's because meat leaves better evidence behind than food made from plants. But new scientific techniques are enabling archaeologists to study remains of plants in ancient dishes. Read about these new and rather different methods for finding out about the everyday diets of our ancestors at Nature magazine. (Image credit: Dosseman)#beer #archaeology #carbs #food #grains #diet
Outrageous Footlong Soft Serve Is Toronto’s Newest Obsession
Can you finish a whole serving of a footlong soft serve cone? If you want to try it out, The Milkman Creamery is serving this unique ice cream in 14 different levels. In addition, the store switches up the flavors every two weeks, and no one knows the new flavors until they are announced at the beginning of a new cycle.Located in Langham Square Mall, the store offers their footlong serve cone for just $10. If you can finish the ice cream for a minute however, you don’t have to pay for it! So far, only nine people have won the creamery’s challenge. Image credit: hungry_wongs, milkman.creamery#IceCream #FootlongSoftServe #Toronto #Canada #UniqueFoodItems #Food
Goldfish-Bowl Inspired Parfait, Anyone?
If you ever go to Japan, make sure you visit the many Risotterias and Parfaiterias of GAKU Inc., a food company based in Japan. If you want to get an idea as to what type of food they serve, then have a look at their Instagram account that is filled with pictures of their mouth-watering and well-presented dishes and desserts, like this goldfish-bowl inspired parfait, which comes in cherry and grape variants.The grape variant consists mainly of grapes with some red beans. The cherry variant, on the other hand, is filled with cherries and daiginjo. A goldfish can be seen at the bottom of the parfait, but I’m really not sure what it is made of.(Image Credit: Risotteria via Instagram)#GAKU #Risotto #Parfait #Food #Dessert
Food Scraps Recycled Into Materials Stronger Than Concrete (But Strangely Remained Edible)
The option for food waste is quite limited - either throw it away or compost it - but there may soon be a third option: make it into a new and robust construction material.Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo first turned fruit and vegetable scraps such as seaweed, cabbage leaves as well as orange, onion, pumpkin, and banana peels into powder. Then, they mixed the powder with some water, poured the resulting mixture into a mold and pressed it at high temperature.When they tested the newly molded material, the researchers discovered that they were quite strong. "With the exception of the specimen derived from pumpkin, all of the materials exceeded our bending strength target," said Kota Machida in a statement, "We also found that Chinese cabbage leaves, which produced a material over three times stronger than concrete, could be mixed with the weaker pumpkin-based material to provide effective reinforcement."Surprisingly, the materials remained edible. They were also more resistant to rotting, fungus and insect infestations and didn't change in appearance or taste after being exposed to air for up to four months.#food #recycling #concrete #ConstructionMaterial #MaterialScience
This Impatient Waiter Will Carry ALL of Your Food in One Go
I bet this waiter also take all his supermarket grocery bags into the house in one trip! This unindentified waiter carried 33 plates of food to serve his customers all at one go. That's some serious arm and back strength, but seriously though, how is this not a food safety and health code violation?#waiter #food
This Robot Can Cook Fried Rice in Less Than a Minute
Is this the future of food? It appears that human labor is not even necessary for cooking anymore: Watch this robot scrambles some eggs then make fried rice in less than a minute.The futuristic cafe named "Bowl & Bowl" (A missed opportunity - it should've been Bot & Bowl) opened its doors in Toa Payoh, Singapore. There, five robotic frying pans cook a variety of fried rice dishes - with toppings such as chicken, prawn, duck, beef, salmon and vegetarian - for ravenous customers.#robot #friedrice #food #automation
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