Tag Archives: food

September 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
  • There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
  • In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

gene-edited soybean oil

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Gene editing is starting to move into food, using CRISPR and something new (to me) called TALENs.

Calyxt’s soybean is the first of 23 gene-edited crops the Agriculture Department has recognized to date.

Scientists at Calyxt, a subsidiary of the French pharmaceutical firm Cellectis, developed their soybean by turning “off” the genes responsible for the trans fats in soybean oil. Compared with the conventional version, Calyxt says, oil made from this soybean boasts far more “healthy” fats, and far less of the fats that raise bad cholesterol…

Tripodi likes to say the product is akin to olive oil but without the pungent flavor that would make it off-putting in Oreos or granola bars. It has earned praise from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group that says public health will benefit from ingredients with less trans and saturated fats, regardless of how they were developed.

I’m not really afraid of genetically engineered food, but when we monkey with whole foods in this way, it almost never ends up being healthier. Two good cases in point are vitamin pills and baby formula. If you want to be healthy, you should eat the actual soybeans rather than the Oreos or granola bars with soybean oil in them, whether genetically modified or not. And I happen to like olive oil, by the way.

My other concern is biodiversity. The more patented, altered, and homogeneous our food supply is, I wonder if it is more vulnerable to some pest or disease coming out of left field and wiping out the vast majority of it. This concern is not limited to genetic engineering either.

July 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • The Trump administration is attacking regulations that protect Americans from air pollution and that help ensure our fisheries are sustainable. Earth Overshoot Day is on August 1 this year, two days earlier than last year.
  • The U.S. has not managed a full year of 3% GDP growth since 2005, due to slowing growth and the working age population and slowing productivity growth, and these trends seem likely to continue even if the current dumb policies that make them worse were to be reversed. Some economists think a U.S. withdrawal from the World Trade Organization could trigger a recession (others do not).

Most hopeful stories:

  • Looking at basic economic and health data over about a 50-200 time frame reminds us that enormous progress has been made, even though the last 20 years or so seems like a reversal.
  • Simultaneous Policy is an idea where multiple legislatures around the world agree to a single policy on a fairly narrow issue (like climate change or arms reductions).
  • I was heartened by the compassion Americans showed for children trapped in a cave 10,000 miles away. The news coverage did a lot to humanize these children, and it would be nice to see more of that closer to home.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

fish

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Fishery policy might seem like a fringe issue, but it is another disturbing example of ignorant politicians disrupting science- and evidence-based policies. This is from Pew:

When a fish population falls below a certain level, it is classified as overfished, and the MSA requires regional managers to create a plan to rebuild the species with a date for meeting the recovery goal. That timeline is based on science and accounts for environmental conditions and biological factors that can influence rebuilding, such as how long it takes the fish to reach reproductive age.

Critics of the MSA claim that the law is rigid in requiring a short timeline, but the facts say otherwise: The average timeline for rebuilding plans is close to 20 years, and most plans have recovery timelines longer than 10 years. H.R. 200 would alter the law to allow exceptions to setting science-based rebuilding timelines. It would open the door for political and other considerations to influence a major element of recovery plans, allowing managers to set arbitrary timelines that could postpone the benefits of fully rebuilt stocks indefinitely. That’s why extending rebuilding timelines would be shortsighted and counterproductive…

To prevent overfishing, the MSA requires managers to set science-based annual catch limits. H.R. 200 would exempt more fish populations from the requirement to establish science-based catch limits—which would increase the risk of overfishing.

Fisheries are a poster child for introducing complex systems. They are a straightforward physical system that is just a little complex. And yet, it is easy for a normal intelligent person to have misconceptions about how they will change over time. This is because there are lags and non-linearities in the system. Fish take a while to grow to maturity and reproduce. You can fish a seemingly abundant fish population at a high rate for awhile, but then it will seem to crash without warning and take a long time to recover. This seems unpredictable to people uneducated in systems (who may be perfectly intelligent, literate, and numerate otherwise), but is fairly easy to grasp and predict once you understand the relatively simple theory and dynamics behind it. So the fact that politicians and the population at large aren’t able to grasp this is just a failure of our education system.

Real fisheries are just a bit more complex than what I described above. This podcast from Fresh Air describes how removing the small fish species that form the base of the food chain, rather than just overfishing of larger commercial species, may have led to the Cod collapse off New England in the 1980s.

how chili peppers got to Asia

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There were no chili peppers in China or Southeast Asia until at least the 1500s according to this article. Chilis are native to South America.

The first mention of the chili pepper in the Chinese historical record appears in 1591, although historians have yet to arrive at a consensus as to exactly how it arrived in the Middle Kingdom. One school of thought believes the pepper came overland from India into western China via a northern route through Tibet or a southern route across Burma. But the first consistent references to chili peppers in local Chinese gazettes start in China’s eastern coastal regions and move gradually inland toward the West—reaching Hunan in 1684 and Sichuan in 1749—data points that support the argument that the chili pepper arrived by sea, possibly via Portuguese traders who had founded a colony near the southern Chinese coast on the island of Macao…

The article also suggests that it might have been Columbus himself who was responsible for calling this plant “pepper”. Because he thought he was in India, and had a habit of naming people and things using words already assigned to other people and things.

April 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Impossible Foods

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Impossible Foods is a synthetic meat company.

The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants — even fast-food stalwart White Castle…

It contains heme (pronounced HEEM), a key part of red meat and a source of iron, which humans can’t live without. Think of Brown’s discovery as plant-based blood. Brown, 63, says it makes the Impossible Burger sizzle, smell and taste like real red meat…

Fake meat will be one of the year’s hottest food trends. An increasing number of flexitarians — people not looking to eat meat at every meal — are helping to drive interest, according to Rabobank. Sales of alternative proteins are dwarfed by the $49 billion red meat and chicken market, but they’re expected to grow about 17 percent a year to $863 million in 2021, according to a CoBank estimate.

Apparently the company is having some trouble with the FDA, which it voluntarily sought approval from.

farm robots

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Farm machinery is getting more high-tech and more automated all the time, due in part ot climate change.

Technological improvements from boosting crop yields to data-tracking systems will be required in coming decades as companies adapt to shifts in weather patterns, according to BMI Research. That may increasingly push agribusiness companies, especially grain handlers and input firms, into acquiring agritech startups.

“The rise of agtech use and ‘precision agriculture’ will benefit or disrupt a number of operations and businesses in the process,” the company said in a report Tuesday.

Farmers and businesses around the world are poised to feel the impact of climate change as supplies get disrupted and farmland and yields come under pressure. At the same time, agriculture, one of the largest sources of gas emissions, will face action from regulators targeting livestock and soil management.

 

test tube dog food

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It makes sense that dog food would be the first serious commercial application of synthetic meat.

I can’t help thinking of the yeast vats in Isaac Asimov’s 1953 Caves of Steel. That idea has almost literally come true.

Bethencourt compares his company’s production of “clean” protein to that of sake—imagine giant fermentation tanks—right down to using the same ingredient to fuel its protein growth. Koji, a fungus, is the Japanese version of baker’s yeast. It grows rapidly inside tanks, along with sugar and nutrients, at the right balmy temperature. The result is a plant-based protein with a close match to eggs or animal-based meat. Because koji is widely consumed by humans, it already has a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) designation. Wild Earth’s supply chain is simple—it uses only a handful of ingredients—and easily traceable.