Innovation Toronto » food

Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy – could 3D printing be the next revolution in cooking?

innovation2 — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:28:16 +0000

Wouldn’t it be great to have a digital food machine sitting in your kitchen that could create any dish, real or imagined, from scratch at the touch of a button? Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy is a concept design that uses the well-established principles of 3D printing – plus precisely timed and temperature-controlled mixing and cooking – to open the door to a virtually limitless realm of replicable, creative cuisine in shapes and combinations that are simply impossible using our current, centuries-old cooking techniques. It’s a wonderful look into the future of cooking, from the creative food lover’s perspective.

We see all sorts of home gadgetry here at Gizmag, but I think it’s fair to say that there hasn’t been a truly revolutionary invention in the world of cooking since the microwave oven – and those started popping up in homes more than 40 years ago. Otherwise, we’re still frying, casseroling, baking, pressure cooking, roasting, barbecuing, steaming and grilling our dinners in much the same way as we have done for hundreds of years.

For many, the simple and precise application of heat, fire, metal and various different ingredients has become a fine art – but surely we’re overdue for a technological overhaul in the kitchen that might open up some new possibilities.

The Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy concept design is an ingenious attempt to turn the cooking process upside down, open up a whole range of new creative possibilities and bring creative cooking into a new and replicable phase for the information age.

Cornucopia builds up edible creations using a layering process similar to some of the 3D printing machines we’ve been writing about recently, except that it uses a variety of different foodstuffs instead of plastics to build up its final product.

The printing head moves on a 3D axis, and extrudes precisely mixed and measured quantities of different ingredients from the canisters on top of the machine. Ingredients can be mixed as they come through the printing head, which is also able to precisely temperature-control the mix as it prints using a laser heating and piped cooling system.

The printed food output sits inside a temperature-controlled chamber that finishes the rest of whatever cooking or cooling needs to happen before the dish is done, and the device lets you know when it’s time to eat.

The ingredient canisters are refillable or automatically re-orderable, and provide constant feedback on stock levels or ingredients that are going out of date as well as offering smart alternatives if you’re low on something.

Read more . . .

Cornucopia Concept Food Printer From MIT (ubergizmo.com)

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Getting Our Nitrogen Fix

innovation2 — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:56:48 +0000

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Our ability to pull nitrogen from the air fed a growing human population. Can 21st century biotechnology refine the process while reducing environmental impact?

In 1968 the entomologist Paul Ehrlich published a foreboding manifesto called The Population Bomb, in which he argued that the explosive growth of the human population would lead, within the next decade, to mass starvation and the death of hundreds of millions of people. It was the old Malthusian trap: Population increases tend to be exponential, while increases in the food supply are linear. The tragedy was simple math.

But Ehrlich was wrong. There were plenty of horrific famines in the 1970s, especially in Sub- Saharan Africa, but there was no global food shortage. In fact, over the next few decades, the growth of the food supply consistently outstripped population growth; it was Malthus in reverse. While a long list of variables drove this trend, from the increased use of pesticides to new varieties of corn, wheat, and rice, one of the most important factors was the introduction of synthetic fertilizer. Plants thrive on nutrients in the soil, and these mass-produced fertilizers led to the doubling of crop yields between 1950 and 1990. We learned how to feed ourselves because we learned how to feed plants.

The story of modern fertilizer is really the story of nitrogen, and how humans learned to make plant food out of air and energy. Fritz Haber was there first. A German industrial chemist, he developed a method for “fixing” nitrogen around the turn of the 20th century. Although nitrogen is abundant, accounting for more than 78 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is also highly inert: The gas is defined by its triple covalent bonds, which are extremely difficult to sever. Haber achieved his breakthrough by heating a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen gas in the presence of the chemical catalyst iron oxide. When this concoction was heated to 500°C and 200 atmospheres of pressure, the result was a brick of ammonia, or NH₃. With Haber, the sky was rendered solid.

Before the Haber process was perfected, fixed nitrogen, usually in the form of sodium nitrate, or “Chile saltpeter,” was a crucial natural resource. In addition to being valuable as fertilizer, it was an essential component of military ammunition?—?nitrogen provides the explosive lift inside the gun chamber?—?so controlling access to nitrogen meant controlling the ingredients of war. Indeed, the first major deployment of Haber’s chemical process had nothing to do with agriculture. Rather, it provided Germany with a seemingly infinite supply of ammonia, which meant that it could fight a world war even if the British Navy cut its access to saltpeter.

Read more . . .

Another Inconvenient Truth: The World’s Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma (scientificamerican.com)

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Benn unveils plan to boost UK food and ‘grow your own’

innovation2 — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:59:23 +0000

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Plans to boost food production in Britain and reduce its impact on the environment have been unveiled.

The government’s 20-year food strategy includes making land available for people to grow their own food and more healthy cooking courses.

Minister Hilary Benn said shoppers had led the push for free-range eggs and could do the same for sustainable food.

The Tories said ministers “belatedly” recognised the need for food security after a decade of declining production.

Environment Secretary Mr Benn unveiled the government’s Food 2030 plan at the Oxford Farming Conference and said a rising population and climate change meant food could not be taken for granted.

Smaller portions

The document includes proposals for a “healthy food code of conduct” to help people choose what food to buy – ideas include clearer labelling, smaller portions for “energy dense” or high salt foods, reducing fat and sugar in foods and nutrition information on restaurant menus.

The government also wants less food waste, more food bought in season to reduce environmental impact and to encourage people to buy sustainably-farmed food.

It says it will pilot healthy cooking classes for “at risk” families as part of efforts to tackle obesity and will help local landowners and community groups work together to make land available temporarily, to grow food.

Read more . . .

Tory plan to ‘curb’ supermarkets (news.bbc.co.uk)
Food labels to show ‘carbon footprint’ under Government plans (telegraph.co.uk)
Parties unveil food strategies (newstatesman.com)
Sustainability Majors on the Rise at Colleges (usnews.com)

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Climate Wizard Makes Large Databases of Climate Information Visual, Accessible

innovation2 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:25:28 +0000

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A Web tool that generates color maps of projected temperature and precipitation changes using 16 of the world’s most prominent climate-change models is being used to consider such things as habitat shifts that will affect endangered species, places around the world where crops could be at risk because of drought and temperatures that could cripple fruit and nut production in California’s Great Central Valley.

Climate Wizard, a tool meant for scientists and non-scientists alike, is being demonstrated by The Nature Conservancy in Copenhagen, Denmark, in conjunction with the climate summit underway there. It also is the subject of a presentation Tuesday, Dec. 15, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco and a paper just released online by the Public Library of Science’s PLoS ONE with Evan Girvetz as lead presenter and lead author. Girvetz worked on Climate Wizard during postdoctoral work at the University of Washington’s School of Forest Resources and just accepted a job with The Nature Conservancy.

“Climate Wizard is meant to make it easier to explore climate data in an interactive way,” Girvetz says. “It makes the data accessible in ways that are more intuitive, even for people who are not climate scientists.”

For example, data used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science organization evaluating the risks of climate change, is made visual and more readily understandable through Climate Wizard. Politicians, resource managers and citizens are all potential users, Girvetz says. Find Climate Wizard at http://www.climatewizard.org/.

Climate Wizard, a joint effort among the UW, University of Southern Mississippi and The Nature Conservancy, lets users focus on states, countries or regions around the world and apply different scenarios to generate color-coded maps of changes in temperature and precipitation that can, in turn, be used to consider such things as moisture stress in vegetation and freshwater supplies.

Read more . . .

Michael Mann speaks out on hacked climate science emails (guardian.co.uk)
Mercury Rising: Temperature Will Soar in Some U.S. States Within the Century (treehugger.com)
‘Back to nature’ cuts flood risks (news.bbc.co.uk)
Climate change is inspiring the ultimate scary movies | Ryan Gilbey (guardian.co.uk)

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World’s Healthiest Food

innovation2 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:03:52 +0000

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So what’s the most scrumptious, wholesome, exquisite, healthful, gratifying food in the world?

It’s not ambrosia, and it’s not even pepperoni pizza. Hint: It’s far cheaper. A year’s supply costs less than the cheapest hamburger.

Give up? Here’s another hint: It’s lifesaving for children and for women who may become pregnant. If you know of a woman who may become pregnant, make sure she gets this miracle substance.

A final hint: It was a lack of this substance that led to a tragedy that I encountered the other day at a hospital here in the Honduran capital. Three babies lay in cots next to one another with birth defects of the brain and spinal cord.

In the first cot was Rosa Álvarez, 18 days old and recovering from surgery to repair a hole in her spine. She also suffers from a brain deformity.

In the next cot was Ángel Flores, soft tissue protruding from his back.

Closest to the door was José Tercera. His mother unwrapped a bandage on his head, and I saw a golf-ball-size chunk of his brain spilling out a hole in his forehead.

The doctors believe the reason for these deformities, called neural tube defects, was that their mothers did not have enough micronutrients, particularly folic acid, while pregnant. These micronutrients are the miracle substance I’m talking about, and there’s scarcely a form of foreign aid more cost-effective than getting them into the food supply.

“It’s unnecessary to have these kinds of problems,” Dr. Ali Flores, a pediatrician and expert on these defects, said as he looked over the three babies.

If a pregnant woman does not have enough folic acid (also known as vitamin B9) in her body at the very beginning of her pregnancy, then her fetus may suffer these neural tube defects. That’s why doctors give folic acid to women who plan to become pregnant.

Equally important is another micronutrient, iodine. The worst consequence of iodine deficiency isn’t goiters, but malformation of fetuses’ brains, so they have 10 to 15 points permanently shaved off their I.Q.’s.

Then there’s zinc, which reduces child deaths from diarrhea and infections. There’s iron, lack of which causes widespread anemia. And there’s vitamin A: some 670,000 children die each year because they don’t get enough vitamin A, and lack of the vitamin remains the world’s leading cause of childhood blindness.

Read more . . .

Don’t block folic acid in early pregnancy (scienceblog.com)
Researchers link asthma risk to folic acid during pregnancy (guardian.co.uk)
Healthy Eating Starts before Birth (parenting-success.com)

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Satellites weigh California water

innovation2 — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:44:30 +0000

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Nasa satellites have weighed the water lost by the US State of California’s heartland since 2003.

The Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins which support the highly productive Central Valley have shed over 30 cubic km of water in that time.

The data comes from the Grace mission which detects changes in gravity caused by water as it cycles between the sea, the atmosphere and the land.

It illustrates the impact of a drought but also excessive irrigation use.

“The numbers we’re getting out of this analysis point to groundwater use at unsustainable rates,” said Professor Jay Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine.

“It’s leading to declining water tables, decreased crop sizes, and continued land subsidence – something that has been going on in the Central Valley for decades.”

Professor Famiglietti has been describing the California situation here at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world’s largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.

It is big issue because of California’s importance to food production in the US.

Its Central Valley is one of the major agricultural regions in the world.

It grows more than 250 different crops, accounting for a little under a tenth of all the food produced in the US by value. But the Central Valley also accounts for about a sixth of all the irrigated land in the US, making the region the second most pumped aquifer in America.

Read more . . .

California’s troubled waters (scienceblog.com)
Satellites eye dwindling water in central Calif. (sfgate.com)
Calif Water Deal No Quick Fix for Struggling Farms (abcnews.go.com)
California Tries to Confront Its Water Woes (nytimes.com)

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A Fish Oil Story

innovation2 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:03:36 +0000

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“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”

If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids, which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack. But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.

But menhaden are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-half fight for survival that began when humans started turning huge schools into fertilizer and lamp oil. Once petroleum-based oils replaced menhaden oil in lamps, trillions of menhaden were ground into feed for hogs, chickens and pets. Today, hundreds of billions of pounds of them are converted into lipstick, salmon feed, paint, “buttery spread,” salad dressing and, yes, some of those omega-3 supplements you have been forcing on your children. All of these products can be made with more environmentally benign substitutes, but menhaden are still used in great (though declining) numbers because they can be caught and processed cheaply.

Read more . . .

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Catch of the Freezer

innovation2 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:57:07 +0000

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GO local. Eat organic. Buy fresh. Those food mantras continue to make waves among environmentally conscious consumers. But — as is often the case in these climate-conscious times — if the motivation is to truly make our diets more earth-friendly, then perhaps we need a new mantra: Buy frozen.

Several years ago, the three of us — two ecological economists and one food system researcher — teamed up in an effort to understand how to develop sustainable food systems to feed a planet of nine billion by 2050. As the focus of our study, we chose salmon, an important source of protein around the world and a food that is available nearly anywhere at any time, regardless of season or local supply.

We examined the salmon’s life cycle: how the fish are caught in the wild, what they’re fed when farmed, how they’re processed and transported and how they’re consumed.

And what did we find in our research? When it comes to salmon, the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon.

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Can We Feed and Save the Planet?

innovation2 — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:40:56 +0000

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Challenges of population control and food production need to be tackled in tandem

We are eating ourselves out of house and home. Recently, in the September 24 issue of Nature, Johan Rockström and his colleagues proposed 10 “planetary boundaries” to define safe limits of human activity. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) Those limits include caps on greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, the global conversion of land cover to cropland, and other mega-impacts on the earth’s ecosystems. Yet humanity has already exceeded several of them and is on a trajectory to exceed most of the others. The rising demand for food plays a large role in those transgressions.

The green revolution that made grain production soar gave humanity some breathing space, but the continuing rise in population and demand for meat production is exhausting that buffer. The father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug, who passed away in September at the age of 95, made exactly this point in 1970 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize: “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”

That common effort was inconsistent at best and sometimes essentially nonexistent. Since 1970 the population has risen from 3.7 billion to 6.9 billion and continues to increase by around 80 million a year. Food production per person has declined in some big regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa. In India the doubling of population has absorbed almost all of the increase in grain production.

Food production accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions when one tallies those from fossil fuels used in growing, preparing and transporting food; the carbon dioxide released by clearing land for farming and pastures; the methane from rice paddies and ruminant livestock; and the nitrous oxide from fertilizer use.

Through the clearing of forestland, food production is also responsible for much of the loss of biodiversity. Chemical fertilizers cause massive depositions of nitrogen and phosphorus, which now destroy estuaries in hundreds of river systems and threaten ocean chemistry. Roughly 70 percent of worldwide water use goes to food production, which is implicated in groundwater depletion and ecologically destructive freshwater consumption from California to the Indo-Gangetic Plain to Central Asia to northern China.

The green revolution, in short, has not negated the dangerous side effects of a burgeoning human population, which are bound to increase as the population exceeds seven billion around 2012 and continues to grow as forecast toward nine billion by 2046. Meat consumption per capita is rising as well. Beef poses the biggest threat because cattle require up to 16 kilograms of feed grains for each kilogram of consumed meat, they emit large amounts of methane, and the fertilizer used to grow their feed contributes hugely to nitrogen oxides.

It is not enough to produce more food; we must also simultaneously stabilize the global population and reduce the ecological consequences of food production—a triple challenge. A rapid voluntary reduction in fertility rates in the poor countries, brought about by more access to family planning, higher child survival and education for girls, could stabilize the population at around eight billion by 2050.

Payments to poor communities to resist deforestation could save species habitats. No-till farming and other methods can preserve soils and biodiversity. More efficient fertilizer use can reduce the transport of excessive nitrogen and phosphorus. Better irrigation and seed varieties can conserve water and reduce other ecological pressures. And a diet shifted away from eating beef would conserve ecosystems while improving human health.

Read more . . .

New recipe looks back for how to feed the world (scientificamerican.com)
Another Inconvenient Truth: The World’s Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma (scientificamerican.com)
Father Earth Is Dead (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)
Grignon Energie Positive: An innovative ecological intensification project for society and the planet. (slideshare.net)
So Much Food. So Much Hunger. (nytimes.com)

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Benign by Design

innovation2 — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:40:21 +0000

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With toxic compounds turning up in animals, food, and people all over the world, scientists are calling for green chemistry: a sustainable ethos of product design.

More than 40 years ago, Rachel Carson warned of a “silent spring.” Twenty years later, Bill McKibben wrote of the human alteration of every aspect of the natural world. Nature has not ended, but signs of severe and subtle disturbance are everywhere. Scientists are now watching natural systems that have evolved over millennia begin to falter in response to chemical wrenches we’ve introduced into the global environment. The manufactured materials we’ve used for the past century have served us well in many ways. But it is now clear we can no longer afford—if we ever could—to proceed with designs that serve but one generation.

There are now tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals—materials that exist nowhere in nature—that are manufactured commercially and go into products that range from electronics to cosmetics, clothing, cookware, and building materials. They now permeate every aspect of our lives. These chemicals were created to perform specific tasks and are intended to make our lives easier, more convenient, and often safer.

But many of these manufactured materials can also behave in ways that produce adverse health impacts. Chemicals that make up lightweight, shatterproof, and bendable flexible plastics; nonstick, waterproof, stain- and grease-resistant surfaces; and flame retardants are being released into the environment. This contamination stems not only from industrial plants and waste sites but also from finished products as we use them. Many of these chemicals are turning up far—even continents—away from where these products are made, used, or disposed of.

Such chemicals are being found in animals, in food, and in people all over the world. Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control have found dozens of such chemicals in the majority of Americans they’ve tested over the past 10 years. Babies are now born in the U\S with synthetic chemicals already in their bloodstreams.

The acute adverse impacts of exposure to large amounts of highly toxic chemicals have long been known. What’s been discovered more recently is that many synthetic chemicals can interact at very low levels of exposure—levels present in the environment —with the biological mechanisms that maintain reproductive, metabolic, immune system, neurological, and even cardiac health. These effects can lead to chronic conditions that include diabetes, obesity, learning difficulties, and reproductive system disorders.

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Innovation Toronto » food

Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy – could 3D printing be the next revolution in cooking?

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Getting Our Nitrogen Fix

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Benn unveils plan to boost UK food and ‘grow your own’

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Climate Wizard Makes Large Databases of Climate Information Visual, Accessible

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World’s Healthiest Food

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Satellites weigh California water

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A Fish Oil Story

Catch of the Freezer

Can We Feed and Save the Planet?

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Benign by Design