food science

It just so happens—and Fletcher maintains that this timing was a coincidence—that as he was mulling over the prospect of a low-fat, low-sugar doughnut, the UK government was limbering up to introduce legislation to restrict how and where unhealthy foods are sold.The new rules, which came into force in October 2022, ban the sale of certain foods high in fat, sugar, and salt near supermarket entrances, on the ends of aisles, or near checkouts. An ocean of prime supermarket real estate awaited anyone who could make a…

A gene-editing startup wants to help you eat healthier salads. This month, North Carolina–based Pairwise Plants is rolling out a new type of mustard greens engineered to be less bitter than the original plant. The vegetable is the first Crispr-edited food to hit the US market.Mustard greens are packed with vitamins and minerals but have a strong peppery flavor when eaten raw. To make them more palatable, they're usually cooked. Pairwise wanted to retain the health benefits of mustard greens but make them tastier to the…

It’s essentially a problem of scale. Proteins like soy and pea are produced on a mass scale for very low prices, but the cultivated meat industry is still reliant on supply chains that exist for the pharmaceutical industry, where margins are much higher. In Oxford in the UK, scientists at cultivated meat firm Ivy Farm Technologies are making a hybrid pork meatball made up of 51 percent pig cells, 7 percent pea protein, and then onion, herbs, and seasoning. The single cultivated meatball I tried at Ivy Farm’s pilot plant…

Kenya is in the middle of its worst drought in 40 years. In the parched north of the country, rivers are running dry and millions of livestock have perished due to lack of food. Around 4.4 million Kenyans don’t have enough to eat, and the situation will worsen if the coming rainy season fails like the previous five. “I’ve never seen it so bad. There’s nothing in the farms, the drought is too harsh,” says Daniel Magondo, a cotton and maize farmer in central Kenya.The record-breaking drought is forcing Kenya to confront a…

In the late 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. Between 1975 and 2009 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than…

Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images (Getty Images)MSG, short for monosodium glutamate, is an ingredient commonly added to processed foods, most notably Chinese takeout, and is naturally found in tomatoes and cheese. It’s supposed to give food a more umami, or meaty, flavor, and was actually first derived from a commonly served seaweed broth in Japan around the turn of the 20th century (nowadays, it’s produced through fermentation of beets and other foods). Unlike some of the items on the list, MSG has been villainized more…

But in the right hands, liberica can be a revelation. In 2016 Davis visited some coffee farmers in Uganda and tried a brew of their local beans. The taste surprised him. It was sweet, smooth, and had notes of jackfruit. He started bringing beans back to the UK and sharing them with coffee importers. They were impressed too, and saw the potential for a high-yielding, tasty bean that could grow across a relatively wide range of locations. “We are talking about people who are doing this for profit, not for passion. If it’s…

Cultivated meat has been approved for sale in the United States for the first time. The decision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) means that a company called Upside Foods will now be able to sell chicken made from real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of requiring the slaughter of live animals.The long-awaited decision from the FDA is a major milestone for the cultivated meat industry. In the last few years, startups in the space have built small-scale production facilities and raised billions of dollars…

“The biggest finding that we had was that truffles were responding to these hot and dry summers,” says Steidinger. He and colleagues found that a temperature anomaly of just 3 degrees Celsius was enough to stop the production of truffle fruiting bodies altogether. As tree-growing seasons shortened, truffles also tended to get smaller. The relationship with trees is crucial since the truffle fungi grow directly on tree roots and provide their hosts with additional moisture and nutrients, while the trees share sugar with…

Today, Ethiopian farmers are feeling the pressure to grow modern monoculture crops, thanks in part to a national push to become an agricultural powerhouse. “If you export grains, you want them to be uniform,” says McAlvay. “The global market wants a certain type of wheat for their Wonder Bread. A mixture of three varieties of wheat and four varieties of barley with some other things thrown in really doesn’t make the cut.”Tesfanesh Feseha, a master’s student in botany who served as a field translator during McAlvay’s…