food science

The autumn of 2013 was a stressful time for the Craten family, who live outside Phoenix, Arizona. In short order, three family members were diagnosed with the same type of salmonella infection. Salmonella is a foodborne bacteria that can travel on poultry meat and, as they would later find out, was sweeping the US in a nationwide outbreak.All they knew at the time was that their 18-month-old son, Noah, was the sickest among the relatives: spiking daily fevers, losing the ability to walk straight, and developing a droop on…

In December 2004, plant scientist Cathie Martin went to the greenhouse to check on her tomatoes. The tiny fruits, about the size of gumdrops, were still green. These miniature tomatoes, a variety widely used in research labs, normally become red upon ripening. But when Martin came back after Christmas, they were starting to turn purple—just as she’d hoped.Martin and her colleagues at the John Innes Centre in the UK were aiming to make a tomato high in anthocyanin, an antioxidant-rich pigment found in blackberries and…

Another way to figure out the impact plant-based meats are having is to look at how price changes impact the demand for various kinds of meat. A study of retail data from a couple of years ago showed that when the price of plant-based meats went down, demand for them went up, but when the price of animal meats fluctuated, demand for those products didn’t fluctuate as widely. The study also found that rather than displacing red meat, plant-based meats tended to be bought alongside beef and pork and usually seemed to be a…

But this is only one part of the process—what’s the point in developing new crops if they taste worse than what’s already on the market? “We have a trained tasting panel in-house that tastes our products weekly,” says Sigal Meirovitch, senior director and head of R&D at Equinom, an Israeli company also focused on improving crops for use in plant-based alternatives to animal products. Unlike Benson Hill, Equinom has so far mainly focused on the yellow pea.“After we see the results, we send the more successful varieties…

This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Across Midwestern farms, if Girish Chowdhary has his way, farmers will someday release beagle-sized robots into their fields like a pack of hounds flushing pheasant. The robots, he says, will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide diversity of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimize their farms.Chowdhary, a researcher at the University of Illinois, works…