Sidewalk Refrigerators Offer Free Food In New York City And Around The World
As the pandemic strains food banks and hunger relief efforts worldwide, volunteers have begun a simple solution: community refrigerators, sometimes nicknamed “friendly fridges.” In New York City, anyone in need is welcome to take food from these sidewalk refrigerators. “Take what you need, leave what you don’t” is a common sign on the fridges, which are cleaned and stocked by volunteers every day. Volunteers also request and coordinate food donations from local restaurants and grocery stores, gathering unsold and unused items that may otherwise have been destined for the trash. Even before the pandemic, 1 in every 4 New Yorkers were food insecure, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that roughly 30% of the country’s food supply went to waste. These trends are echoed around the world, as the data from the United Nations indicate that as many 270 million could become food insecure before the end of 2020, an 82% increase since the pandemic began. To combat the growing hunger problem, public refrigerators have proliferated around the world. Freedge.org, a database and network of free food refrigerators, lists dozens of these so-called “freedges.”
Wearable Tech Necklace Tracks Food Intake To Help Optimize Diet
NeckSense is a new necklace designed by Northwestern University researchers to help wearers understand, either on their own or by working with health professionals, what factors or behaviors trigger bingeing or overeating. The necklace contains a tiny wearable camera with sensors that record activities such as dietary intake and heart rate. Researchers refined the wearable tech after testing it on 20 study participants with and without obesity and publishing the study results in the journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. “The ability to easily record dietary intake patterns allows dieticians [sic] — or even laypeople making use of our tech — to deliver timely digital interventions that occur as eating is happening to prevent overeating,” said lead study author Nabil Alshurafa, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
China’s Country Garden Opens Restaurant Run Entirely By Robots
Health and safety concerns during the coronavirus outbreak have accelerated the use and acceptance of robots in restaurants. In the city of Shunde in China’s Guangdong province, Country Garden real estate and catering group has just opened a 21,000 square foot restaurant complex operated entirely by robots. The restaurant’s menu has 200 items including fast food, hot pot, and various other Chinese dishes that are prepared by 20 robots. The restaurant can handle 600 diners at once.
While robots have been used before in restaurants to greet guests and run food, most establishments still relied on human chefs. In Country Garden’s new restaurant complex, robots perform all tasks from cooking and serving to cleaning with specific robots trained to make dishes such as ice cream and clay pot rice. To assure customers of their safety, the robots have all received new safety certifications from China’s National Robot Testing and Accreditation Center.
Country Garden plans to expand with additional centralized kitchens in and around Hong Kong this year with the expectation of producing 5,000 robots a year. In the coronavirus era and beyond, the company is betting that customers will feel safer dining in a restaurant in which the food has been produced with no human contact.
Coming In 2021: World’s First 3D Printed Vegan Steak
Israeli start-up Redefine Meat has joined the plant-based “meat” market with plans to launch a line of 3D printed vegan steaks next year. “You need a 3D printer to mimic the structure of the muscle of the animal,” said CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit. The company is testing its “Alt Steaks” at several fine-dining restaurants this year and aims to roll out industrial-scale 3D printers to meat distributors in 2021. Redefine Meat’s machines will have the capacity to print 20 kilograms (about 44 pounds) of 3D printed plant-based meat per hour.
While Redefine Meat has focused on beef, the Spanish company Novameat has also been developing a line of 3D-printed plant-based meats focused on whole-muscle cuts that resemble pork. Like Redefine Meat, Novameat’s products will tested in European restaurants this year and the company has rollout plans for 2021.
“The market is definitely waiting for a breakthrough in terms of improving the texture,” said Stacy Pyett, who manages the Proteins for Life program at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. It remains to be seen whether 3D printing will provide that breakthrough. Either way, sales of alternative “meat” products are predicted to reach $140 billion by 2029, about 10% of the world meat market, according to Barclays.
Food Automation Goes From Niche To Necessity
With guests eager to experience restaurant food and service–but safely–food automation devices such as salad and smoothie robots have become more widely accepted. The Chowbotic company’s robot, Sally, is an autonomous kiosk capable of mixing dozens of beautiful, fresh salad combinations in short order with little human interaction. These salad robots are now in high demand at large foodservice operations such as hospitals and universities. “The hospital market has accelerated,” says Rick Wilmer, Chowbotic chief executive officer. “We were one of those lucky companies that had the solution ideally suited for the circumstances.”
Similarly, a smoothie robot named Chef B can whip up more than three dozen 12-ounce smoothies in an hour without human assistance. Chef B’s parent company, Blendid, is now on the DoorDash app, with made-to-order smoothies ready for delivery. Even fast food hamburgers have become more automated and safer at Creator restaurant in San Francisco. Creator opened in 2018 with a 14-foot burger machine capable of making 130 burgers in an hour. Now it has a new pressurized airlock transfer window for contactless takeout orders.
World Food Prize Goes To Ohio State University Soil Scientist
The World Food Prize honors an individual’s achievements that have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. This year’s winner, Rattan Lal, is a professor of soil science at Ohio State University and is the founding director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center there.
Lal’s work has focused on the principle that crop residues are essential for maintaining healthy soil by restoring depleted carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the soil. This approach differs from conventional soil fertility strategy, which has relied heavily on fertilizer since the 1970s. In the 1990s, Lal’s research revealed that restoring degraded soils by the increasing organic matter in it improved soil health and helped combat rising carbon dioxide levels by sequestering atmospheric carbon in the soil. “Dr. Lal is a trailblazer in soil science with a prodigious passion for research that improves soil health, enhances agricultural production, improves the nutritional quality of food, restores the environment and mitigates climate change,” World Food Prize Foundation President Barbara Stinson said.
New Research Links Acne to Sugar, Milk, and Chocolate
According to a new study of 25,000 French adults, consumption of milk, sugary drinks, and fatty foods appears to be directly associated with acne. The research was published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Dermatology. “This is an important study, and it adds to the body of evidence which has found that certain eating patterns may be one factor playing a role in acne for some individuals,” said board-certified dermatologist Dr. Rajani Katta, who was not involved in or with the study. The findings are part of a long-term observational analysis of French dietary habits called the NutriNet-Santé study, which began in May 2009. Study participants recorded what they ate over a 24-hour period on three separate occasions in November of 2018 and then again six months later. “Our current thinking on the role of diet and acne has really undergone a significant shift in the last decade and a half,” said Dr. Katta. One reason for this dietary association, according to the study, may be that a high glycemic-load diet causes a rise in circulating levels of insulin, hormones and other compounds which create oxidative stress and inflammation, leading to the development of acne.
Parental Restrictions Lead To Picky Eating, Study Says
A new study published in the journal Pediatrics followed over 300 parent-and-child pairs for five years and found that restricting food or demanding that a child eat was associated with the most picky eating behaviors in children. Less picky eating was associated with fewer parental food restrictions and fewer demands that a child eats.
Families who participated in the study were eligible for the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start program, according to the study’s senior author Dr. Megan Pesch, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. This means the families were living at or below the poverty level for a family of four. In the study, children were categorized by levels of pickiness, including low, medium, and high pickiness. Roughly 15% of the children in the study belonged to the “high” picky eater group, meaning the children were nervous about new foods and frequently would not eat vegetables.
Parents responded to questionnaires when their children reached the ages of 4, 5, 8 and 9. In the study, picky eating was clear by age 4 and continued through the five years of the study. Child health experts say the best time to introduce new foods to a baby is at six months, when the baby starts eating solid foods, adding that a variety of foods should be offered through the formative toddler years. The study showed that picky eating was associated with lower body mass index, confirming the findings of previous studies that picky eating does not cause weight gain. “Picky eaters do generally tend to eat high-carb, high-fat, hyper-palatable processed foods more,” said Dr. Pesch. “Yet studies have really shown that in developed countries, like the United States, we don’t see many — if any — micro-nutrient deficiencies in picky eaters.”
Physicists Create Iridescent Chocolate That Shimmers Like a Rainbow
Samy Kamkar, the founder of internet security company Openpath, has been experimenting with a new kind of chocolate that has a mesmerizing appearance. Kamkar developed a 3-D model for casting with a saw-tooth pattern at its base. He then tempered his chocolate and pressurized it in a vacuum chamber (a step he isn’t sure is 100% necessary). Kamkar’s cast results in chocolate with numerous surface lines and edges that make diffracted light the most visible light, giving the chocolate an iridescent appearance. Harvard physics professor Dr. David A. Weitz claims that Kamkar’s saw-tooth pattern isn’t strictly necessary, as any uniform pattern of parallel lines spaced in proximity to the wavelength of light will create the iridescent effect.
Swiss researchers have also been working on iridescent chocolate for two and a half years. Some use the same technique as Kamkar and plan to bring the chocolate to market soon. Their obstacle, however, is convincing consumers that no artificial coloring or additives have been applied to the surface of the chocolate. “People think that there is a plastic foil on top, which is not the case,” says Patrick Rühs, a Zurich food scientist. For those interested in making chocolate that shimmers like a rainbow, Kamkar will soon release a video tutorial showing people how to make his iridescent chocolate at home.
Science Can Help You Brew A Better Cup of Coffee
Christopher H. Hendon teaches computational materials chemistry at the University of Oregon. Also known as “Mr. Coffee,” Hendon puts the wisdom of his profession to work at home. His goal is to produce a consistent taste in his single daily cup of coffee. Here are his tips:
*Freeze your beans to maintain freshness, then grind them in a burr grinder. The frozen beans will break into similarly sized chunks for even flavor extraction. Determine your grind setting by trial-and-error, changing it until you find the optimal setting for your brewing device. Finer grinds tend to work best for drip brewing, while coarser grinds work best for immersion brewing.
*Use a ratio of 60 grams of coffee to one liter of water, which works for both immersion brewing and drip brewing.
*For the most flavor extraction and foolproof brewing, choose a brewing device that fully immerses the beans in the water, such as a French press.
*Use soft tap water heated to a temperature just below boiling (195 to 205ºF), as recommended by the National Coffee Association, and brew for two to four minutes for French press or about five minutes for drip coffee.
