Despite the weather taunting us, spring is technically on its way here in southern Ontario. With it, comes the promise of delicious local fruits and veggies to wake up our hibernating tastebuds. I’ve always loved waiting for my faves to come into season — asparagus makes me think of Victoria Day, and McIntosh apples of Thanksgiving pies!
 
But my culinary calendar may get reorganized if James Rogers has his way. The Materials PhD has invented an organic spray coating for food items, that purports to increase their shelf life three times over. Rogers was inspired by his original work on an industrial spray that when dry, acted as a solar panel. Already attuned to sustainability through that project, he was further galvanized by the food waste he witnessed as fall out of seasonality: “The problem is you’re either in season and have more than you know what to do with, or you have nothing.” 
 
So Rogers created Apeel Industries (of which he is now CEO), which is revolutionizing food preservation technologies, starting with his plant lipid spray. Ryan Bradley at the Guardian has the fascinating science:
 
“The spray can be made of the lipids from any plant – much of the source crop for their ingredients changes throughout the year, and is simply the excess or discarded produce from farms and vineyards – but it has to be molecularly reconstituted to act more or less exactly like the specific fruit on which it is sprayed.
 
We arrive at yet another lab, this one home to the material sciences team – the beating heart of the Apeel operation. Here, they use liquid gases to separate specific molecules from the lipid slurry, then reconfigure those molecules into a variety of combinations, essentially highly educated hunches as to what a specific fruit or vegetable’s skin might be like. If this seems like a lot of tedious guesswork, it is. The research and development for Apeel’s first product, a coating for avocados, took eight years.”
 
While Apeel has rivals in this particular niche, some with more complementary products, and others with direct competitors, Apeel has the most funding, mostly through major venture capitalist firms that share its Silicon Valley neighbourhood. It’ll be interesting to see how this competition shakes out — and how these sea changes to the industry reverberate up and down the supply chain. If it means having a fresh clementine in July… cognitive dissonance aside, I might be willing to try it!

Due to a variety of reasons, North America has ended up behind the eight ball in terms of our protective response to COVID-19. In particular, my heart goes out to my home state of Michigan, as well as other U.S. states scrambling to take care of their own. Where there is a silver lining to be found, it’s in stories of a courageous population reaching unheard-of levels of resourcefulness in battling this virus!
 
As a small business owner, I was amazed at the big heart and production line dexterity I read about at Dirty Water Distillery, an artisanal Massachusetts liquor producer. In the early days of the pandemic, when a hand sanitizer shortage was reportedly their area, they realized the ability to make up some of the shortfalls was easily in their grasp. So they suspended production of drinkable alcohol (like their delicious-sounding local cranberry gin ), and quickly pivoted to cleanser alcohol instead, using a recipe the owner’s wife sourced from the WHO website. 
 
“If Dirty Water had the necessary facilities, they had credentials in spades, too: [owner Pepi] Avizonis has a Ph.D. in physics, and his head distiller, Brenton MacKechnie, has a degree in chemistry.

Aside from ethanol and distilled water, both available in droves at the distillery already, the recipe called for glycerol and hydrogen peroxide, easily procured ingredients. After their first five-gallon test batch came out well, Avizonis and MacKechnie jumped to a 40-gallon batch the next day. In two weeks, the distillery has produced and distributed about 200 gallons of hand sanitizer, and they’re just getting started.”
 
Local emergency services and hospitals have been using Dirty Water hand sanitizer by the barrel, and the taproom has been open for members of the public to come in and refill their own personal bottles. In a perfect world, we’ll look forward to the day when we can enjoy a simple cocktail again (I daresay maybe on a patio? With other people??). Until then, while it is very much a problem that government support isn’t there for many populations, I’m thrilled to see individual citizens using their unique strengths to help others. That is the literal foundation of civilization — and as long as we have that, we will ultimately make it.

I’ve long been fascinated by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Norwegian deep freeze is where thousands of the world’s food crop seeds lie slumbering, preserved as a testament to Earth’s genetic diversity — with a sad eye to the day when they are extinct outside of the seed vault’s concrete walls.

But for all its officialness, the Svalbard Vault shouldn’t let us get complacent about the state of seeds worldwide. It takes a thousand daily tiny acts of conservation to preserve our planet. Ideally, we should never get to the point of needing to access the Vault’s contents — which is why I am inspired by this profile of Will Bonsall, author, farmer, and virtual one-man seed-vault. Bonsall is doing his bit to preserve food diversity in his own corner of the world. His Maine homestead features a seed collection of countless varieties of peas, beets, tomatoes, corn, and other crops, organized in envelopes and waiting for the day they can see the sun again.

“Whereas other seed savers might concentrate on specific crops, on what grows best in their regions, or on species that exhibit certain characteristics, Bonsall seems to value rarity and diversity for their own sakes. Among his alphabetized envelopes are plenty of heirloom seeds that no one is particularly clambering to plant, but Bonsall compares his collection to a library — he doesn’t get rid of something just because no one has checked it out in a while. Here and there, he suspects he has some varieties that only a handful people worldwide still possess — a rare beet, for instance, once grown by gardeners in a region of Bosnia decimated by war and genocide in the ’90s.
 
Unlike the Doomsday Vault and other institutional collections, Bonsall’s Scatterseed Project aims to actually scatter his seeds. In the old days, he did this by publishing lists of his varieties in directories printed by groups like the Seed Savers Exchange. These days, he fills requests that come through various online platforms. He has long been a presence at ag fairs and grange-hall meetings, where other growers can pick his brain and sometimes rifle through his inventory. Since he launched the Scatterseed Project in 1981, Bonsall estimates he’s shared seeds with tens of thousands of people.”
 
In this space, we’ve looked at seed genetic diversity as a time machine to the past, but reading about Bonsall and his quest is the first time I’ve thought of it as a time machine to the future. Bonsall and other seed protectors are ensuring a human food horizon that can handle blight, fungal infection, and corporate interests through our planet’s greatest strength — individuality. It’s up to us and our individuality to ensure their efforts stick!

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but in this case, it seems the mother of re-invention as well: Japanese foodies are making an ancient “cheese,” called so, to liven up their quarantines due to COVID-19. They’re also doing it for a civic-minded reason — with kids out of school, there is an overabundance of the milk they usually drink with their school lunches. Home cooks are now processing the excess milk into a dairy delicacy with very historic roots. The always-entertaining Gastro Obscura has the details:

“It’s not quite certain where the trend started, but along with recipes for desserts that used excess milk, a craze for making so took off in early March. So (pronounced with a short o, as in ‘lot’) is a Japanese dairy product from the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1185) periods, when the influence from China and Korea was at its strongest. The aristocrats that ruled the land at the time eagerly absorbed culture and technology from the mainland, including the consumption of dairy products and dairy farming, which didn’t exist in Japan at the time. […]
The Engishiki, a book of laws and customs that was written mostly in 927, notes that so was made by cooking down milk to one-tenth of its volume. It was exquisite enough to be deemed suitable for presenting to the emperor.”

Article author Makiko Itoh attempted her own batch of so at home, with mixed results. She scorched her first try, while “distracted by some COVID-19 news.” Her second batch was successful, after six hours of careful stirring on her stovetop, but tastewise, she felt it was a flop. For modern palates used to the variety of sharp, fermented, and otherwise flavourful cheeses, so, as simply concentrated milk, reads as bland.

But, like sourdough and other slow food projects that cooped-up citizens are picking up, so could be fun — and, paired with the right zesty cracker, even tasty. Now more than ever, I’m a fan of efficiency, so I’m very into this history lesson and Instagram-worthy snack all in one!

In this time of supply-chain uncertainty, many of us are looking at different sources of food. It seems that includes other species: namely, a compost-heap-derived bacterial enzyme that scientists have refined to eat and recycle plastic — within hours!
 
Originally discovered happily digesting a pile of leaves in 2012, this year the enzyme became the front runner in science’s search for something — anything ­— to help us dig out from under the huge amounts of plastic we release into our planet, without hope of reuse. Researchers on behalf of a Carbios, a French bio recycling and biodegradation firm reorganized the enzyme’s insatiable hunger and aimed it toward PET. PET is the shatter-resistant, pliable, and inexpensive plastic with which water bottles and cosmetics containers are made — and the toughest to recycle back into plastics of comparable quality.
 
“The scientists analysed the enzyme and introduced mutations to improve its ability to break down the PET plastic from which drinks bottles are made. They also made it stable at 72C, close to the perfect temperature for fast degradation.

Carbios has a deal with the biotechnology company Novozymes to produce the new enzyme at scale using fungi. It said the cost of the enzyme was just 4% of the cost of virgin plastic made from oil.”
 
While scientists do recognize that reducing our general dependence on plastic is important, there are some industries, like medicine and food preparation, where PET plastics really are the best material. Making more PET out of already-used PET, rather than downgrading it to carpet fibres or stuffing for sleeping bags, can keep our overall creation of plastics down to a minimum. That spells maximum efficiency for us, a reduced burden on Mother Nature — and some delicious snacks for a certain hungry bacterial enzyme!

While we are still in the thick of the COVID-19 curve, it feels like a luxury to think about a future that not all of us are going to get a chance to see. But some experts are starting to talk about the potentially beneficial social fallout our descent into the unthinkable might have.
 
How humans consume the bounties of our planet — the air, the water, and other animals — is now under a microscope lens. COVID-19 is accepted to have begun in a mix of interspecies fluids in a Wuhan wet market. The original SARS started the same way. Heck, the best guess at how Spanish influenza may have arisen is a human flu and the avian flu both finding a home in pigs on a Kansas farm — pigs whose bodies quickly brewed the new super-virus. While China is rolling out a ban on wildlife trade for food purposes, it remains to be seen whether loopholes for the use of animals in traditional medicine will be closed, or even if the ban will be enforced at all.
 
So it’s not just crazy vegans anymore who are calling for the end of our dependence on meat. Just this week, the EU is expected to approve insects as being safe for human consumption in all member countries. This means mealworms, crickets, locusts, and grasshoppers will soon appear on menus throughout the world’s largest economy — if Europeans can negotiate the tricky legal waters that stand like a moat between them and the protein source of the future.
 
“The UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Finland have taken a permissive approach to a 1997 EU law that requires foods not eaten before that year to get novel food authorisation. […]

But such products are banned in France, Italy and Spain, among other countries. In 2018, a new EU law sought to bring some clarity. It stipulated that insect-based dishes would also require novel food authorisation. […]

Indeed, companies such as Protifarm in the Netherlands, Micronutris in France, Essento in Switzerland and Entogourmet in Spain are said to be preparing to ramp up their operations.

“We have many of our members building bigger factories because the key to success is to upscale your companies and produce on a mass scale. And this is already happening,” [International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed secretary-general Christophe] Derrien said. “We are expecting the next few years will be very interesting ones and obviously the novel food authorisations will definitely help.
 
Insects as food is a concept that has deep roots in many international cuisines. But the EU getting on board means a stamp of approval from an economic powerhouse — for a form of protein that is low-overhead, low-environmental-impact, and low-fat. The world could be a very different place if we wean ourselves off the water- and resource-hogging factory-farming industries, and meat in general. After all, even insects aside, there’s plenty of other things we can still have the joy of grilling — when all this is over!

Talmudic into modern-day measurements – making sense out of what those rabbis were talking about

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Talmud incidences of measure (a visual concordance)

Among the many things we are getting up to in this time of contagion and physical distancing is a) taking care of projects around the house, and b) ordering in food from hard-hit local restaurants to help keep them afloat.
 
Luckily, we can now combine these two tasks into one, with news from ad firm Ogilvy Hong Kong: Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA and pie-slinging chain Pizza Hut have joined forces to create the Säva, a full sized table that is a dead ringer for the white plastic “pizza saver” we’ve all seen defending our delivery deep-dish.
 
The table comes flat-packed (naturally!), and the assembly instructions include a suggestion to order a Swedish meatball pizza from the Hut (like the table, also only available in Hong Kong). When you place the boxed pizza — and its pizza saver — on top of the Säva, it forms a recursive loop, much like the Land o’ Lakes butter packaging. Pizz-ception, if you will!
 
It’s hard to find info on this table that isn’t a rehashed press release, but I did dig up an interesting tidbit: that “the campaign has already proven successful, with the IKEA x pizza hut pizza selling more than 67% of the projected units.” That’s a lot of financial investment in a visual joke…
 
Sure, it’s a publicity stunt for both companies. But I was won over by the whimsy inherent in making a real-life version of the table my kids repurposed and sat their action figures around way back when. And, I think we need more whimsy right now. More whimsy, and always, more pizza!

I’ve often joked with David about converting our trusty canine-and-condiment-hauling vans to “green” vehicles by filling the gas tanks with recycled deep fryer oil. Besides being the cheapest option for long-term fuel use, it would have the added benefit of making everything inside the van — including the driver! — smell like the world’s best food: FRENCH FRIES.

But it turns out there’s now a competing recycling market for used fryer oil; and frankly, it’s so cool, I’m willing to let them have it. Researchers at UofT Scarborough’s Environmental NMR Centre have devised a way to use recycled fryer oil as raw material for 3D printing. They were motivated by the great cost of standard light-projection printing resins they needed to make custom parts for their nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer — a breed of machine we encountered in this space last week. CNN Business has details:
 
“[Professor Andre] Simpson had bought a 3D printer for the lab in 2017. He hoped to use it to build custom parts that kept organisms alive inside of the NMR spectrometer for his research.

The dominant material for light projection printing is liquid plastic, which can cost upward of $500 a liter, according to Simpson.
Simpson closely analyzed the resin and spotted a connection. The molecules making up the commercial plastic resin were similar to fats found in ordinary cooking oil.”
 
Simpson and his students scored ten litres of used fryer oil from a local McDonald’s, filtered the food particles out of it, and began refining it into a usable resin. Several batches in, the team printed a butterfly as a test. It was sturdy, stayed solid at room temperature, and, most excitingly, proved to be biodegradable when buried in the soil. The applications for the team’s discovery, while tangential to their original aim, could be endless — and environmentally sound, in more ways than one. Delicious!

With the current health climate, we at DFC consider ourselves luckier than ever that we live out in the woods. Still, we are laying in a few supplies in case we get sick. This is a continuation of our usual winter M.O.: Who wants to schlep out to the shops when you’re coughing and miserable, whatever the cause?
 
I’ve always thought is essential to have some freezer meals, painkillers, ginger root, and cold meds at the ready all winter. And honey; definitely honey! The straight-up miracle elixir that not only coats your throat, but has enzymes, antioxidants, and trace vitamins in it that will make every cup of tea a healing experience! … Right?
 
But Vice has sad news this cold season, that the honey we trust off the shelf may not at all be what it seems. Author Shayla Love has uncovered the fact there is shockingly little regulation involved in the manufacturing, labelling, and selling of honey. While real raw honey itself has antimicrobial and antibacterial properties and was even used by ancient cultures as a wound-healing salve, some modern manufacturers are heating their honey until those benefits disappear, faking its provenance, or even adding sugar syrup to stretch their wares — all without informing the health-conscious consumer. Love sees this fraud in action when she brings various kinds of honey to the Sweetwater Science Labs for testing.
 
“In the past five years, another technology has stepped up to bat: nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMR). NMR isn’t new, but its application to honey is. The NMR food screener, made by scientific instrument producer Bruker, can analyze the magnetic fields of the atoms in any substance. When you image honey with NMR, it creates a spectrum that acts like a fingerprint, and can test for at least 36 different components of honey. NMR can also identify the country it came from using that molecular fingerprint by comparing it to a growing database of more than 18,000 honey samples established by the Honey Profiling Consortium, a collaboration of all the labs that use this specific technology on honey. […]
 
But the total number of people doing NMR testing on honey is small—so small, in fact, that [Jim] Gawenis’s lab at Sweetwater Science in Columbia, MO is the only lab facility in the United States currently using the technology.”
 
The whole article is an interesting, but sobering, read. I take it as a cautionary tale about how, when certain industries are given an inch, they take a mile — sometimes trampling our consumers’ rights. It’s up to us sometimes, to use science to protect one of our most interesting and delicious foods, and ultimately us.