We at DFC love our bees. From adding to the biodiversity of our home in the Frontenac Arch to ensuring food supplies for the world at large, bees are superstar pollinators who have (rightly!) been earning all the press. As the hemisphere moves towards summer, the buzz of happy bees among the flowers outside has started filling the days at DFC headquarters.
 
But researchers at University College London have uncovered another powerhouse pollinator, that doesn’t fill the same spot in our imaginations, probably because it operates at night: The moth!
 
The UCL team’s research, recently published in Biology Letters, points to moths as being a more substantial contributor to pollination — and therefore crop yield — than previously thought. The study involved moths from nine pond-centred ecosystems in agricultural Norfolk, UK. They found that, not only did the moths pick up more pollen that butterflies and hoverflies (similarly to bees), but they visited a different array of plant species than any of their diurnal cousins.
 
“Nocturnal moth communities and daytime pollinators were surveyed once a month to see which plants they visited and how frequently.

In comparison, daytime pollinators, a network of 632 bees, wasps, hoverflies and butterflies, visited 45 plant species, while 1,548 social bees visited 46 plant species.”
 
The team’s conclusion: While daytime pollinating insects tend to visit “greatest hits” plants — maximizing their personal take of nectar by going to known prolific sources — moths are into the “deep cuts,” and going further for more obscure nectars. In terms of its effect on our food crops, the butterfly/moth approach is wonderfully complementary. The variety of the insects’ tastes supports the reproduction of a variety of plants, which helps ensure biodiversity!

The research team confirms further study is needed into the precise impact of moth pollination on food crops, but this is an excellent start. I’m sure the pollination situation in North America is similar. So, the next time a moth flits around my head as we both enjoy a warm summer night on the porch, I will wish them a hearty bon appetit!

In this space, we’ve written about Lego many times, but never before has the ubiquitous Danish brick toy dovetailed so well with our current obsession, food! Via one of my favourite lucky-dip blog Boing Boing, I’ve discovered a charming video by Lego YouTubers The Brick Wall. In it, these spatial geniuses demonstrate a “tapas factory” built from the plastic bricks. This contraption takes a hungry user from a whole baguette to delicate hors d’oeuvres, primed for noshing, in four minutes flat!
 
Check out the factory in action here. The baguette forklift even doubles as a tray and beverage holder for the completed snack at the end.
 
This is definitely some serious Lego-ing, using motors and cutting blades that your average 7-year-old shouldn’t be trusted with. But for peckish, nostalgic adults, the Brick Wall folks have demonstrated a pretty cool proof of concept. With summer on its way and quarantines only gingerly lifting (LET’S NOT RUSH THINGS, PEOPLE), this Lego setup seems like the perfect patio combo: light bites and a distracting technical project rolled into one! Now, if I can somehow get one to do the barbecuing for us…

Just a couple weeks ago, we looked into a new microbe, with whose help scientists are hoping to recycle PET plastics back into PET plastics with no degradation in quality. (No mean feat considering said microbes essentially eat the plastic — what comes out the “other end” is the new material!). While this development is great in that it transforms previously single-use plastics into multi-use, humanity should be moving toward (ideally) a model where we use as little as possible of any plastics at all.
 
But, since plastics are so interwoven into our lives, we have to take baby steps. To that end, Dutch biochemical corporation Avantium has gone ahead and redefined the concept of “plastic”: inventing a way to replace PET-like plastics in things like drinking bottles with all-plant sources — not fossil fuels! Coca-Cola, Danone, and Carlsberg have all pledged backing for the pathfinder project, with plans to manufacture cardboard “bottles” for their products, lined with the new plant plastic, in the near future.
 
“Avantium’s plant plastic is designed to be resilient enough to contain carbonated drinks. Trials have shown that the plant plastic would decompose in one year using a composter, and a few years longer if left in normal outdoor conditions. But ideally, it should be recycled, said [Avantium CEO Tom] Van Aken.

The bio-refinery plans to break down sustainable plant sugars into simple chemical structures that can then be rearranged to form a new plant-based plastic – which could appear on supermarket shelves by 2023.

The path-finder project will initially make a modest 5,000 tonnes of plastic every year using sugars from corn, wheat or beets. However, Avantium expects its production to grow as demand for renewable plastics climbs.” 
 
This is the kind of renewable, refreshing innovation I like to see, and one that might ultimately sustainable for us. As we’ve seen with other environmental initiatives, often the greatest obstacle the habits of people (and our corporations, which in some jurisdictions, are people too). People are irrational and love our routines, so relying on all of us to abandon plastics and haul heavy mason jars full of water to the park is a non-starter. But, stealthily replace plastic in its most common uses with something far better, and we don’t have to disturb our precious routines. Which is GREAT. So, sign me up for the first cold beer in a cardboard bottle when they arrive on our shores! “Cheers!” will sound different — but it’ll taste far sweeter.

When DFC was located in the Toronto suburbs, we often found ourselves grabbing a quick bite at some of the amazing Chinese restaurants in that community. Besides being fast and delicious, they were often open at the unusual times we were peckish!
 
Now that our offices are in the (relatively) deep woods, more often than not we have to look to homemade options for lunch. But, if and when we venture into the big city to scratch our culinary itch, we’ll be on the lookout for the fascinating physics of fried rice, recently uncovered by a team of mechanical engineers!
 
Frying rice in a commercial-grade wok is a major physical challenge for a chef. The rice grains and other tasty components must circulate in the pan constantly, so the dish doesn’t burn over the incredibly high heat. The Georgia Tech team analyzed a sample of five professional chefs, filming their fried rice technique and slo-mo-ing it for a full breakdown.
 
“These chefs made a specific set of motions that repeated about three times a second, the researchers report February 12 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Each repetition includes sliding the wok back and forth while simultaneously rocking it to and fro, using the rim of the stovetop as a fulcrum. […]

By simulating the trajectories of rice in a wok, the researchers hit on some key culinary tips. The rocking and sliding motions shouldn’t be totally in sync, otherwise, the rice won’t mix well and could burn. And the wok’s movements should repeat rapidly. Moving the wok even faster could launch the rice higher, and might allow cooking at higher temperatures, and perhaps a quicker meal.”
 
This complex move often results in a lot of shoulder pain in wok-specializing chefs. In the most kind-hearted invocation of Skynet I’ve ever encountered, the researchers suggest that a robot be developed to take on rice-frying duties, to spare the humans in the kitchen. While I’m sure it can provide the brawn, it remains to be seen if a robot can handle the moment-by-moment subtle modifications humans are great at. How would it turn out? Oh dear: All this wondering has me craving fried rice. Be back soon…!

Usually, I start thinking about what to write as an introduction at the start of the weekend…however I did not have to do that this week. On Friday the day that every pet owner dreads came upon us – we had to say goodbye to Jill. 
Jill’s mobility wasn’t going in the right direction and I was getting worried about her. I was also being wary with the weekend coming up that something extreme would happen to Jill and I’d have to find an emergency vet during these COVID times or deal with it myself. To make a long sorrowful story short, Jill’s heart (the organ, not her spirit) was failing and her muscles were not getting the nourishment they needed to move her around. So because of these Covid times, we sat on the large porch outside of the veterinary clinic and spent time with Jill giving her lots of liver treats…the girl went out in style!
Now that it’s Sunday evening the house is still too quiet and too big, but that raw sting of sadness is ebbing away and I’m starting to remember the stories and antics of which there are plenty of! (Including the time she defied me and marched into the local Foodland)

Here is a picture of puppy Jill with her sisters (she’s in the middle), big sister Jill when Samson was new to the family, Jill barking at cows, and the grande-dame of Perth Road. 

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!