A Food Waste Solution You Might Not Know You Are Already Using

The Food Waste Solution That You Might Not Know You Are Using

Some of the bagged bread options in a local grocery store

Do you buy bagged bread in the grocery store?  There are usually several options including bread made with whole grains or containing several different kinds of grain. You have probably noticed that such breads stay nice and soft for quite a while.  Some people are even suspicious about that imagining that the bread might be “loaded with preservatives.”  They are not.  If you buy the freshly “baked in the store” options like baguettes, or get those at a bakery, they are really tasty, but they rather quickly become stale.  They become candidates for making French Toast or maybe croutons.  That kind of short-lived bread is amajor source of food waste and some have even found creative ways to collect stale bread from bakeries and turn it into beer. 

Fresh bread from in-store bakery

The bagged bread on the other hand can remain good and usable for a week or more.  If you don’t get through using the loaf for a long time it might get moldy, but in general each loaf can keep a family fed with morning toast or lunch sandwiches for quite a while. That didn’t used to be the case.  Back in the 1960s the bread aisle was restocked almost every day and you could buy “Day Old Bread” at a discount - but it wasn’t very good. 

So what changed?  It’s an interesting story that involves crystals and enzymes.  We think of stale bread as being “dried out,” but that isn’t the real issue. Staling occurs when the starch changes to a crystalline form in the finished bread. The solution to the food waste problem of stale bread is a type of enzyme called “amylase” that can modify the bread’s starches during baking and keep that crystalline structure from forming after the bread is baked. To unpack that, I’ll go into some background on enzymes and on starch.

OK, flash back to high school biology class.  Do you remember learning about enzymes?  Those are proteins and if you do the 23andme analysis of your DNA, a good deal of it codes for the enzymes that make your body function.  These very cool proteins “catalyze” chemical reactions, serving functions like digesting our food, or turning it into the energy that keeps us going.  There are also enzymes in our liver that protect of from certain toxins.

Bread is made from mostly wheat grains that contain starch.  Starch is a really big molecule that is a long and branched chain built from many units of the simple sugar glucose linked together. The reason that a wheat plant makes starch is so the germinating seed can use it as a source of energy to start growing a new wheat plant.  About 10,000 years ago, we humans started growing wheat as a crop and it has been a major source of our food since then.  We get both energy and protein from eating wheat.

When we eat bread, there is an enzyme in our saliva called amylase that starts breaking the starch into simple sugars and the process continues in our digestive system.  There is a similar enzyme in the wheat itself because that seed needs to be able to tap into the energy stored in the kernel when it starts to grow.  The yeast we add to make bread also has various enzymes including amylase and there are even more enzymes from various organisms in something like sourdough bread.  Bread “rises” because the wheat and yeast amylase enzymes make some of the starch into simple sugars that the yeast then ferments to grow.  In the process the yeast makes carbon dioxide gas that makes bubbles in the dough that make the bread rise.  So in the enjoyment of bread there are already three different kinds of amylase enzymes involved- from the wheat, from the yeast and later from ourselves.

But after the bread is baked, the starch that is still mostly undigested can “re-crystalize” into forms that make the bread taste “stale” to us.  We think of it as “dry” but that isn’t really the issue. It’s a texture thing based on those starch crystals. What the baking industry discovered in 1990 is that they could add a different kind of amylase enzyme to the dough that would control the starch in baked bread and slow down the formation of the crystalline structure that makes the bread taste/feel stale. 

So if you look at the ingredient list of the bread in the store, it could list “enzymes.”  The one that keeps the starch from crystallizing is an amylase. Not only does that reduce the amount of bread waste generated by stores and in customer’s homes, it also has dramatically reduced the number of trips that bread trucks need to make from the bakeries to the stores, thereby reducing the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere

Note the Enzymes" in this bread ingredient label

When we eat the bread, that tiny amount of enzyme is just a protein that our own digestive enzymes easily break down into the amino acids that we need as a part of our diet. 

So the next time that you pull a loaf of supermarket bread out of your breadbox and find it still soft and tasty, you can appreciate this robust, enzyme solution to the food waste issue of stale bread!

(Note: I am writing this article as part of a partnership with the enzyme producing company, Novozymes. This gives me the time to delve into the technical details about specific enzymes and then try to explain those in ways that make sense to as many readers as possible)

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

GMO Foods: To Label Or Not To Label?

(This post first appeared on Science 2.0, 8/21/12)

This fall, California voters will be asked to vote on Proposition 37, a law which would require that all foods including “GMO Crop ingredients” be labeled as such.   There are many reasons that this isn’t a good use of governmental authority for mandatory food labeling.  A look at historical logic and precedents for labeling, and at the misleading messages this initiative would foster, should inspire Californians to reject it at the ballot box.

Labeling for a Known Hazard

If a food is hazardous to some consumers, but not others (e.g. peanut allergy), then it makes sense to require that it be labeled to protect that minority.  If a food contains something generally hazardous, but difficult to immediately remove from the food supply, it makes sense to label those foods as well (e.g. trans-fats for which labeling was required after 2006).   If a particular GMO crop were to be found to be hazardous to certain people, or people in general, the appropriate response would to ban the use of that particular trait nationally, not to label it at a state level.  No such hazard has been documented for dozens of biotech crops crop traits over 16 years of extensive commercialization, so “hazard” has never been a reason to require labeling of a GMO crop. 

Labeling For Lack of Safety Studies

The proponents of Proposition 37 argue that because the FDA does not require a set of specific human safety studies prior to commercialization, consumer need to be warned. Considering the diversity of biotech traits, it does not really make sense to specify a particular battery of safety studies.  They would really need to be varied on a trait-by-trait basis.  The opponents of these crops imply that these foods are thus, untested when it comes to safety.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Both the companies that produce the crops, and a wide range of independent researchers, have studied GMO crop safety for years.  Highly qualified scientific panels have reviewed those data and consistently concluded that these improved crops represent no unusual risk compared to crops improved by traditional methods. Indeed, "Nature" seems to make similar genetic modifications.

Ironically, the largest single contributor to the pro-labeling effort is the internet “health advisor,” Dr. Mercola whose $800,000 donation was funded by his thriving, natural supplement business.  There is very little regulatory oversight for that multi-billion dollar supplement industry in terms of required testing either human safety or product efficacy.  When it comes to safety testing, GMO crops are far more intensively scrutinized than something like Dr. Mercola’s supplements.

Labeling Because Other Countries Require It

One argument for requiring labeling has been that places like Europe, Japan and China do so.  First of all, most of the ingredients in the US, human food supply that come from GMO crops (corn starch; high fructose corn syrup, soybean, cotton seed or canola oil…) have always been supplied from different crops in other regions (potato or rice starch, beet or cane sugar, sunflower, peanut or rapeseed oil…) so there are actually very few GMO labeled foods in those countries.  They import massive amounts of our GMO crops for animal feed, but that is not labeled.  Second of all, the scientific review panels in these other countries have come to the same conclusions as those in the US.  They find no reason to doubt the overall safety of GMO-based foods.  It is just that politics trumps science in those political systems.  That is certainly not something we should imitate.

Labeling Because It Is A Consumer’s “Right to Know.”

Bits of information do not actually become “knowledge” unless they can be placed into a meaningful context.  We have a historical example of this with the mandatory food composition labeling that has been required in the US since 1990.  The calorie, protein, fat, carbohydrate and vitamin content of foods could theoretically be useful information that consumers could “know.”  Unfortunately, when Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, it never actually funded the education part (imagine that).  For most consumers, the information on food products is not part of a functional knowledge-base that could guide their food decisions.  Instead, they are left to be influenced by the advertizing messages and ever-changing food fads that shape our “marketing of non-existence” food culture.  Proposition 37 does not include any sort of official educational component,. It would just mandate that a bit of information, “contains ingredients from crops modified by genetic engineering” be attached to many foods.  The contextualization of that information will be heavily influenced, not by any sort of balanced presentation, but by a range of activist groups, aggressive organic marketers, and fear-based marketers like Dr. Mercola.   This will not be anything new as these groups have been flooding the internet with hyperbolic warnings for more than a decade.  One might think that there would be a statute-of-limitations on saying that “the sky is falling.”  It is not at all surprising that Mercola and others would like the opportunity to ramp up the level of societal fear with the help of the “information” supplied by California law.  (By the way, Dr. Mercola has not just promoted fear of GMOs.  He has been a conduit for anti-vaccination activists and even for a “doctor” with the theory that all cancers are fungal infections.  His consistent message is, “Be afraid! Buy my products”).

Labeling As A Way To Track The Effects of GMO Foods

Another argument that Prop-37 supporters make is that labeling will allow us to better track or detect any issues with these foods.  Other than the fact that there is no obvious mechanism for that to happen, there is another major problem with the argument.  Foods purchased in restaurants would not be labeled under Prop-37.  Considering that on average people eat about half of their meals out, and that many mostly eat out, this idea of tracking falls apart.  The other implication of this exemption is that the information on grocery items (which will be cast in a scary light by Mercola et al), will not be seen in restaurants, including those that serve fast food, fried in GMO vegetable oils and sweetened with GMO corn-based sweeteners.  Making home meals sound scary and restaurant meals sound safer hardly sounds like a smart message to be sending to a population with an obesity problem.

Labeling To Allow Some Consumers To Avoid GMO Foods

Some people may never trust the scientific/regulatory consensus.  That is OK, but those folks don’t really need to force mandatory labeling for everyone else.  They always have the option to buy Organic, which decided not to use GMO long before it was even an option.  These folks also always have the option to buy products that are sold as or even certified as non-GMO – something that is allowed already.  Anyone can also learn a few simple rules based on the limited number of crops that are GMO in the first place. Here are the simple rules: If the product has ingredients that are derived from Corn, Soy, Cotton, Canola, or Sugar beets, just assume it is probably includes biotech varieties since farmers of those crops overwhelmingly choose those option.  Right now, the only fresh market GMO crops in the US are papayas from Hawaii (virus resistance developed by Cornell University that saved the crop), and some sweet corn. In the rare case of another biotech crop being added to this list, there is always plenty of official notice and press/blog coverage. 

Labeling to Allow Consumers to Intentionally Choose Biotech Improved Foods

Within a few years there may be some biotech-based, non-browning apples on the market, but they will be voluntarily labeled as such because it is a positive consumer feature and because that value chain is amenable to full identity preservation down to the sticker on each fruit.  This is the most logical form of GMO crop labeling, and there are no regulatory or legal barriers to such labels.

Conclusion

Mandatory food labeling should be reserved for well-documented public health needs and should be linked to viable public education efforts.  It shouldn’t be something designed to enrich fear-based marketers or to give people a false comparison of at home and restaurant foods.

You are welcome to comment here or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com

Classic California License Plate from WoodysWorld1778

            

reade more... Résuméabuiyad