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)

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Could The Humble Potato Change Your Image of GMOs?

Hash browns cooking - regular potatoes on the left and the new "White Russet" biotech potatoes on the right

Last week I got my first chance to cook with a "GMO" Potato.  I made one of my favorite breakfast dishes - hash browns!  I was excited to try that with these new potatoes because they have been modified to turn off the gene for the enzyme that makes them turn brown when cut (polyphenol oxidase), or in this case grated.  With regular potatoes, even if you work quickly, the grated potatoes begin to darken before you can get them into the pan.  I've gotten around that by grating them directly into the hot oil, but that is far from ideal in terms of safety.  With these new potatoes I had plenty of time to grate them and shape them.  They turned out not only looking far better, but also came out crispier and better tasting.  It is going to be difficult to put up


These potatoes have been approved for sale and are in many stores, but are not yet in stores where I live.  Colleagues at Simplot Biosciences were kind enough to mail me a bag.  I also posted a video about using this excellent new product.  There is a next generation of potatoes going through the USDA deregulation process.  In addition to the traits that reduce food waste (non-browning/bruising, low sugars in storage) and enhance food safety (reduced acrylamide production during frying), the latest potatoes also have a gene from wild potatoes that makes them resistant to a disease called late blight.  That is what caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 19th century and an issue for potato growing to this day.  The following is the comment I submitted to the USDA in support of deregulation:

(Submitted to USDA on 10/11/16 - https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=APHIS-2016-0057)

I am writing to support the deregulation of the X17 and Y9 potato lines which involve the same modifications as in previously deregulated lines.  Potatoes are a difficult crop to breed because they only rarely make seed and are polyploid.  While new lines are being developed, there is a substantial advantage of being able to modify older varieties that have proven field performance and desirable characteristics for cooking.  In this case the modified lines are Ranger Russet and Atlantic which are both important commercial varieties.

As with earlier lines, the RNAi gene silencing mechanism has been used to reduce the potential for acrylamide formation during cooking, reduce sugar production during storage which lowers quality, and reducing bruising and browning.  Together the last two traits will help to reduce food waste.  I believe that consumers will also find these potatoes to be quite desirable.

This week I had the chance to cook some of the Russet Burbank cultivar with this non-browning/bruising trait.  I like to make hash browns with fresh potatoes but because of the browning issue I have to grate the potatoes directly into the hot oil.  With these modified potatoes I was able to grate the potatoes and form them into servings prior to frying.  The non-modified potato I used for comparison was definitely inferior in terms of appearance and taste (I've included a picture of the hashbrowns - the upper one is with a standard potato and the lower one is with the down-regulation of the polyphenol oxidase gene.  I will certainly be looking forward to seeing more of these potatoes in commercial channels.

Top hashbrown from a standard Russet Burbank, lower from a White Russet, modified version.

Some critics have implied that the RNAi gene silencing mechanism could have unintended effects.  I believe that this discussion developed by Food Standards Australia New Zealand does an excellent job of debunking the paper by Heinemann et al which is often cited in this context.  Small double stranded RNAs are abundant in the food supply and this mechanism of gene regulation is widespread among eukaryotes.

As a plant pathologist I am particularly excited about one of the traits included in these new potato lines - resistance to the late blight fungus, Phytopthora infestans.  Not only did that disease cause the Irish Potato Famine in the 1800s, it represents a major management burden for potato growers around the world today.  To be able to include plant resistance in an integrated control program will be extremely helpful for potato growers.  The gene, VNT1, comes from wild potatoes native to South America.  To move that gene through conventional breeding would be slow and it would be very difficult to get back to the horticultural and culinary characteristics of desirable potatoes like Ranger Russet or Atlantic. This is an extremely logical application of modern biotechnology and one that would make a great deal of sense for other crops like grapes or coffee which also have pools of genetic diversity which are hard to utilize using conventional or even marker-assisted breeding.

To conclude it makes perfect sense to deregulate this crop as it presents no plant pest risk and substantial societal benefit in terms of food waste reduction and disease management.

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Does Science Belong On Your Dinner Plate?

(Originally published on Forbes 5/5/15) 

I was recently asked to give a talk in Toronto addressing this question: “Does science belong on my plate?” The quick answer is:

“No, because Science isn’t a “thing” you can serve or eat. Science is really a verb - a process, a method, a conversation.”

A longer, better answer is:

“There is a rich history of innovation and change in the human food supply extending over millennia. More recent innovation examples that have been achieved using sound science are a continuation of that tradition. They certainly belong on our plates.”

Many consumers have the impression that, until recently, food and food production was something little changed. This mistaken view is understandable considering modern society’s isolation from the production of food, and marketers’ penchant for using romanticized imagery and narratives to sell food products.

This is a great bread product, but that image has nothing to do with how the wheat for that is produced today.

The truth is that innovation and change have been central to food and farming throughout human history - both before and during the scientific era. One of my goals as a new Forbes contributor will be to tell some of the stories behind interesting and important innovations that have changed what is “on our plates” in very positive ways.

Feast or Famine

From the beginning, a fundamental challenge for humanity has been that sources of food tend to be either over-abundant or scarce. Thus, innovations around food storage and preservation have been key to our survival (e.g. drying, salting, pickling, cheese making, fermentation…). Even the ancient storage of dry grains involved innovations like using herbs to line the urns to reduce damage from insect pests.

Cold storage has been used to spread-out the supply of food beginning with caves or cellars. Later people used stored ice from the winter, and eventually came up with refrigeration. Susanne Freidberg’s excellent book, Fresh, describes just how transformative and controversial the innovation of mechanical refrigeration was as it was slowly adopted around the turn of the 20^th century.

Genetics

Another major theme of human food-supply innovation has been “genetic modification.” The “natural,” pre-domesticated forms of our food plants are barely recognizable vs their modern forms. Over millennia, humans consciously or unconsciously selected for more desirable specimens, and in so doing, they achieved dramatic genetic changes even with no understanding of the underlying biology. While this worked well for grains and vegetables, a few thousand years ago people realized that you cannot propagate a desirable specimen of a tree or vine by replanting its seeds, because they don’t grow up to be the same as the parent. So, people innovated various ways to “clone” these desirable cultivars – rooting, grafting, budding etc. A “transgenic” innovation of that category saved the European grape industry in the 1870s when it was on the verge of collapse due to a deadly new pest. The innovated solution was to use American grape species as the protective rootstock on which to graft venerable varieties of the traditional species, Vitis vinifera. That system still protects virtually all of the world’s grapes today.

This cool vineyard I saw in Sicily a few weeks ago survives because it is on American rootstock

In the last century, increasing scientific understanding has enabled continued innovation to enhance the food supply in terms of quality and availability. By better understanding plant physiology, innovative controlled atmosphere storage systems were developed that have greatly enhanced our access to fresh fruits throughout the year. Similar packaging and shipping innovations have reduced post-harvest waste and expanded value-added, “fresh cut” options for consumers. Science-based advances in chemistry, biology, and toxicology have enabled innovative new methods of crop pest management with far better health and environmental profiles. Rapidly advancing understanding of genetics has enabled a growing and increasingly precise “tool box” for crop innovation (cross breeding, hybridization, wide crosses, mutation breeding, genetic engineering, marker assisted selection, genome editing).

The long tradition of food and agricultural innovation continues, enhanced by the application of the scientific method.  So, yes – “science” in that form certainly belongs on our plates.  I'm happy to talk about this in the comments here and/or at savage.sd@gmail.com 

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