Category Archives: aquaculture

These lovely, innocent wildflowers are slowly dying. Thanks, climate change!

by MarquisHNUE Posted on June 25, 2015

These lovely, innocent wildflowers are slowly dying. Thanks, climate change!

By on 25 Jun 2015commentsShare

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by climate change news, don’t — I repeat, DO NOT — stop to smell the roses. Because they are probably more overwhelmed than you: Scientists in California can see the effects of climate change in fields of flowers, which are losing species diversity as winters get warmer and drier, according to one new study.  Flowers are pretty, colorful dabs of joy that never hurt anyone, and climate change is killing them — welcome back to Spoiler Alerts.

Here’s the story from the LA Times:

Over time, the researchers noticed that the big, intense blooms of wildflowers that used to appear in the spring were becoming less and less frequent. So they decided to analyze changes in plant species over time.

They picked 80 different sites from all over the reserve and counted all of the species growing in five small plots at each site. They also estimated how much area each plant species covered within each plot.

The research team correlated changes in plant growth with changes in rainfall patterns, temperature, cloud cover and humidity.

Across all 80 sites, clusters of native wildflower species became increasingly less diverse from 1999 to 2014, the researchers found. In particular, the species that were disappearing fastest were those with broad leaves, which are most susceptible to drought.

The 15% decline in wildflower species diversity was correlated with about 50% less rain in midwinter, about 20% more sun in fall and winter, and a 20% drop in winter humidity.

You know comes next, right? “Correlation is not causation,” yeah yeah — but this study offers powerful evidence of changes in ecosystem makeup at the local level. What, do you think this is these scientists’ first science rodeo? (Go ahead and picture those lab-coated rodeo clowns anyway.) More from the LA Times:

To take account of other factors that might affect plant diversity, the researchers made sure about half of the sites were in areas with fertile soils, no grazing and no recent history of fire. The other sites had inhospitable soils, occasional grazing and had burned in 1999. Even when these variables were considered in their model, the link between climate change and wildflower growth held up.

Hope you guys like wild grasses, because it looks like that’s what we’ll have left.

Source:
Scientists see climate change in action in California wildflower fields

, LA Times.

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These lovely, innocent wildflowers are slowly dying. Thanks, climate change!

Posted in Anchor, aquaculture, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These lovely, innocent wildflowers are slowly dying. Thanks, climate change!

The Future of Food Has Robot Arms and Smells Like Bacon

by JacintoHahn Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Cooki, a robotic cooking machine prototype, on display at the Parisoma “Future of Food” meet-up Maddie Oatman

In the not-so-distant future, a robot named Cooki will make you dinner. Cooki will follow a recipe drawn from a database of millions of crowd-sourced ideas accessed through a subscription service similar to iTunes. Then, it will stir together pre-chopped ingredients with a robotic arm. Instead of the $15 required to buy and deliver take-out food, Cooki’s meal will cost you $4 to $5.

At least, that’s how the future will look if Timothy Chen has anything to do with it.

Chen is the CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, the company producing an automated robot that can supposedly cook “restaurant-quality” meals at your kitchen counter and clean up after itself. Chen was one of around a dozen entrepreneurs pitching their victual innovations at a tech event called the “Future of Food,” hosted by the San Francisco co-working space Parisoma on Wednesday. A line snaked around the block at the entrance of the building at 7 p.m. when I arrived. Inside, designers, data-geeks, food marketers, and underground supper club hosts mingled over beers or the papaya-colored smoothie samples from the Pantry vending machine. I overheard the phrases “superfood” and “drought-friendly” more than once over the course of the evening.

Timothy Chen unwraps a plastic tray of ingredients to feed into Cooki during a demonstration

The concept behind the cooking robot comes from Chen’s 18-year-old twin sisters, Haidee and Helen, who wondered why their mom had to spend so many hours making fresh food every day. “Shouldn’t cooking be as easy as pushing a button?” their IndieGogo campaign page implores. Aside from making cooking more efficient, Sereneti’s social mission includes a desire to cut down on food waste and promote access to healthy ingredients.

Though Cooki only really does one-pot cooking, Sereneti imagines its machine making 60 percent of the world’s types of food—from pastas to salads to curries. Chen hopes to retail Cooki for around $500, or $200 if customers subscribe to a recipe and ingredients delivery service. (You could also prepare and input your own ingredients into the robot).

Midway through the “Future of Food” event, I wander over to Sereneti’s table to catch Cooki in action. Dressed in an argyle sweater and sporting rectangular glasses, Chen’s a quick-talking guy with a background in robotics. “This is the Keurig for food,” he explains, referring to the individualized coffee pod machines that I’ve covered in the past. He pulls out clear plastic trays full of raw bacon, lamb, cherries, and pine nuts that have been prepared and preserved with the help of food scientists. Once loaded up with the goods, the machine extracts one of the trays, tips it into a pot heated underneath by coils, and begins to stir. Soon, the smell of bacon oozes out from under the machine’s glossy white hood.

Chen has pretty big dreams for Cooki: As he sees it, it will not only save parents time, it could also make them money. By crowd-sourcing recipes and charging people one-time-use fees, “every time someone uses your recipe—you get paid,” Chen explains. “It’s the ultimate in multi-level marketing,” he says to me—”and it’s not even a Ponzi scheme!”

Okay. While Cooki’s frying, I decide to check out some of the other booths. A man with watery blue eyes and a thick French accent passes out crackers smudged with bone-white brie made from almond milk. Unlike some of the tasteless, pasty vegan cheeses I’ve sampled in the past, Kite Hill’s cheese draws from the traditional cheesemaking process: Cultures and enzymes are added to the milk to create an actual curd. Kite Hill claims to be the only company treating almond milk this way. The result is impressive—if I didn’t know any better, I would think it was a sheep’s milk cheese. Kite Hill’s cheesemaker, Jean Prevot, who hails from France, spent 15 years in the dairy industry before turning to almond milk “for the challenge of it.”

Soft ripened almond brie from Kite Hill

At the table across the way, two chipper, unblinking blonde women dish up crackers made with flour from ground-up crickets. Their San Francisco-based company, Bitty Foods, produces the cookies as well as a cricket-based baking flour “that’s high in protein, drought-resistant, and lower in greenhouse-gas emissions,” as cofounder Megan Miller tells one taster. I overhear two men discussing their cookies in between bites. “There’s a little aftertaste,” one says. “It’s subtle—if I wasn’t thinking about it, I wouldn’t have picked up on it.”

Leslie Ziegler and Megan Miller serve cricket-flour cookies from their company Bitty

Over to the Kuli Kuli Foods table, where women in acid-green aprons peddle samples of bars made of moringa, a leafy plant that Time recently deemed the new kale. Kuli Kuli is the first US company marketing moringa. Its founder, Lisa Curtis, first learned about the plant while in Peace Corps in Niger in 2010. Feeling malnourished on the local diet, she was urged to try the nutrient-dense moringa plant, which is high in calcium, protein, amino acids, and vitamin C. The plant grows super fast and thrives in hot, dry climates. Curtis realized that locals weren’t marketing the superfood because they had no international market, so she set out to create one in the US by importing the plant in powder form. Aside from fueling her own fruit and nut bar company, she tells me that local juice joints around San Francisco are picking it up for use in smoothies. (Side note: Fidel Castro is a huge moringa fan.)

Moringa bar samples from Kuli Kuli

I want to love moringa. If the current California drought is any predictor, we’re going to need plants that survive harsher conditions and provide such an impressive array of nutrients. But this one tastes rather grassy, and goes down like a shot of wheatgrass, which is to say, abruptly. So power to Kuli Kuli, but here’s hoping its moringa recipes continue to evolve.

I make it back to Chen’s table just in time for the tasting of Cooki’s “sauteéd lamb and macerated cherries” dish. Cooki had certainly cooked through the lamb, softened the cherries, and roasted the pine nuts. I don’t eat meat, so I had to rely on other people’s tastebuds to know how the dish turned out. “It’s pretty good,” one woman, Barb, told me, and shrugged. “I do wonder how it will cook vegetables,” another taster said. Neither of them were aware that the dish included bacon grease. To which, I had to ask—doesn’t everything taste pretty good when coated in bacon grease?

Lamb, cherries, and pine nuts (and bacon) made by Cooki

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The Future of Food Has Robot Arms and Smells Like Bacon

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Why You Should Never, Ever Shake Your Martini

by AlejandroGrevill Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

A version of this story was originally published by Gastropod.

Whether you sip it with friends, chug it before hitting the dance floor, or take it as a post-work pick-me-up, there’s clearly nothing like a cocktail for bracing the spirit. In addition to its peculiar history as a medicinal tonic, plenty of hard science lies behind the perfect cocktail, from the relationship between taste perception and temperature to the all-important decision of whether to shake or stir.

In this episode of Gastropod—a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history—we discover the cocktail’s historical origins, its etymological connection to a horse’s butt, and its rocky history, post-Prohibition. We also investigate the science of the perfect cocktail with culinary scientist Dave Arnold. Here are three tips he shared with us that will improve your drinks and wow your guests. Cheers!

Tip #1: Add salt—but not too much. It might seem counterintuitive, but, in a world overflowing with fancy bitters and spherical ice makers, the thing your cocktail is missing is actually much simpler: salt. Arnold, the mixologist behind high-tech cocktail bar Booker and Dax, shared this secret with Gastropod. It’s just one of several scientific tricks contained in his new book, Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail.

Of course, the most important ingredient in a cocktail is the liquor. The sugar, acids, and ice choices also have flavor implications, making every cocktail recipe into a kind of calculus that factors in the physics of energy transfer as well as variations in the molecular structures of different sweeteners.

But salt can play a crucial role. Arnold is quick to point out that you should only add a very tiny amount—”We are not talking about salting the rim of your glass here!” he told Gastropod.

Cocktail construction chart, created by the US Forest Service in 1974, now housed in the National Archives

Arnold’s insight draws on the same logic that calls for adding a pinch of salt to most baked goods, from ice cream to pastry. “These very, very small quantities of salt really just cause all the flavors to kind of pop,” Arnold explains, because of the way our taste buds work. Recent research has begun to tease out how the receptor cells on our tongues responds to sour, bitter, sweet, and salty tastes differently depending on their concentration and how they are combined. For example, if you add a tiny sour note to a bitter-flavored drink, it will actually boost the bitter sensation, but at a more moderate concentration, sour tastes suppress bitterness. (Try this at home, by adding a drop of lime to a margarita, versus the full ounce.)

Similarly, at very low concentrations, salt doesn’t register as a taste at all, but instead reduces bitterness and boosts sweet and sour notes in the food or drink you add it to. Basically, says Arnold, “next time you make a cocktail, add a tiny little pinch of salt to it and stir—and then tell me you don’t like it better.”

Tip #2: Shake daiquiris, not martinis. James Bond is famous—some might say notorious—for preferring his martini shaken, not stirred. But science-minded bartenders would urge you not to follow his lead—though Arnold is quick to point out that the right way to make a drink is the way it tastes good to you. Still, there’s some solid science behind why a martini should be stirred and a daiquiri shaken, rather than the other way around. Both methods chill, dilute, and blend your drink—but they have different effects on flavor and texture that work better with some cocktail recipes than others.

Typically, Arnold explains, when you shake a drink, it will get colder—and thus more diluted—than it would be after stirring. “Banging ice rapidly around inside a shaking tin is the most turbulent, efficient, and effective manual chilling/dilution technique we drink makers use,” he explains. Because flavor perception, and sweetness, in particular, is blunted at cooler temperatures, a shaken drink needs to start out significantly sweeter than its stirred equivalent.

Shaking also adds texture to a drink, in the form of lots of tiny air bubbles. That’s a good thing when you’re making a cocktail with ingredients that taste nice when they’re foamy, like egg whites, dairy, and even fruit juice, and not as good when you’re mixing straight liquor with bitters. Sorry, Mr. Bond.

Or, as President Jed Bartlet put it, “James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it.”

The other thing to bear in mind is that you really shouldn’t linger over a shaken drink. “The minute that someone hands you a shaken drink, it is dying,” says Arnold. “I hate it when people don’t drink their shaken drink right away.” We can’t responsibly advise you to chug them, so we recommend making your shaken drinks small, so that you can polish them off before the bubbles burst.

Tip #3: Add milk. And then remove it. Ever since the first ice-cube was added to the original cocktail recipe of liquor, bitters, and sugar, mixologists have loved their bar gear. Ice-picks, mallets, swizzle sticks, shakers, strainers, and even red-hot pokers were all standard features of the nineteenth-century celebrity bartender’s toolkit. Today, Dave Arnold has added rotary evaporators, iSi whippers, and liquid nitrogen to the mix, placing the most cutting-edge cocktails out of reach of the home mixologist.

But there is one super trendy, high-tech trick that you can try at home. It’s called “booze-washing,” and it makes use of protein to remove the astringency from a drink. It actually has a historic basis—even Ben Franklin wrote down his own a recipe for milk punch that uses the casein protein in milk to strip out the phenolic compounds and turn a rough-around-the-edges brandy into a soft, round, soothing drink. But Arnold came up with the idea when he was trying to make an alcoholic version of an Arnold Palmer, the delicious iced tea/lemonade mix.

“I knew that adding milk to tea makes it less astringent, which is why the Brits do it,” Arnold explained. “And then I wanted to get rid of the milk, because I didn’t want a milk tea, I wanted a tea tea.” So he added citric acid, which caused the milk to curdle, so he could separate it out in a centrifuge. “And only afterwards was I like, oh yeah, milk punch!”

Arnold washes drinks to remove flavors, rather than add them. He’s taking advantage of the chemical properties of protein-rich ingredients—milk, eggs, or even blood—that preferentially bind to the plant defense chemicals that can give over-oaked whiskey, certain red wines, tea, coffee, and some apple varieties a mouth-puckering dryness. He’s found that as well as smoothing out a drink, booze-washing has the side benefit of creating a lovely, velvety texture.

Arnold demonstrates booze-washing in a sequence of photos from his new book, Liquid Intelligence. Photos by Travis Huggert, who is also responsible for the image used in the embedded Soundcloud player, above.

The good news is that you don’t need a centrifuge to make the perfect milk punch or alcoholic Arnold Palmer at home. You follow Arnold’s recipe (which he shares on the Gastropod website), let it sit overnight, and then strain out the curds through a cloth and then through a coffee filter. According to Arnold, your yield will be a little lower than with a centrifuge, but the result will be just as tasty. His only word of warning is that you have to drink the resulting cocktail within a week, or else the proteins will clump together and the drink will lose its foaming power. But that shouldn’t be too difficult…

Listen to Gastropod’s Cocktail Hour for much more cocktail science and history, including an introduction to the world’s first celebrity bartender, an unexpected use for Korean bibimbap bowls, and a cocktail personality test based on Jungian analytics.

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chile peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

This article has been revised.

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Why You Should Never, Ever Shake Your Martini

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How a Massive Environmental Crisis Led to the Invention of Cheese

by HassanNoriega Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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A version of this article was originally published on Gastropod.

This is the story you’ll often hear about how humans discovered cheese: One hot day 9,000 years ago, a nomad was on his travels and brought along some milk in an animal stomach—a sort of proto-thermos—to have something to drink at the end of the day. But when he arrived, he discovered that the rennet in the stomach lining had curdled the milk, creating the first cheese.

But there’s a major problem with that story, as University of Vermont cheese scientist and historian Paul Kindstedt explained on the latest episode of Gastropod—a podcast that explores food through the lens of science and history. The nomads living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East in 7000 B.C. would have been lactose-intolerant. A nomad on the road wouldn’t have wanted to drink milk; it would have left him in severe gastro-intestinal distress.

Kindstedt, author of the book Cheese and Culture, explained that about a thousand years before traces of cheese-making show up in the archaeological record, humans began growing crops. Those early fields of wheat and other grains attracted local wild sheep and goats, which provide milk for their young. Human babies are also perfectly adapted for milk. Early humans quickly made the connection and began dairying—but for the first thousand years, toddlers and babies were the only ones consuming the milk. Human adults were uniformly lactose-intolerant, says Kindstedt. What’s more, he told us that “we know from some exciting archaeo-genetic and genomic modeling that the capacity to tolerate lactose into adulthood didn’t develop until about 5500 B.C.”—which is at least a thousand years after the development of cheese.

It took another recent advance to figure out the origins of cheese: Kindstedt says that only recently have scientists been able to analyze the chemical traces on pottery from thousands of years ago in order to find milk fat in the higher concentrations that indicate it was used to hold cheese or butter, rather than plain milk.

Using this new research, Kinstead explains, we now know that the real dawn of cheese came about 8,500 years ago, with two simultaneous developments in human history. First, by then, over-intensive agricultural practices had depleted the soil, leading to the first human-created environmental disaster. As a result, Neolithic humans began herding goats and sheep more intensely, as those animals could survive on marginal lands unfit for crops. And secondly, humans invented pottery: the original practical milk-collection containers.

In the warm environment of the Fertile Crescent region, Kinstedt explained, any milk not used immediately and instead left to stand in those newly invented containers “would have very quickly, in a matter of hours, coagulated due to the heat and the natural lactic acid bacteria in the milk. And at some point, probably some adventurous adult tried some of the solid material and found that they could tolerate it a lot more of it than they could milk.” That’s because about 80 percent of the lactose drains off with the whey, leaving a digestible and, likely, rather delicious fresh cheese.

With the discovery of cheese, suddenly those early humans could add dairy to their diets. Cheese made an entirely new source of nutrients and calories available for adults, and, as a result, dairying took off in a major way. What this meant, says Kindstedt, is that “children and newborns would be exposed to milk frequently, which ultimately through random mutations selected for children who could tolerate lactose later into adulthood.”

In a very short time, at least in terms of human evolution—perhaps only a few thousand years—that mutation spread throughout the population of the Fertile Crescent. As those herders migrated to Europe and beyond, they carried this genetic mutation with them. According to Kindstedt, “It’s an absolutely stunning example of a genetic selection occurring in an unbelievably short period of time in human development. It’s really a wonder of the world, and it changed Western civilization forever.”

To learn more about what those first cheeses tasted like—and how we got from there to Velveeta—listen to Gastropod’s “Say Cheese!” episode:

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chili peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

Originally posted here: 

How a Massive Environmental Crisis Led to the Invention of Cheese

Posted in alo, Anchor, aquaculture, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Thermos, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How a Massive Environmental Crisis Led to the Invention of Cheese

Inside the Bizarre Cow Trials of the 1920s

by MaxieKnqzqbb Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

From a 1920 USDA publication titled, “Runts—and the Remedy”

A version of this article was originally published on Gastropod.

Something extremely bizarre took place in the early decades of the 20th century, inspired by a confluence of trends. Scientists had recently developed a deeper understanding of genetics and inherited traits; at the same time, the very first eugenics policies were being enacted in the United States. And, as the population grew, the public wanted cheaper meat and milk. As a result, in the 1920s, the USDA encouraged rural communities around the United States to put bulls on the witness stand—to hold a legal trial, complete with lawyers and witnesses and a watching public—to determine whether the bull was fit to breed.

In 1900, the average dairy cow in America produced 424 gallons of milk each year. By 2000, that figure had more than quadrupled, to 2,116 gallons. In the latest episode of Gastropod—a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history—we explore the incredible science that transformed the American cow into a milk machine. But we also uncover the disturbing history of prejudice and animal cruelty that accompanied it.

Livestock breeding was a normal part of American life at the dawn of the 20th century, according to historian Gabriel Rosenberg. The United States, he told Gastropod, was “still largely a rural and agricultural society,” and farm animals—and thus some more-or-less scientific forms of selective breeding—were ubiquitous in American life.

Meanwhile, the eugenics movement was on the rise. Founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, eugenics held that the human race could improve itself by guided evolution—which meant that criminals, the mentally ill, and others of “inferior stock” should not be allowed to procreate and pass on their defective genes. America led the way, passing the first eugenic policies in the world. By the Second World War, 29 states had passed legislation that empowered officials to forcibly sterilize “unfit” individuals.

Combine the growing population, the desire for cheap meat and milk, and the increasing popularity of eugenics, and the result, Rosenberg said, was the “Better Sires: Better Stock” program, launched by the USDA in 1919. In an accompanying essay, “Harnessing Heredity to Improve the Nation’s Live Stock,” the USDA’s Bureau of Animal Industry proclaimed that, each year, “a round billion dollars is lost because heredity has been permitted to work with too little control.” The implication: Humans needed to take control—and stop letting inferior or “scrub” bulls reproduce!

The “Better Sires: Better Stock” campaign included a variety of elements to encourage farmers to mate “purebred” rather than “scrub” or “degenerate” sires with their female animals. Anyone who pledged to only use purebred stock to expand their herd was awarded a handsome certificate. USDA field agents distributed pamphlets entitled “Runts—and the Remedy” and “From Scrubs to Quality Stock,” packed with charts showing incremental increases of dollar value with each improved generation as well as testimonials from enrolled farmers.

The USDA’s script for prosecuting an inferior bull. The document was unearthed by Duke historian Gabriel Rosenberg, who is writing a book on the subject.

By far the most peculiar aspect of the campaign, however, came in 1924, when the USDA published its “Outline for Conducting a Scrub-Sire Trial.” This mimeographed pamphlet, which Rosenberg recently unearthed, contained detailed instructions on how to hold a legal trial of a non-purebred bull, in order to publicly condemn it as unfit to reproduce. The pamphlet calls for a cast of characters to include a judge, a jury, attorneys, and witnesses for the prosecution and the defense, as well as a sheriff, who should “wear a large metal star and carry a gun,” and whose role, given the trial’s foregone conclusion, was “to have charge of the slaughter of the condemned scrub sire and to superintend the barbecue.”

In addition to an optional funeral oration for the scrub sire and detailed instructions regarding the barbecue or other refreshments (“bologna sandwiches, boiled wieners, or similar products related to bull meat” are recommended), the pamphlet also includes a script that begins with the immortal lines: “Hear ye! Hear ye! The honorable court of bovine justice of ___ County is now in session.” The county’s case against the scrub bull is laid out: that he is a thief for consuming “valuable provender” while providing no value in return, that he is an “unworthy father,” and that his very existence is “detrimental to the progress and prosperity of the public at large.” Several pages and roughly two hours later, the trial concludes with the following stage direction: “The bull is led away and a few moments later a shot is fired.”

Within a month of publication, the USDA reported receiving more than 500 requests for its scrub-sire trial pamphlets. Across the country, the court of bovine justice was convened at county fairs, cattle auctions, and regional farmers’ association meetings, forming a popular and educational entertainment.

These bull trials may seem like a forgotten, bizarre, and ultimately amusing quirk of history, but, as Rosenberg reminded Gastropod, “They are talking about a lot more than just cattle genetics here.”

Indeed, the very same year—1924—that the USDA published its “Outline for Conducting a Scrub-Sire Trial,” the state of Virginia passed its Eugenical Sterilization Act. Immediately, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, Director of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, filed a petition to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old whom he claimed had a mental age of 9, and who had already given birth to a supposedly feeble-minded daughter (following a rape). Buck’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. upholding the decision in a 1927 ruling that concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Historians estimate that more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized in the decades leading up to the Second World War, with many more persecuted under racist immigration laws and marriage restrictions.

Eugenics, with its philosophical kinship to Nazism, largely fell out of favor in the United States by World War II. But the ideas promoted in the bull trials—that humans can and should take increasing control of animal genetics in order to design the perfect milk machine—have gained ground throughout the past century, as breeding has become ever more technologically advanced. As we discuss in this episode of Gastropod, the drive to improve dairy cattle through livestock breeding has led to huge innovations—in IVF, in genomics, and in big-data analysis—as well as much more milk. But it has also continued, for better and for worse, to highlight the ethical problems that stem from this kind of techno-utopian approach to reproduction.

In this episode of Gastropod, we find out about the bull trials of the 1920s and meet the most valuable bull in the world, as we explore the history and the high-tech genomic science behind livestock breeding today. Along the way, we tease out its larger, thought-provoking, and frequently deeply troubling implications for animal welfare and society in general. Listen below.

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chili peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

Continued: 

Inside the Bizarre Cow Trials of the 1920s

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Here’s What the Government Thinks You Should Be Eating in 2015

by PhilomeLoggins Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, I wrote about some of the nutrition controversies surrounding the release of new United States Dietary Guidelines in 2015. The Guidelines, which inform public health initiatives, food labels, and what health-conscious parents decide to make for dinner, are revised every five years, with help from a scientific committee.

Today, that committee released its initial scientific report, an extensive 572-page tome on all the current thinking about healthy diets.

So what are we eating—and what should we be eating—in 2015?

Perhaps the biggest change this year could breathe some life into your breakfast habits: The cholesterol in egg yolks is no longer as much of a health concern. The US Dietary Guidelines used to recommend that you eat no more than 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol a day, or under two large eggs. But this year, the committee has scrapped that advice as new research suggests that the cholesterol you consume in our diets has little to do with your blood cholesterol. Saturated fats and trans fats, on the other hand, could boost blood your blood cholesterol levels, as could unlucky genes.
The committee found that Americans lack vitamin D, calcium, potassium, and fiber in their diets. We also eat too few whole grains. On the other hand, we eat far too much sodium and saturated fat. Two-thirds of people over age 50, those most at risk for cardiovascular disease, still eat more than the upper limit, or 10 percent of their daily calories from saturated fat.
Gardeners, rejoice: The committee applauds vegetables in its latest report, describing them as “excellent sources of many shortfall nutrients and nutrients of public health concern.” Unfortunately, our veggie intake has declined in recent years, especially for kids. Only 10 percent of toddlers eats the recommended 1 cup of vegetables a day.
Added sugars, which make up 13.4 percent of our calorie intake every day, contribute to obesity, cavities, high blood pressure, and potentially cardiovascular disease. If you are in tip top shape, the committee suggests keeping your added sugar consumption under 10 percent of your daily energy intake, or roughly 12 teaspoons (including fruit juice concentrates and syrups). But for most people, the report adds, the ideal amount of added sugars is between 4.5 to 9.4 teaspoons a day, depending on your BMI.
Most adults are fine to keep drinking alcohol in moderation—one cup a day for women, and up to two for men. “However,” writes the the committee, “it is not recommended that anyone begin drinking or drink more frequently on the basis of potential health benefits.”
Be it máte, espresso, or chai, your caffeine habit is fine in moderation, up to 400 mg a day (3-5 cups of coffee). But before you start handing out the Rockstars: The committee found evidence that high levels of caffeine, such as those found in energy drinks, are harmful to kids and pregnant women. (Plus: See above for the danger of the added sugars found in many of these energy drinks).
Seafood is a pretty healthy thing to eat from a dietary standpoint, and concerns about mercury don’t outweigh the health benefits of eating fish, according to the committee. And yet, the collapse of fisheries due to overfishing “has raised concern about the ability to produce a safe and affordable supply.” The report suggests that both farm-raised and wild caught seafood will be needed to feed us in the future.
The committee found that a diet “higher in plant-based foods…and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current US diet.” A group of 49 environmental and animal-welfare groups sent a letter to the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services to urge them to embrace this sustainability-oriented message in their Dietary Guidelines, which are set to be released later in 2015.

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Here’s What the Government Thinks You Should Be Eating in 2015

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Is This Fungus the Future of Farming?

by 1LymSlagter473 Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

Mycorrhizal fungi growing on a petri dish in Alia Rodriguez’s lab Cynthia Graber

This article was originally published on Gastropod.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard about the human microbiome.

Research into the composition, function, and importance of the galaxy of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that, when we’re healthy, live in symbiotic balance in and on us has become one of the fastest moving and most intriguing fields of scientific study. But it turns out that plants have a microbiome too—and it’s just as important and exciting as ours.

In this episode of Gastropod, a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, we look at the brand new science that experts think will lead to a “Microbe Revolution” in agriculture, as well as the history of both probiotics for soils and agricultural revolutions. And we do it all in the context of the crop that Bill Gates has called “the world’s most interesting vegetable“: the cassava.

We now know that we humans rely on bacteria in our gut to help us digest and synthesize a variety of nutrients in our food, including vitamins B and K. There’s a growing body of evidence that the different microbial communities we host—in our guts, on our skin, in our mouths, and deep inside our bellybuttons—help protect us against disease and may even play a role in regulating mental health.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, plants, including all the ones that we rely on to provide grains, vegetables, and fruit for our tables, have an equally tight relationship with microbes. And, as in humans, the symbiotic partnership between a plant and the microbes that live on its leaves and roots and in the soil around it is utterly essential to the plant’s continued existence and health. Indeed, the very plant-ness of plants—their photosynthetic ability to harness light and transform it into food—comes from an ancient microbe that plants came to depend on so closely that they incorporated it into their own cells, transforming it into what we now know as a chloroplast.

But, despite its importance to their (and thus our) survival, the plant microbiome is perhaps even less well understood than its human equivalent. The main way in which scientists study such tiny creatures is by growing colonies of a particular microbe on a petri dish in a lab. But researchers estimate that only about 1 percent, the tiniest sliver of the plant world’s microbial citizens, can be cultured that way.

High-tech tools such as metagenomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics help researchers take a snapshot of the genetic diversity of life in a given bit of soil. But it’s still incredibly difficult to tease out exactly which bacteria or fungus performs what function for a given plant. Janet Jansson, whose lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is studying the role of soil microorganisms in the cycling of carbon, calls this great unknown “the earth’s dark matter.” She’s part of a new venture called the Earth Microbiome Project, an international collaboration of scientists working to understand microbial communities in soils all around the world.

While researchers scramble to map and analyze the plant and soil microbiomes, companies have sensed that there’s money to be made. When it comes to the human microbiome, processed food giants have started adding probiotics and prebiotics to everything from frozen yogurt to coconut water. In the field, scientists, small biotech companies, and agricultural behemoths such as Monsanto are all racing to develop probiotics for plants: learning from bacteria and fungi to develop supplements that can help crops grow better, using less fertilizer and pesticide, even in challenging environmental conditions.

In this episode, we focus on one particular kind of microbe: mycorrhizal fungi. These are ancient fungi that are believed to have lived on plant roots ever since plants first moved onto land, and they still co-exist with and support 80 percent of all plant species on the planet. We meet British scientist Ian Sanders, whose career has been devoted to studying mycorrhizal fungi genetics. Sanders’ latest big idea is that, by breeding better mycorrhizal fungi, he can help plants grow more food. He’s been working with agronomist Alia Rodriguez to test this theory in the cassava fields of Colombia, and we join him to find out his astonishing, as yet unpublished, results. Can the Microbe Revolution live up to its promises, out of the lab and in the field?

Rusty Rodriguez’s Seattle greenhouse Cynthia Graber

Along the way, we discuss other research into plant microbes, some of which has already been commercialized. For example, Rusty Rodriguez, head of a company called Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies, has scoured extreme environments to find fungi that can help plants survive heat, cold, drought, and floods. During trials, AST’s new product, BioEnsure, which was released onto the market this fall, enabled crops planted during the 2012 drought in the American Midwest to produce 85 percent more food than untreated ones.

With early results like these, microbes are being called the next big thing in agriculture. There’s plenty of hype: Monsanto’s BioAg Alliance claims to be “rewriting agricultural history,” the American Academy of Microbiology recently issued a report titled “How Microbes Can Help Feed the World,” and even normally sober scientists have declared that this research may well “precipitate the second Green Revolution.”

But the first Green Revolution has plenty of critics, and the process of translating promising science into food on tables is never without its challenges. Listen in to this episode of Gastropod for the scoop on the history and potential impact of the Microbe Revolution.

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chile peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

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Is This Fungus the Future of Farming?

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Dead zones are coming for your rivers, lakes, and oceans

by CortneyULX Posted on November 10, 2014

The Dead Sea

Dead zones are coming for your rivers, lakes, and oceans

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10 Nov 2014 4:30 PM

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Halloween may have come and gone, but climate change continues to give us the creeps. A new study revealed that warmer temperatures are causing zombie-like “dead zones” in rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide.

According to the study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center found two dozen ways that climate change is worsening dead zones.

If you’re catching up: Climate scientists define dead zones as areas of oxygen-depleted water where no life exists. Though unlike a zombie apocalypse, they are potentially reversible. They happen for a number of reasons, but we’re primarily concerned with the human causes, such as industrial sewage pollution, agricultural runoff, and big, ugly oil spills. (P.S. The second largest dead zone in the world is in — yep, you guessed it — the northern Gulf of Mexico).

Back to the study: Researchers looked at 476 zombie zones around the world and found that once wildlife is eliminated, water temperatures typically increase by about 4 degrees F, instigating the potential of a vicious cycle: Climate change exacerbates dead zones and, in turn, dead zones increase water temperature. And unfortunately, we can’t stop it with a bullet to the brain.

The researchers also used a projection model to surmise how climate change’s effects on dead zones could look by the end of the century. The study reads:

The implications of these projections, especially for Northern Europe, are shifts in vulnerability of coastal systems to HAB events, increased regional HAB impacts to aquaculture, increased risks to human health and ecosystems, and economic consequences of these events due to losses to fisheries and ecosystem services.

The findings of this study scare us as much as a Bruce Campbell flick. But this problem unfortunately doesn’t come with a step-by-step survival guide. Yet.

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Dead zones are coming for your rivers, lakes, and oceans

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“Wild-Caught,” Eh? 30 Percent of Shrimp Labels Are False

by MelissaBresnaha Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Shrimp is America’s favorite seafood—we eat more of it than any other kind, by a wide margin. And the tasty crustacean still (more or less) thrives near our ample shores—from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf to the Carolinas. That’s why it’s deeply weird that 90 percent of the shrimp we eat comes from often-fetid farms in Southeast Asia, which tend to snuff out productive mangrove ecosystems and have a sketchy labor record. But it gets worse. Even when we do try to choose wild-caught US shrimp, we’re often fooled. That’s the message of a new report by the ocean-conservation group Oceana.

The researchers sampled 143 shrimp products from 111 grocery stores and restaurants in Portland, Ore., New York City, Washington D.C., and along the Gulf of Mexico, and subjected them to DNA testing. Result: 30 percent of them were misrepresented on labels.

They found the most deception in New York City, where 43 percent of the samples from supermarkets and restaurants proved to be misleadingly labeled. Of those, more than half were “farmed whiteleg shrimp disguised as wild-caught shrimp.” Oof. D.C. shrimp eaters have also have cause for doubt about what’s being served them: Supermarkets there showed better than in ones in New York, but nearly half of shrimp samples from D.C. restaurants turned up mislabeled.

Even in the Gulf, still the site of a robust shrimp fishery despite the occasional cataclysmic oil spill and vast annual dead zones from agricultural runoff, the researchers found that “over one-third of the products labeled as ‘Gulf’ shrimp were farmed.” On the other hand, “nearly two-thirds of the samples simply labeled as ‘shrimp’ were actually wild-caught Gulf shrimp,” the report states, “possibly a missed marketing opportunity for promoting domestically caught seafood.”

Only Portlandia emerged virtually unscathed from Oceana’s scrutiny: Just one sample in 20 turned out to be mislabeled—a dish presented as “wild Pacific shrimp” turned out to be farmed.

Beyond rank mislabeling, the report also reveals that consumers indulge their shrimp habit from within a generalized information void. “The majority of restaurant menus surveyed did not provide the diner with any information on the type of shrimp, whether it was farmed/wild or its origin,” Oceana found. As for supermarkets, “30 percent of the shrimp products surveyed in grocery stores lacked information on country-of-origin, 29 percent lacked farmed/wild information and one in five did not provide either.

This overriding lack of transparency does more than lull us into accepting an inferior product. As Paul Greenberg argues in his brilliant 2014 book American Catch, it also makes our coastal areas—home to 40 percent of the US population—vulnerable to climate change.

That’s because treating treasures like the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery as an afterthought allows us to disregard the ecosystems that make them possible: the region’s wetlands, which are vanishing at the rate of one football field-sized chunk per hour, largely under pressure from the oil industry. These coastal landscapes don’t just provide nurseries for shrimp and other seafood; they also provide critical buffers against the increasingly violent storms and rising sea levels promised (and already being triggered) by a changing climate. Greenberg argues that a revival of interest in US-caught shrimp could rally support for wetland restoration, “conjoining of the interests of seafood and the interests of humans.”

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“Wild-Caught,” Eh? 30 Percent of Shrimp Labels Are False

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Video: You’ve Never Seen the Colossal Power of the Ocean Quite Like This

by DannielleEdden Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Water from Morgan Maassen on Vimeo.

More than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by oceans; they support nearly 50 percent of all the planet’s species. And yet for us land-bound bipeds, their depths remain mysterious, fearsome, and untouched: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that “more than 95 percent of the underwater world remains unexplored.” While greenhouse gases snatch the global warming headlines, the oceans play a crucial role in our understanding of climate change, having absorbed more than 90 percent of the Earth’s extra heat since 1955. This video, uploaded to Vimeo by photographer and filmmaker Morgan Maassen from Santa Barbara, Calif., taps into that awesome, elemental power of the unknown, lifting it way above the run-of-the-mill surfie video into something that left me slack-jawed (and missing summer). Enjoy.

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Video: You’ve Never Seen the Colossal Power of the Ocean Quite Like This

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