Around two years ago, the then 10-person team of Bowery, an indoor farming startup, started growing a small array of leafy greens out of what was once a shipbuilding yard in Kearny, New Jersey. Undeterred by the rather harsh post-industrial environment, the Bowery team was just looking for somewhere to set up that had a lot of space. After all, their farming system is more about the tech than it is the soil and the water and the things you might generally associate with farming. By growing produce in trays, stacked high in rooms whose temperature, lighting, and humidity is tightly controlled by a proprietary operating system, Bowery’s farming requires no soil, and instead delivers nutrients to its array of leafy greens via a hydroponic system that uses 95% less water than traditional agriculture.
Bowery certainly doesn’t look like a farm, but that, to CEO Irving Fain, is the point. “We’re excited about being able to move into these abandoned spaces in cities and create new jobs and industry,” he says. In Kearny, that’s exactly what Bowery is doing: On September 24, the startup officially unveiled its second, larger farm (the company does not disclose square footage) in a new building on the same industrial complex, which was built in 2017 as part of a larger revitalization effort in Kearny. In terms of output, the new farm is about 30 times more productive, and the startup has greatly diversified its crop output, adding bok choy, cilantro, and parsley to its original kale, spinach, and basil offerings. The startup is also expanding its distribution: It will continue selling through Whole Foods, as it already has been (at a price comparable to most of the retailer’s other greens) and also be featured on menus at Sweetgreen and Dig Inn throughout the Northeast.
By Eillie Anzilotti
]]>
American eating habits are changing faster than fast food can keep up. Instead of dining out, more Americans than ever are staying in. Restaurants are getting dinged by the advent of pre-made meal kits and online grocery delivery. Dining out has dropped to an average 185 times a year, down from a peak of 216 in 2000. This shift is hurting the fast food industry especially hard. Chains like McDonalds are raising prices to offset rising costs, but that’s likely to only drive more customers to home cooking. Chick-fil-A has adopted a creative approach: adding meal packages that customers can pick up and cook at home. (Source: Bloomberg)
]]>
On a projection screen in front of a packed room in a coastal Maine town, computer-animated salmon swim energetically through a massive oval tank. A narrator’s voice soothingly points out water currents that promote fish exercise and ideal meat texture, along with vertical mesh screens that “optimize fish densities and tank volume.” The screens also make dead fish easy to remove, the narrator cheerily adds.
The video is part of a pitch made earlier this year for an ambitious $500-million salmon farm that Norway-based firm, Nordic Aquafarms, plans to build in Belfast, Maine, complete with what Nordic says will be among the world’s largest aquaculture tanks. It is one of a handful of projects in the works by companies hoping these highly mechanized systems will change the face fish farming—by moving it indoors.
If it catches on, indoor aquaculture could play a critical role in meeting the needs of a swelling human population, Nordic CEO Erik Heim says. He believes it could do so without the pollution and other potential threats to wild fish that can accompany traditional aquaculture—although the indoor approach does face environmental challenges of its own. “There’s always some risk, but the risk of the land-based system is a small percentage of the risk of an outdoor system,” says Michael Timmons, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has studied aquaculture for more than 20 years and is not involved in the Nordic project.
]]>
Britain is set to become the truffle capital of the world within 30 years, scientists have said, as they are developing new genetic approaches to create varieties that grow twice as fast.
It comes as a shift in climate means truffle farmers in the Mediterranean are facing exceptionally dry weather, creating a chronic shortage of the flavoursome fungus.
Mediterranean black truffles are mostly found in northern Spain, southern France and northern Italy because they need warmer and drier conditions. Read more.
By Katie Morley & Charles Hymas
Our much-loved molluscs have had a bad rap in recent days, with government scientists claiming that seven out of 10 oysters sold may harbour the norovirus bug . But as David Jarrad, head of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain has pointed out, the tests are flawed. They identify the amount of norovirus in the water, but do not differentiate between active and inactive viruses.
Our love affair with oysters is long standing. At the turn of the 20th century, the oyster industry was one of the largest in the country. And for a good reason: oysters were cheap and nutritious. Overfishing led to them being restricted to high-end restaurants for most of the 20th century, but they have been having a renaissance. The world now is our oyster – they are being served up at street food markets all around the UK and you can even buy them at pubs and music festivals.
So if you – like so many of us – enjoy tucking into a delicious, nutritious oyster, then fear not. You are more likely to catch norovirus in your local supermarket than you are from eating an oyster. Read more
By Drew Smith
]]>
At the turn of the 20th century, prominent physicians who were trying to understand where mental illness comes from seized on a new theory: autointoxication. Intestinal microbes, these doctors suggested, are actually dangerous to their human hosts. They have a way of inducing “fatigue, melancholia, and the neuroses,” as a historical article in the journal Gut Pathogensrecounts.
“The control of man’s diet is readily accomplished, but mastery over his intestinal bacterial flora is not,” wrote a doctor named Bond Stow in the Medical Record Journal of Medicine and Surgery in 1914. “The innumerable examples of autointoxication that one sees in his daily walks in life is proof thereof … malaise, total lack of ambition so that every effort in life is a burden, mental depression often bordering upon melancholia.”
Stow went on to say that “a battle royal must be fought” with these intestinal germs.
By Olga Khazan
]]>
Gazing down at the paper plate, I take a few moments to contemplate the meal in front of me. Is that a piece of wheat gluten masquerading as fried chicken, I wonder, poking at it with a chopstick? A speckled roll of yuba resembling steak? A ball of bean curd made bouncy like cuttlefish? Each year brings new discoveries, as I try to identify the animal of inspiration for each plant-based protein nugget doled out by nuns at the cafeteria. It’s sort of like trying to guess the fruit in a bag of Tropical Starburst.
I am at the Chuang Yen Monastery in New York’s Hudson Valley. Since my grandfather’s ashes were placed in an urn on the mountainside here 10 years ago, my family and I have paid visits, often for Qing Ming, a Chinese holiday of ancestral worship. The vegetarian meal served in the dining hall is a highlight—but if you’ve ever gone to any restaurant with the word “Buddha” in its name, then you’ve had this food, too: mock duck, mock char siu, mock chicken, and mock fish dishes galore. Elaborately prepared wheat gluten (sometimes called seitan), tofu, and other plant-based proteins are the building blocks for an inexhaustible variety of satisfying nonmeats that have been honed at Buddhist monasteries for centuries. The iterations never cease to delight me. Perhaps it’s because of my annual monastery visits that I’ve embraced them so richly. But I wonder, do other omnivores feel this way, too?
By Cathy Erway
]]>
In 2017, the United States Forest Service spent close to $2.5 billion fighting and containing wildfires. It was the most expensive year on record. Governors in Montana, Oregon, and California declared states of emergency. Blazes cost the state of California alone nearly $700 million. By the end of the year, more than 71,000 fires had been recorded and 10 million acres leveled nationwide.
It was a historic, destructive season. Some say the worst ever.
But after all the tallying, the requests for federal aid, the agricultural losses, the hundreds and hundreds of homes and businesses left in need of rebuilding, comes something else—something sort of miraculous. Mother Nature is as swift in replenishment as she is in annihilation: When a wildfire departs, a treasure rises, literally, from its ashes. Morel mushrooms.
By Jessica Fu
]]>
Food shortages have been making dramatic headlines for the past half-dozen years. The end of the avocado is in sight. Maple syrup could become a luxury ingredient, just like peanut butter. Hummus will go from snack food staple to special-occasion snack.
The panic is based on genuine factors, including a years-long drought in California’s Central Valley, the heart of the U.S. almond industry. Weather has also affected Madagascar’s vanilla producers and India’s chickpea crops. Meanwhile, demand has squeezed supplies of seafood.
Biochemist Patrick O. Brown, founder of Impossible Foods Inc., invented a magic ingredient” that solves what he calls the planet’s biggest environmental problem: beef. The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants — even fast-food stalwart White Castle.
It contains heme (pronounced HEEM), a key part of red meat and a source of iron, which humans can’t live without. Think of Brown’s discovery as plant-based blood. Brown, 63, says it makes the Impossible Burger sizzle, smell and taste like real red meat.
The resemblance to beef is the Impossible Burger’s claim to fame. It may also be its bane. Even though Impossible Foods is compliant with all regulations, the company is having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration review the product’s safety in the interest of transparency. So far, the FDA says the company hasn’t met the mark. The FDA said the plant-based heme is so new there needed to be more evidence before it will give its blessing. Impossible Foods says it tried again and is waiting for the FDA’s response.
]]>