Food Bug Zappers

In chapter 10 of Unnaturally Delicious, I wrote about a variety of food safety innovations.  Frank Yiannas, Walmart's vice president for food safety told me a bit about some of the technologies and efforts he's been involved with.  But, first on Walmart itself:

“I started by asking about the size of Walmart. More than 120 million Americans (more than a third of the U.S. population) shop at Walmart every week. Does the sheer scale of the operation make the U.S. food system riskier? If Walmart has an outbreak, multitudes would be sickened. Yiannas replied: “One out of every four dollars spent on food are spent at a Walmart. We can make a big difference. Large organizations like Walmart result in a safer food system.” He points out that when Walmart makes a change, it affects the whole system.”

He went on to tell me about how they're ensuring rotisserie chickens are properly cooked.  

“To address this problem Walmart turned to the power of information technology and Big Data.28 Now all stores are equipped with new handheld sensors that are used to check cooking temperatures of every single batch. The sensors automatically record and send the information to the web in real time. During the month that health inspectors checked Walmart chickens ten times, the company recorded 1.4 million temperature checks. Whereas earlier inspection methods relied on taking a small sample of readings to check for compliance, Yiannas said the new approach is “N = all.” In other words, Walmart employees check every single chicken. Moreover, Walmart no longer has to wait on a report from an inspector or third-party auditor to learn the outcomes. Yiannas can check at any time during the day to see which stores are doing what they should to meet food safety standards. The troves of data can be exploited to find out which stores, which equipment, and which employees are doing better. Perhaps most important, it might just stop you and me from walking out the door with an undercooked chicken.”

I also talked to Kevin Myers, the senior vice president of research and development for Hormel, who was involved in implementing a relatively new technology to help ensure safe meat: high pressure processing.  

“High-pressure processing (sometimes also called pascalization after the seventeenth-century scientist Blaise Pascal, who studied pressure) allowed Hormel Foods to sanitize both the meat and the package it comes in. The process is particularly well suited for ready-to-eat foods because it takes place after the product is packaged and eliminates potential contamination which could occur after cooking and before packaging.

Myers said the process works by placing the packaged food in a chamber and submitting it to extreme levels of pressure. Have you ever jumped off the diving board at the deep end, only to have your ears hurt as you approached the bottom of the pool? That pain is caused by the pressure exerted on your eardrums by the water above you in the pool. At a depth of about ten feet, your ears are feeling about 4.3 pounds per square inch (psi) of pressure. If you could somehow swim to the deepest point in the ocean (about thirty-six thousand feet down), you’d feel more than 15,600 psi. Well, you wouldn’t actually feel anything because your body would be crushed well before you reached that depth. According to Myers, Hormel’s high-pressure processing system applies 87,000 psi to food products. That is five and a half times more pressure than would be felt at the deepest depth of the ocean.”

All that pressure is enough to kill bacteria and other pathogens without adversely affecting the food itself.  Here's a photo of a high pressure pasteurization machine provided by Avure Technologies, which is finding applications of high pressure pasteurization for a wide variety of foods.

There is more in the chapter on Walmart, Hormel, and on innovators working on new, rapid food safety testing devices.  

Enriched colonies

A couple months ago, I discussed the book chapter I wrote on a different type of hen housing system: the enriched colony . Today, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece I wrote about this hen housing system and the costs of alternative housing systems.   

A few snippets:

“A 2014 California voter initiative and subsequent state legislation ultimately led to a ban on sales of battery-cage eggs in the Golden State. Because eggs have few close substitutes, demand tends to be relatively insensitive to changes in price. When demand is inelastic, a small-percentage change in the quantity supplied causes an even greater increase in price.

Comparing the prices of eggs sold in California before and after the law with the prices of eggs sold in other states reveals that the legislation increased egg prices for Californians by at least 22%—or about 75 cents for a dozen. A related analysis using Agriculture Department wholesale price data indicates the California law increased prices between 33% and 70%. Poor Americans, who spend a larger share of their incomes on food, are disproportionately affected.”

and

“Rather than getting rid of the cages entirely, one answer is to use a relatively new type of housing: the enriched-colony cage system. Unlike the barren environment in the battery cages, the much larger, enriched-colonies have nesting areas for egg laying and a matted area that allows the hens to exercise their natural urge to scratch. Also available are perches that allow the hens to get up off the wire floor.

An enriched colony is not a Ritz-Carlton, and some animal advocates think the systems do not go far enough. However, they represent an innovative compromise that attempts to balance cost and the hens’ well-being.”

Lab grown meat

Quartz.com just ran a piece taken from one of the chapters of Unnaturally Delicious on lab grown meat.  Here's the start:

“On Aug. 5, 2013, Mark Post went out to grab a hamburger. This was no drive-through Big Mac. Rather, Post bit into his $325,000 burger in front of an invitation-only crowd of journalists, chefs, and food enthusiasts in the heart of London.

The strangest part wasn’t the cost or the crowd but the meat. Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, grew the burger himself. Not from a cow on his farm, mind you, but from a bovine stem-cell in a petri dish in his lab. Post’s research, partially funded by Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, has the potential to upend conventional wisdom on the environmental, animal welfare, and health impacts of meat eating.

Ironically enough, I first met Post at a meeting of some of the world’s largest hog producers. ”

The Quartz editors left out what I think is one of the most important points made in the chapter about relative inefficiencies of meat eating.  So, for sake of completeness, here's the segment they left out (long time readers will recognize that I've touch one this theme in previous blog posts).

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More broadly, this line of argument – that meat production (inside the lab or out) is “wasteful” because it requires feed inputs that humans might use – is misplaced.  To see this, it is useful to consider a thought experiment – an imaginary story that might help us get to the bottom of things. 

Imagine a biologist on an excursion to the Amazon looking for new plant species.  She comes across a new grass she’s never before seen, and brings it back home to her lab.  She finds that the grass grows exceedingly well in greenhouses with the right fertilizer and soil, and she immediately moves to field trials.  She also notices that the grass produces a seed that is durable, storable, and extraordinarily calorie dense.  The scientist immediately recognizes the potential for the newly discovered plant to meet the dietary demands of a growing world population.

But, there is a problem.  Lab analysis reveals that the seeds are, alas, toxic to humans.  Despite the set-back, the scientist doesn’t give up.  She toils away year after year until she creates a machine that can convert the seeds into a food that is not only safe for humans to consume but that is incredibly delicious to eat.  There are a few downsides.  For every five calories that go into the machine, only one comes out.  Plus, the machine uses water, runs on electricity, burns fossil fuels, and creates carbon emissions. 

Should the scientist be condemned for her work?  Or, hailed as an ingenious hero for finding a plant that can inexpensively produce calories, and then creating a machine that can turn those calories into something people really want to eat?  Maybe another way to think about it is to ask whether the scientist’s new food can - despite its inefficiencies (which will make the price higher than it otherwise would be) - compete against other foods in the marketplace?  Are consumers willing to pay the higher price for this new food? 

Now, let’s call the new grass corn and the new machine cow. 

            This thought experiment is useful in thinking about the argument that corn is “wasted” in the process of feeding animals (or growing lab grown meat).  Yet, the idea that animal food is “wasted” is a common view.  For example, one set of authors in the journal Science wrote,

“Although crops used for animal feed ultimately produce human food in the form of meat and dairy products, they do so with a substantial loss of caloric efficiency. If current crop production used for animal feed and other nonfood uses (including biofuels) were targeted for direct consumption, ~70% more calories would become available, potentially providing enough calories to meet the basic needs of an additional 4 billion people. The human-edible crop calories that do not end up in the food system are referred to as the ‘diet gap.’”

The argument isn’t as convincing as it might first appear.  Few people really want to eat the calories that directly come from corn or other common animal feeds like soybeans.  Unlike my hypothetical example, corn is not toxic to humans (although some of the grasses cows eat really are inedible to humans), but most people don’t want to field corn.    

So if we don’t want to directly eat the stuff, why do we grow so much corn and soy?  They are incredibly efficient producers of calories and protein.  Stated differently, these crops (or grasses if you will) allow us to produce an inexpensive, bountiful supply of calories in a form that is storable and easily transported. 

The assumption seems to either be that the “diet gap” will be solved by convincing people to eat the calories in corn and soy directly, or that there are other tasty crops that can be widely grown instead of corn and soy which can produce calories as efficiently as corn and soy.  Aside from maybe rice or wheat (which also require some processing to become edible), the second assumption is almost certainly false.  Looking at current consumption patterns, we should also be skeptical that large swaths of people will want to voluntarily consume substantial calories directly from corn or soy.

What we typically do is take our relatively un-tasty corn and soy, and plug them into our machine (the cow or pig or chicken, or in Post’s case the Petri dish) to get a form of food we want to eat.  Yes, it seems inefficient on the surface of it, but the key is to realize that the original calories from corn and soy were not in a form most humans find desirable.  As far as the human pallet is concerned, not all calories are created equal; we care a great deal about the form in which the calories are delivered to us.

The grass-machine analogy also helps make clear that it is probably a mistake to compare the calorie and carbon footprint of corn directly with the cow.  Only a small fraction of the world’s caloric consumption comes from directly consuming the raw corn or soybean seeds.  It takes energy to convert these seeds into an edible form – either through food processing or through animal feeding.  So, what we want to compare is beef with other processed foods.  Otherwise we’re comparing apples and oranges (or in this case, corn and beef).

 The more relevant question in this case is whether lab grown meat uses more or less corn, and creates more or less environmental problems, than does animal grown meat.  

Wheat breeding

One of my favorite interviews in Unnaturally Delicious was with Brett Carver, who is a fellow professor at Oklahoma State.  Carver is a wheat breeder.  He took me out to some fields I drive past every day.

“Carver took me out to the middle of an unusual-looking wheat field. The feeling of awe and beauty that comes when you look out at amber waves of grain arises, in part, from the many acting as one: each stalk and head of grain is about the same height and size, and the group moves in unison with the wind. But this wasn’t that type of field. Carver’s field looked a bit like
a bad hair day. It was chaotic. Some stalks of wheat were almost up to my waist, others were only a bit taller than ankle height. Some stalks were golden yellow, others were darker brown. Some spikes scrawny, others fat. Long bristles protruded from most of the plants’ heads, but some had no bristles. Carver’s goal is to create a new wheat variety.”

and

“Standing in the middle of the proverbial haystack he planted, Carver said, “There are sixty-six thousand different strains out here. I’ll pick one of them, and it will ultimately be grown on millions of acres. It’s a big responsibility.” Carver developed all the top four varieties of wheat planted in the state of Oklahoma——Duster, Endurance, Gallagher, and Ruby Lee— where farmers planted more than five million acres of wheat in 2015.”

One of the most fascinating lessons I learned was about the history of wheat.

“Even though wheat has been around since the dawn of civilization, it is actually a product of biotechnology. But, as Carver said, “Man didn’t do it. . . . God did it or nature did it, but it wasn’t man.” He added, “If I tried to do this today, I’d be labeled a mad scientist who’s creating some sort of evil genetically modified food.”

The history of wheat can be found in its DNA. Unlike humans, wheat does not have one father and mother but three fathers and three mothers. Rather than a single pairing of genes, which is what occurs in humans (a diploid), wheat has three sets of chromosomes, and each set exists as a pair—something called a hexaploid. This somewhat strange state of affairs came about when one species mated with another, and then it happened yet again. Carver explained that about 300,000 years ago one grassy weed species crossed with another—a spiky, unruly-looking plant that eventually led to the plant we call emmer. Then, about ten thousand years ago, this crossbreed mated yet again, with another grassy species, one of the many goatgrasses. The result is our modern wheat used for making bread . . . All this makes Carver’s job more complex. Whereas humans have an estimated twenty-to twenty-five thousand genes, wheat has 164,000 to 334,000 genes.”

Kitchen of the Future

Yesterday I recorded an interview with New Hampshire public radio about my new book, and at the beginning of our segment, the host played the following clip from the Jetsons.  I told the host I don't think we're quite there yet.  By the way, I love the mom's reaction to all the "work" involved in making breakfast (the kitchen segment starts at the 1:17 mark).