News Brief: artificial meat (from last month!)

oops, missed this one ...

Race to serve up artificial chicken for a $1m prize

The Guardian 21 January 2012 (full article here)

A small group of people will meet in Washington later this year for what they hope will be a lunch to change the world. The meal should consist of fried chicken and nothing else, but while it may look like chicken, have the texture of chicken and even taste like chicken, it will never have lived or breathed.

Five years ago Peta, the world's largest animal welfare group, gave scientists until 30 June 2012 to prove they could make "cultured", or laboratory meat, in commercial quantities. The first scientist to show that artificial chicken can be grown in quantity and be indistinguishable from "real" chicken flesh will be awarded $1m.
 

... Leading the race to show that it is possible is Mark Post, head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Post ... has claimed he will produce a synthetic beefburger this year.Post cannot win the Peta prize because he is working with beef, not chicken, but he has successfully grown strips of meat a few centimetres long. But his work is slow and it is proving hard to grow the meat any thicker or in large quantities.

Another group of scientists, at Utrecht university in the Netherlands, is experimenting with stem cells harvested from embryos. ... I think it is a decade away and we need research money," said Bernard Roelen, professor of veterinary science.

Coming from a different direction is US scientist Vladimir Mironov, ... now working with a Brazilian meat company. Mironov works with tissue engineering and has taken embryonic muscle cells from turkeys, bathed them in a bovine serum and successfully grown muscle tissue, but only in very small quantities.

...  the prize of being able to one day grow hundreds of tonnes of meat from stem cells is potentially vast, say animal welfare groups and food manufacturers. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation expects world consumption of meat to double between 2000 and 2050,

... Cultured meat has the added advantage of requiring far less energy and space to grow. Analysis by scientists from Oxford and Amsterdam last year showed the process could be engineered to use only 1% of the land and 4% of the water compared with conventional meat.

... For vegetarians, the prize is less animal suffering. "More than 40bn chickens, fish, pigs and cows are killed every year for food in the US alone, in horrific ways. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering," said Peta.

News Brief: Singapore to lift restrictions on Taiwanese foodstuffs

The Singaporean Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) has decided to lift safety measures on certain Taiwanese products and return to normalized trade, the Taipei Representative Office in Singapore announced yesterday, the Taipei Times reports today (full article here).

After the plasticizer food scare in May last year, Singapore enacted measures compelling five major foodstuff imports from Taiwan (sports drinks, juice products, tea products, jams and syrup products, and foodstuffs in the form of capsules, pills or powders) to be labeled with the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ (MOEA) Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection’s special proof of examination.

The plasticizer scare refers to the use of di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, or DEHP, and other -plasticizers, -chemical substances used to increase pliability in plastic materials and which have been found to be endocrine disruptors, in food additives such as clouding agents.

The office said that after assuring the AVA that the plasticizer issue has been taken care of in Taiwan and urging it to consider lifting the extra safety measures on Taiwanese imports, the authority had agreed to a general lift of the measures starting on March 1.

News Brief: Eating shark fin could cause brain damage

People who like to eat shark fin should be careful, and not just because environmental groups want to stop consumption of this delicacy. Researchers in the United States have discovered the neurotoxin β-N-methylamino-L-alanine (甲氨基-丙氨酸; BMAA) in shark fin, which could cause brain damage or lead to Alzheimer’s disease (阿茲海默症), ETTV (東森新聞) reports today (full Chinese-language article here, and related English-language article here).
 
Concentrations of BMAA  found ranged from 144 to 1,838 nanograms per milligram, which were noted to be similar with the levels found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Translation © Jiyue Publications 2012

News Brief: Pardonez Moi!--Will McDonald’s persuade you with its “McBaguette”?

In order to make headway into lucrative fast-food markets around the world, McDonald’s is happy to incorporate local tastes into its menus. The latest such initiative comes in France, where for six weeks starting April 18, hamburgers made using “French bread” will be offered by the US franchise’s 1,228 outlets to see if they will increase the chain’s customer base, NOWnews reports today (full Chinese-language article here).

These are reported to include the “McBaguette”(4.5 Euros; ca. NT$180), which will also use local Charolais beef in its patty, Emmenthal cheese and French mustard.

According to research by the Bread Observatory, French people consume bread with almost every meal and annually eat an average of 55kg of French bread. French research organization Credoc says that 98 percent of citizens eat bread every day, mostly French bread.

McDonald’s already has locally customized menus in 14 European countries. In Finland, for example, it sells the Rye McFeast, in Spain it makes gazpacho (cold tomato-based raw vegetable soup), and in Italy it has products made in conjunction with a 3-star Michelin restaurant. 

Translation © Jiyue Publications 2012

News Brief: Government clampdown on illegal eateries in Shida neighbourghood continues

The Taipei Times has more on this issue today (here).

Of particular interest to anyone thinking of opening a food outlet, apparently:

"In addition to noise and air pollution, some local vendors have also violated regulations as their locations are classified as a residential zone. According to land-use regulations, roads less than 8m wide in residential zones cannot be used for commercial purposes."

Feature/Debate: Why youngsters are reaching puberty younger and younger

The scientific aspects to the “are lean-meat additives bad for people?” debate about US beef imports to Taiwan are getting politically tainted with so-called blue (KMT) and green (DPP) food science experts getting wheeled out to make their pontifications.

Although not of direct relevance to the issue of ractopamine but of chemicals in food in general, this called to mind reports last year of recent surveys finding a lowering of the age of puberty in girls, with 15 percent starting as young as seven (CBS article here). This represents a doubling of the number found in 1997, which would seem to be a super fast social change.

CBS put the causes down to “obesity” and “environmental exposures, things like BPA (Bisphenol A, a chemical used in plastic water bottles and lining of canned foods and drinks) that are ubiquitous in our environment can have hormone-like activity”.

Some have blamed hormone residues in milk and meat, particularly the artificial bovine growth hormone rBGH. But this is now less blamed, as it should be destroyed in the human digestive process.

Others (e.g. NaturalNews here) point a more direct finger. Quoting a report in “Public Health Nutrition”, it notes that “while only 35 percent of girls who ate meat four times a week or fewer had reached puberty by age 12.5, 49 percent of those who ate meat 12 times a week had done so.”

This, it suggested, was due to the higher levels of persistent organic pollutants found in animal fat, such as meat and dairy.

And this is not just a Western phenomenon. A 2011 survey in New Delhi, India, found puberty occurring in girls as young as 8 (shouldn't we call them “8-year-old women” if they have already reached puberty?) compared with a previous low of 10.

The Indian Express (full article here) did go on to blame a Western junk food diet, however.

Text © Jiyue Publications 2012

News Brief: beware "nutrient-enhanced" milk -- nutritionalist

Consumers of fresh or powdered milk products are urged to pay attention to information on food labels before making a purchase, as many items contain unnecessary and excessive additives, a foundation said yesterday, the Taipei Times reports today (full article here).

Although some milk cartons are emblazoned with words such as “nutrient-enhanced,” the milk itself has a high cream content, which translates into more fat and a less balanced diet, said Hsu Hui-yu (許惠玉), director of the nutritional section of the John Tung Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to public welfare.

A survey conducted by the foundation earlier this year found most milk products contain a wide range of additives such as calcium and sugar substitutes.

“Our bodies do not need these additives,” said Lin Wei (林薇), a professor at Chinese Culture University’s department of food health and nutrition science.