Issue #6 2021-09-20
NASA invents photosynthesis?
Space-age protein production
A very nasty food harvest technique
The banned athlete and her burrito; getting to the bottom of drugs in food
Palm oil, the bad guy of sustainable food production
Food fraud incidents and horizon scanning updates from the past week
Hi,
Welcome to Issue 6 of The Rotten Apple, a weekly newsletter for professionals, policy-makers and purveyors.
This week I’m reading a marvellous piece by Samanth Subramanian of The Guardian. It’s a (very) deep dive into food authenticity, highly recommended. Warning, make yourself a cuppa first, it’s a long read:
I’ve also been excited by - and disappointed by - new protein production technology and thrilled about developments in shark fin trade rules and palm oil production.
As always, this issue ends with a list of food fraud incidents from the past week.
Thanks for reading!
Karen
Food Integrity
The problem with space-age proteins
This week, a headline about a company that is ‘Making Protein from Air’ caught my eye.
This was new! My immediate thought was nitrogen. Proteins contain nitrogen. The air we breathe is mostly nitrogen. So it seemed like this technology could have been extracting nitrogen from air to create protein. I was interested to find out more about the technology, which was - according to the press release - pioneered by NASA.
I’m generally sceptical about high-tech methods of protein production because it’s difficult to replicate the efficiencies of nature in man-made processes. Put simply, turning energy from the sun or electricity into food takes a lot of work. Plants do it better than we can.
But I was interested to hear about anything that could extract nitrogen gas from the air and turn it into protein.
The article was a disappointment. It wasn’t about nitrogen after all. The ‘ground-breaking’ new tech uses carbon dioxide, not nitrogen. It combines the carbon dioxide with solar energy to produce food. Carbon dioxide plus solar power? Sounds a lot like photosynthesis to me. In this new tech, they also use bacteria known as hydrogenotrophs. Such bacteria ‘feed’ on hydrogen gas, not carbon dioxide but the marketing spin didn’t explain their role in the process:
“Air Protein uses the carbon dioxide that is abundant in the atmosphere, mixes it with organisms called hydrogentrophs [sic] and water, and then using solar power, ferments the mixture in tanks until the final product is ready.
“It’s fermentation re-imagined,” said Air Protein CEO Lisa Dyson. “It’s re-imagined in a way that makes it carbon negative. When you undertake fermentation today, it actually produces CO2. By contrast, our cultures consume elements of the air and are able to make a nutritious flour that is carbon negative.”
Hmmm, after reading this, my understanding is that the radical new technology uses living organisms to convert the CO2 in air to nutrients that we can eat. Like algae and higher plants do in photosynthesis.
These days there is so much excitement about new technologies for high-tech food production (I’m looking at you, lab-grown meat and vertical farming), but they are largely unproven in terms of efficiencies of scale. I am hoping to also see more discussions around the energy efficiencies of such tech.
I believe it’s going to be extremely difficult to justify the energy requirements for man-made protein as the technology matures. Watch this space.
In short: 🍏 A company is using fermentation technology to ‘make protein from air’ 🍏 The implied benefits are low/no carbon emmissions and efficiencies 🍏 Energy use in man-made protein production is an area that needs more investigation 🍏
Read more: https://www.newfoodmagazine.com/article/156528/making-protein-out-of-thin-air/
An introduction to hydrogenotrophs: https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Gut_hydrogenotrophs
Sustainable Supply Chains
The UK gets heavy on a very nasty food harvest
If food integrity encompasses safety, authenticity and sustainable/ethical supply chains then shark fins have got to be right up there with the least ‘integrity’-ish foods. Shark fins are a luxury food in many Asian countries, but the way they are sometimes harvested ticks all the wrong boxes.
Harvesting ‘detached’ shark fins involves cutting the fins off the living shark at sea and throwing the animal back into the water. The shark dies.
Sustainable? Nope. According to the United Kingdom government, the species that are harvested for their fins include endangered species and overfished species including the short fin mako shark and blue shark.
Authenticity? Problematic. Because the practice of shark-finning is banned in some jurisdictions and because some of the targeted species are protected, it’s thought that a significant proportion of fins have illegal sources and these sources are deliberately obscured from customers and consumers.
Ethical? The UK’s Animal Welfare minister describes shark finning as “indescribably cruel” and “unforgivably wasteful.” It’s hard to disagree.
The UK has included a ban on the import and export of detached shark fins and shark fin products, including tinned soup, in its Action Plan for Animal Welfare, which it released last month. Good for you, United Kingdom!
In short: 🍏 Shark fins have authenticity issues as well as sustainability and ethical issues 🍏 The UK government has banned the import and export of detached shark fins and shark fin products 🍏 This is part of its wider Action Plan for Animal Welfare 🍏
Read more: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-introduce-world-leading-ban-on-shark-fin-trade
Action Plan for Animal Welfare: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/985332/Action_Plan_for_Animal_Welfare.pdf (this is a direct download pdf link)
Food Authenticity
Burrito adulteration (is this a case of wild boar in a sandwich?)
Food fraud can have far-reaching consequences.
Last December a woman called Shelby Houlihan ate a pork burrito. Ms Houlihan is a runner. A very good runner. She holds the American records for 1,500 and 5,000 meters. But she has been banned for competing until 2025 by World Athletics.
She blames her ban on a pork burrito, eaten 10 hours before a drug test.
World Athletics refutes the athlete’s claim that her positive test for the drug nandrolone, was caused by her eating pork meat. Nandrolone is a banned steroid that is used by body builders to increase muscle mass.
Nandrolone produces 19-norandrosterone when metabolised in the body. Presumably, this metabolic marker is what the drug testers look for in athletes’ urine samples. Researchers have found that people who eat certain pork products can excrete 19-norandrosterone at significant levels, for up to 9 hours after the meal.
Shelby Houlihan strenuously asserts her innocence and her lawyer complained that the Athletics Integrity Unit of World Athletics did not seek a second opinion.
I picked up this story because I thought that the steroid in the pork meat might have been there due to nefarious activities. In some countries, steroid hormones have been used to illegally increase yields in meat production. Such use of banned hormones is deliberately deceptive and is done for economic gain, making it food fraud.
But here’s the thing. In other jurisdictions, it is legal to administer steroids to livestock to increase yields. On top of that, meat can naturally contain hormones in levels that are detectable in the urine of humans who eat the meat. In fact, the meat from non-castrated boars naturally contains the precursor(s) of 19-norandrosterone.
According to The Washington Post, the US Anti-Doping Agency has had 30 cases of positive drug tests that resulted from innocent or accidental sources since 2016.
Is it possible that Houlihan consumed meat from an uncastrated boar that naturally contained hormones that could lead to a positive drug test? Yes. Is it probable? Perhaps. Are hormones present in meat due to fraudulent, illegal, or deceptive practices? Sometimes. Other times, the hormones are approved for use in the food chain or naturally present in the food.
The US Court of Arbitration for Sport found Houlihan’s explanation “possible but improbable” and we may never know what really happened.
The lesson? Food contains thousands of chemicals, both good and bad. When we start testing for chemicals, we sometimes get unexpected, or unexplainable results. It’s complicated. And it can have far-reaching consequences for people like Shelby Houlihan, who may never compete again.
In short: 🍏 Researchers have found the metabolites of a banned substance in the urine of people who consumed certain types of pork meat 🍏 Athlete’s diets can result in false positive drug test results 🍏 An American track star claims that hormones in a pork burrito resulted in her failing a drug test 🍏A court of arbitration found the athlete’s claims of innocence to be “possible but improbable” 🍏 Hormones can be present in meat due to food fraud and for legitimate reasons 🍏
Sources and more reading:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2021/06/14/shelby-houlihan-failed-drug-test/
https://www.doping.nl/media/kb/7048/H%C3%BClsemann%20et%20al%202020.pdf (this is a direct download of a pdf of the research paper)
https://extension.umn.edu/beef-news/growth-promoting-hormones-beef-production-and-marketing
Sustainable Supply Chains
Let’s talk about palm oil
I used to work in the R&D department of a large food manufacturer. My role was to develop and optimise fried savoury snacks. Yum, fried snacks….
The company’s production and manufacturing teams loved palm oil. Loved it! Why? Because it is incredibly stable. Compared to other vegetable oils, palm oil is much slower to lose quality when you use it to fry moist foods.
The company I worked for was all about quality. Substandard oil results in snacks with worse flavour profiles and shorter shelf lifes (lives?). Poor quality oil also increases the fat content of the final product. Making good quality fried food is all about managing oil turnover so that the frying oil is always at its peak. With palm oil, that was easy to do. It was also cheaper than other oils. For the production and manufacturing teams, palm oil was unquestionably the best.
The marketing team did not love palm oil. Palm oil has a nutrition profile that is ‘worse’ than other vegetable oils. The marketing team were worried that consumers preferred ‘better’ oils and were desperate for us to switch to sunflower oil. Being in the R&D department was like being the meat in the sandwich.
Decades later and I’m sure marketing departments everywhere still hate palm oil. These days, however, sustainability is more likely to be the focus. Because palm oil has become the bad guy of (un)sustainable oil crops.
The accusations levelled (rightly) at palm oil revolve around the growing areas and practices. It is grown in areas that have been cleared of tropical rainforest, forests that were once the habitats of endangered animals including orangutans, tigers and pygmy elephants. The industry also engages in wasteful farming practices, exploitative labour practices and is responsbile for preventable greenhouse gas emissions.
It would be simple-minded to imagine that switching to alternative oils would solve these problems. If we stop clearing Asian rainforest to grow palm oil, we would need to clear other land to grow other vegetable oil crops. According to one source, palm oil takes just 10 percent of the land used to grow oil seeds but accounts for 35 percent of the world’s oil. Using these numbers, palm oil production is incredibly efficient in terms of calories per hectare.
What is the food industry doing about palm oil?
The palm oil industry has created standards for sustainable palm oil production. They address deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, human rights, weed management strategies and fire management. Oils that are certified to the standard(s) can be considered to be responsibly sourced and sustainable.
The availability of certified-sustainable palm oil has increased dramatically in the past decade and I expect that to continue, as responsible food companies re-think their sourcing of palm oil. Finally, the future is looking better.
In short: 🍏 Palm oil is prized for its cooking properties 🍏 It accounts for 35 percent of the world’s edible oil 🍏 Environmental concerns, ethical labour issues mean that palm oil production is considered to be very unsustainable 🍏 Palm oil is an efficient use of land compared to other oil crops 🍏 There are certified sustainable palm oils 🍏 Use of certified oils is increasing
Sources: https://www.newfoodmagazine.com/article/151027/sustainable-palm-oil/
Standards for sustainable palm oil: https://rspo.org/resources/certification/rspo-principles-criteria-certification
Food Fraud Incidents and Horizon Scanning
Food fraud incidents added to Food Fraud Risk Information Database in the past week
None this week.
Other updates to the Food Fraud Risk Information Database in the past week
Wine
French wine production will be down 29 percent this year, compared to last year. France’s winegrowing regions were affected badly by frosts during spring. The frosts followed warm weather which had caused early budding, making the growth susceptible to the frosts. The Burgundy-Beaujolais region is one of the worst hit. As well as the frosts, its vines experienced hail damage. The Champagne region had heavy summer rains which caused fungal diseases. France is the world’s second largest wine producer, after Italy. 07/09/2021