Category: Featured Entry

Does Timpsila ring a bell? No? Yet, it once was a staple across the Great Plains. NATIFS – North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems – is reviving the consumption of this and many other ingredients through its training center and kitchen called Indigenous Food Lab. That’s great news for Native communities, not least for biodiversity in food.

The average eater gets the bulk of their calories from just six sources. But this homogeneity is relatively recent. In the Americas, it dates back to the 1800s, when European colonization accelerated. Land grabs then went hand in hand with destroying local crop varieties and establishing monocultures. Which has dire consequences on biodiversity and people still today.

Reliance on few species indeed hangs food security on a thread, as the crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminds us. Indigenous Food Lab restores precolonial knowledge to increase food sovereignty and diversity among Native communities since 2020. Several COVID waves later, public-facing activities are finally picking up.

Education for enhanced Indigenous food literacy

If uncovering forgotten Indigenous flavors underpins the center’s work, enhancing its literacy is its raison d’être. After all, realizing their absence from the US culinary landscape is what led the Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman and partner Dana Thompson to embark on this journey. First with a precolonial foods cookbook featuring 200 recipes, then with lectures, keynotes, and even a TedTalk. The Sioux Chef, as he is known, and his newly hired team now share educational resources online and are creating curricula for more training sessions in and out of the Lab around three axes:

Forage sustainably

As effective stewards of our environment – 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is under their custody – Indigenous Peoples know nature is a pantry. The Lab organizes foraging excursions to teach participants how to harvest their rich terroir without emptying it. One of their goals is to strengthen communities’ capacity to protect the areas that gift them with delicacies such as wild mustard, wild rice, camas, and many more.

Practice Native farming systems

Indigenous Food Lab is reclaiming the Three Sisters Mound. A method where corn, bean, and squash are co-planted to improve soil quality and productivity. The waffle system where clay “walls” help retain moisture is also making a comeback as a clever way to adapt to drought. Other practices include Indigenous permaculture, raised beds, and seed saving. All are practiced at the Lab-managed Maskiikii community garden, where volunteers grow food and medicinal crops such as comfrey and ground cherries.

Cooking to decolonize tastebuds

Those who are into authentic Mexican cuisine have probably heard of metate, a ground stone used to make smooth masas for tortillas. But the nixtamalization – soaking corn in limewater – itself is ingenious as it improves the nutritional and gastronomic quality of the grain. Cooking techniques and tools like these are essential in the Lab’s kitchen/classroom.

Here, forget wheat, dairy, cane sugar, pork, or chicken. Instead, say hello to cedar leaves, wojabi sauce, balsam fir tea, maple syrup, bison, etc. Indigenous Food Lab’s culinary program breaks with centuries of processed food from US government food distribution programs. The same programs known to cause high obesity and diabetes rates due to their hyperglycemic content.

In addition, the non-profit has been helping Indigenous guest chefs decolonize their menus.

Economic empowerment for thriving Indigenous communities

Believe it or not, there are zero Native restaurants in US’ biggest cities. Not in New York. Not in LA. Not in Chicago. The Lab empowers trainees to start successful culinary businesses. Enterprises that lift Indigenous food traditions and improve access to rich diets that support a diverse biosphere. To that end, it’s opening an Indigenous market that’ll feature food and beverages, of course, but clothes, and art too.

Currently, Indigenous Food Lab organizes most of its activities in Minneapolis, where it’s based. But that’s just a start. It’s determined to spark the renaissance of Indigenous foods across North America and beyond. A North American network representing the over 1000 communities that call the US, Canada, and Mexico home is part of their mid-term plan.

Category: Featured Entry

Swedish farms should store more carbon! That’s the premise on which Svensk Kolinlagring (or Swedish Carbon Storage) built its three-way platform among researchers, farmers, and companies.

Researchers make recommendations based on the specificities of each field, farmers implement the sustainable practices, and companies finance both operations as part of their carbon compensation programs – a win-win for all parties AND the planet.

Agriculturalists and siblings Lova, Vidar, and Gusten Brodin got the idea while cruising through the Swedish countryside. Strong winds were stirring up so many soil particles that visibility was impaired. Somebody should do something to bind that soil, they thought. The trio went on to establish Svensk Kolinlagring in 2020.

Keeping soil grounded

So, what does a dust storm have to do with carbon storage? Well, monoculture leaves soil bare a good chunk of the year. When it’s finally time to sow seeds, tractors till it to remove weeds and apply fertilizers. The practice reduces the earth’s ability to retain moisture. Dried out and loose, it becomes prone to blowing away and hostile to (micro-) organisms that make it fertile. And a depleted soil is terrible news for the climate too, as it loses its ability to store carbon.

Let’s throwback to biology classes. Plants take in carbon dioxide, which consists of carbon and oxygen. They then release the oxygen but keep the carbon for growth. Two-thirds of that carbon is stored in the soil, placing the black gold on the top step of the podium when it comes to carbon sinks on land. Since one hectare of healthy arable land can sequester about one ton of carbon dioxide or 300 kg of carbon every year, keeping agricultural soil grounded is a two-in-one solution. It helps limit global warming while boosting yields without resorting to harmful pesticides.

Investing in farms as carbon sinks

Farmers often have very tight margins. A change of practice can entail short-time financial risks. Risks very few can afford. That’s why Svensk Kolinlagring takes potential losses out of the equation. The platform offers financial incentives to facilitate the large-scale adoption of climate-smart and regenerative farming methods among growers sooner rather than later.

Its main task is to evaluate different approaches and guide each farmer effectively. Minimizing tillage, growing deep-rooted perennials, incorporating trees, planting cover crops to keep fields green year-round, and more than 40 other combinations aim to reduce both carbon losses and soil erosion.

The platform is currently running the second round of its pilot project, which counts eight academic partners, 12 businesses, and 41 farms spread over some 900+ hectares. A two-year contract binds farms to companies that commit to offset their CO2 emissions and buy carbon credits at 1 300 SEK (around 150 USD) per hectare. Most of the money (1 000 SEK) goes directly to the farmer. The rest finances soil samplings and analyses.

Lova, Vidar, Gusten, and their team have already developed a Monitoring, Reporting and Verification framework. Next on the agenda is to design a framework that addresses potential carbon leaks. Who will pay for them? How will they be priced? These questions answered, Svensk Kolinlagring hopes to be fully operational on the Swedish market by 2023. A global expansion is to follow, given the substantial international interest it has garnered so far.

Category: Featured Entry

If you are anything like us, you put great effort into searching for alternatives to your favorite soya sauce or chocolate spread. And when you do find one to your liking, it’s only normal to ensure it is, in fact, greener. With the Open Food Facts app, you can find out whether or not the product is good for the planet by simply scanning its bar code.

The app, available on Android and iOS, gives a single environmental score to each scanned product. It couples ratings spanning from A to E with a green-to-red color gradient for quick and easy recognition. But details on each of the 15 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) indicators it’s based on are just one click away. Impact on climate, waterways, and land is measured at all stages, from production to consumption. To compensate for criteria missing from the LCA framework, Eco-Score also :

adds a bonus for official certifications (organic, fairtrade, MSC, etc.), local raw produce, and strict national environmental policies.
subtracts a penalty for ingredients threatening biodiversity and ecosystems, non-recycled or non-recyclable packaging, and overpacked products.

Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing

The end product is freely accessible to all. Not only that, but consumers can also take the helm and enter data directly into the app or the website, where it’s possible to search, filter, and compare products by category. The crowdsourcing even goes a step further. Producers are encouraged to submit information too. This time via a dedicated platform. All entries are then manually verified by tens of thousands of volunteers.

Eco-score was launched by Open Food Facts in January 2021, with the support of ten partners, including recipe app Yuka and e-shop la Fourche. A little over a year later, it already features 750 000 products. Co-founders Stéphane Gigandet and Pierre Slamich and their team of four are adding more indicators to the score and finetuning the algorithm for a re-launch in 2023.

Hacking the food systems, one scan at a time

The non-profit organization founded in 2012 aims to unleash consumers’ power to shape market offerings. The ambition is to prompt a healthy sustainability competition among manufacturers, spurring them to reduce the environmental footprint of their products. And this isn’t their first rodeo.

In 2014, the team already launched Nutri-score on their website. The move kicked off the spread of the rating system invented by Prof. Hercberg and encouraged many producers to improve the nutritional value of their products for a better score. France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland went on to adopt it as their official but voluntary front-of-package label. As the European Commission is to decide on a mandatory food label system by 2023, nearly 300 scientists and associations support the Nutri-score. One can only hope that transparency on the environmental impact of food gains similar traction.

But there is one major difference between the two scores. All information needed to boil down data into an overall Nutri-Score was already buried in the fine print of packages. It’s an entirely different ball game for Eco-Score. Although Open Food Facts can retrieve part of it from Agribalyse – the French national database for food products, it still needs to source the missing information from other stakeholders, producers included.

But the Wikipedia of food can leverage the 100+ applications currently using their API, the nearly 2 300 000 indexed products worldwide, and the 15 million unique users as springboards for the deployment of Eco-Score. It’s the world’s biggest food database. And scale is crucial for consumer adoption, according to Founder Stéphane. Reputation may help too. Belgian supermarket Colruyt, French Carrefour, and others in 6 more European countries have already added the guide to their e-shops.

Category: Featured Entry

You may have heard of soy yogurt, coconut ice cream, or cashew cheese. You can now add the humble potato to the list of ingredients used to imitate dairy products. Sweden-based Veg of Lund chose it for its gentler environmental footprint to develop DUG, its vegan milk assortment.

More and more people are ditching milk. Lactose intolerance, animal welfare, dairy farmers’ unfair wages: there is no shortage of reasons to make the switch to alternative products. What’s more, ruminants like sheep and cows emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for 30% of global warming.

While plant-based dairy analogs are generally around three times more climate efficient than cow milk, DUG’s climate impact is even lower. It emits four times less carbon, according to the impact assessment platform Carbon Cloud.

Potato’s multi-faceted competitive edge

DUG’s environmental benefits do not stop there. Potato yields twice as much as the popular oat, for example, making it more land efficient. Compared to almonds, a best-selling substitute linked to California’s wildfires, potatoes are 56 times more water efficient.

On a social level, potatoes are also superior to say cashews, which come with a human cost. Forced and child labor is common in exporting countries like India and Vietnam. Furthermore, getting the nut out of its shell damages workers’ hands, eyes, and lungs, while potatoes can be cultivated and harvested easily almost anywhere, even under worsening climate conditions.

DUG has a nutritional edge too. First, potatoes contain most of the nutrients needed by humans, including proteins, vitamins, minerals, fibers, and carbohydrates. Second, like most alt-milks, it contains added vegetable oil. R&D Manager and Professor emerita at Lund University, Eva Tornberg, whose research is the bedrock of Veg of Lund’s patented emulsion, chose Canola – or rapeseed – oil for its high omega-3 content. Rapeseed can also grow in a variety of climates.

The end product is free from lactose, soy, gluten, and nuts, perfect for allergies. Three drinks – Original, Barista, and Unsweetened – hit the shelves in Sweden and the UK early last year. And Veg of Lund intends to enter the US market soon.

Would you pour potatoes onto your bowl of cereal?

Category: Featured Entry

Halfway between first responder and systemic change agent, World Central Kitchen mobilizes local chefs to serve meals to victims of natural and humanitarian disasters and build resilient food systems.

With global warming accelerating, droughts, floods, and other natural hazards multiply. Madagascar is experiencing it firsthand. Four devastating storms have hit the African island this year alone. World Central Kitchen arrived onsite right after cyclone Batsirai to support thousands left homeless, hungry, and thirsty. It set up a field kitchen and hired 50+ locals to prepare thousands of fresh meals every day. It also partnered with other NGOs to help build a clean water system,

The organization remains in the country to help families prepare for the next landfall, as more storms may hit southern Africa in the coming months.

Providing emergency food relief

World Central Kitchen was founded by renowned Spanish-American chef José Andrés in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. It has since served more than 60 million meals to victims of wildfires in California, tsunamis in Indonesia, cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala, the Beirut explosion, and many more places across the globe.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization started serving a new population segment: healthcare professionals. In India, it partnered with celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor to provide breakfast to hospital staff working around the clock. In the US, Founder José Andrés turned eight of his own restaurants into soup kitchens to feed people affected by the pandemic – from frontliners to isolated elderlies. World Central Kitchen has so far served more than 40 million meals worldwide as part of its COVID-19 pandemic response.

Each time, its teams activate restaurants and connect with local community groups. These connections grow into ongoing collaborations aiming to address chronic food system challenges.

Building resilience after a disaster

World Central Kitchen is a first responder. Not only that, its Resilience Programs also prepare victims for potential new crises. The non-profit created a culinary school in Haiti that proved instrumental in feeding survivors after the 2021 earthquake. Students – 60% of which will enter the job market following their training – delivered meals within 24 hours.

Beyond the culinary school, it has awarded thousands of dollars to small farmers, fishers, and food businesses in the Caribbean and Central America to improve long-term food security in these disaster-prone regions.

Accelerating the adoption of clean cooking practices is another pillar of the organization’s resilience-building work. It renovates school and community kitchens and installs LPG cookstoves in replacement of open-fire stoves, which pollute indoor air and cause 2 million premature deaths every year.

All these initiatives are led by locals, helping rebuild a sense of community. And in light of conflicts sprouting in all corners of the world and natural disasters intensifying, World Central Kitchen continuously welcomes volunteers. Check out how you can get involved near you.

Category: Featured Entry

A holistic food concept has revolutionized school meals in southern Stockholm, where thousands of students now enjoy locally produced and seasonal food.

In a public procurement-driven system, authorities tend to favor low-cost products. In the case of school meals, it means that the pea soup served to Swedish pupils on Thursday afternoons is often sourced and prepared thousands of kilometers away from their canteens. But the municipality of Södertälje has chosen an alternative path. Through its Diet for a Green Planet project, it mobilizes local food producers to supply fresh produce to nearby establishments.

Diet for a Green Planet offers healthy and environmentally friendly lunches to students. In doing so, it uses nutrition as a powerful tool to combat climate change. By limiting imported produce and their transport-related carbon footprint, the project enables schools to contribute to sustainable food production and consumption. It even expands its impact to other sectors and countries via various networks and services.

Schools as testbeds for institutional kitchens

School kitchens in Södertälje, a town in the southern part of Metropolitan Stockholm, are an epicenter of sustainable cuisine. Not only do they serve wholesome, locally-sourced food, they also serve as testbeds for innovative sustainable dishes.

When Michelin-starred chef Mathias Dahlgren participated, he added a twist to 2 classics. He cooked a falafel of local, protein-rich, grey pea wrapped in a sourdough pita bread mixing Swedish spelt, rye, and barley. His meat option, a ground chicken souvlaki, was made of organic spent hens that would otherwise be euthanized because they stopped laying eggs. Both got rave reviews from more than 27 000 kids and adults.

Beyond celebrity chefs, municipal employees continuously create and improve the quality of their menus with seasons. Their main goal is to minimize the ecological footprint while maximizing nutritional intake. With strict budget constraints, Södertälje has successfully implemented the concept in its schools, kindergartens, and retirement homes since 2010. The town shared also his learnings with cities Mollet del Vallès in Spain, Molėtai in Lithuania, and Lomza in Poland through URBACT – a European exchange program for sustainable urban development.

What started as a research project by BERAS (Building Ecological and Regenerative Agriculture and Society) now also reaches companies via training sessions organized by MatLust.

From circular farming research to practical guide

The original research project explored Ecological Regenerative Agriculture (ERA). This agricultural method reduces negative impacts on water sources and increases organic matter levels in soils, creating carbon sinks.

Diet for a Green Planet emerged as a spin-off project when the researchers wanted to create a model for environmentally friendly eating habits based on ERA protocols. They then broadened the initial scope from the Baltic area to the entire planet, since the concept can be adapted to different geographical conditions. Together with Novia University, BERAS now offers online course Managing Transformations in the Food System to producers and restaurants alike.

Diet for a Green Planet follows and teaches five essential guidelines for sustainable eating habits. All are in line with EAT-Lancet healthy diet:

Tasty and healthy food
Organic (preferably ERA) food
Fewer animal products; more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains
Locally-produced, seasonal food
Reduced production, processing, distribution, cooking, and overall food waste

For more information, visit www.dietforagreenplanet.se

Category: Featured Entry

It sounds like science fiction; it’s just science. Turning CO₂ into edible fat using electricity is already feasible on a laboratory scale. The concept called Power to Food combines several existing chemical processes to make food for humans and feed for animals on a grander scale.

How does it work? First, electrical energy splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then, reacting to the hydrogen, CO₂ is converted into chemical intermediates, which commercially available technologies can turn into substances similar or identical to the plant-based butters and oils we eat. The only difference is that the energy content comes from electricity instead of traditional plant photosynthesis. Therefore, an alternative description of the Power to Food process could be electrical photosynthesis.

Laboratory tests conducted by researchers at RISE – Research Institutes of Sweden demonstrated the feasibility of the concept for common fat types called triglycerides and free fatty acids such as palmitic acid and caprylic acid. Sweden´s Innovation Agency Vinnova funded the research project, and company Green-On is now commercializing the concept. The company aims to create a test cooking oil and a butter-like fat within 1-2 years, have a pilot plant up and running in 3-4 years, and go to market in 5-8 years.

The environmental advantage of electrical photosynthesis

Production of foodstuffs using this process can replace part of today’s primary food production with a lower environmental footprint. Oils and fats produced through electrical photosynthesis would indeed use a fraction of land compared to traditional agriculture – minimizing biodiversity loss and deforestation – and require zero nitrogen and phosphorus. They would also be more water-efficient and resilient to changes in weather and climate. Powered by solar or other renewable energy sources, their environmental impact would be minimal.

Power to Food can, for example, capture and transform the 560,000 tons of CO₂ emitted annually by a typical Swedish paper mill into the equivalent of 110,000 tons of rapeseed oil: entire harvest in Sweden. The edible fats can be eaten as is, blended into conventional foods, or used to produce animal feed.

As long as CO₂ is available, the Power to Food process can help produce food, particularly where water is scarce and sunlight abundant. With desertification accelerating worldwide, this process may be one of the few options to produce fat locally in many regions.

Category: Featured Entry

The researchers at Undeland Lab are developing a circular system that salvages refuse from the fishing industry and recovers nutrients typically lost in process waters.

As the global population continues to grow and the need for arable land is driving deforestation, our sustenance increasingly depends on the sea. And we are capturing fish at unsustainable levels. Despite this, on average, we squander 30-70% of any given caught fish due to inefficient processing methods which result in a massive waste of perfectly edible food.

In Sweden, the situation is even worse: a mere 17% of all fish brought ashore makes its way onto people’s plates. Swedish Undeland Lab has developed several technologies that reclaim byproducts which they rebranded “co-products”. These are residual raw materials that are nutritionally as valuable as the main products, i.e., fish fillets and other cuts we usually consume. Upcycling them into food could generate additional revenue for the fishing industry while reducing the catch-to-trash-can waste.

Separating fish meat from bones mechanically

Co-products such as backbone, tail, or head meat can be separated from bones manually and ground into mince. But removing these bits by hand is labor-intensive and expensive. The Chalmers University of Technology’s Lab is therefore investigating less pricey mechanical separation methods.

Fish mince, obtained from co-products, can be made into burgers, sausages, and more. Their market potential is enormous, notably in institutional kitchens where the demand for inexpensive, nutritious food is substantial. The Lab has already partnered with Sweden Pelagic AB and Pelagic Seafood Sweden AB to develop fish mince products from herring backbones.

Reinjecting nutrients into the food system and beyond

Undeland also addresses the loss of nutrients. Take herring, for example. Often consumed pickled, this cornerstone of the Swedish cuisine matures in brine for up to two years before commercialization. During this time, the fish fillets shed significant amounts of lipids, including long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, and proteins into the marinades. Similarly, the nutritional value of other seafood products such as peeled shrimps decreases as beneficial nutrients leach into process waters during manufacturing. These liquids are suitable for food- and biomedical use.

At Klädesholmen Seafood AB, Sweden’s most prominent herring producer, Undeland’s team is developing methods of extracting high-grade protein from these waters. One involves lowering the liquid’s pH and adding food-grade flocculants – carbohydrates from algae such as carrageenan and alginate – to attract dissolved nutrients. They then introduce microscopic air bubbles introduce, pushing the protein and lipid clusters to the surface where they gather in a frothy mass – a suitable ingredient for food and feed production.

The remaining process water holds further promises. Once proteins and lipids have been removed, the liquid still contains nitrogen and phosphorus. The nutritious “soup” is ideal for growing microalgae and edible filamentous fungi – yet more contributors to the impending protein shift, spawned quasi-free.

The Lab Founder Dr. Ingrid Undeland and colleague Dr. Mehdi Abdollahi patented a method that utilizes the pH shift method – commonly used to extract protein from soybeans – to produce cold-pressed fish oil and protein ingredients from filleting co-products. They are also researching how to cull collagen from fish cartilage and skins during the same process.

Undeland’s value chain is relatively easy to replicate on a global scale.

Category: Featured Entry

Every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the oceans, of which the majority spills out from rivers. A portion of this plastic travels to ocean garbage patches, getting caught in a vortex of circulating currents. Marine plastics are unintentionally ingested by marine species such as fish. Floating plastics also contribute to the spread of invasive marine organisms and bacteria, which disrupt ecosystems. According to a study conducted by Deloitte and the Ocean Cleanup, yearly economic costs due to marine plastic pollution are estimated to be between $6-19 billion USD. The costs stem in part from the plastic’s impact on fisheries and aquaculture. To address this challenge, The Ocean Cleanup is developing a passive cleanup method, which uses the natural oceanic forces to rapidly and cost-effectively clean up the plastic already in the oceans. With a full fleet of cleanup systems in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, the organization aims to clean up 50% of its plastic every five years. The Ocean Cleanup has also developed the first scalable solution to efficiently intercept plastic in rivers before it reaches the oceans. By placing Interceptors in 1000 strategic locations in rivers around the world, the organization expects to halt 80% of plastic from entering the oceans in five years from rollout.

www.theoceancleanup.com

Category: Featured Entry

The adage ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’ no longer rings true in many parts of the world. Destructive fishing techniques, rising ocean temperatures and other human influences have devastating effects on the distribution, productivity, and species composition of global fisheries. Taking only as much fish as we need is a key sustainability challenge. But this is not as simple as it sounds. Even when we try to be selective, not all fish that end up in nets are intended to be there. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, between 8 and 25% of the total global fisheries catch is discarded each year due to a technical inability to accurately target and catch the right fish, at a cost of €1.59bn per annum. In the fishing industry, by-catch refers to the fish or other marine species that are caught unintentionally while fishing for a certain target species. Bycatch can be a problem especially when endangered, threatened and protected species are accidentally caught, injured or killed. Catching the wrong species can also disrupt the food chain by inadvertently catching fish species that other fish rely on as food.

Guided by science and the knowledge that fish species are attracted or deterred by certain colors of light, SafetyNet Technologies has developed a series of light emitting products to keep non-target species at bay. One of SafetyNet Technologies’ products is Pisces, a kit of lights that can be attached to fishing gear to repel unwanted bycatch. The fisherman can select specific light colors before dropping their nets. This allows for greater control over the composition of the catch. Studies have shown that lights can reduce by-catch by 90% in some instances. Pisces provides light for more than 270 hours of use and can help fishermen comply with fishing regulations that require the use of sustainable fish gear, says SafetyNet Technologies.

https://sntech.co.uk/