Bill Gates Backs A Company That Doubles the Shelf Life of Vegetables (cnn.com) 108
Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shared this article from CNN Business:
One company is doubling the shelf-life of avocados, citrus and other produce by taking a chemical-free cue from nature.... After researching the issue, Apeel CEO James Rogers realized spoilage was at the root of the problem. In 2012, he founded Apeel Sciences, which aims to extend the shelf-life of food and reduce waste. Rather than relying on chemical agents to preserve fresh produce, it develops a special protective coating to slow down the rotting process. The company is backed by Micorosoft cofounder Bill Gates and venture capitalist Andressen Horowitz, and has raised $110 million dollars in financing to date. Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods, recently joined its board of directors....
Food typically rots when moisture exits, oxygen gets in and mold takes over. To prevent this, Apeel takes the skins, seeds and pulp of homogeneous fruits or veggies -- such as grapes from a winery or tomato skins from a ketchup factor -- and presses out an oil rich in fat lipids. The company turns the oil into a colorless, odorless, tasteless powder that is tailored for each type of produce to which it will be applied. It's then mixed with water by the suppliers before it arrives at the store. The produce is either rinsed in or sprayed with the mixture at packaging facilities, essentially creating a second "peel"...
Apeel says the process is doubling the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and can triple it inside their lab. It aims to extend the life of some produce by four times.
The article points out that nearly a trillion dollars of food still goes to waste each year around the globe -- and at least one store testing Apeel's product has already reported a 50% boost in their profits on avocados thanks to the longer shelf life.
The FDA recognizes Apeel's product as safe, and it's already being used in more than 200 grocery-selling stores in the U.S., including Costco and Kroger.
Food typically rots when moisture exits, oxygen gets in and mold takes over. To prevent this, Apeel takes the skins, seeds and pulp of homogeneous fruits or veggies -- such as grapes from a winery or tomato skins from a ketchup factor -- and presses out an oil rich in fat lipids. The company turns the oil into a colorless, odorless, tasteless powder that is tailored for each type of produce to which it will be applied. It's then mixed with water by the suppliers before it arrives at the store. The produce is either rinsed in or sprayed with the mixture at packaging facilities, essentially creating a second "peel"...
Apeel says the process is doubling the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and can triple it inside their lab. It aims to extend the life of some produce by four times.
The article points out that nearly a trillion dollars of food still goes to waste each year around the globe -- and at least one store testing Apeel's product has already reported a 50% boost in their profits on avocados thanks to the longer shelf life.
The FDA recognizes Apeel's product as safe, and it's already being used in more than 200 grocery-selling stores in the U.S., including Costco and Kroger.
Bananas, yes, but (Score:2)
Altered Carbon has a much more interesting notion of a "sleeve".
Solve for the latter, you solve for the former.
"oil rich in fat lipids" (Score:3)
Isn't that saying the same thing 3 times?
What's done with all the skinny lipids?
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Yes, but by phrasing it this way they have carefully avoided giving away their secret, genius innovation, which is: wax.
Re:"oil rich in fat lipids" (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Basically same thing that makes some fruit like apples have incredible shelf life compared to most of the fresh produce.
Re: "oil rich in fat lipids" (Score:2)
Can't be wax. Wax is made of chemicals, and this article cleary says they're not using chemicals. Clearly they must be using electric fields or some other type of magic.
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When Catholics tell you that they're feeding you flesh of Christ and letting you drink blood of Christ at mass, do you take them literally also?
"Chemicals" in parlance of the religious movement that is modern Green movement means "not ideologically pure". It has as much to do with observable objects we know as chemicals as food given at Catholic mass has to do with physical body of Christ. It's a metaphorical representation.
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When Catholics tell you that they're feeding you flesh of Christ and letting you drink blood of Christ at mass, do you take them literally also?
Catholics really do believe it's literally the flesh and blood of Christ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And religious part of green movement really does believe that "chemicals are bad". Which is why the marketing had picked this up and ran with it.
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This discussion belongs so far in the realm of theology, I don't feel I have sufficient expertise to continue it.
Chemicals (Score:2)
Good thing those are all chemical free. Don't want chemicals in your food do you?
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You would be amazed how much of hong kong is actually non developed land.
it's a political choice problem, which has roots in .. well. you need to still have facilities to handle all the extra population. where the income generators are tends to end up being expensive to live.
like, inexpensive housing is already really really inexpensive. but it's not in the right place. way under 100km from hong kong you can rent a house for the same money that gets you a literal metal fence box in hong kong. like a real ho
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anyhow, that a trillion dollars worth of food just spoils tells that spoiling food is actually really cheap, hence it ending up spoilt and not eaten.
When I'm not working, I live in Thailand.
While it is "not a secret" that in Germany e.g. supermarkets alone throw away 40% of all fresh food (obviously not canned food etc.) similar amounts get thrown away by the population. Thrown away! Not fed to livestock or animals.
Here in Thailand the amount of food thrown away feels to be 90%. Stuff I would eat, my GF th
No Chemicals??? (Score:3, Insightful)
I get what they are tryin gto imply here, but saying it doesn't use chemicals but then say it applies a protective coating. Is the coating not made of chemicals???
Re:No Chemicals??? (Score:4, Informative)
"Chemicals" is code word for "not pure" for modern city folk with religious bent toward green movement. "No chemicals" means "pure", which carries the exact same emotional charge as spiritual purity does for religious people. As such, it has nothing to do with physical reality. It's purely a spiritual construct.
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I doubt if the scientists at Apeel said "no chemicals". They may have said "no artificial chemicals" and the journalist (she has a degree in religious studies [cnn.com]) rephrased it into nonsense.
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That wouldn't fit any better. The wax being generated artificially is still artificial.
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Seriously, did I fuck you and didn't call the next day?
Sounds like I made a correct choice.
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Same reason why only some beverages are used as representation of "blood of Christ" at Catholic mass. Dogma.
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"Chemicals" is code for industrial compounds like benzene that will give you cancer or just poison you quickly.
Only intentionally obtuse sanctimonious gits pretend it's meant to include everything like things like water.
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And then one remembers the multiple dihydrogen monoxide jokes done on people and understands that your argument is a desperate deflection.
Re: No Chemicals??? (Score:2)
More important than the chemicals: what happens to the nutritional makeup of the food when it's stored for longer than normal? It might look fresh, but do vitamin levels fall, for example. Do some of the volatile chemicals that give it an attractive fragrance disappear. Or will the texture degrade over time?
As a consumer, I don't really want food to have a longer shelf life. I want fresh food. Long shelf lives just benefit supermarkets with inefficient supply chains.
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I don't really want food to have a longer shelf life. I want fresh food
Most fruit has a limited harvest season, and plenty of fruit needs to be transported long distances and cannot be picked fresh. If you insist on truly fresh food, your choice will be very limited.
Re: No Chemicals??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fruit can be trucked maybe 1000 miles North or South before it loses its freshness. That extends the growing season of common fruit from weeks to months. After that, I'd prefer eat something else. Out of season fruit taste dreadful. Winter strawberries look great but are a flavour desert, for example.
On of my rules of thumb when assessing a new restaurant is to look at the dessert and vegetable menus. If they're advertising out of season stuff - maybe asparagus in autumn or berry fruit in spring - I go to a different place and the grounds that the chef doesn't understand the importance of high quality ingredients.
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So can or freeze it then. This fetish with "fresh" is primarily a fixation of the rich who feel the need to waste as much money and resources as possible.
This fixation makes a simple thing appear difficult for no good reason.
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So can or freeze it then. This fetish with "fresh" is primarily a fixation of the rich who feel the need to waste as much money and resources as possible.
This fixation makes a simple thing appear difficult for no good reason.
Freezing food is usually pretty good from a nutritional and perspective, but it utterly destroys the texture of many foods. Canning destroys both texture and nutrition. So frozen lamb tastes pretty decent, but frozen salmon is a totally different culinary experience from fresh. Frozen peas aren't too bad, but frozen strawberries are disastrous.
So, no. 'Fresh' is a fixation of those who care what they eat, not the rich. Fresh food can be incredibly cheap - root vegetables, the cabbage family (including kale,
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Interestingly though, Europe doesn't irradiate *enough* foods because they still kill a lot of people from time to time with preventable foodborne illness, but I think that
The Chinese have a solution (Score:2, Interesting)
They make a fridge with a special compartment with a lower percentage of oxygen that extends the shelf life of anything perishable you put in there.
Re:The Chinese have a solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah here's the link
https://www.marketscreener.com... [marketscreener.com]
So I don't know if they "make" it yet, but I heard about this technology and I didn't see a particular model.
Chemical free? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't be the only one wondering about the nature of this miraculous product which uses no chemicals, yet somehow manifests in the material world as a coating.
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*clap* *clap* *clap*
For those keeping score at home (Score:3)
Re: For those keeping score at home (Score:2)
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Stuff like this is entirely irrelevant. Your reaction makes me hate people.
Not that long ago we had to deal with none of the kind of modern technology that you probably need to use as a crutch. We sent people on long voyages comparable to colonizing Mars. We managed very well. You're probably only here because of how well we could manage.
There is nothing stopping us from distributing all of the necessary food while not even employing any modern technology for the preparation of it.
I know people that still e
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What percentage of still-pristine canned goods does your supermarket throw away? Far less than fruit or vegetables I'll wager, and the "keep the shelves stocked" pressure is exactly the same for both - so what's the difference?
Cans will sit on the shelf basically forever, so there's very little pressure to get the old stuff off the shelves faster than it sells. Throwing away product costs you money - you usually only do it if it's no longer saleable. And the longer something can remain saleable while sitt
Is there a potential for grower pushback? (Score:2)
The grocery stores were ordering X amount of product because everyone knew that on average a certain percentage was going to spoil. Now that order is going to be less because of less spoilage, and lower prices.
So how is this different from wax applied to fruit (Score:3)
Does this work better than wax applied to apples and other fruit? There is a paper on wax coating avocado's from 1997
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... [psu.edu]
So I'm not clear what this new company is bringing to the table - does wax (lipids) extracted from peels contain other beneficial compounds.
Chemical Free Coating? (Score:1)
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In marketing-speak, "chemical" means "synthetic chemical" as opposed to a wax extracted from an existing plant using only physical changes [wikipedia.org].
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Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) (Score:2)
I agree that assuming "not synthetic = safer" is a fallacy [rationalwiki.org]. But in this particular case, Apeel's coating is extracted from fruits that are already Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) [fda.gov] by national food regulators.
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Potassium Cyanide can be extracted from Almonds and Apple Seeds using only physical processes. Its completely organic and natural and will kill you on contact with your tongue. Organic is a scam.
Tomatoes? (Score:3)
Does that mean, we get tomatoes back?
Evolutionary, not revolutionary. (Score:2)
The new part is not the idea of coating to delay rot. That has been done for years, usually with waxes [wikipedia.org] or gases [meatinstitute.org].
Apparently, they are simply working out a new coating that like many others before it has its origins in nature, followed by many manipulations that one does not find in nature.
My supermarket already achieves this (Score:1)
in about half the time the wholesale does.
I want sulfite-preserved shredded lettuce (Score:2)
I'd be delighted if I could buy sulfite-preserved shredded lettuce at the grocery store. I don't have sulfite allergies, so they're harmless to me... and I absolutely HATE wasting most of a $2 bag of shredded lettuce because it ends up turning brown before I have enough time to use even half of it.
I feel the same way about cat food. Somewhere along the line, marketing departments got the crazy idea that high-quality cat food has to be "all natural" and free of artificial flavors. The problem is, a cat who's
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Hmmm.. wonder if you can DIY.. buy so2 powder, no?
So, wax? (Score:2)
Wikipedia says this has been done since the 12th or 13th centuries (for fermentation? How does that work? Do you end up with alcoholic apples? Sounds neat!), and since the 1920 commercially for preservation and aesthetic purposes. [wikipedia.org]
Vinegar (Score:2)
They developed Iocaine? (Score:2, Funny)
They should also invest into something that (Score:2)
They should also invest into something that makes the fruit/veggies cheaper to grow. It's ridiculous when good quality apples or salad mix cost the same (or more!) as pork or chicken breast. In the case of apples, I'm sure it's not because they go bad quickly, if the retailer was worried about that they'd reduce the price to move inventory.
lower temperatures and ozone (Score:1)
Re:Overpopulation (Score:4, Funny)
I agree with you whole-heartedly.
Please stop eating. Now.
Re:Overpopulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Is your mind still living in the 1977s?
Population growth is flattening.
The only regions with starvations are war zones and areas where war lords rule instead of a "government".
World wide 40% to 50% of all harvested food is thrown away ... not an issue of shelf life. More an issue of "does not look good enough to be put on the shelf" and oh, it is already close to "best used before" date. Or people buy it and don't eat it.
The planet has no population problem. It has a "robber baron capitalism" problem.
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The planet has no population problem. It has a "robber baron capitalism" problem
Very well said. And being that we are presently in Late Stage Capitalism, the problem will only get worse. Here in the US we've seen mass-fraud become a standard business model on Wall Street, the ever increasing greed in a market where most the money is already in very few hands will all but assuredly reach a point to where the US becomes a starving nation of mass poverty
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Population growth is flattening.
At best, that's only a temporary phenomenon. You cannot stop evolution.
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So what? Evolution doens't naturally tend to overburdening the environment. In fact on islands where species evolved with no predators, and thus their greatest threat to survival was overburdening the environment, they evolved to self-regulate their population growth, responding to environmental stress by not mating.
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It does not matter on local scale if the robber barons are capitalist or fachists.
Why do you deliberately try to miss my point?
North Korea had enough food if USA (robber barons) and south Korea would not always disrupt the harvest in North Korea with their late summer war maneauvers in front of the North Korean coast.
Venezuela has no food problem. They have a distribution problem and a currency crisis. And like America: an idiot as president.
And like North Korea: they are under an trade embargo by the US. A
Re:Overpopulation (Score:5, Informative)
If we feed everyone today, soon we will have ten billion people on Earth.
This is complete nonsense, and the exact opposite of the truth.
People react to food insecurity, environmental stress, social turmoil, and high mortality by having MORE KIDS and investing less in each. The highest population growth in the world in in Niger, one of the world's poorest countries, affected by drought, famine, and civil war. The highest birthrate in Asia is in Afghanistan.
The way to lower birthrates is peacekeeping, better healthcare, better nutrition, reduced infant mortality, education, and urbanization. When people are confident that their children will survive, they will stop popping out more and invest in those they already have. This is what has happened repeatedly all over the globe.
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Technically, we're likely to end up with 10 billion+ people on Earth within the next century or so, even IF everyone became educated, well-fed, and lived in peace starting tomorrow afternoon. Why? Historically, it takes a couple of generations for affluence & education to "sink in" -- and overcome parental nagging.
Take India. Its population has almost doubled within the past few decades, even though its education level, affluence, urbanization, food, and everything else has approached modern first-world
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Take India. Its population has almost doubled within the past few decades, even though its education level, affluence, urbanization, food, and everything else has approached modern first-world norms.
This is not true at all. You have obviously never been to India, or maybe just a 5-star hotel in Mumbai. Go visit a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, and you will never again believe that India "has approached first-world norms". India is poorer than Nigeria. Per capita GDP is a quarter that of China.
Your premise that affluence doesn't matter in India is also wrong. Middle class Indians reproduce at below replacement levels. The surplus births are coming from the rural poor.
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In 1950, India's population was 359 million.
In 1978, it was approximately 665 million.
As of this year, it's approximately 1.3 billion.
So, India's population almost doubled between 1950 and 1978, and literally doubled between 1978 and the present.
Rural-vs-Urban is a whacked-out mess pretty much EVERYWHERE, including the US.
The truth is, the postwar baby boom, and the much smaller generation that came before it, both had their origins in the Influenza Pandemic and Great Depression. After the pandemic, America
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is not by and of itself "news".
It is not news because Bill invested in Apeel years ago. There is no actual "news" in TFA.
It is also not news that their product is "an oil rich in fat lipids", but it would be news if was an oil NOT rich in fat lipids. That would be like dehydrated water.
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De-hydrogensulphatized battery acid. Make sure you use the pristine stuff, unless you live in an area with lead piping; you won't notice a difference with your ordinary tap water then anyway.
Disclaimer: IANAWWE.