USDA, Russian scientists develop interactive crop mapthe U s. Department of agriculture and St petersburg State university have partnered to create a new website that offers geographic distributions of 100 crops,
The idea behind the Internet-based, bilingual maps, collectively called Agroatlas, is to promote world food security--with specific attention to nations who were a part of the former Soviet union.
helping to both conserve and reduce energy consumption while enabling onsite plant and food production. Bosco Verticale is designed to irrigate the plants by filtering
But at some point roughly 500 years ago, indigenous tribespeople discovered that they could guide the formation of this outgrowth using betel nut trunks as tools.
Invention turns fog into drinking water Video: World s cheapest light bulb Innovative bike tire can inflate itself Finally,
a urinal for girls Invention uses sunlight to produce clean water New irrigation system helps farmers conserve water
Hire this noodle consultant. NEW YORK--When, at 18 years, Shuichi Kotani left his small Japanese village in Hyogo to head to Tokyo,
After countless rejections, he decided to apply for a job at the modestly appointed Kyorinbo restaurant owned by the late chef Oguchi Sumio.
As a part of the workplace induction, Kotani was presented with the house special--a steaming bowl of fresh soba noodles.
Every time I make noodles, I'm trying to recapture that moment, 34-year-old Kotani said,
as he commences his live soba-making session at Treehaus, a restaurant in New york, the city in
The Japanese chef is now a noodle master who lends his expertise to chefs and restaurant owners to help boost their Michelin or Zagat ratings.
He does this through education and training, and is often the behind-the-scene talent
and contributor to dishes at respected restaurants in New york and Chicago in the U s. occasionally working in Tokyo and Bogota as well).
A noodle consultant who often works as part of a team, comprising of Michelin-rated chefs;
Kotani focuses on noodles while his colleagues specialize in other Japanese cuisines such as sushi, shashimi and okazu (side dishes.
This Japanese culinary dream team is responsible for U n. dinners and other special events. During the soba-making session, Kotani works with quiet confidence, looking up on occasion to smile shyly at the awed onlookers who are crowded around the table--two are filming the spectacle with their smartphone cameras.
Kotani was expected to make noodles in all types of conditions--wet, dry, hot and cold.
and trained under Kotani, claims him the undisputed expert in noodle-making. The temperature and humidity affects the noodle,
but he is such an expert that you put him in any environment and he'll still make an excellent noodle,
she said. She explained that there is no other noodle consultant like Kotani in New york. Kotani is the only noodle chef
I know, Minakawa said. He specializes in it--he can make a noodle out of any grain.
Normally, with soba noodles when you put them in the soup they expand, but with Kotani's noodles, they do not expand.
The richness and the flavor doesn't escape in the broth, it stays in the soba...
I don't know what his secret is--he is said amazing, she. Taking a break from his hour-long demonstration (the time it takes him to make two pounds of soba),
Kotani explained in his broken but good English that the mark of a quality soba is that it brings out the true flavor of the buckwheat
Because there is no gluten in buckwheat, the soba must absorb the moisture equally and then be kneaded in the shape of a chrysanthemum flower--the most challenging part of the process.
He often shares his knowledge with the general public through courses on soba making. Kotani who runs a noodle production company,
Worldwide-Soba Inc.,has three small noodle factories in New york and one in Chicago--with a fifth one underway.
He explains that American wheat mills spin too fast which means that that a lot of valuable nutrients are lost.
He has built special stone mills that slowly process the buckwheat to preserve all their goodness.
Proficient in making all types of noodles, Kotani says that his specialization is in gluten-free buckwheat noodles--a fast-growing dietary requirement.
According to global nonprofit medical center Mayo Clinic, celiac disease (in which your body is unable to process gluten) is four times more common now than it was 60 years ago.
From Queens to Soho, East Village to Chinatown, today, the options are endless for eating any kind of noodle in New york--noodles are as ubiquitous as a pizza slice.
With the ramen, the Japanese pizza popping up around the city, it won't be too long before demand for quality becomes a priority.
According to Serious Eats, a community food blog, the ramen craze hit New york in 2004 when Korean-American chef David Chang opened up his restaurant Momofuku.
Today the city is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance, with restaurants clamouring to be the best in a competitive dining landscape.
Jamie Feldmar, managing editor of Serious Eats, says, Ramen has seen a huge surge in popularity in the past five to seven years.
Part of it, I think, stems from our simultaneous obsession with pork and animal-centric cooking in general.
Ramen perfectly encapsulates our hedonistic pleasure in eating--it's comforting casual and open to creative interpretation at the hands of talented chefs.
As the everyman begin to realize that a good bowl of ramen is only as good as the sum of its ingredients,
restaurants will be looking to consultants like Kotani to educate them on noodle making. Kotani explains there is no official Japanese culinary school in the U s
As the Director of the All Japan Food Association and as member of the Japanese Culinary Academy of America, Kotani will work in partnership with the U s. Government
and restaurant in two years with a clear goal--to not only share his passion for noodles with the country,
Some users of glyphosate were observed to have a higher risk of multiple myeloma, a cancer affecting bone marrow,
which residents can trade recyclables for fresh food, homemade goods and plants. People handed over their bags of glass,
I showed up with a bagful of newspapers, some plastic yogurt containers and a few beer bottles
cheese, herbs and houseplants. The market is something of a marketing gimmick in a city that is pushing hard to get residents to recycle.
Rosa Fajardo and her daughter, Itzel Patricio, traded 15 kilos of recyclable material for four houseplants and two rounds of cheese.
I checked the prices oe in points oe of cauliflower, Swiss chard, cilantro, spinach, mushrooms. The 20 or so vendors had been paid by the city in advance for their produce,
and two handfuls of cilantro and left the market with a certain satisfaction for having bartered trash for food.
and use it as part of their diet. Surrounding it are rock outcrops. They're using their vocalizations in the rock outcrops to propagate,
what is paid by other retailers and restaurants in the same area. The store is also reportedly not required to share any of its revenue with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Many authorities count on traffic from the Apple Store to flow into nearby shops and restaurants,
In just under two months, the arrival of the Apple Store boosted sales for a neighboring restaurant by seven percent.
The Steakhouse, which is owned co by basketball star Michael Jordan, credits its new neighbor for the increase in traffic as the other owner says the uptick occurred only after Apple s debut. via Ars Technica,
He cites the example of a baby-food company that messed with the tray and shrink style of its boxes,
don't minimize product protection Trade group makes case for environmentally sound packaging New battleground in beverage wars:
The solutions--everything from irrigation systems to grain grinders to medical braces--used design innovations to reduce the cost of current solutions.
The list of companies that have collaborated with d. school on projects include Visa, Motorola, Google and Pepsico. And recruiters at companies such as Google,
Design schools are also offering short executive courses as a means of teaching the folks in C-suites how to apply new design strategies.
and beauty discounts than its grocery deals. But in India, sales of the onion, a staple in Indian cooking, are soaring.
But what's driving Indians to burn through Groupon's inventory of onions instead of just going to a local market?
and this damage affects every aspect of your life from your water to your food to your medicine.
to protect our future resources of food, textiles, pharmaceuticals, building materials and a host of other products drawn from nature.
which offers us hope for medicines and future food stocks. In the second case we need to prioritize areas
and food come at an every increasing cost. But we should also see there is an appetite to do things differently
Honeybees play an important role in pollinating roughly one-third of global food crops. But they are dying off annually in massive numbers.
Too many bees in a small area and not enough bee food. As Professor Francis Ratnieks, a co-author of the article,
 If a game park was short of food for elephants, you wouldn t introduce more elephants,
 The researchers calculate that to sufficiently meet the needs of every new hive, about one hectare (or about 2. 5 acres) of  borage,
Can you talk on how biodiversity can influence your food supply? Any other issues? GM foods?
Biodiversity and a sustainable food supply are linked intimately by way of both ecosystem goods and services.
First, wild or semi domesticated foods form a significant source of nourishment to many people around the world.
Nutritional diversity is correlated with improved nutrition. While there is a global trend towards dietary simplification in favor of a few crops,
locally grown and wild foods can provide increased nutrient and caloric intakes. Unsustainable use and biotic simplification threaten these important resources,
which often also have critical cultural value. For example, berry picking and seal hunting are important
not only for physical nourishment but also to shape cultural identity. Second services such as nutrient and water cycling, soil aeration, pest control,
and pollination are essential in sustaining the global food supply. Other ecosystem goods and services sustain human health in a variety of ways.
Studies have estimated that at least 80%of the world s population relies on compounds obtained mainly from plants as their primary source of health care.
This building was famous for its Tio Pepe jerez (sherry) sign, which has recently been removed, during restoration.
and Glen Bull of the  Curry School of education at the University of Virginia, recently answered my questions about the project.
a city still must reap the benefits of the area around it, especially with regard to food.
The study appears in the current issue of The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.
A consistent player on the Fortune s 100 Best Companies to Work For list, the tech giant established a scientific department focused on keeping employees happy--going beyond offering gourmet food
 He stresses the importance of packaging materials that help preserve food and prevent other sorts of waste,
aims to provide clean drinking water to the 894 million people around the globe who lack access to it.
Safe drinking water is the most basic of human needs, Tata Sons chairman  Ratan Tata said in prepared remarks.
and scientists had been working on it for food additives: flavors and fragrances. A distillation will get out the chemicals that carry that odor
or flavor and take that to make flavorings or fragrances. A nice pine scent for detergent--take this essence of pine.
Smoked hickory for your bacon--take this scent out of pyrolisized hickory wood. The wood in the pyrolysis process comes out in this liquid--pyrolysis oil.
They were extracting the chemicals for food additives from it. The remainder they were simply giving away to whoever would take it.
and paper mill and those guys would mix it back in with their black liquor. We came to them
They'll mix that in with  horse manure, old hay, wood chips. Do you bring the compost back once it's ready to use  in the roof garden?
and then planted a couple dozen different varieties of herbs, fall vegetables. We had lettuces and radishes, peppers, snow peas.
We're not trying to grow all of our own herbs. We just think it's a very cool and neat thing to do.
For special events that we sponsor, lunches or dinners, we'll incorporate some of the stuff from our garden in the meal.
It's not that we really get a lot out of the garden but it represents
For instance, on the cook line we have about  eight or nine  pieces of equipment that use  gas.
As we burn the gas and cook the food, we have this huge fan on top of the building that sucks it out.
Aztec"cuisine breeds gourmet taste for rare bugs"MEXICO CITY oe  Ant larva, wild boar, fly eggs, wild greens:
It's a meal to make the Aztecs proud. Pre-Hispanic cuisine, which celebrates native Mexican ingredients
and preparations that existed before the Spaniards arrived, has been enjoying increasing popularity at home and is shaping up to become Mexicos next cultural export.
Although exotic elements of pre-Hispanic cuisine have been a feature of top restaurants in Mexico city for more than a decade,
chefs say the national appetite for hard-to-find delicacies is growing. Meanwhile, an artist-turned-chef in San francisco, originally from Mexico city, is betting that health-conscious Americans are ready for bug tacos.
At Restaurant Chon a downtown hideaway for pre-Hispanic cuisine in Mexico city, Chef Fortino Rojas serves plates of escamoles (ant larva), chapulines (crickets) and jabalã Â (wild boar),
among other proteins favored by early Mexicans. He describes the food as simple but with an Aztec flavor.
Once derided, insects have become a symbol of exclusivity. Chefs catering to diners willing to pay for luxury will search high and low for the most sought-after species
. While insects are a striking feature of pre-Hispanic food, the cuisine encompasses a broad range of vegetables, legumes and game oe many
of which serve as the base of traditional Mexican cooking, including corn, chile and beans, as well as seeds, herbs and flowers.
Meats that are considered pre-Hispanic include venison, duck, boar, armadillo or a squirrel-like rodent called tepezcuintle.
Chef Daniel Ovadã Â a, 28-year-old owner of the upscale Paxia restaurants, sees a movement afoot, especially among a younger generation.
Young Mexican chefs are rediscovering the ingredients and preparations endemic to their home regions. That didn't happen before, he said.
Now the idea is to bring it to contemporary Mexico and to the world. They say that the food of the future will include a lot of insects
said Ricardo Muã Â oz Zurita, chef-owner of Mexican restaurants Azul and Azul y Oro.
But thankfully Mexico's insects aren't so well-known. Although he touts the healthfulness of protein-rich edible bugs,
Muã Â oz Zurita doesn't use native insects in his restaurants due to the scarcity and the cost.
The combination of depleted supply and increased demand for pre-Hispanic foods like gusanos de maguey, white worms that feed on the leaves of a maguey that grows as tall as a man,
or acociles, tiny native crayfish, make them pricey by default. That makes heavy commercialization unsustainable
Ovadã Â a adheres to a sort of slow food approach, in which chefs create new demand for ingredients that,
and who could imagine Mexican food without cheeses and creams? Who could imagine Mexican salsa without cilantro,
which comes from Asia? An appetite for the exotic may be crossing the northern border, too.
In San francisco, Mexico city native Monica Martinez is working on a taco cart concept called Don Bugito,
making food that is pre-Hispanic influenced and inspired with ingredients from the Bay Area. Most people know tacos and burritos,
Martinez said. So I thought, why not? It's such an amazing type of cuisine,
and it hasn't gotten the recognition outside of Mexico. When people approach the cart,
waxworm larva tacos with pasilla pepper, and vanilla ice cream topped with caramelized worms and prickly pear syrup.
Photos: Crickets by Flickr/William Neuheisel Ant larva by Lauren Villagran
Baltimore's next steps: transportation, energy, green building, foodif Baltimores planning director has his way,
and a new food czar to help transform the blighted sections infamously portrayed in HBOS The Wire.
You just hired a food czar. Holly Freishtat is the new city food policy director.
Were one of the first places in the country to have someone on city staff working with the planning
and health departments to promote access to healthy food across the city. Shes got a lot of experience working in the Pacific Northwest.
Shes getting involved with everything from community gardens to getting folks with food stamps access to farmers markets.
and farms and provide fresh produce for some of these places that are food deserts.
What about chickens? The whole chicken thing is a growing issue. As we rewrite the code this would be the time to address that issue as well.
Images: City of Baltimore
Beef-based diesel: Amtrak goes to the cowsi don't eat a lot of meat. I prefer that the animals I do eat lived in an at least somewhat healthful and respectful fashion,
and in the end, that as much of them as possible was used in some way. Because I don't like wasting available resources either.
The idea of dairy cow manure producing electricity or pig feces paving roads didn't disturb me much,
000 to see how the beef-based fuel would fare in the 3, 200-horsepower engine of a P32-8 locomotive.
as long as Americans don't start claiming domestic energy as an excuse to eat (even more) cheeseburgers. Top Image:
Beijing invests millions in laser writing scheme for pork productsbeijing-Â With a few days left before Chinese New Year,
pushing past mountains of bagged roast duck and revolving pyramids of luxury chocolate. A complete pig carcass hangs behind the meat counter, illuminated by a blue LED light,
revealing a series of numbers printed on the meat's surface. Å These numbers show the date that the pig was slaughtered,
part of a food safety plan launched this week by the Beijing government. Pork is Chinas most popular meat,
and Beijing alone will consume nearly 30,000 pigs a day over the New Year period.
But eating pork in China can be risky. Last year, more than 4 million pounds of pork were recalled by the Chinese government after pigs in central China were found to have been injected with a fat-reducing drug called Clenbuterol.
Money-conscious Beijingers worry that water is injected into pork in order to increase its weight. One of the codes printed onto pig skin with a laser.
In response, Beijing's Government has launched the ŠMeat Reassurance  project. As well as the codes etched onto pigs bodies with lasers, customers at sixty-seven supermarkets across Beijing will receive a printed code each time they buy pork,
which can be used to check where where it was slaughtered. The project has already cost the government 2 million RMB (about 160,000 USD),
and will be extended to cover all the citys supermarkets and over eighty percent of its wholesale markets within three years,
or the  significance  of the bar codes attached to their freshly purchased pork. Machines installed to help customers check the origins of their meat have hardly been used,
supermarket staff said. Å I'm worried about food safety, but think the meat at this supermarket is more reliable,
thats why Im willing pay extra to shop here  one customer said. The majority of Beijing's meat is sold still in fresh food markets
while supermarkets have more appeal for middle-class consumers. Few supermarket customers were aware of the machines allowing them to check the origins of their pork products.
The project helps Beijing's government to investigate food safety problems, Yuan said. Å In the past the people responsible for unsafe meat would often escape the blame,
unless they were filmed secretly by the media, Â he said. Å Now we can track exactly where the meat has travelled from,
which means if there is an outbreak of poisoning, the government can easily check who is responsible,
 he said. ZFD equipped slaughterhouse meat hooks with RFID Chips as part of the project
which are used to record the weight of pigs before and after they leave the slaughterhouse.
The Meat Reassurance project is part of the Chinese governments efforts to promote the ŠInternet of things  oe equipping ordinary objects with microchips,
sensors and barcodes which allow them communicate information digitally. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao expressed his support for the industry in 2009,
All Chinese cities with a populations above 1. 5 million people will be required to install a meat monitoring system over the next five years,
while the world is pretty adept at producing enough food for everyone, it's not so good at distributing it--leaving hundreds of thousands hungry around the globe.
not least because they drive up food prices, siphoning grains from the bowls of the poorest into the gas-tanks of the richest--with limited environmental gains, at best.
Can the World Feed 10 Billion People? Foreign policy Photo: International Institute of Tropical agriculture/Flickr
Biomimetic irrigation system wins James Dyson Awarda concept for efficiently harvesting water to irrigate crops by condensing water underground
The food supply was designed to last 30 to 45 days, and they were living on fruit flies,
but now theyre on their own living without too much food. They can live a long time without food,
so were hoping to get them back and get them hydrated and look at them under the microscope.
which avoids competing with food production, unlike the corn and soybeans that coat much of the Midwest's farmland.
because algae are the base of the marine food chain. For example: Screw up and over-engineer a strain,
Turning algae into oil the NASA way Scientists create high-capacity batteries from algae Pressure-cooking method makes an algae-based biofuel Plane takes first flight on 100
like genetically modified (GM) food--such as Roundup Ready soybeans--should we be concerned that scientists are tinkering with Mother Nature?
Their iphones are 30-ft.-long, $60, 000 hay balers. Cloud startups have served largely their own industry--technology--first,
including tomatoes, lettuces, and herbs. New york city consumers have been supportive of urban agriculture for years. In 2010, Brooklyn Grange opened a rooftop garden in Long island City, Queens, Â with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign.
After decades of centralization and industrialization in the food supply chain, Americans wants to know oe
-and have a right to know oe-where their food comes from. The demand for local food is the most powerful trend in the food industry
and will strengthen for decades. The success of this trend is evident in New york's culinary scene.
According to Yelp, an online restaurant rating site, the New york area plays host to 47 farm-to-table restaurants.
healthy and local food to a community demanding fresh, healthy and local food. A rendering of the new site.
Build better bricks with this beer brewing byproduct   Portuguese researchers have found a way to incorporate leftover brewery grains into a paste used to make bricks.
pulpy cake that can be used as animal feed or in a landfill. Â Conventional red clay bricks contain polystyrene (a synthetic polymer),
United states In Buffalo, New york, saving bees is part of a local business person's vision for redeveloping a waterfront industrial site into a design district.
The winning team of architecture students from the University at Buffalo designed a 22 foot tall tower made with steel, glass and cypress.
CNN Eco Solutions, Artinfo, Â University of Buffalo Press Images: copyright Charles Barclay, Li Xiaodong
featuring an Aussie outback adventurer called  Les Hiddins (a Macgyver meets Bear Grylls character) who impressed us with his passionate knowledge of Indigenous foods.
Today, the reality of eating from the land is much more palatable, especially with the recent spate of respectable magazines touting foraging as a big food trend.
At this years Melbourne Food and Wine Festival foraging (along with fermentation) was a hot topic.
Chef Ben Shewry, a quiet trailblazer in the Melbourne food scene, spoke in length about finding edible wild plants and foods.
A witchetty grub shell. But just how edible are these native foods? In Australia, we colloquially refer to our native foods as  Šbush tucker.  Australias Aboriginal inhabitants have been eating off the land for centuries.
As an environment that sustains them, they treat the land as a fundamental part of their wellbeing.
Australians today have much to learn from their traditional practices. But if you think bush tucker is about witchetty grubs,
youd better not tell that to Julie Weatherhead, an Indigenous food expert and environmental scientist.
Shes somewhat frustrated with how little Australians know about their native foods. On the Melbourne food scene
bush tucker has enjoyed something of a niche market, with lemon myrtle and warrigal greens the most well known of Indigenous foods.
Lilli pilli jam and native pepper are two more, but more likely to be found in boutique shops and high-end restaurants.
Å Chefs don't really learn about it in their hospitality courses, Â Weatherhead says. Å They put a bit of lemon myrtle into something and call it Indigenous food.
Some arent game enough to put it in their dishes, so the flavours are really mild and youre not sure
what youre eating. Â Australian native food expert Julie Weatherhead Weatherhead points out the misconception that Australian native foods are primitive.
She says that the Aborigines have been living long, healthy lives for centuries, due to their incredible connection, understanding
and respect for the land. Of course, there are native animals that are edible too (such as kangaroos, crocodiles and emus),
but Weatherhead prefers to educate us on the wonders of Australias native flora world. Julie and her husband, Anthony Hooper, live
and work on their eight hectare Peppermint Ridge Farm in West Gippsland, (about an hour's drive out of Melbourne).
Theyve been running food tours, and land and sustainability courses since 1996. An ecologist with a degree in environmental science and education, Weatherhead dedicates an area of the farm as her Å Living Classroom Â,
to educate people on the multiple uses of bush tucker. Å The joy of bush foods is that they don't taste like anything you've ever tasted before,
 she says. caption id=attachment 7063 align=alignright width=300 caption=Some Acacia wattle seeds contain toxins
and should not be eaten. Warrigal Greens (tetragonia tetragonoides
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