Category Archives: Food manufacture

The Binsted Lecture 12th December 2018

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Tickets now available for the 2018 Binsted Lecture, with Michele Perchonok

A joint event from the IFT British Section and The Institute of Food Science & Technology

We are delighted to announce that the speaker for this year’s Binsted Lecture will be Michele Perchonok, President of IFT and former manager of the NASA Human Research Programme at the NASA/Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.

Date: Wednesday 12th December
Time: 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Location: Food and Drink Federation (FDF), 10 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2SL
Price: £10

The evening will end with a drinks reception.

Dr Perchonok will speak about feeding astronauts in space, and focusing particularly on the logistics of long missions like a potential 5-year mission to Mars.

Buy Tickets

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Feeding Nine Billion People

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Attached is a fascinating insight into what was called at one time ‘Miracle Rice” published by the BBC.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-38156350

 

A lovely follow-up to my thoughts and reminiscences on the subject.

Adrian Binsted, Editor & Proprietor, Food Trade Review.

GM Crops save lives

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A long time ago FTR was what is nowadays called the media sponsor of the First International Food Science and Technology Congress at Imperial College in London, whose President was Lord Rank, the leading figure of the food industry in the UK at the time. This became known as the first IUFOST Congress. As a young man I was introduced by my father Raymond Binsted, Editor & Proprietor of FTR to Dr, now Professor M S Swaminathan. Years later I was to be greeted by Dr Swaminathan as Director General of the International Rice Institute in the Philippines when I was visiting the country with a small group of experts advising President Marcos on what food products could be manufactured in the Philippines and exported to Europe to help replace the income from the giant American Airbase which was already being reduced in size.

Dr Swaminathan reminded me of our meeting all those years before and took our small group on an excellent visit of all the facilities and the rice growing fields before lunching together. In 1986 the research facility was still working hard to improve the harvests of rice across the ASEAN countries to fend off famine. Countless millions of humankind owe their lives to this work to this day. The continuous efforts to improve GM crops are what will feed nine billion people in the coming years.

Adrian Binsted, Editor & Proprietor, Food Trade Review

Only half of recommended Omega 3

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If you have not seen this, please read carefully as this is of interest to food industry from many different angles. The problem is the reduction in the amount of fish content in fish meal, the answer is to genetically modify rapeseed.

This is well worth a discussion.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37321656

Adrian Binsted, Editor & Proprietor, Food Trade Review

Pesto Sauce and the brown bears

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My post on the plight of the brown bears in Northern Canada and the Russian Tundra drew over 800 comments via social media and our website within the first month. Some readers re-tweeted the comments on Twitter resulting in a small but growing number of people who have decided not to use pine nuts in their salads anymore nor to east pesto sauce.

It appears from my research that the global uptake of pine nuts for food for human consumption is about 100,000 tonnes a year. It sounds a lot, or rather it sounds as though millions of people must use and  consume Pesto sauce and indeed millions of people must eat Pine nuts on their salads.

I am sure that there is an alternative source for these nuts and indeed readers will undoubtedly make suggestions of alternative homemade sauces and their commercially available equivalents.

Adrian Binsted, Editor, Food Trade Review