The Times: Tech column - Food tech/E-Envoy progress/KPMG stupidity
By David Rowan
IN A LAND which hails tinned omelette and chips as a culinary revolution, and where frozen sushi is the supermarkets' latest gourmet delight, you might not consider food technology to be at the cutting edge of research. But with fortunes to be made by forecasting the next epicurean trends, US nutrition companies are playing with their food to a remarkable extent in the technology labs.
Food technologists are getting excited about everything from new "functional foods" - such as therapeutic breads modified to calm you down - to beers manufactured so as to minimise hangovers.
Not all breakthroughs, they stress, will catch on: there may be a limited market for that new American delicacy, shrink-wrapped slices of bread covered in peanut butter and jam. So what innovations can we expect in the near future? Enormous work is going into developing "neutraceuticals" - functional foods that offer pharmaceutical benefits, whether muesli steeped in St John's wort, or fruit chews containing inulin, considered effective against Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Biotechnology, though still controversial, will play a role: Unilever, for instance, has developed a genetically modified tomato that increases vastly the levels of flavonols, seen as highly effective against heart disease and cancer.
The way these healthy ingredients are obtained is also changing. Claudia O'Donnell, chief editor of Prepared Foods magazine, is excited about technologies that "separate and extract" useful nutritional products from natural sources - such as fermentation technologies used to obtain Omega-3 fatty acids, which help to counter heart disease.
Food will stay fresh for longer without losing its taste, thanks to high-pressure sterilisation. Until now, heat has been the easy way to pasteurise food - but you get that tell-tale long-life flavour. Now everything from avocados to ham is undergoing new pressure treatments to kill microbes: a company in Louisiana, for instance, found that bombarding oysters with 35,000psi of pressure separated them from the shell while killing most of the bacteria.
"We're going to see much more of this technique," says Clair Hicks, professor of food science at the University of Kentucky. "We don't yet know how it will work with canned soups, but at 100,000psi you could make meat-based canned soups that are as delightful as any you make fresh."
New packaging technologies could finally do away with the family butcher. Meat cuts will be factory-packed within specially formulated gases that will keep them "fresh" for weeks. This new "modified atmosphere packaging" will also work for fruit, so expect apple slices to hit the shelves weeks after they left the tree.
Genetically modified foods will finally gain acceptance. "It's just a matter of time," Professor Hicks says. Even now in the UK, she points out, more than 90 per cent of hard cheese is made using a genetically modified enzyme, recombinant chymosin.
"Look back in history, and you'll see that consumers will eventually migrate to a good product that's safe and appeals." Still, Professor Hicks is in no hurry to sample the delights of canned omelette and chips.
++++
The Government's Office of the e-Envoy was busy congratulating itself last week on "the huge progress made towards ensuring that the UK is a world leader in the knowledge economy" - that is, putting half of government services online, establishing a network of local "online centres", and promoting the cause with lots of mindnumbingly forgettable adverts.
Sorry to spoil the party, guys, but your annual report forgets to mention the recent survey that put us 19th out of 27 countries for contacting the Government online, or the OECD report on broadband use which puts us near the bottom of a long list. Maybe you and your chums at Oftel should start by forcing BT to lower the cost of broadband access - and make it easier for us, say, to submit company tax returns without having to buy special software.
Otherwise your worthy action plans might start looking a bit ambitious.
++++
EVERY now and then a company makes an electronic faux pas that is so bad that the entire Internet community comes out in force against it. Step forward Frank Dunne, senior manager at KPMG for "Global Brand & Regulatory Compliance", who last week e-mailed Chris Raettig, a London-based programmer whose personal website was linked to KMPG's.
Dunne had been unable to find "a formal agreement" authorising the link, and demanded that it be removed. Raettig refused, replying that "the free associative nature of hyperlinking" was the basis of the Web, and then posted the correspondence on his site. By Friday, Raettig had become something of a Web hero, with 102 other websites adding new links to KPMG's site. Er, Mr Dunne, doesn't your firm claim to understand e-business?
(The Times, December 10 2001)
IN A LAND which hails tinned omelette and chips as a culinary revolution, and where frozen sushi is the supermarkets' latest gourmet delight, you might not consider food technology to be at the cutting edge of research. But with fortunes to be made by forecasting the next epicurean trends, US nutrition companies are playing with their food to a remarkable extent in the technology labs.
Food technologists are getting excited about everything from new "functional foods" - such as therapeutic breads modified to calm you down - to beers manufactured so as to minimise hangovers.
Not all breakthroughs, they stress, will catch on: there may be a limited market for that new American delicacy, shrink-wrapped slices of bread covered in peanut butter and jam. So what innovations can we expect in the near future? Enormous work is going into developing "neutraceuticals" - functional foods that offer pharmaceutical benefits, whether muesli steeped in St John's wort, or fruit chews containing inulin, considered effective against Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Biotechnology, though still controversial, will play a role: Unilever, for instance, has developed a genetically modified tomato that increases vastly the levels of flavonols, seen as highly effective against heart disease and cancer.
The way these healthy ingredients are obtained is also changing. Claudia O'Donnell, chief editor of Prepared Foods magazine, is excited about technologies that "separate and extract" useful nutritional products from natural sources - such as fermentation technologies used to obtain Omega-3 fatty acids, which help to counter heart disease.
Food will stay fresh for longer without losing its taste, thanks to high-pressure sterilisation. Until now, heat has been the easy way to pasteurise food - but you get that tell-tale long-life flavour. Now everything from avocados to ham is undergoing new pressure treatments to kill microbes: a company in Louisiana, for instance, found that bombarding oysters with 35,000psi of pressure separated them from the shell while killing most of the bacteria.
"We're going to see much more of this technique," says Clair Hicks, professor of food science at the University of Kentucky. "We don't yet know how it will work with canned soups, but at 100,000psi you could make meat-based canned soups that are as delightful as any you make fresh."
New packaging technologies could finally do away with the family butcher. Meat cuts will be factory-packed within specially formulated gases that will keep them "fresh" for weeks. This new "modified atmosphere packaging" will also work for fruit, so expect apple slices to hit the shelves weeks after they left the tree.
Genetically modified foods will finally gain acceptance. "It's just a matter of time," Professor Hicks says. Even now in the UK, she points out, more than 90 per cent of hard cheese is made using a genetically modified enzyme, recombinant chymosin.
"Look back in history, and you'll see that consumers will eventually migrate to a good product that's safe and appeals." Still, Professor Hicks is in no hurry to sample the delights of canned omelette and chips.
++++
The Government's Office of the e-Envoy was busy congratulating itself last week on "the huge progress made towards ensuring that the UK is a world leader in the knowledge economy" - that is, putting half of government services online, establishing a network of local "online centres", and promoting the cause with lots of mindnumbingly forgettable adverts.
Sorry to spoil the party, guys, but your annual report forgets to mention the recent survey that put us 19th out of 27 countries for contacting the Government online, or the OECD report on broadband use which puts us near the bottom of a long list. Maybe you and your chums at Oftel should start by forcing BT to lower the cost of broadband access - and make it easier for us, say, to submit company tax returns without having to buy special software.
Otherwise your worthy action plans might start looking a bit ambitious.
++++
EVERY now and then a company makes an electronic faux pas that is so bad that the entire Internet community comes out in force against it. Step forward Frank Dunne, senior manager at KPMG for "Global Brand & Regulatory Compliance", who last week e-mailed Chris Raettig, a London-based programmer whose personal website was linked to KMPG's.
Dunne had been unable to find "a formal agreement" authorising the link, and demanded that it be removed. Raettig refused, replying that "the free associative nature of hyperlinking" was the basis of the Web, and then posted the correspondence on his site. By Friday, Raettig had become something of a Web hero, with 102 other websites adding new links to KPMG's site. Er, Mr Dunne, doesn't your firm claim to understand e-business?
(The Times, December 10 2001)
posted by David Rowan at Monday, December 10, 2001
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