Tag Archives: food-science

If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, doubling its biomass as quickly as every two days to conquer small bodies …

We all know that too much sugar is bad for us. It can lead to weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. But it’s hard to avoid. In the US, three-quarters of the packaged food sold in supermarkets has sugar added to it when it’s processed or prepared. …

July 2023 was a landmark moment for the cultivated meat industry. For the first time, meat brewed directly from chicken cells went on sale in two US restaurants after a pair of California startups got a green light from the US Department of Agriculture. The US had joined Singapore as …

There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared. …

Popular vegan egg and lab-grown-meat company Eat Just is in deep financial trouble. A WIRED investigation bringing together court records, documents, and interviews from former employees suggests that the company frequently struggled with paying its suppliers on time. Now it is being sued by a former partner for roughly $100 …

This Halloween, when you grab a candy bar, pay attention to the wrapper. In the United States, a "nutrition facts" label has been required for all packaged foods since 1994, giving the serving size and the amount of sugar, protein, fat, and sodium the food contains. But the most interesting …

This month, the Cambodian government reported that two people there died of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1 bird flu, after being exposed to infected poultry. For people, the risk of getting infected is low, but outbreaks in animals have been rising worldwide, wiping out chicken flocks and wild bird …

One of the first meals I made from an exciting new cookbook was a simple stir-fry, but I would never have done it without the nudge that the book gave me. Another dish I made, Chinese brined eggs, was surprisingly easy; they simply sat in a salty bath with a …

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed psychoactive beverages on the planet. Nearly every country, region, and culture has its own unique way of preparing and consuming coffee. There's nothing simple about coffee. Those beans in your kitchen are the sum total of a complex series of interactions between …