Новости за 18.12.2020

This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay. It has been edited for length and clarity. As told to Krithika Varagur. We get our beans from the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, and right here in Mexico. Since…

Lab-grown meat, artificial human breast milk, genetically modified pigs, a cauliflower field farmed by robots—if that’s the kind of science-fiction-y stuff you expect to read about in a special issue on technology and food, you won’t be disappointed. (And if you like actual science fiction, take a look at this short story by Anjali Sachdeva.) …

There’s a long-running column in Cook’s Illustrated called “What is it?” where we track down the origins of kitchen gadgets that our readers find in their attics or on dusty antique-store shelves. A recent favorite: the Acme Rotary Mincer, vintage 1935, a handheld device featuring 10 stainless-steel rotary blades, which promised to mince herbs and…

We won’t easily forget how we worried about food in the first days of the pandemic: empty shelves, scarce products, and widespread hoarding became an alarming reality around the world. While being reassured that the disruptions were “temporary,” Americans also heard troubling news about farmers plowing crops back into their fields, dairy farmers pouring milk…

As a machine operator for the robotics startup FarmWise, Diego Alcántar spends each day walking behind a hulking robot that resembles a driverless Zamboni, helping it learn to do the work of a 30-person weeding crew.  On a Tuesday morning in September, I met Alcántar in a gigantic cauliflower field in the hills outside Santa…

One cool fall night 10 years ago, Jessica Krieger went for a run to clear her head. Krieger, then an undergraduate in neuroscience, had just watched a documentary that showed the gruesome ways many animals are slaughtered for food. “The animals were terrified, in pain, dying,” she recalls.  Krieger was already worried about the meat…

This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay. It has been edited for length and clarity. As told to Krithika Varagur. The National Agricultural Statistics Service is used to set nationwide estimates of agricultural commodities. We have 12 regions across the country,…

Blockchain Chicken Farm, a new book from Oakland-based writer, designer, and scholar Xiaowei Wang, explores technology in rural China and the surprising ripple effects of the country’s food supply chain on people all around the world. The book connects, for example, an AI-driven pig-farming operation in Guangdong to Silicon Valley surveillance culture, while avoiding the…

“To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-­dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality … [A] single map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data …”  —Mark Monmonier, How…

This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay. It has been edited for length and clarity. As told to Krithika Varagur. I’ve been a farmer for six years, mainly of maize, but also coffee and sweet potatoes. Two years ago, I started…