Gardening & Food

For years that bright yellow color of Kraft macaroni and cheese wasn’t all-natural, but it’s about to be.

Kraft is removing artificial preservatives and synthetic colors from its mac and cheese recipe, starting in January 2016.

It will use spices like paprika, annatto and turmeric to replace the synthetic colors and promises that its mac and cheese will taste the same as before.

Kraft already took out the fake coloring from its character macaroni, like its SpongeBob,Star Wars and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shapes. Starting in 2016, all of its mac and cheese boxes will be synthetic-free.

The change comes after hearing from parents who wanted improved nutrition and simpler ingredients, Kraft said.

Related: Warren Buffett must really love mac & cheese

CNNMoney (New York) April 20, 2015: 1:10 PM ET

There’s a lot of momentum in the sustainable agriculture world. We helped Walmart discover that fertilizer runoff is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions in its supply chain, and they’re now working with suppliers to improve the way grain is grown across the U.S. That’s because half of all fertilizer applied to crops runs off the field, leading to water pollution, aquatic dead zones that kill marine life, and contributing to climate change – since the nitrogen in fertilizer runoff converts to nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Major food companies are also recognizing that increased weather variability from climate change can cause supply chain disruptions, that their customers are demanding transparency for how their food was grown, and that it’s in their best interest to meet retailers’ demands for sustainably grown grain.

That’s why Campbell’s Soup has focused on growing its vegetables as sustainably as possible, and why its Pepperidge Farm subsidiary is now investing in wheat sustainability in their Ohio and Nebraska sourcing areas.

My colleague Suzy Friedman, director of agricultural sustainability at EDF, recently interviewed Dan Sonke, manager of agricultural sustainability at Campbell’s, to get his take on this unprecedented momentum. Below are the highlights of their conversation on why his company is working with farmers to reduce environmental impacts, what they’re hearing from customers, and about why sustainable grain is becoming the new normal.

How did Campbell’s get involved in sustainable agriculture?

We heard from our customers and investors that they wanted more transparency and a greater focus on sustainable ag. We initially drafted goals for reducing our environmental footprint, then after I was hired we developed a plan to meet these goals, starting with tomatoes. I created a program to research the best techniques our farmers can use to grow our tomatoes, focusing on water, fertilizer, greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality, and pesticides. Based on the success of this program, we decided to expand our focus to four other ingredients: carrots, celery, potatoes and jalapenos.

Is fertilizer efficiency an easy sell to growers?

It depends on the crop. A specialty crop like tomatoes is very different from wheat. Fertilizer is a much smaller portion of production costs for tomato farmers, but fertilizer might be a top cost for wheat farmers. Vegetable farmers also sell directly to us, while wheat may go through several steps before it reaches us.

That’s why our collaboration with EDF and United Suppliers focuses on sustainability in our wheat sourcing areas. We’re deploying SUSTAIN™, developed and deployed by United Suppliers in collaboration with EDF, to help our wheat growers improve fertilizer efficiency and improve soil health, without sacrificing yields. United Suppliers brings a direct connection to wheat growers.

Are you seeing a shift change in terms of demand for sustainable grain?

Yes, yes, yes! Especially in the last two years – I’ve spent a lot of time at different forums and sustainable agriculture is next big thing that food companies are working on. There’s a big shift happening. Customers and a desire for transparency are one driver, but we also realize as food companies that sustainability of supply reduces risk in today’s world.

There’s a growing realization that agriculture represents the largest impact on natural systems and that we need agriculture to survive. We’re starting to see a lot of organizations that haven’t thought about this before start to express an interest in improving farming practices.

I see sustainability programs as a way to communicate to the world the progress that growers have made and the environmental benefits that come from efficiency.

The European Union’s largest grain grower and exporter has asked the European Commission for France to be excluded from some GM maize crop cultivation under the new scheme, the farm and environment ministries said in a joint statement.

As part of the opt-out process, France also passed legislation in the National Assembly that would enable it to oppose the cultivation of GM crops, even if approved at EU level, on the basis of certain criteria including environment and farm policy, land use, economic impact or civil order, the environment ministry added.

Widely grown in the Americas and Asia, GM crops have divided opinion in Europe. France had already banned cultivation of U.S. group Monsanto’s GM maize, saying it had serious doubts that it is safe for the environment.

Monsanto says its maize (corn) is harmless to humans and wildlife.

The EU opt-out, agreed in March, allows individual countries to seek exclusion from any approval request for GM cultivation in the 28-member bloc or varieties already cleared as safe by the EU.

Monsanto’s MON810 maize is the only GM crop grown in Europe, where it has been cultivated in Spain and Portugal for a decade, but other maize crops are in the process of being approved at EU level.

One of them is an insect-resistant maize known as 1507. Its developers, DuPont Pioneer and Dow Chemical, have been waiting nearly 15 years for the EU executive to authorize its cultivation in the bloc.

The French request concerns nine GM maize strains. Producers also include Switzerland’s Syngenta, a spokesman for the environment ministry said.

Germany also intends to make use of the new EU rules to stop the growing of GM crops, documents seen by Reuters showed last month.

The European Commission is responsible for approvals, but under the new rules requests for opt-outs also have to be submitted to the company making the application.

Monsanto has said it will abide by requests from Latvia and Greece to be excluded from its application to grow a GM crop in the EU but accused them of ignoring science.

(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide, Gus Trompiz and Valerie Parent; Editing by Jane Merriman and David Goodman)

It’s hard to get most kids to eat more than one broccoli floret. It’s nigh impossible to get them to eat only one potato chip. And it may be unhealthy, but there are few things more satisfying for vast swaths of humanity, regardless of age, than a cheeseburger and fries. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We think of taste as happening inside our mouths when we eat and drink, but researchers say that’s just the first domino in a complex chain reaction that determines how we experience flavor. Learning how to tune that cerebral response through neurogastronomy may help us lead healthier lives.

Rather than asking how food stimulates our senses, neurogastronomists start with the brain and ask how it creates sensations while eating. Our taste buds, of course, register sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami, but neurogastronomists are studying how scores of other stimuli work in concert to create the experience. Sound, scent, and visual presentation of food, for example, hold nearly as much sway as taste: the crunch of a potato chip, the kaleidoscope of color in a candy store, the plating of an elegant meal.

Think about a french fry, a pretty perfect food as far as the human brain is concerned, according to Gordon M. Shepherd, who uses it as an example in his book, Neurogastronomy . The potato is naturally sweet, and the fry is salty. Yum, right? But, also consider the crispy exterior and soft interior, springy consistency, warmth from having recently come from the fryer, and golden brown color. All of these sensations send the brain whirring. Combine that with the fatty-punch of a burger and the carbonated sweetness of a soda, and it’s a complete sensory overload.

Pairing those kinds of foods sets off a series of events in our brains: There’s not much fiber in the meal, so we don’t feel full. The variety of flavors stimulates a renewed interest in eating. Or maybe the fast-food joint is loud, which, weirdly enough, makes it harder for our brains to detect sweetness and saltiness.

The term “neurogastronomy” didn’t exist until 2006, when Shepherd, a Yale professor of neurobiology, coined it in the journal Nature Insight . “People hadn’t realized how central food flavor is to animal, and especially human, behavior,” he says. Shepherd’s specialty is retronasal smell, the scent we detect from inside our mouths, but it can be dizzying to consider everything neurogastronomy covers. As Dan Han, chief of University of Kentucky Neuropsychology Service’s clinical section and founding member of the International Society of Neurogastronomy, says, the field connects “neurosciences, clinical health sciences, culinary arts, and agriculture and food technology. We are excited to have our art and science truly integrate all things taste.”

In the decade since its inception, the field has taught us some really weird things about how we perceive taste. Someone who has experienced dining in one of those pitch-black restaurants can tell you lack of sight radically changes how you experience a meal. But other multisensory restaurants, some of which have taken a cue from neurogastronomists, have become en vogue , too, employing everything from wall projections and scent diffusers to illuminated plates and music synchronized to match the different courses of a meal. The fast-food industry has long mastered these triggers, with researchers analyzing every aspect of how their products are consumed to maximize our enjoyment. But can’t we exploit those responses for healthy, affordable food, too?

Studies about how non-taste-related sensations impact flavor could drive healthy eating in school cafeterias, at restaurants, and at home. Rough spoons, for example, create the sensation of saltiness without any added sodium. Desserts served on specifically colored plates can naturally boost the perception of sweetness. Upping the scent of food makes it taste richer without any added calories.

But, beyond tricking our brains, the challenge is finding out what satisfies us and makes healthy food attractive in everyday cooking. Chef Jehangir Mehta, chef and owner of the New York food and wine bar Graffiti (and also a Next Iron Chef runner-up), says he cuts down on beef in his restaurant’s burger by bulking it up with ground mushrooms and adding green chiles and coriander, which preserves the umami flavor of the dish. “People think there’s no protein in vegetables,” he says. “When you talk about vegetarian diets, the first thing people ask if whether they will have enough protein in their diet every day. And the answer is yes, you will have more than enough.”

Chef Leah Sarris, who runs Tulane’s University’s culinary medicine program, focuses on “teaching people how to make really delicious food that happens to be good for them,” she says. “A lot of that is finding ways to make people still feel satisfied without extra calories, fat, and sugar.” Not only does she lead community cooking classes and chef trainings, but she teaches doctors about cooking and communicating with patients about food. She says neurogastronomy is bridging the divide between chefs and science, and the delicious and the healthy. “Doctors are dealing with a problem after it exists, but chefs can change the whole health of the nation,” she says. “They are feeding people, which can cause or cure diseases. Chefs are starting to realize their impact on reversing health decline.”

Neurogastronomy holds promise for managing disease, too, from understanding how cancer patients’ taste changes during treatment to creating satisfying diets for diabetics.

Change will be slow, Mehta says. “It’s not just one person changing – society has to change.” As Shepherd says, some of the change will require public nutrition policies, looking at the economics of agriculture, and examining how our eating habits stem from offerings at places like grocery stores, which stock their shelves with processed foods.

The field is still in its infancy, but the International Society of Neurogastronomy was just formed last year and is having its inaugural symposium at the University of Kentucky this fall, featuring talks by Mehta, Sarris, and Shepherd, as well as other chefs, psychologists, and neurologists. While they’re making headway, you could try ditching some sugar and putting on some rose-tinted glasses for a sweeter outlook. Seriously .

Yeast has been engineered to produce the main psychoactive compound in marijuana – tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Responsible for the majority of marijuana’s psychological effects – including the high – THC can also be use to treat symptoms of HIV infection and chemotherapy and researchers are hoping their yeast will be able to pump it out more efficiently than producing synthetic versions.

“This is something that could literally change the lives of millions of people,” Kevin Chen from Hyasynth Bio, a US-based company that’s been engineering yeasts to produce both THC and cannabidiol – another active compound that has shown promise as a medical treatment – told The New York Times.

Back in August, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley in the US announced that they’d figured out how to make ‘home-made’ heroin using a modified form of sugar-fed yeast and an enzyme extracted from poppies. They discovered that a certain type of enzyme can turn glucose sugars into morphine, and were able to successfully express it in a simple form of genetically engineered yeast.

Now, researchers from the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany have outlined in the journal Biotechnology Letters how they looked into which genes the marijuana plant uses to produce THC, and then engineered those genes into their yeast. They then fed a cocktail of specially chosen molecules to the yeast, and it essentially ‘poops’ out the THC.

They’ve also reportedly managed to produce cannabidiol in the same way, but are yet to publish the details. The big challenge now will be figuring out how to replace these molecules with a raw material such as sugar to make the process cheap, easy, and commercially competitive.

The purpose isn’t to replace the marijuana plant, because let’s face it, it’s doing a pretty good job on its own. As Jonathan Page, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada who helped sequence the THC and cannabidiol genes, told Roxanne Khamsi at The New York Times: “Right now, we have a plant that is essentially the Ferrari of the plant world when it comes to producing the chemical of interest. Cannabis is hard to beat.”

The idea instead is to offer up an alternative for places such as Europe, where medicinal compounds from marijuana would be welcomed if they didn’t come in the form of a plant that could be illegally farmed. And synthetic versions of THC are currently available in pill form to treat several side effects of having HIV or chemotherapy, but the chemical synthesis involved is complicated and expensive.

What yeast could also offer is the potential to more efficiently test the medicinal properties of specific active compounds in marijuana, which have shown promise in treating everything from seizures and inflammation to cancer and parkinson’s disease. Yasmin Hurd, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Tech Insider that using all the compounds in marijuana simultaneously is like “throwing 400 tablets in a cocktail and saying ‘take this,'” rather than figuring out which component of that cocktail is really beneficial for the specific disease.

Because right now, rigorous scientific evidence showing that marijuana and its constituents effectively treat the symptoms of many of the illnesses for which they’ve been prescribed is lacking.

“Marijuana is increasingly embraced as medicine, yet there is limited evidence that it is effective against many of the conditions for which it is prescribed,” The New York Times reports. “Researchers hoping to separate fact from wishful thinking will need much better access to marijuana’s unique constituents. Modified yeast may provide them.”

What exactly is fertilizer? And, why do plants benefit from it?

Fertilizer is simply a material added to soils or directly to plant tissues that contains nutrients essential to the growth and health of the plant. Usually, this means Phosphorous, Nitrogen, and Potassium. These basic elements are usually in the form of chemical compounds that can be converted by the plant to access the needed elements. For instance, plants require Nitrogen, but use it in the form of larger compounds like ammonia (NH4) or nitrate (NO3-). Soils naturally contain these required chemical compounds, but often there is an imbalanced ratio. Fertilizers are inputs that farmers and gardeners can use to increase the amounts and balance the ratios of these essential chemical compounds.

Soil is not dirt. Soil is very much a living, breathing, organic system of nutrients and matter, which plants draw from to build themselves. When you look at a plant, and think of all the matter making up that plant, you realize that all of it came from three places: air, water, and soil. In nature, those plants will die and decompose back into the soil, helping to return much of that matter. In farming and gardening, the plants are removed from their location, to be consumed. This means that all of that matter has now exited the soil permanently. Over years of use, soils become less nutritious. To mend this, we add inputs back into the soil. Often times, this is in the form of a fertilizer.

Replacing and fortifying nutrient levels is key to maintaining healthy soils. Check out our awesome infographic below for a visual guide to understanding some fertilizer basics!

The first all-vegetarian drive-thru plans to open later this month in California.

Fans of Amy’s Kitchen – a well-known vegetarian frozen food chain – will be pleased to know that the company is planning on opening the world’s first all-vegetarian drive-thru later this month.

“Everybody said we couldn’t do it,” said Andy Berliner, Amy’s Kitchen co-founder. “But we set up a test kitchen in our warehouse space and did it. We learned how to do it from scratch very quickly.”

Such is definitely a sign of the changing times. Although fast food companies and Pepsi can make fun of health-conscious eaters, the fact-of-the-matter is that making ‘food one’s medicine’ is a priority all people need to take more seriously.

The menu for the drive thru will include gluten and dairy-free meals like tortillas, pizzas (in a rice or wheat crust), and burgers, all vegetarian and all cooked to order with fresh ingredients. Their first

location – as one can only assume this will take off in be in high demand elsewhere – will be located in Rohnert Park, California near the company’s Petaluma headquarters.

“The weather doesn’t always cooperate, so one of the most challenging parts of our business right now is the agricultural end,” disclosed Berliner, who has 50 people in the company working on finding just the right ingredients from farmers 18 months in advance.

“Consumers of all ages, but particularly millennials, are aware that what they eat affects their health, their wellbeing and how they feel,” he added. “We’ve just reached a tipping point in a whole new level of interest in eating better.”

The restaurant’s offerings will definitely be a welcome change from conventional fast-food options. For example, the fries, which come from a farm in California, will be fried in sunflower oil, according to Time.

And even though more work will be required to keep the food fresh, the price is competitive to other establishments. Burgers will cost $2.99 (doubles will be $4.29), cheese pizzas will cost $5.89, burritos $4.69 and salads will range from $3.99 to $7.99.

And if that’s not enough to make you wish every fast food establishment could be replaced with this healthier, more sustainable version, the structure of the drive thru is also more appealing.

The healthy-oriented restaurant is built where an old barn stood, and all of its wood was shipped back to the Idaho where it will be reused at the company’s plant. Solar panels line its roof and the building will collect and re-use rainwater. Furthermore, scrap metal was collected for construction and the wood furniture was made mostly with unused and discarded lumber off-cuts (the few brand new pieces are Forest Stewardship certified). And finally, all the packaging is printed with non-GMO ink.

Would you eat at an Amy’s restaurant if one was located near you? Share your thoughts in the comment sections below.

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Think fast food has to be greasy, unhealthy and cheap? Think again.

The country’s first all-organic drive-thru has finally opened in California, with lines out the door as customers flock for a chance to support what could be the biggest step forward for industry ever.

The new Amy’s Organic Drive-Thru restaurant opened in Rohnert Park, California, featuring an all-vegeterian menu packed with items like veggie burgers, salads, and even mac n’ cheese in both regular and vegan flavors.

The company’s signature frozen pizzas have always been a top seller in health food and grocery stores nationwide, and now Amy’s first restaurant is serving them up piping hot with toppings ranging from spinach and diced tomatoes (on its popular margherita pizza) to regular mozzarella cheese and even vegan “cheeze.”

As reported by ABC-7 News in the Bay area, the new Amy’s Restaurant has been completely packed with long lines in the dining area and in the drive-thru, and reported wait times of 15-20 minutes.

Others have chimed in on review sites noting that they were excited to see huge crowds with lines going all the way out the door, reminiscent of another chain working to change the food system: Chipotle Mexican Grill, whose popularity is exploding at the same time that McDonald’s is faltering.

“Five days in and they can barely keep up with demand,” reported ABC-7 about Amy’s first week in business.

Manager Paul Schiefer was more than happy with the response.

“So many (have) showed up and it’s given us a lot of hope that this is a concept that works.”

Sustainably Grown, GMO-Free and Tasty!

While other fast food restaurants import virtually all of their products from factory farming operations and give nothing back to the community, Amy’s actually grows produce on site thanks to its roof-bound garden.

Amy’s, an independently owned organic frozen food company, also reportedly pays workers a living wage with health benefits and is believed to be the first vegetarian fast food restaurant as well.

Check out a report on the grand opening below and see the menu: