Surely many of you have as childhood memory go shopping with your parents to buy fresh milkfrom farm or the nearest village, or even remembers the van of milkman that went selling the milk in jugs by the streets. This flavour, the cream was left on the surface after boiling at home and what good this cream was to prepare delicious pastries!
In Spain the direct supply by the producer of small quantities of raw milk to the final consumer or to local retail establishments that supply directly to consumers is prohibited, according to Royal Decree 640/2006.
But meanwhile the AECOSAN (Spanish Agency of Consumer Affairs, Food Security and Nutrition) is considering the possibility of amending Royal Decree 640/2006, so that by 2015 it requested the Scientific Committee to report on the microbiological risks associated with the consumption of milk raw and processed dairy products made from raw milk. The report by the Scientific Committee gathered concretely aspects:
The sale of raw milk and cream
The production of cheese more than 60 days with raw milk that does not meet the criteria somatic cell and total germs
The applicable requirements colostrum.
However, the sale of raw milk and cream in Spain intended for direct human consumption is not limited or prohibited, if all the requirements of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 and Regulation (EC) No 853/2004 are achieved.
Therefore, currently in Spain we can find places to buy raw milk, in fact the trend for “natural is healthier” and other trends have increased the sale of this product. In Spain 42 tons of raw milk were consumed in 2013 (1.2% of all milk consumed), according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment. In the United States these trends are much higher, and there are lobby groups that promote the consumption of raw milk and dairy products, but is it safe drinking raw milk?
According to European Union (EU) legislation, “raw milk” is defined as milk produced by the secretion of the mammary gland of farmed animals that has not been heated to more than 40 °C or undergone any treatment that has an equivalent effect. Therefore, when it comes to raw milk consumption we refer to milk without any treatment, not even if we purchased raw milk and it is boiled by us in our home, and by the way, it is made at the discretion of each one.
Milk is a rich in nutrients, high water activity and with proper pHfor growth of microorganisms, both microorganisms beneficial (species of the genera Lactobacillus, Streptococcus, Enterococcus) as pathogens (the most common organisms Salmonellaspp., Campylobacter spp., Escherichia coli, Yersinia enterocolitica, Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus, but also viruses, parasites and food toxins) and this is where it runs a risk when consuming raw milk or products made from it.
Raw milk, contrary to what many people think, is not sterile, and may be the vehicle for the transmission of various diseases, some of them very serious depending on the state of health of the affected person or the moment of the life (children, pregnant women, ageing people, immunocompromised persons, etc.). Potential pathogens are not eliminated because does not exist a heat treatment, and may have reached the milk by a systemic infection of animals, or mastitis thereof (udder infection), addition during milking and subsequent distribution there is a risk contamination and deterioration thereof.
Treatments like pasteurization (heating for a specified time at temperatures below 100 ºC) or sterilization (higher than 100 ºC for a given time), allow us to have in our homes safe milk for our consumption, killing vegetative forms in first case and vegetative and spore forms the second.
The movements and groups advocating the consumption of raw milk, recommend its use without any heat treatment, even for children, arguing that the milk itself is safe, and they rely on the control of livestock and good practices. They also believe that raw milk is able to prevent allergies and intolerances. Neither pasteurization or sterilization determine allergy or intolerance to milk, milk either raw, pasteurized or sterilized is not suitable for people who have intolerance to lactose.
Processing operations of milk have influence in their organoleptic quality, and someflavors and tastes that have raw milk are lost during these operations, mainly due to the process of homogenization of fat, rather than processes heat to make it safe for its consumption.
The technology of food processes has allowed over the years to provide safe and affordable food to consumers. In the case of milk may we yearn for the taste of milk, their original taste, but if we do a real analysis of the risks of drinking raw milk without any treatment not worth playing roulette with a glass of raw milk… even if it is yummy.
In the 20th Century 80’s decade there was reborn interest in neural networks, both in academia and industry. A neural network is an algorithm that mimics the neural connections present in the neocortex. The interest was motivated by the rediscovering of algorithms to train the networks. Through training, a neural network can learn to do something. And since neural networks are implemented in computers, we have computers that can learn. This is an intellectual ability that people share with monkeys among other animals with neocortex. For this reason, neural networks are the backbone of machine learning, which according to some is part of artificial intelligence.
Neural networks can learn to classify objects and also to reproduce the behaviour of complex systems. They learn by examples. When we want to teach a neural network to differentiate between apples and oranges we have to present it examples of both fruits with a label indicating if it is an orange or an apple. The point is the neural network will be able to correctly classify oranges and apples different to the ones used during training. This is because a neural network does not perform a mere memorisation, but they are able to generalise. This is the key for learning.
But the interest in neural networks that raised up during the eighties faded as the following decade started because more promising machine learning methods appeared. However, a group of indomitable Canadian researchers managed to persevere and transformed neural networks into deep learning.
Deep learning is an algorithm family similar to neural networks, with the same aim and better performance. The number of neurons and connections is higher, but the main difference is the abstraction capacity. When we train a neural network to differentiate between apples and oranges we cannot present the items as they are, we have to extract some features that describe the oranges and apples, as the colour, shape, size, etc. To do this is what in this context we call abstraction. In contrast to neural networks, deep learning is able to do abstraction by itself. This is the reason why deep learning is thought to be able to understand what they see and heard and it is, therefore, a bridge between machine learning and artificial intelligence.
As it happened with neural networks, deep learning has gained huge interest among companies. In 2013, Facebook failed to buy company DeepMind, but Google succeeded one year later when it paid 500 million dollars for it. In case some body missed this irruption of deep learning in the media, it became mainstream in early 2016 when Google DeepMind software AlphaGo beated Lee Sedol, the go champion. This was an unprecedented technical success because go is much harder than chess. When IBM’s Deep Blue won Garry Kasparov in 1996, it used a strategy based on figuring out all the possible short-term movements. However, this strategy is not possible in go because the possibilities are infinite in comparison to chess. For this reason, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo is not programmed to play go, it is able to learn to play by itself. The machine learns by playing many times against a human player, improving in every game until it becomes unbeatable.
Deep learning is not a secret arcane, anybody who wants to learn it can do it. There are free available tools, like Theano, TensorFlow and H2O, that allows any person with programming knowledge and the concepts in mind to try it. The company OpenAI has freely released its first algorithm, which has been made around the reinforced learning paradigm. There also companies offering commercial products onto which applications can be build. These are the cases of the Spanish Artelnics and the Californian Numenta. Deep learning is being successfully used for face recognition and verbal command interpretation.
Deep learning, besides other machine learning paradigms, could be an important innovation opportunity. It could be one of the tools to unleash the value hidden in the big data repositories. Moreover, in the industrial practice it could be used to detect and classify faults or defects, to model complex systems to be used in control schemes, and in novelty detection.
The photographer Peter Menzel few years ago visited different countries of the world in order to photograph families of those countries with the food they consume regularly for a week. A book was published based on this work, “Hungry Planet”, where tastes, preferences and food culture of these countries are reflected, but in addition we can see the reality of our world, in which millions of people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, while in other countries obesity rates grow as epidemic and food are wasted in large amounts.
The expense that a family does in your shopping basket is very different between countries reflecting Menzel. In some, like Chad, they survive as little more than a dollar a week, while in others, we eat with excess of calories and we are wasting big amounts of food. With our habits, we contribute to wasting much of the food we buy and consume in our homes.
I used the pictures of Menzel in this occasion to close this post the serie about food waste in particular, to speaking about food waste in households.
The 42% of food are thrown out in household according to UE, and Spain is the seventh country that more food waste to 7,7 million tons. In 2013 a study was published by Hispacoop and supported by the National Institute of Consumption in which it was noted that in Spain the average waste per household is 1,3 kg/week. The group of breads, cereals, pastries and others foods (19,3%), fruits and vegetables (16,9%), milk yogurts, cheeses and other dairy products (13,3%) and pasta are the most waste food, among all these groups account for 62.6% of wasted food in households.
Leftovers, main reason Leftovers meals are the main reason why food is thrown away in the household (86.5%), not to calculate the portions not plan well or menu beforehand.
We have to recover recipes and seek to take advantage of these leftovers, our recipe book is full of dishes that are born like recipes of leftovers: “croquetas”, “ropa vieja”, the delicious “torrijas”, etc. All of them have appeared of wit of chefs, cooks and especially housewives who have sought the way to harness remains of bread, meat, vegetables and give them a second chance like delicious dishes.
The deterioration of food by poor storage or excess in storage has been reflected as the next reason to reject food in Spanish households. We tend to save the leftovers of the meal, with the intention to use it for a later meal, but then we do not plan well, or we let spoil this leftovers, to finally end up in the rubbish bin.
Planning, kitchen and reused To reduce this waste in our homes we should start by good planning. We have to think the weekly menu, and the food we need for this menu, and what we are going to do with leftovers. Knowing the weekly menu will help us to know previously what quantities and ingredients we need to do it.
In this way we will not buy too much and thus we will avoid some of these foods end up damaged, or buy food we already have in the pantry. When we make the purchase it must look at the expiration date or preferred consumption of food, ensuring that falls within our planning.
At the time of cooking we should adjust the amounts of ingredients to the number of people, using kitchen utensils to help us calculate the portions always in the same way. It can be calculated for cooking more quantity if you have a clear intention, and freeze the leftovers for a later meal planned, but this must be taken into account.
On 26 September it was celebrated in Madrid the “4th Meeting point against food waste” organized by AECOC, where the waste problem was analyzed from different perspectives and pooling actual experiences of prevention and reduction.
Social enterprises as “Espigoladors”, which employs people at risk of social exclusion, transferred their experience in preventing waste through the use of fruits and vegetables discarded in the field (by size, defects, appearance) for the production and sale of jams and creams, contributing in a sustainable way to reducing waste, creating jobs and getting an economic benefit.
Innovation in packaging it has also been discussed and how can reduce the waste, or in the case presented by Pepsico, how through a program of valorization of its by-products is achieved zero waste in one of its production plants snacks.
Several posts have been dedicated about food waste in this blog, trying to find solutions for the waste reduction and its valorization. We have discussed the need for prevention as a tool to reduce waste throughout the food chain, but besides preventing, what can it be done to decrease the amount of waste generated by the food industry?
The food industry is one of the main generators of waste organic nature in our country, mainly composed of those parts of the raw materials are not useful in the development process and can represent up to 85% by weight of the raw material received.
Few years ago these organic wastes were leaded to animal feed industry or agronomic valorization. But in recent decades, in the face of need for food industry to value their by-products, the R & D and the work of the research teams, are aimed at finding innovative and tangible solutions with economic return and high value-added .
Companies are slowly changing their outlook towards the environment, gradually transforming its working methods towards more sustainable manufacturing processes, but while optimizing their resources, reduce waste and obtain an economic benefit.
Trends in R & D in terms of the valorization of by-products go in parallel to trends in the food industry in the manufacture of new foods. Thus, many food by-products are source for obtaining compounds with high added value as antioxidants, fiber, essential fatty acids, antimicrobials, minerals, etc., which can later be included in production processes to obtaining new foods of high added value and in many cases with functional properties.
The food industry is not the only one who can benefit from using these products. Currently, there are cosmetics or pharmaceuticals in the market incorporating different compounds such as antioxidants or polyphenols, which have been obtained from by-products valorization.
The CARTIF experience in this research field has been wide, and it has developed several projects where the objective has been to obtain compounds with high added value from by-products of the food industry. The DIANA project led by several companies and accompanied by research centers, where the goal was to obtain from different products like coffee, grape marc, algae, etc., compounds with high added value for their incorporation into different food matrices and provide various improvements, thanks to these compounds.
The LACTISHOE project works in a very different meaning, because from whey as a by-product of the cheese industry and through and hybrid membrane-fermentation reactor, that it will produce lactic acid. Then, it will perform the lactic acid microencapsulation, and then it will be incorporated in the templates and in the lining of shoes, giving them beneficial properties for the foot.
Waste generation by food industries is an inherent consequence of their activity, but the search for sustainable and environmentally friendly alternatives is a necessity that faces all companies, not forgetting that both have an economic benefit through the valorization of their by-products.
There is a restaurant in Japan where if its clients left one only rice grain in the plate, should pay a fine. Specialized in shellfish, the “Hachikyo Restaurant” offers a dish that consist of salmon roes over a white rice bed. The restaurant informs the customers who order this dish: “Working conditions of fisherman are hard and dangerous. To express our gratitude to the food that they provide, it is forbidden to leave one only rice grain in the plate. The costumers who don’t finish their tsukko meshi should give a donation.
These punitive measurements are been applied by some restaurants in different countries around the world to make people aware of the food waste in the hospitality sector, where in the case of Spain are thrown 63.000 tons of food per year, a wastage that costs 255 M€.
On average 21% of food waste arises from spoilage; 45% from food preparation and 34% from consumer plates (WRAP. 2013. “Overview of Waste in the UK Hospitality and Food Service Sector”).
If a restaurant wants to reduce their quantity of food waste, it have to identify what are the critical points where is throwing the food and them to apply solutions. Mismanagement purchasing, incorrect storage and conservation of products can become in waste of product, economic and resources (personal cost that prepare food that later rather will throw it, waste of energy during cooking, conservation, etc).
A point of improvement to reduce waste food can be the practices in food preparation at kitchen. Peel, chop, clean, cut are techniques that if it doesn’t do efficiently or it don`t use the correct utensils the quantity of product that is thrown can be very important.
The leftovers are the sign more obvious about the food waste. Portions too big or garnishes not consumed, should be an indication for take the initiative by the restaurant and provide some changes to the customers. These changes can be very attractive to clients concerned with the problem of food waste. Some tips to reduce waste:
• Offer in the menu different sizes of portions (whole, half portion, mini-portions, portions for kids, etc). • Inform to the customers about the size of portion before they order their meal. • Include in the menu some pictures of the dishes, in this way the customers can make an idea about the size of portions. • Garnishes are very important in the quantity of waste, the restaurant have to analyze which are thrown it by the customers to suggest some changes. It possible that the restaurant is offering the same garnish for different plates and so that the customer will leave it. In other cases, garnishes very “thoroughgoing” are offered where the customer don’t know if they are part of the menu or they are put like ornament. Offer the garnish separate to the customer can serve himself the quantity that he wants is a good option for reduce this kind of food waste. • Many times the client doesn’t want dessert because he is aware that is too big for finish it, a solution could be to offer “minidessert” or “miniportions”. • Bread is one the food more wasted is restaurants. In many occasions bread is served as an individual portion, when the consumption of bread is different between customers or it is dependent on the kind of meal. Bread can be served in a little hamper in small portions to the clients to eat in based on their appetite.
Food waste due to client is much higher in buffet restaurants, because the customers can serve all the food that they want. This promotes the wastage in an important way. In this kind of restaurants is possible carry out some initiatives to reduce the waste, like:
– Use plates and utensilsmore little in the moment of serving. The quantity that the client can serve it is not limited, but the big plates promote that the client pick a lot of food that it will end up being thrown in the bin. – Don’t use trays which promote that the clients serve themselves a large quantity of food. – Posters with material informative about food waste are found in some restaurants to make aware of the problem of food waste. In these posters it is recommended serving only the food that it is going to be consumed.
“Doggy bag” is offered in some restaurants in others countries, this kind of lunch box is used to carry the leftovers by the customers when they don’t finish their menu, and contribute to reduce the waste and to become aware of the problem. This habit it is not very common in Spain, because the embarrassment of the customers to request the leftovers, but this trend is changing thanks to customers worried about food waste and there are more and more restaurants that offer their own “doggy bag”.
In 2012 the campaign “No lo tiro” was launch by “San Miguel” brewing company in collaboration with restaurants of Madrid and Barcelona. This campaign encouraged to clients to request the leftovers of the menu.
Even there are restaurants where their menu is elaborated only with leftovers, using surplus goods from the food industry, these are foodstuffs which shops cannot sell for various reasons due to the demands of consumer culture – such as those discarded for purely aesthetic reasons of standard shapes, or surplus seasonal produce.
The hospitality sector has a lot of improvement opportunities in this sense, and restaurants managers and customers it can achieve in an important way the reducing of food waste.
