helo joel,
>Frementation technology has already had a dramatic impact on
>global agriculture and has the potential to restructure the whole
>north-south agricultural relationship.
certainly correct.... the flavor of the natural product has become
less and less important, you simply add it later in the food chain..
>My understanding is that within just a few short years after the
>technical feasibility of this technology was shown in a lab,
>Pepsi and Coca-Cola switched over to HFCS and the world sugar
>market collapsed never to recover.
and immediately ran into trouble. remember the coke/pepsi war and
the withdrawal of hfcs coca-cola ("only apes drink coke") ? isn't
the "REAL" coke again produced with "REAL" sugar-cane sugar ?
>My prediction is that in the near future, it will be possible to
>use fermentation technologies to cost effectively biosynthesize
>the "significant" molecules of nearly all of the commodity crops
>currently grown exclusively in the tropics. In factories in
>temperate regions, biomass substrates will be converted into
>instant coffee, tea, cheap chocolate....
that's already going on for several years. but again people
don't seem to be lucky with it in every case. there was an
enormous uproar in germany half a year ago, which again
undermined confidence in food. the largest producer of yoghourt
in germany was selling his raspberry yoghourt with a label
showing nice darkred raspberries and telling the consumer :
"produced only with natural ingredients" (which the consumer
clearly understood as "natural raspberries" or some kind
of concentrate). it was found out, that the thousands of tons of
yoghourt never in their short life came even near ONE SINGLE
raspberry - the flavour was produced by fermenting
the wood of a canadian tree to a pulp. from this pulp a flavour
component was extracted, which tasted like raspberry. it could
not even be declared "nature-identical flavour", as it wasn't the
flavour being responsable for the original taste of raspberries.
the trouble got before court (german government against
landliebe), the yoghourt producer won. argument: wood pulp IS a
natural ingredient. would you believe me, that consumers did
(and do) not want to eat fermented wood, when they thought
to have bought a yoghourt with real raspberry fruits ?
scandale after scandale the food industry is burying it's own grave
and is feeding another way of food distribution. but: anyone
expecting, that organic food per se would be accepted without a
control system, which would be able to uncover such tricks, is
talking moonshine... people know, that up to now things like did not
happen in certified organic systems and so they have a
"trust bonus", but they certainly do not trust it blindly.
so fermentation also is a two-sided sword and what a lot of people
usually associate with cheese- and wine-making, ethanol and vinegar
production partly has become the lab of dr. who.
another fermentation technique was producing proteins from oil,
in the result something comparable to that:
# WOULD YOU EAT STEAK OFF THE PETRI DISH INSTEAD OF THE HOOF?
Scientists have found how to "grow" a steak from a few cells -
creating the world's first humanely produced meat. But will
vegetarians go for it - steak from a petri dish?
www.healthcentral.com/drdean/DeanFullTextTopics.cfm?ID=22902
---------------
klaus wiegand
+-[Quote of the day, powered by k. wiegand]--+
| |
| This land is your land. |
| This land is my land. |
| So stay on your land. |
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