NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Behold the Golden Age of Ice Cream

Barring lactose intolerance, an allergy or some unnatural prejudice, it's pretty safe to say we all scream for ice cream. Good for us, because we just might be living in the golden age of our favorite frozen treat. As evidence, here are a few spoonfuls that prove the future of ice cream is anything but vanilla.

In this month's issue of Food Technology, senior editor Don E. Pszczola covers a lot of ground in his article "The Not So Rocky Road of Ice Cream."

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First off are our tastes -- they're changing, particularly toward the sweet and salty side of the bowl. Does the flavor "salted caramel chocolate pretzel" make your mouth water like it does mine? At last year's Ice Cream Technology Conference of the International Dairy Foods Association, that combo was selected as the most innovative prototype flavor of the year.

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And hold on to your spoon -- chocolate-covered potato chips and popcorn are also flavors in the making.

Other atypical flavors are being lapped up, too. Avocado, ginger, beet and vanilla drizzled with olive oil and sea salt may sound gross, but have a bite first before you judge. And in England? Mustard-flavored ice cream. I'll understand if you pass on that one.

However, it's no secret about ice cream's effect on one's waistline. Helping slim down the extra-scoopers are a variety of companies producing healthy products. Despite being buzzkill adjectives, sugar-free, lactose-free and gluten-free actually have our health in their best interest, so don't wrinkle your nose at them. Other dairy-free desserts are being made with soy. Again, no brow-wrinkling.

Another company developed a line of vegetable extract blends that can give your ice cream a healthy boost. Carrot, pumpkin, sweet potato, paprika and reishi mushrooms are a sampling of the extracts.

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Just to be sure all this health-kick talk doesn't totally bum you out, I'll leave you with this: Pszczola writes about a new ice cream inspired by chewing gum. Taken from a Turkish-style ice cream called "dondurma," this new creation becomes stretchier the more it's manipulated. Its secret is the wild orchid root that gives it a unique texture. And it melts very, very slowly.

I don't know about you, but I'm gassing up my truck and driving into town. First stop: Sparky's ice cream parlor. I definitely know I'm getting a waffle cone. What I'm putting inside is anyone's guess.

via Newswise

Credit: Comstock / Getty Images

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Urban Beehive Makes Beekeeping Chic

Want a science lesson on bees and a guaranteed source of honey right on your high-rise balcony? The Philips Urban Beehive does just that, but it isn’t for sale. The beehive is a concept for the design company’s Microbial Home project, which is developing products that take a sustainable approach to energy consumption, human waste, food preparation, as well as other everyday household issues.

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The hive has a flowerpot on one side with an entry above that leads into an orange glass container. The honeycomb frame inside provides a base for the bees to build their wax cells. There is also a pull on the hive to allow smoke to come in to calm bees down before releasing them or harvesting honey. The reach of this idea goes far beyond improving a household; according to the press release, an item like this could improve the dwindling numbers of global bee colonies. Supposedly this would “encourage the return of the urban bee,” which sounds like a good thing, for pollination purposes, unless you’re allergic to bees ... and live in a city.

Via: CNET

Credit: Philips

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Would You Like Some Electronic Fries With That?

It’s undeniable that our world is becoming increasingly digital, interactive and connected. Over the past few years, some amazing progress has been made that allows us to bridge the gap between the physical world and the digital one. We can expect that one day everything we know in the physical world will have a parallel existence in cyberspace.

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Hannes Harms, a student at the Royal College of Art in London, has an idea for a way to do this with food. He wants to implant food items with edible radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. RFID tags are often used to catalog and track various objects, ranging from merchandise inventory to casino chips. They are made out of a small integrated circuit with an antenna and are generally not edible. However, in 2007 Kodak developed a safe, ingestible RFID tag to be used in medical imaging.

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Harms' so-called Nutrismart concept uses these edible chips in combination with a "smart plate" that acts as an RFID reader. When tagged food is placed on the plate, the plate reads it and then sends the information via bluetooth to a computer, laptop or smartphone.

Harms points out several ways in which the Nutrismart system might be useful: by providing nutritional information about an item, transmitting information about allergenics and expiration dates, or communicating whether the item is organic and where it was produced.

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For now Nutrismart remains a conceptual design because of the extra cost associated with manufacturing the RFID chips. New Scientist points out that “RFID chips can be made cheaply, but adding a dollar to the cost of a dollar food item is a leap many people might not want to make.”

NutriSmart from HannesRemote on Vimeo.

Credit: Hannes Harms

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Most Food Allergy Diagnoses Are Incorrect

Thirty percent of Americans think they have food allergies, but only five percent actually do, according to a recent study from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Much of that discrepancy can be blamed on the unreliability of the test currently used to diagnose food allergies. Right now, a patient thought to have a food allergy has small amounts of different allergens placed under his or her skin. If nothing happens, there's no allergy. But if a red bump or something similar appears, they are diagnosed as allergic to the corresponding food .

One researcher at MIT says he has developed a new technology to make food allergy diagnoses much more accurate. MIT assistant professor and chemical engineer Christopher Love describes his new process in an article for the journal Lab on a Chip. He says his new technology can analyze individual immune cells taken from patients, and measure a cell's response to each allergen.

That means it would take only a blood test to reveal a person's food allergies, which is much faster and more reliable than current tests.

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An allergic reaction occurs when the body's immune system mistakes a protein in food for something harmful. That allergic response that can include hives, rashes, swelling and much worse. This new technology only applies to food allergies, and will be of little use to help diagnose drug or airborne allergies.

Love says that many food allergy diagnoses now are circumstantial more than anything else. But the research has the potential to make food allergy diagnosis a much more exact science.

Photo: iStockphoto

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