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As a proposed pathway to societal transformation, the bioeconomy is aimed at providing a sustainable alternative to the fossil-based economy, replacing fossil raw materials with renewable biogenic alternatives. In this conceptual contribution, we argue that it is impossible to transform societies into sustainable bioeconomies considering the narrow boundaries of the bioeconomy as a policy. Drawing on approaches including agro-food studies, cheap food, and agrarian extractivism, we show that the bioeconomy is entangled in a broader context of social relations which call its claim to sustainability into question. Our analysis of the global soy complex, which represents the core of the current agro-food system, demonstrates how the bioeconomy perpetuates global inequalities with regard to trade relations, demand, and supply patterns, as well as power relations between the involved actors from the global to the local level. Against this background, we propose a fundamental rethink of the underlying understanding of transformation in bioeconomy policies. Instead of thinking the bioeconomy only along the lines of ecological modernisation, its proponents should consider studies on social-ecological transformation, which would entail radical structural change of the prevailing food regime to cope with the social-ecological crisis.

Tasty, convenient, and cheap, instant noodles are one of the most remarkable industrial foods ever. Consumed around the world by millions, they appeal to young and old, affluent and impoverished alike. The authors examine the history, manufacturing, marketing, and consumption of instant noodles. By focusing on three specific markets, they reveal various ways in which these noodles enable diverse populations to manage their lives. The first market is in Japan, where instant noodles have facilitated a major transformation of post-war society, while undergoing a seemingly endless tweaking in flavors, toppings, and packaging in order to entice consumers. The second is in the United States, where instant noodles have become important to many groups including college students, their nostalgic parents, and prison inmates. The authors also take note of \"heavy users,\" a category of the chronically hard-pressed targeted by U.S. purveyors. The third is in Papua New Guinea, where instant noodles arrived only recently and are providing cheap food options to the urban poor, all the while transforming them into aspiring consumers. Finally, this study examines the global \"Big Food\" industry. As one of the food system’s singular achievements, the phenomenon of instant noodles provides insight into the pros and cons of global capitalist provisioning.

There's a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation's school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it's no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower \"lunch ladies\" to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children? The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft,The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.

This chapter documents American food and eating history, presenting primary sources from a wide variety of perspectives from the Pre‐Columbian Era through the American Revolution. The United States government established the Communicable Disease Center, later called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 1946. Beginning in the 1980s, the CDC began to pay increased attention to the problem of obesity in the United States. By the start of the twentieth century, Michael Pollan had emerged as the most influential and talked about food writer and thinker in the United States. With his best‐selling books and thoughtful essays in widely circulated magazines and newspapers, he helped to give shape to and consolidate a new American food movement. Americans spent 18 percent less on food during the 1990s than they did during the 1980s. Much of the drop in food prices stemmed from increased efficiencies and output in the food industry.

Vitamin A deficiency is a major health problem in Africa and in many other developing countries. Biofortified staple crops that are high in pro-vitamin A have the potential to reduce the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency. Using a choice experiment with the real product in Uganda, we quantify the magnitude of the premium or discount in consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) that may be associated with it. Results suggest that taste plays an important role in consumer acceptance, and the provision of nutrition information does translate into substantial premiums for the biofortified variety. There is a substantial hypothetical bias in the WTP for the new varieties, and while cheap talk mitigates this bias, it does not eliminate it.

This article reports on an archival analysis of cases and policy documents in China and a survey and oral interviews with food safety regulators, food industry members, consumer organization representatives, food safety observers and scholars in Zhejiang province of China, on the nature and extent of food crime, the composition of offenders and factors associated with food crime. Results indicate that the prevalence of food crime occurs in the context of 'cheap capitalism', which is characterized by low price, inferior quality of products and degraded social morality and business ethics. A closer interaction among government, industry and academia, forming a triple helix, is playing an increasingly significant role in causing food crime.

A cheap technique based on an open-ended coaxial probe together with a vector network analyzer was set up. The vector network analyzer NanoVNA, a very tiny handheld device, is the affordable component that gives the instrumental chain a cost-effective perspective. The open-ended coaxial probe is a cable with an SMA gold-plated termination. User-friendly programs can be used to calibrate the instrument, carry out the measurements, and save data on PC. Simple liquid solutions (sodium chloride, citric acids, and saccharose) and more complex liquid food (milk, egg products, and fruit juice) were investigated. In addition, the temperature on the electric measurement of milk was measured to evaluate a possible influence for refrigerated storage products. The reflection parameters, such as the real and imaginary parts of S11, were used to build univariate and multivariate models. The best results in terms of coefficient of determination and related error were 0.997 (RMSE 0.05%) for sodium chloride and 0.965 (RMSE 0.71 °Brix) for fruit juice considering the univariate model, and 0.997 (RMSE 0.04%) for sodium chloride and 0.981 (RMSE 4.44%) for yolk using multivariate analysis. The proposed solution is non-destructive, cheap, rapid, and very attractive for potential lab and industrial applications.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the staple food of more than half of the world’s population. The main factors affecting the quality of rice include grain length, texture, stickiness, flavor, and aroma. Pesticides are intended for the protection of plant products from weeds, fungi, or insects. However, pesticides also result in negative effects such as environment disturbances, pest resistance and toxicity to both users and food consumers. The aim of this study was to conduct validation experiments of a method for the determination of multi-pesticides in rice, a model food of other cereals. A quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe (QuEChERS) method was used for the extraction of pesticide residues from rice followed by high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) with a triple quadrupole instrument using electrospray ionization. The analytical method has chromatography-tandem according to SANTE/11813/2017. The limit of quantification was 5 μg/kg. Recoveries for the 155 analyzed pesticides ranged between 77.1% for pirimiphos-ethyl and 111.5% for flutriafol and they were determined at 3 spiking levels. The proposed method was demonstrated to be quick, simple, precise, and accurate and allowed for evaluating the compliance of cereals samples with legislated maximum residue levels of pesticides in the European Union.

Colour is a key parameter in the evaluation of food products. Accurate colour measurement enables us to maintain their consistent quality. The aim of this study was to compare three colour measurement methods. The food products used for the study were French fries, the colour of which was checked after defined frying times. Their colour was measured using a professional Minolta C-5 spectrophotometer (Konica Minolta Sensing Europe B.V., Nieuwegein, The Netherlands) as well as a low-cost SparkFun SEN-15050 spectrophotometer (SparkFun Electronics, Niwot, CO, USA) and a readily available HP SkanJet 4850 scanner (Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, CA, USA). The images obtained were analysed using free ImageJ software ver. 1.54. The results indicate that low-cost spectrophotometers used in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems and colour measurement methods based on vision techniques are suitable for less precise but fast measurements and, in such cases, can successfully replace the expensive and often bulky devices.

Ptaquiloside, a naturally occurring cancer-causing substance in bracken fern, has been detected in the meat and milk of cows fed a diet containing bracken fern. A rapid and sensitive method for the quantitative analysis of ptaquiloside in bracken fern, meat, and dairy products was developed using the QuEChERS method and liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry. The method was validated according to the Association of Official Analytical Chemists guidelines and met the criteria. A single matrix-matched calibration method with bracken fern has been proposed, which is a novel strategy that uses one calibration for multiple matrices. The calibration curve ranged from 0.1 to 50 µg/kg and showed good linearity (r2 > 0.99). The limits of detection and quantification were 0.03 and 0.09 µg/kg, respectively. The intraday and interday accuracies were 83.5–98.5%, and the precision was <9.0%. This method was used for the monitoring and exposure assessment of ptaquiloside in all routes of exposure. A total of 0.1 µg/kg of ptaquiloside was detected in free-range beef, and the daily dietary exposure of South Koreans to ptaquiloside was estimated at up to 3.0 × 10−5 µg/kg b.w./day. The significance of this study is to evaluate commercially available products in which ptaquiloside may be present, to monitor consumer safety.