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FACTS
New Device Measures Ripeness of Avocados
Felix Instruments has developed a new avocado quality meter which will gauge
the ripeness of avos using a spectrometer. “Simply put, we shine a light into
the avocado and the information that comes back informs us of the dry matter
content and ripeness stage,” says Dennis Fisher, an application scientist at Felix
Instruments – Applied Food Science. The device, the F-751 Avocado Quality Meter,
determines avocado freshness via dry-matter assessment (dry matter is what
remains after water is taken away from the fruit). It defines the starch levels, sugars,
and other ripening solids. The idea is to help growers more accurately gauge a
harvest date while saving on labor costs in the process. “We are excited to have an
affordable instrument that avocado growers can use anywhere, from the field to
the packing houses to the retailers,” says Fisher. “This instrument can give non-
destructive accurate maturity and ripeness data from anywhere that avocado is.”
—freshplaza.com
UN Report Says Too Much Food is Wasted
A new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations has found that too much food across the globe is
being wasted. In the report’s summary, it states the global volume
of food wastage is estimated at 1.6 billion tonnes of “primary
product equivalents.” Total food wastage for the edible part of this
amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes. Other facts from the report state
that: Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion
tonnes of CO 2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere
per year; the total volume of water used each year to produce food
that is lost or wasted is equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s
Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva; and
1.4 billion hectares of land — 28 per cent of the world’s agricultural
area — is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.
—www.fao.org
Scholarly Approach Could Help Solve Global Food Crisis
Some argue the current approaches for solving issues with the global
food system don’t cut it. Researchers at the University of Michigan
are advocating an interdisciplinary approach that views all elements
of the food system as part of a comprehensive framework they
mapped out in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
“A global system that leaves millions food-insecure while contributing
to obesity, that generates significant environmental degradation, and
that compromises the well-being of consumers and producers alike
challenges the research community to ask new research questions
and apply novel analytical frameworks for analyzing them,”
states the conclusion in the article. In their article, the
researchers propose a new analytical framework for the
study of the global food system found at the intersection
of four topics: the ecology of agroecosystems, equity in
global and local food systems, the cultural dimensions
of food and agriculture, and human health.
—sciencedaily.com
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