Once in a while, a really intriguing story comes along – one which makes you think, “How did they make THAT connection?” In today’s case, its just the latest discovery by a US researcher who has a fixation on putting stale bread to good use…
It’s estimated that more than one third of the world’s total
population doesn’t have access to safe drinking water…
It’s a specific food waste issue. But one which has plagued cooks and those responsible for providing food for larger groups (towns and villages; navies at sea; armies in the field) for centuries…
Also a family-level concern
Bread has occupied a unique place in history as a food whose presence can be traced back thou-sands of years in an unbroken line. Very few other foods can make the same claim. Except, perhaps, beer and wine. In fact, there have been times – the Middle Ages, in particular, comes to mind – when the vast majority of the population based all three meals every day on a small loaf (large ‘bun’) of some kind of bread per person and a cup of weak beer.
Bread was made fresh every day – sometimes several times a day – then. Especially by the bakers, who were highly-respected members of the community. Many folks relied upon them to provide the ‘daily bread’ they needed to survive. Because it was at this time that skilled workers in society were beginning to specialize.
Up to that point, families were generally self-sufficient units. Someone in each family made ‘the bread’ every day. But families were starting to forge cooperative arrangements which amounted to communities. As such, every community had a baker, a carpenter, a smithy, a weaver, a cooper (bar-rel maker) and perhaps a selection of other specialists who made the community as whole stronger.
Rather than risk making too little bread to meet a community’s needs, bakers would aim high, just in case. Immediately, the problem of leftovers and food spoilage became a concern. Food was too valu-able and crucial resource to waste…
Enter, some new ‘products’
Thus did the concept of ‘toast’ come into being, when folks tried re-heating bread to ‘make it fresh again’. And stuffing was developed as way of refreshing and enhancing ‘day old’ bread.
Let’s not forget bread crumbs – which were only invented when very stale bread was first crushed as an addition to, and topping for a variety of other foods.
A serious issue
But in our modern ‘world of plenty’, food waste has be-come less and less a concern. Folks have be-come blind to the dangers of food supply sustainability over about the past half century. You could say, since the Great Depression. We’ve been encouraged to become a throw-away culture. Especially when kit comes to food
The situation has gotten to the point where more than half of all food produced around the world is wasted at some stage or other of production or distribution, or in the home itself.
Science to the rescue!
Enter, University of Pennsylvania grad students David Bujdos and Zachary Kuzel, and their supervisor, Dr Adam Wood, who had previously published a paper on the potential for turning stale bread into industrial carbon electrodes.
Following up on techniques tested in those earlier efforts, the team has now come up with a way to use stale bread to desalinate sea water for human consumption.
That’s particularly important, in a world where (it’s estimated) more than one third of the total popu-lation doesn’t have access to safe drinking water – at the same time as 24 million slices of ‘stale’ bread are thrown out every day. That translates to an estimated 900,000 tons of ‘surplus’ bread going to waste every year.
Also a climate issue
A biologically active substance such as bread is a particularly bad thing to throw into a landfill, Wood also points out.
Research published recently in the open access journal Molecules warns, “bread waste presents a serious environmental impact. Considering the fact of [bread] being organic biogenic waste, studies have shown that bread is responsible for gas emissions in the form of carbon dioxide [and] meth-ane.” Both are primary greenhouse gasses.
My take
Rarely does a discovery such as the process to turn stale bread into carbon electrodes and micro-filters for water desalination preset itself. And because these stories are shrouded so deeply in the mysteries of lab science they even more rarely ‘surface’ in language that the average person can understand. But I go trough a lot of learned studies a month. And only a few make it to the FFB as post topics I think you really should hear about.
I hope you’ll keep that in mind, when you read stories such as today’s in this space, that the issues behind them really do have huge potential to effect the world, either for better or worse.
Truly, ‘news you need to know’…
~ Maggie J.