Food

The University of California, Davis, has been awarded $20 million as part of a multi-institutional collaboration to establish an institute focused on enabling the next-generation food system through the integration of artificial intelligence, or AI, technologies. The award is part of a larger investment announced today (Aug. 26) by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, in partnership with several federal agencies — distributing a total of $140 million to fund seven complementary AI research institutes across the nation.

A new startup out of the UC Davis biological and agricultural engineering (BAE) department has developed an award-winning system that uses insect larvae to produce animal feed with less land and a smaller carbon footprint. Fresh off success in UC Berkeley’s 2020 Big Ideas competition and UC Davis’ 2019 Big Bang! Business Competition, BioMilitus is poised to use their lab-based research to make the planet more sustainable.

People in the United States and Europe lose and waste about as much food as the entire food production of Sub-Saharan Africa. Are the people in developing countries simply better at food handling and consumption than those in developed countries? Why is it, then, that smallholder farmers, especially those in developing countries, around the world suffer from food insecurity? How can we reduce some of the 1,300,000,000 tons of food lost or wasted global per year?

There are clues about how to preserve food and keep it safe that based on nature inspired approaches if we look hard enough for them. Professor Nitin, in the latest in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Winter Quarter Seminar Series, discussed this topic and how he has applied it in his work.

Professor Nitin started off with a carrot. A simple food that leaves questions unanswered when one takes the time to look more closely at it.

Earlier this month, ASABE announced the winners for this year’s 2019 AE50 awards. Among them is the SAUNA Food Waste Nutrition Conversion System produced by Treasure8 of San Francisco. Sponsored by ASABE’s Resource Magazine, the AE50 awards are given to top innovative products sold in the previous year.

Drs. Zhongli Pan and Ruihong Zhang along their team members of Drs. Chandraseker Venkitasamy, Ragab Khir and Hamed E Elmashad received a $1.1 million Public Interest Energy Research Program (PIER) grant to work on a new commercial walnut drying system that could save growers as much as 50 percent in energy costs.

Read all about it in the full article on the California Energy Commission’s blog.

Dr. Zhongli Pan, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at UC Davis and Research Engineer at USDA-ARS-WRRC, has been elected as the President-Elect for the Chinese American Food Society for 2015/16. Founded in 1975, the Chinese American Food Society serves to engage professionals interested in food science and technology and in Chinese culture and to create venues where the food scientists can share and exchange ideas for the advancement of food science and technology.

Officials from the city of Zhuhai, China, and the University of California, Davis, signed a memorandum of understanding on May 26 to establish the World Food Center-China.

The WFC-China will be the central office for coordinating research and training activities in food safety for various Sino-U.S. Joint Research Centers across the country. A facility for the center is being developed in a newly created economic zone in Zhuhai’s Guangdong province, a region known for its technology industry, economic vitality and proximity to Hong Kong.