Today’s Solutions: April 29, 2024

Miscellaneous

This guy spends $2.75 a year o

This guy spends $2.75 a year on food and eats like a king

Over the last two years, William Reid has spent just $5.50 on food. Reid is a committed dumpster diver: He dredges unsold grub from supermarket dumpsters and collects food scraps wherever he finds them. And he feasts. A graduate student in film and electronic media at American University in Read More...

Denmark launches funding to fi

Denmark launches funding to fight food waste

Denmark has announced a subsidies scheme to combat food waste. The scheme was launched by the country’s minister for food and the environment, Esben Lunde Larsen. A subsidy pool worth more than DKK 5 million (almost $750,000) will be distributed to projects trying to tackle waste throughout Read More...

Biomimicry Institute announces

Biomimicry Institute announces winners of second food systems Challenge

The Biomimicry Global Design Challenge has announced the winners of its 2016 competition, the second challenge centered on food systems and how biomimicry can help improve them. The 10 winning teams will receive cash prizes and some will get the chance to bring their project to market and compete Read More...

Sub-Saharan Africa agriculture

Sub-Saharan Africa agriculture to rise 2.6% yearly through 2025

Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural output may rise 2.6 percent annually through 2025, boosted by productivity improvements. “Faster technology adoption associated with the emergence of medium-scale producers and integration of smallholder producers into the value chain” will raise Read More...

Growing Greens in the Spare Ro

Growing Greens in the Spare Room as ‘Vertical Farm’ Start-Ups Flourish

They include City-Hydro, a farm built in a spare bedroom on the second floor of Larry and Zhanna Hountz’s three-story rowhouse in Baltimore. Mr. Hountz came to urban farming out of necessity. After a serious car accident, he was unable to leave his house for two years and had trouble Read More...

Want power? Fire up the tomato

Want power? Fire up the tomatoes and potatoes

Summer is high season for composting food waste—and, at large scale operations, for generating power by burning the biogas it generates. But scientists around the globe are figuring out new ways to turn decomposing food into power beyond the trash heap, and they’re finding that some Read More...

Farmers have modified our food

Farmers have modified our food for at least 10,000 years, why does it matter all of a sudden?

In the past week you’ve probably eaten crops that wouldn’t exist in nature, or that have evolved extra genes to reach freakish sizes. You’ve probably eaten “cloned” food and you may have even eaten plants whose ancestors were once deliberately blasted with radiation. Read More...

This startup is turning leftov

This startup is turning leftover beer into delicious snacks

When you're looking for dinner ingredients at the supermarket, you probably wince at the bruised pears, skip over those oddly shaped carrots, and reach past ugly red peppers. This preference for pretty produce means the ugly fruits and vegetables are tossed out, filling landfills with otherwise Read More...

3 plant-based recipes you need

3 plant-based recipes you need to try this World Meat Free Day

Next Monday is World Meat Free Day, a great time for all of us to stop and think about the impact of our eating habits on our health – and the health of the planet. Animal agriculture in particular leaves a huge mark on the environment: from water pollution to deforestation to climate change. Read More...

Why Chicago is becoming the ur

Why Chicago is becoming the urban farming capital of the U.S.

When you walk into Farmed Here’s 90,000-square-foot warehouse in Bedford Park, a sleepy industrial outpost about 15 miles southwest of Chicago, you might not immediately register that you're standing in the second coming of the locavore movement. But then you get inside and smell Read More...