What do you do with used eco-cutlery?Now that you feel environmentally conscientious for having used a corn fork — those forks made with corn starch that lately are the darlings of the takeout world — what will you do with it? This is a question that restaurants in the US are trying to answer after all non-recyclable plastic and polystyrene were banned. “Our goal is to become zero waste . . . to go back to a 1950s approach of using less, like wrapping a sandwich in paper instead of plastic,” explains Josephine Miller, an environmental analyst. Acceptable choices include recyclable aluminum and plastic, paper and those compostable vegetable products.But compostable isn’t the same as biodegradable. Corn forks must be professionally composted at high temperatures, or they’ll end up sharing landfill space with Styrofoam. The problem isn’t the product, but the lack of public compost bins. Cities plans to provide green compost bins for all single-family homes “very soon” (some private homes already have them). But getting compost bins to apartment buildings and office parks “is much more complex”. “You can always boil the stuff until it dissolves,” says a restaurateur. But he calls back to say, “Forget that — it’ll only turn the fork into a twisted-up, weird science experiment.”Aroma of coffee has effect on rats, study findsIf you’re the type of person who perks up in the morning at just the smell of fresh-brewed coffee, you are not alone. There are some laboratory rats you should meet. While countless studies have looked at what occurs when coffee is drunk, far fewer have examined the effects of sniffing the aroma, which contains many volatile compounds. So Han-Seok Seo of Seoul National University and colleagues exposed stressed-out rats that had been deprived of sleep to coffee bean aroma and then evaluated the effects by performing genetic and protein analyses on brain tissue. They compared the results with tests on other rats, including some that were sleep deprived but not exposed to coffee. As they report in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, they found that the expression levels of 13 selected genes were different between the stress-with-coffee rats and the stress-only animals. With 11 of the genes, levels were higher for the stress-with-coffee group; with the other two the levels were lower. The researchers say the study is a first step toward understanding the effects of coffee aroma. One intriguing question, they say, is whether it is better to smell coffee than to drink it when trying to stay awake all night.How to avoid a peril in a potIs it dangerous or unhealthy to eat fish or meat that has been frozen, cooked, refrozen, then cooked again? “There is nothing inherently dangerous about that process as described,” said Kathryn Boor, professor and chairwoman of the food science department at Cornell University. “But you cannot answer the question unless you know the full history of how the food was handled at every point.” For example, Boor said, if Staphylococcus aureus contaminates meat or fish, and the warm dish gets left on the back of the stove overnight, “you wouldn’t see anything and you wouldn’t smell anything, but you could have a real problem that you could not cook out of it.” On the other hand, she said, if the food is handled without any contamination or temperature abuse,” recooking it and eating it is not by definition dangerous. “If you unfreeze meat quickly, cook it quickly, then freeze it again quickly, there is no problem,” Boor said. “It might get mushy in texture, but it is not dangerous. Fish is more likely than beef, for example, to have textural problems, because it is more fragile.”
