The Van Trump Report

Month: April 2022

A Company Making Fake Meat Taste Like the Real Thing

As chefs always say, fat is flavor. It’s also what gives traditional animal proteins their texture, mouthfeel and cooking behavior. That fact has long held alternative proteins back due to the fact that there are limited fats available today that are both plant-based and offer the same properties as their animal-based counterparts.  We need to …

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How American Cheese Created One of Our Greatest Food Empires

American cheese is one of those food items which most people have a very strong opinion about. I’m talking about the highly meltable “pasteurized cheese product” that comes as individually wrapped slices, or gets sliced off a giant orangish cube at the deli counter. As much as the critics might hate it, even the biggest …

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New Autonomous Tractors Coming to U.S. Market

AMOS, the acronym for Autonomous, Modular, Omni-Scalable, is a fully-electric autonomous tractor design recently unveiled by Amos Power. The tractor model started as a design-build project with the engineering and prototyping teams at One3 Design and Redshield Electronics with the aim of fitting tractor-quality power and capabilities onto a relatively small tractor frame. The results, …

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The Strange History of Tomatoes… They Weren’t Always Popular!

Tomatoes are a reliable favorite among chefs and eaters alike. But up until the mid- to late-1800s, they were shunned by many Americans and Europeans due to a long-time belief that they were poisonous. The tomato is native to western South America and Central America. The English word tomato actually originates from the Aztec word …

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How About a NEW Use for Corn… Creating High-Performance Biopolymers

Biopolymers are literally everywhere, in products that we all use every day, and for good reason. They’re inexpensive, naturally produced and have uses in food, healthcare, personal care, the energy industry and more. But, despite these advantages, producing biopolymers at scale has long been challenging and limited their potential use in industry.  A new company …

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NASA’s Earth Observatory Image Shows Two Decades of Global Cropland Expansion

NASA Earth Observatory recently featured research on global cropland expansion as its Image of the Day. The new mapping from the Global Land Analysis & Discovery Lab (GLAD) at the University of Maryland show changes between 2003 and 2019 and are based on imagery collected by Landsat satellites. According to the GLAD team analysis, the …

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