Overview of Some Recent Advances in Improving Water and Energy Efficiencies in Food Processing Factories

Designing healthier and more sustainable ultraprocessed foods

The food industry has been extremely successful in creating a broad range of delicious, affordable, convenient, and safe food and beverage products. However, many of these products are considered to be ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) that contain ingredients and are processed in a manner that may cause adverse health effects. This review article introduces the concept of UPFs and briefly discusses food products that fall into this category, including beverages, baked goods, snacks, confectionary, prepared meals, dressings, sauces, spreads, and processed meat and meat analogs. It then discusses correlations between consumption levels of UPFs and diet-related chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes. The different reasons for the proposed ability of UPFs to increase the risk of these chronic diseases are then critically assessed, including displacement of whole foods, high energy densities, missing phytochemicals, contamination with packaging chemicals, hyperpalatability, harmful additives, rapid ingestion and digestion, and toxic reaction products. Then, potential strategies to overcome the current problems with UPFs are presented, including reducing energy density, balancing nutritional profile, fortification, increasing satiety response, modulating mastication and digestion, reengineering food structure, and precision processing. The central argument is that it may be possible to reformulate and reengineer many UPFs to improve their healthiness and sustainability, although this still needs to be proved using rigorous scientific studies.

Edible Insects in Latin America: A Sustainable Alternative for Our Food Security

Nowadays, the food industry faces paramount challenges in different areas, since worldwide consumers are increasing every day, and at the same time, they are demanding new convenient products. Recent studies show that the current food production system is unsustainable over time and therefore is necessary to create new alternatives of production. New food trends are focused on the consumption of natural products, that have an eco-friendly production approach, and a beneficial nutritional profile for the consumer’s health. Hence, products are being created to not only have good organoleptic characteristics, but also to contain a wide variety of micro and macronutrients, and to be sustainable within their production. For this reason, the use of raw materials that satisfy the needs previously mentioned is being implemented. For instance, the use of insects as raw material, because they have a high protein content comparable to animal-based foods. Specifically, ants and crickets can contain between 9 and 77% protein of dry weight, while beef contains between 25 and 28%. On the other hand, insects present an ease and sustainable production system, compared to livestock farming, since some of them feed with food waste generated by humans. In addition, require less food for their upbringing; insects can convert 2 kg of feed into 1 kg of insect mass, while cattle use 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of body weight. On the other hand, there is evidence that insects produce fewer greenhouse gases during their production, for example, pigs produce between 10 and 100 times more greenhouse gases per kg of weight. United States, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Argentina have begun to develop and consume these products; thus, promoting different and new ventures. Large-scale production of insect-based food products could help solve or even prevent the looming food problem and contribute to the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations. Thus, the aim of this review work was to compile and investigate the edible insect’s alternatives in Latin America, as well as the commercially available or potential derivative products. We discussed the nutritional value of edible insects, and how they could contribute to food security.

Trends in mitigation of industrial waste: Global health hazards, environmental implications and waste derived economy for environmental sustainability

Majority of industries, in order to meet the technological development and consumer demands generate waste. The untreated waste spreads out toxic and harmful substances in the environment which serves as a breeding ground for pathogenic microorganisms thus causing severe health hazards. The three industrial sectors namely food, agriculture, and oil industry are among the primary organic waste producers that affect urban health and economic growth. Conventional treatment generates a significant amount of greenhouse gases which further contributes to global warming. Thus, the use of microbes for utilization of this waste, liberating CO₂ offers an indispensable tool. The simultaneous production of value-added products such as bioplastics, biofuels, and biosurfactants increases the economics of the process and contributes to environmental sustainability. This review comprehensively summarized the composition of organic waste generated from the food, agriculture, and oil industry. The linkages between global health hazards of industrial waste and environmental implications have been uncovered. Stare-of-the-art information on their subsequent utilization as a substrate to produce value-added products through bio-routes has been elaborated. The research gaps, economical perspective(s), and future research directions have been identified and discussed to strengthen environmental sustainability.

Influence of Multifrequency Ultrasound-Assisted Freezing on the Flavour Attributes and Myofibrillar Protein Characteristics of Cultured Large Yellow Croaker (Larimichthys crocea)

The influence of multifrequency ultrasound-assisted freezing (UAF) as compared with single- and dual-UAF on the flavour, microstructure, and myofibrillar proteins (MPs) of cultured large yellow croaker was investigated to improve food quality in a sustainable way and address the major global challenges concerning food and nutrition security in the (near) future. Multifrequency UAF-treated samples had lower total volatile basic nitrogen values during freezing than single- and dual-UAF-treated samples. Thirty-six volatile compounds were identified by solid-phase microextraction (SPME) coupled to gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) during freezing, and the multifrequency UAF-treated samples showed significant decreases in the relative contents of fishy flavoured compounds, including 1-penten-3-ol and 1-octen-3-ol. In addition, multifrequency UAF treatment better maintained a well-organised protein secondary structure by maintaining higher α-helical and β-sheet contents and stabilising the tertiary structure. Scanning electron microscopy images indicated that the ice crystals developed by the multifrequency UAF were fine and uniformly distributed, resulting in less damage to the frozen large yellow croaker samples. Therefore, multifrequency UAF improved the flavour attributes and MP characteristics of the large yellow croaker samples. Overall, multifrequency UAF can serve as an efficient way for improving food quality and nutritional profile in a sustainable way.

Feasibility of atmospheric cold plasma for the elimination of food hazards: Recent advances and future trends

In recent decades, food safety has emerged as a worldwide public health issue with economic and political implications. Pesticide residues, mycotoxins, allergens, and antinutritional factors are the primary concerns associated with food products due to their potential adverse health effects. Although various conventional processing methods (such as washing, peeling, and cooking) have been used to reduce or eliminate these hazards from agricultural food materials, the results obtained are not quite satisfactory. Recently, atmospheric cold plasma (ACP), an emerging low -temperature and green processing technology, has shown great potential for mitigating food hazards. However, detailed descriptions of the effects of ACP treatment on food hazards are still not available. Thus, the current review aims to highlight recent studies on the efficacy and application of ACP in the reduction or elimination of pesticide residues, mycotoxins, allergens, and antinutritional factors in various food products. The possible working mechanisms of ACP and its effect on food quality, and the toxicity of degradation products are emphatically discussed. In addition, multiple factors affecting the efficacy of ACP are summarized in detail. At the same time, the major technical challenges for practical application and future development prospects of this emerging technology are also highlighted.

Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

Agri-food systems (AFS) have been central in the debate on sustainable development. Despite this growing interest in AFS, comprehensive analyses of the scholarly literature are hard to find. Therefore, the present systematic review delineated the contours of this growing research strand and analyzed how it relates to sustainability. A search performed on the Web of Science in January 2020 yielded 1389 documents, and 1289 were selected and underwent bibliometric and topical analyses. The topical analysis was informed by the SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems) approach of FAO and structured along four dimensions viz. environment, economy, society and culture, and policy and governance. The review shows an increasing interest in AFS with an exponential increase in publications number. However, the study field is north-biased and dominated by researchers and organizations from developed countries. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while environmental aspects are sufficiently addressed, social, economic, and political ones are generally overlooked. The paper ends by providing directions for future research and listing some topics to be integrated into a comprehensive, multidisciplinary agenda addressing the multifaceted (un)sustainability of AFS. It makes the case for adopting a holistic, 4-P (planet, people, profit, policy) approach in agri-food system studies.

Indicators and Recommendations for Assessing Sustainable Healthy Diets

Research coupling human nutrition and sustainability concerns is a rapidly developing field, which is essential to guide governments' policies. This critical and comprehensive review analyzes indicators and approaches to "sustainable healthy diets" published in the literature since this discipline's emergence a few years ago, identifying robust gauges and highlighting the flaws of the most commonly used models. The reviewed studies largely focus on one or two domains such as greenhouse gas emissions or water use, while overlooking potential impact shifts to other sectors or resources. The present study covers a comprehensive set of indicators from the health, environmental and socio-economic viewpoints. This assessment concludes that in order to identify the best food option in sustainability assessments and nutrition analysis of diets, some aspects such as the classification and disaggregation of food groups, the impacts of the rates of local food consumption and seasonality, preservation methods, agrobiodiversity and organic food and different production systems, together with consequences for low-income countries, require further analysis and consideration.

Possibility to Save Water and Energy by Application of Fresh Vegetables to Produce Supplemented Potato-Based Snack Pellets

The aim of the study was to examine the effect of fresh vegetable addition on processing efficiency, and to ascertain the energy and water consumption during production of potato-based snack pellets. The extrusion-cooking process with a modified single screw extruder was applied at variable screw speeds and amounts of vegetable additives. A mixture of potato flakes, potato grits and starch was used as a basic recipe. The potato composition was supplemented with fresh pulp of onion, leek, kale and carrot in amounts of 2.5–30.0% as replacement of a related amount of potato starch. The water consumption, as well as processing indicators: the production efficiency, the specific mechanical energy (SME), and the total SME requirements during snack pellets processing at the laboratory scale were evaluated. As a result of this work, we found that the amount of applied vegetable additives had little impact on both processing efficiency and SME depending on the screw speeds applied. Moreover, we saw increased processing efficiency with increased screw speed during extrusion. Of particular note, maximum value of processing efficiency was observed if fresh onion was used as an additive at the highest speed screw. Furthermore, the lowest specific mechanical energy consumption was noted for extrudates supplemented with fresh onion addition processed at the lowest screw speed. The most important limiting of water consumption during processing without negative effects on processing efficiency and quality of the final snack pellets was observed if 20% to 30% of fresh vegetables were used in the recipe. We believe that application of fresh vegetable pulp limited the energy requirements by mitigating the drying process of additives.