There are many useful techniques for preservation of our fresh food to eat in winter or out of season, often these are forgotten or are not passed on through the generations nowadays with our tendency to rely totally on supermarket stocks. Preserving can be..

Can you believe the Cranberry a small insignificant berry, has its own 'World Summit'? and even its own dedicated Cranberry Institute? It has recently gained much respect in the food and nutrition industry. Mostly eaten as a juice or the whole berry taken..

We put together a round up of all the things you can eat to keep your youthful appearance and vitality as you go through life. Anti-aging is important to many of us and simple attention to our..

Although the drying process can take several days, it is very rewarding to dry-preserve your own fruits to eat when the summer has long gone and the weather is not so kind. Start by..

Buying to eat in recession means trying to save those precious pennies on everything we buy, but the upside is that we can use this time positively to lose weight by eating a sensible balanced diet and staying off those..

Recently fashionable, the Raw Food Diet will have you shedding the pounds in no time ! People often overeat because the body is not getting its full vitamin and nutrition requirements. Raw food gives you that full satisfied ..

An interesting view came out of Mintel Research recently where they tracked claimed health benefits by food manufacturers. The top advertised claim for food right now is apparently 'Digestive Health' with 38% of the top ten claims, followed by Cardiovascular at 14%. Suprisingly Beauty is..

In a quest to find out which are the smelliest and most pungent cheeses around Europe, Steve White a research officer at Cranfield University decided to take a scientific approach by using an electronic sniffer to verify an expert panels opinion with some interesting..

Some research has shown that sticking to the same diet as your family forebears brings health benefits in the form of protection from disease and higher resistance to illness. Researcher Dr Weston A. Price travelled widely to try..

Although almost a lost art, edible flowers are now staging something of a revival. Providing you observe some simple rules in harvesting the correct blooms, and avoiding pesticides this is a delightful way to liven up any dinner table and offers many new untried

The debate regarding the health benefits of organic food has erupted this week amid strong criticism from the organic community, claiming that a recent report commissioned by the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) is inaccurate and unreliable...

Organic food has once again been criticised for not living up to the health expectations and benefits it claims. The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) commissioned the world's largest study to-date on the benefits of organic food based on its nutrient content, in comparison with “conventionally”...

The wine industry's carbon footprint is pretty large, when you take into account the transportation and upkeep of the vines. One of the pet peeves of environment-conscious vintners is all the lawn-mowing that has to be done throughout the year, to stop the grass between the vines from extracting all the...

Those Locavores have it so easy nowadays! In the States, Locavores – people who eat only locally-produced food – can now pick up their iPhone and ask it what produce is in season locally and what...

The Rainbow Grocery store in San Francisco, California has been up and running since the 1970's and has been working under a radical cooperative business model since its inception...

At the same time as business leaders and scientists met in the Danish capital of Copenhagen on the weekend of May 24-26 to discuss global warming at the World Business Summit on Climate Change, another type of “summit” was happening elsewhere in the city to decide upon future changes to the gastronomic world...

Rachel's Organic dairy products holds the accolade of being Britain's first certified organic dairy...

This Spring, Barack and Michelle Obama have begun work planting the first White House vegetable garden since the second world war...

A while ago, we reported on the Slow Food movement...

At the end of January, the UK's Soil Association – which approves organic produce for sale in Britain and Northern Ireland...

Diet books are famous for giving miracle qualities to certain foods, including the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Grapefruit diet and many other fad diets. This time, the Japanese have come up with the Morning Banana Diet..

If the news had managed to slip under your radar, let it be known that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato! As declared by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), 2008 is the year in which we can officially celebrate the cultivation, history..

Ecotarianism might be described by some as a sort of "Greatest Hits" collection of all our favourite food fads of the last decade. The word was coined by undergraduate students at Oxford University in 2006 who wanted to combine all the major environmental and humanitarian aspects surrounding the products we buy and roll them..

The delicacy that is the truffle has been getting gourmands hot under the collar for centuries, millenia even! Lauded by the Romans and the Greeks as a fungi with powerful therapeutic and aphrodisiac qualities, today the little black gems fetch a high price from restaurants and individuals prepared to pay over..

This week, the United States Food and Drug Administration ruled that producers are allowed to expose lettuce and spinach to high levels of radiation in order to kill harmful bacteria.

Safer produce
Irradiation is a common practice used to "clean" foods which may be..

The latest buzz word around restaurants in search of the freshest, most unusual, wild ingredients, is foraging. Also available to everyone anywhere, foraging is the age-old tradition of taking what mother nature is giving out for free and finding some great new ingredients for your..

Since the backlash against food-miles began, a small yet growing movement called Locavorism has been gaining ground in Europe and the US. Locavores are people who shun imported food and choose to eat only what has been grown or produced within a 100 mile radius of their house..

This week it has been announced that Camembert originating from Normandy in France must be made with raw milk, which is a coup for small artisan producers but rather to the contrary for large organisations.

The Institut Nationale de l'Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) announced that in order for Camembert de Normandie to carry the Appelation Controlée..

The alarm against the injustice of keeping battery hens and factory-farmed chickens has been sounded and particularly strongly in the UK by two celebrity chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver. Late in 2007, the pair launched a televised campaign to boycott sales of cheap factory chicken and opt for free-range and organic, to pressure the..

An all new soya-alternative, vegetarian superfood is soon to be on the market and has been tested in Sweden for its outstanding nutritional qualities. Tempe is a wholegrain food made from oats and barley created by doctorate student Charlotte Eklund-Jonsson of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.

New vegetarian food
Eklund-Jonsson aimed to create a new vegetarian food which would be high in fibre but also aid with iron uptake by being high in vitamin B folate. Tempe is usually made by fermenting soybeans, however in Europe, barley and oats make the product more sustainable and cut down on food miles.

Charlotte says: "Tempe is designed for..

When considering what we can do to promote ethical food-sourcing, the latest buzz words have been 'food miles' and the 'carbon footprint'. However, a new measure of sustainability has been dreamt up called the 'water foot print'.

Water Deficit
Driven by increasing world population and therefore water deficits in key regions, the water foot print was designed to bring into sharp relief the amounts of water consumed in basic food production..

Courting controversy is what the food-retail industry does very well: from genetically modified food to cloning we are constantly faced with new technologies which may benefit the industry but will stretch our morals. Now there is a new technology on the horizon which is set to revolutionise the journey our food makes from farm to fork. It is called nanotechnology – the science involved in changing the core molecular structure of substances or objects – in short, it can alter almost anything. When applied to food, this technology could render what we eat more healthy, less chemically toxic, and provide a range of other benefits to the consumer and producer alike..

If you go to any restaurant in Europe it's likely that you'll be asked to choose from still or sparkling water. So why are we not given the choice of bottled or tap? The bottled water industry has attracted growing criticism in recent years over its detrimental impact on the environment, so why have we stopped using our clean, safe tap water in favour of the stuff in plastic bottles?

e market in organic produce is now, officially, huge. The organic industry in Europe is currently worth 66m euros and is expected to grow by 10 to 50 % in the coming years. So why is there doubt about it's true quality? To date, no substantial or rigorous evidence has been supplied to prove that organic produce is nutritionally more..

Given the choice, would you eat dairy or meat produce from an animal that had been cloned? It's an ethical question that we consumers will face in the coming years, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States has now approved the production of food derived from cloned animals. Under the new ruling, meat and other produce from..

ke sure you eat only well ripened fruit if you want the full antioxidant effect. Antioxidants become unlocked the more the fruit ripens, and more stilll as the fruit eventually turns towards going bad, claim researchers at the Uni of Innsbruck in Austria. Looking closely at Pear and Apple fruits, the research team found that as the skin changed colour during the ripening process as they underwent a decomposition similar to..

The heat of the 'Bhut Jolokia' pepper is so hot it is almost twice as fiery as the previous title holder 'Red Savina'. Dr. P. Bosland, of Chile Pepper Institute, aptly situated in New Mexico, stumbled across the red hot chile in India back in 2001. He collected some seeds and has nurtured the plants for several..

Research shows that eating garlic regularly can reduce blood pressure and allow the blood to carry more oxygen to vital organs says Dr Kraus of University of Alabama. "Certainly in areas where garlic consumption is high, such as the Mediterranean and the Far East, there is a low incidence of cardiovascular disease..

How can food claim to be produced as 'Organic' if it then burns large amounts of carbon via expensive air freight transport ? That is the question the UK Soil Association, which certifies most of the countrys' organic produce, is considering. It may recommend that produce that has been air freighted goes against the green principles of organic food production and cannot be certified as organic..

National Geographic have an interesting new site: www.thegreenguide.com with some thought provoking articles based around the green issues we all face. An organic food quiz caught my attention as fun, although i got only half of the answers correct !