Food Recipes

I agree that too much technology isn't healthy. It leads people to be more sedentary.
I also find it difficult to believe that being surrounded by and in close proximity to radio and electromagnetic waves isn't harmful.
Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of suspected causes of many other things you mention, which are too many to go into here, but I will point out a few. Don't forget that there is tonnes of pollution in the skies.
Also, due to widespread travel, we are exposed to viruses and other germs at a much higher frequency than in the past.
I am a food allergy sufferer. So are many of my relatives. It goes back generations. I had friends who had had anaphylaxis, growing up in the 60s, including one who had an allergy to peanuts.
What has changed historically is the amount of exposure to allergens on a regular basis. Go to the store and look at the ingredients in cookies, crackers, soups and sauces. You will find soy, wheat, corn or corn syrup in almost everything. Look at chilled cookie dough. It will have these as well as several types of nuts and other things you would never imagine.
I have found cheeses to contain soy or other unusual products. Many cereals, candy and other items warn they may contain traces of nuts. Any exposure to trace amounts of an allergen can trigger an immune response that prepares for a severe response to subsequent exposures.
Other things that have changed with our food supply are the quality and types of substances added to food.
For example, the types of oils used. Butter was more widely used as an ingredient. Then hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils were popular, but turned out to be bad for health. Now palm oil and palm kernel oil are becoming popular and are unhealthy. Cottonseed oil, used for industrial purposes, is being used as edible oil. It is linked to lower sperm counts in men.
We have genetically modified (GM) foods, where let's say, a gene from a sea plant or some other organism is imbedded into the DNA of a plant to ward off pests, fungi, or resist drought.
Sounds reasonable, but why are food and chemical companies spending lots of money to prevent legislation requiring labelling of GM foods?
Something else that older folks will recognise that has changed with our food supply is its containment.
Prior to the 70s, I can't remember anything being sold in plastic containers. Everything was in glass, cans, or waxed boxes. Grocery bags were paper. Plastics has a lot of good points. It doesn't break easily and is much lighter, but some plastics can leach chemicals into food. Some of these chemicals affect hormones in humans.
People should be careful about what types of plastics they use for food storage.
Health awareness has increased awareness and diagnosis of some conditions, so comparing statistics of now and then might be misleading.
A lot of 'problem children' probably had attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder back then, but would never have been diagnosed. Who would have known if they had Type 2 diabetes or heart disease? Things like that used to be normal, and people didn't always know why someone died.
Don't you think artificial lighting has something to do with sleep disorders? Is it natural for most people to be up so late? Light affects one's biorhythms, which affect one's health.
It has only been a little more than a century that humans have been staying up so late on such a wide scale. Anyhow, think about it.

Scientists face many obstacles on the path to greater knowledge. But new research suggests how to avoid one of the more common pitfalls: spilled coffee.
"I cannot say for sure if coffee spilling has been detrimental to scientific research to any significant extent," says study author Rouslan Krechetnikov, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "But it can certainly be disruptive for a train of thought."
Krechetnikov and his graduate student Hans Mayer decided to investigate coffee spilling at a fluid dynamics conference last year when they watched overburdened participants trying to carry their drinks to and fro. They quickly realized that the physics wasn't simple. Aside from the mechanics of human walking, which depends on a person's age, health, and gender, there is the highly involved science of liquid sloshing, which depends on a complex interplay of accelerations, torques, and forces.    
{Let's not forget the physical characteristics of the fluid e.g. temperature and viscosity. Perhaps there are produce development applications for convenience beverages designed to be consumed on the go!}

As a software engineer descended from three generations of butchers, I might be uniquely qualified to answer this question. My perspective as a programmer and general hacker gives me the ability to decompose complex problems into structured solutions; creating an algorithm is almost no different than creating a recipe. And while I’m not a butcher by profession, my overall familiarity with the butchering, preparing, and cooking of meat in its various forms may give me some insight into the “problem domain.”
In order to consider the future of meat, we must first look at its current state. So I’ll start with my “State of the Meat Union,” which may be controversial to some, but I’ll take you through my thinking step by step.
In the United States, ConAgra – and two or three other companies to a much lesser extent – process 80 percent or more of all meat. All meat! If you’re eating meat in this country, there’s a high probability that the animal came from a particular factory feedlot, ConAgra processed it into products, and you bought the end result at a Wal-Mart. This is the lifecycle of what most people eat as “meat”: a consolidated, monolithic supply chain controlled by a literal handful of special interests concerned only with making profits. The resulting meat products lack taste, are unhealthy, and are chock-ful of preservatives, additives, antibiotics and artificial flavoring.
This is why I say: the mass production of processed meats is not the future of meat. It’s the future of something that might resemble meat if you squint your eyes, but it’s not what I call meat. It may be classified as food, but it’s not meat.
Does that make me a “meat purist”? Absolutely.
The future of meat I want to see is one where sustainable farming practices, increased diversity of livestock and an emphasis on quality at all levels of production creates incredible meats that more people can enjoy. I experienced this firsthand when I purchased my first “quarter of a pig” share from a community shared agriculture hog farm in upstate New York. I have eaten a lot of meat in my life, and I am here to tell you that I have never had anything before or since that’s come anywhere close to the exceptional quality of the meat they produced for me. Pulled pork, bacon, ribs, ham, sausage – it was all addictively delicious. Now that I know what I’ve been missing, I don’t want anything else!
It’s the kind of thing you just can’t buy in a big-box grocery store, because it’s simply impossible for the mass producers to achieve that level of farm-to-table quality. It’s not profitable enough for them, and it’s too hard for them to do in a factory. Put plainly: I don’t want a future where “meatfood” that’s cloned or genetically modified, grown, synthesized, and processed in a factory laboratory is the norm. Their unsustainable mass production techniques have generated a multiplicity of severe problems in animal health, human health, environmental health, created and exacerbated terrible diseases, perpetrated unbelievable and outright criminal wastes of medicines and other resources… I could go on and on and on, but their worst atrocity is simply that their “food” tastes nothing like real meat, and to me that’s what matters most.
I therefore propose that we limit the problem domain to small-scale meat production and consumption. This should include protecting industrious small farms from the predation of the big agribusiness mafia and their paid enforcers, the United States government. If we can’t protect them, there is no future of meat! Legislation has been and will continue to be handcrafted by Big Ag lobbyists and then given directly to the best Congress their money can buy. These laws will continue to be unevenly enforced, killing their smaller competitors in the market and placing undue burdens on the artisans and small business folk who are bringing us the future of real meat. If we care about that future, we need to make sure this doesn’t happen.
I’ve identified the following areas where I believe we can use information and technology to create hacks for small-scale meat production and consumption. Each of these in turn can be broken down further into more specific solutions in their particular areas, hopefully guided by our “steakholders.” I also pose a few questions to get the brainstorming started:

• Husbandry and cultivation of livestock – How can we help small farmers adhere to sustainable practices? How do we get them greater yields, better and faster distribution? What data do farmers need to do their job better?

• Storage, preservation and preparation, consumption – Can we use technology to measure production and consumption, monitor quality? What can crowdsourcing do to help consumers find / prepare meat?

• Government corruption – See above; what do we need to do to protect the future of meat? Can we do data visualizations that reveal uncompetitive business practices or unfairness in the laws? Do we need systems that can monitor prices, report bad practices?

• Education – How do we inform people how great real meat tastes? What can we do to teach people to “take meat back”, learn home butchery (everyone should be able to bone a chicken and know how to make chicken stock), no longer be afraid of meat?

Serial entrepreneur and investor Michael Arrington and popular technology blog TechCrunch both covered the debate over California’s Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of foods that have been genetically engineered or contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Why? Tech investor and entrepreneur Ali Partovi launched a provocative video (below) and IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for Facebook ads that counter anti-Prop 37 corporate advertising.
Many of the big agricultural chemical and CPG companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Coke, Pepsi and General Mills have collectively spent more than $35.6 million on anti-Prop 37 advertising. So, Partovi is hoping to level the playing field, or “democratize democracy,” as he says, by crowdfunding $50,000 which he is matching for a total of $100,000. With these funds, Partovi is running Facebook ads “where you can’t you can’t fool people with deceptive ads, because the community’s opinions speak louder,” he writes.
TechCrunch reports the ads are already a big success, garnering a click-thru rate of 4 percent at $0.15 per click, which is reportedly 20 times better than the internet average. Partovi is also encouraging people to use Facebook’s new Promoted Posts feature, which allows anyone to pay $7 to improve their visibility in their friends news feeds, to spread the word.
Sure, technology as a democratizer is interesting, but there is another reason why the technology community might care about Prop 37.
Currently, information asymmetry puts consumers at a disadvantage. The science behind GMOs is inconclusive on both sides and, without regulation, the food industry gets away with labeling foods “all natural.” These products can command a premium and thus allow companies to unfairly increase prices, which is deceptive to the free market. Enacting Prop 37 would “return us to a baseline of basic transparency from which a free market can thrive,” says Partovi. Free markets only work when there is transparency and people are able to make decisions based on information, which does not exist in the case of GMOs. If Prop 37 is enacted, and, armed with this information, a significant enough number of consumers decide not to buy these products, the onus will be on the companies to conduct more research and produce better data.
“You know, not all engineering is created equal. Like with Google maps versus Apple maps, sometimes engineers make mistakes. But Apple let their customers know they were releasing new maps for iPhone and then their customers have been left to decide whether they like it or not. Similarly, Prop 37 is not a warning label, it’s just an informative label.”