News by Subject Agriculture

Meal kit services, which deliver a box of pre-portioned ingredients and a chef-selected recipe to your door, are hugely popular but get a bad environmental rap due to perceived packaging waste.

The American Bumblebee - a species once more commonly seen buzzing around Southern Ontario - is critically endangered, according to a new study led by York University. The finding, published in Journal of Insect Conservation, found the native North American species, Bombus pensylvanicus, is facing imminent extinction from Canada, considered the highest and most at-risk classification before extinction.

Contamination of rice with arsenic is a major problem in some regions of the world with high rice consumption. Now, researchers reporting in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology have found a way to reduce inorganic arsenic in rice by modifying processing methods at traditional, small-scale parboiling plants in Bangladesh. The new method has the added benefit of increasing the calcium content of rice, the researchers say.

Milk is a staple of the human diet, full of key nutrients such as protein, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins. Cow's milk in particular is one of the most-used dairy products globally, with over 800 million tons produced annually according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Today, scientists report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry a comprehensive, centralized database of all known bovine milk compounds.

Scientists at the University of Illinois developed new purple corn hybrids with differing combinations of phenols in the pericarp that fight obesity, inflammation and insulin resistance, a new study in mice suggests. The pericarp also provides the food industry with a new source of colorants and farmers with a new value added product for their crops.