This is a barn burner. We are all conscious of losing good food in
our fridges. I would write the date of application on the strip
itself in order to track what is going on. So far two weeks sounds
good and what does not start to deteriorate can last a very long
time. Recall the problem of the rotten apple. Then recall that
those good apples can last deep into the winter. Winter apples,
after all were always to sour to eat as hand fruit.
The take home is that all fruit and vegetables can last weeks
provided the attack is prevented. We now have a way to test this all
out on our own. I would love to fill my crisper with three types of
lettuce, spinach, peppers and tomatoes and leave for more than three
days. At present, one almost has to plan meals or buy every two
days.
In the meantime it will be available through Whole Foods soon so you
can help the cause and go there and ask for it.
Saving food, one
sheet of paper at a time
By Jane
Black, Published: May
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/saving-food-one-sheet-of-paper-at-a-time/2012/05/14/gIQAXeHLRU_story.html
When I was a kid, the
future promised all kinds of whiz-bang technologies. Jet boots.
Robot maids, like on “The Jetsons.” And, most exciting for a
12-year-old with a subscription to Gourmet magazine, “smart”
refrigerators that performed tricks like alerting you to eat that
lettuce in the back of the produce drawer before it spoiled and went
to waste.
Smart
refrigerators finally do exist. (Sadly, I’m still waiting for
jet boots.) For about $4,000, I can have a fridge that
generates recipes based on what’s on the shelves and tells me when
I’m out of milk. But no matter how smart the appliance is, it
still cannot warn me when those pricey strawberries from the farmers
market are about to get moldy or when that bunch of cilantro is
about to turn black. Nor will it be able to assuage my guilt for
forgetting about them and wasting food.
Happily, there is a
better, low-tech solution to that problem: FreshPaper, which
looks like small, square paper towels. They are infused with a
mixture of organic spices and botanicals that inhibit bacterial and
fungal growth and extend the life of quickly perishable produce. One
sheet of maple-scented FreshPaper helped my basket of very ripe
strawberries last more than a week in the fridge. A sheet tossed
into a plastic bag with cilantro helped the herb last about 10 days.
FreshPaper doesn’t
blink or beep, but I’m not complaining. Its power is in its
simplicity — and its price. Each 5-by-5-inch sheet, manufactured
in Massachusetts, costs 50 cents. Sheets can be used and reused over
the course of two or three weeks and then composted.
Like many useful
inventions, the idea for FreshPaper began by happenstance. Kavita
Shukla, then a student at Burleigh Manor Middle School in Ellicott
City, was visiting relatives in India and swallowed some water while
brushing her teeth. Immediately, she began to worry that she would
get sick to her stomach. But her grandmother made her a spice tea
from an old family recipe, and Shukla avoided illness. Soon, she
began to wonder what else this magic formula could do.
If Shukla, now 27 and
living in Cambridge, Mass., were like most of us, the story would
end there. But she was a determined teenager with a talent for
invention. She received her first patent at 13 for a product called
Smart Lid. Inspired by her mother, who regularly forgot to screw on
the gas cap on her car, the lid beeped when a container or jar was
left open.
In high school,
Shukla began to look in earnest for practical applications for her
grandmother’s special tea. (“As a kid,” Shukla says with a
laugh, “I couldn’t test for stomach ailments, except on
myself.”) She found it one day at the grocery store when her
mother asked her to pick out a pint of strawberries. Many of the
baskets had berries that were already going bad. Would dipping the
berries in her spice mixture help them stay “healthy”?
It did. And it seemed
to work for other fruits and vegetables as well. At 17, Shukla was
awarded her second patent.
Shukla thought her
invention would be best used in developing countries, where many
people lack refrigeration and a lot of produce spoils between the
farm and the table. While studying at Harvard — where else would a
young woman with two patents on her résuméend up? — she
considered starting a nonprofit organization to promote the product.
But, she says, “I didn’t really understand how difficult it
would be to distribute something, even if you were giving it away
for free.” For several years, she put her plans aside.
Then, in 2010, Shukla
decided to market her product closer to home, in the United States.
She began to visit farmers markets and street fairs in Boston. As
she talked to potential customers, she heard stories of frustration
about tomatoes and greens thrown in the trash and families skipping
fresh produce for fear that it would go bad before they used it.
Food spoilage and waste, Shukla realized, were big problems
everywhere.
That’s an
understatement. According to the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization, approximately one-third of food, about 1.3
billion tons, is lost or wasted annually. American and European
consumers toss out between 210 to 250 pounds of food per person each
year. A study at the University of Arizona at Tucson in 2004
estimated that household food waste in the United States alone adds
up to $43 billion each year.
And so, a decade
after receiving her patent, Shukla founded Fenugreen along
with a friend, Swaroop Samant. (The company’s name is a play on
fenugreek, one of FreshPaper’s main ingredients.) Their first
customer was Harvest Co-op in Cambridge, which agreed to sell the
product after performing its own semi-scientific experiment. Chris
Durkin, the director of membership and community relations, bought
two baskets of blueberries and left them unrefrigerated. The berries
without FreshPaper shriveled within three days and grew moldy by day
five. The ones with FreshPaper nestled at the bottom of the basket
stayed fresh. “I tend to be a bit of a cynic,” Durkin says. “So
I was pretty excited when it worked. This is a low-cost,
low-environmental-footprint solution to help fresh food to last
longer.”
Fans of FreshPaper
have likened it to “dryer sheets for produce,” according to
Shukla, as they toss them in the vegetable drawer, a fruit bowl or a
cardboard berry box. And they say FreshPaper saves them money. “I
have not thrown out a single carton of berries since I started using
it,” raved Joan Popolo, a customer in Carlisle, Mass.
It also alleviates
the guilt of wasting food. Denis Healy, the director of development
for the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, uses
FreshPaper regularly to extend the life of mushrooms, broccoli and
green beans. “I hate to waste,” he says.
“You put all this
time in shopping for the best things you can find, and if you don’t
eat it right away it goes bad.”
Washington area
consumers will get their first glimpse of FreshPaper this weekend,
when Shukla and Samant will be selling it at the FreshFarm Markets
in Silver Spring on Saturday and in Dupont Circle on Sunday.
(Fenugreen will donate proceeds of its sales to the markets’
Matching Dollars Program for nutrition assistance.) Farm 2
Family’s mobile farm stand will carry FreshPaper starting
this week at Eastern Market and at the Maret School, and at the Farm
to Family Market in Richmond.
Shukla remains
determined to make FreshPaper available where it is most sorely
needed. To that end, she is working to introduce the product to
farmers and distributors who might use it during harvest and
shipping (with customized paper sizes). Later this year, Shukla is
launching a “buy-one, give-one” program in which, for every
package of FreshPaper that is sold, Fenugreen will donate a package
to food banks or nonprofits in less-economically developed
countries.
“We started
Fenugreen as a social enterprise,” she says. “We still believe
that in areas where there is no access to refrigeration for farmers
and consumers, it can be life-changing.” Smarter than even the
smartest technology.
Black, a former Food
section staffer based in Brooklyn, writes Smarter Food monthly.
Follow her on Twitter: @jane_black. Shukla will join
today’s Free Range chat at noon at
live.washingtonpost.com.
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