More than one billion tons of the food produced in the world ends up being wasted every year, accounting for about one-third of the food produced globally. For this reason, the problem of food waste management has been the focus of the different actors intervening in the food supply chains, who recognize that food waste has not only environmental but also economic and social impacts. This review focuses on foods of plant origin wasted at different stages of their life, namely primary production, transformation/processing, transportation, sales, catering and the domestic level. It addresses the subject from multiple angles, considering the environmental, economic and social perspectives. The review was based on a search carried out within scientific databases, for example, ScienceDirect, Scopus and the Web of Science. The results highlighted that in the generation and management of food waste from plant origin, there is a clear difference between developed and developing countries, with these last showing higher losses in production, principally the transportation and storage of the foods. Contrarily, in developed countries, excess food produced and not consumed is the strongest contributor to food waste. Valorization of agricultural waste and industrial residues for application into animal feed or agricultural fertilizers, or through the recovery of valuable compounds for industrial purposes, are some of the ways to deal with food waste while generating additional economic value and reducing environmental impact. However, there is still a need to modify processes and behaviors to reduce food waste and improve the sustainability of supply chains. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct research to identify and report food waste so that stakeholders can contribute positively to solving this problem.
In recent years, food nutrition estimation has received growing attention due to its critical role in dietary analysis and public health. Traditional nutrition assessment methods often rely on manual measurements and expert knowledge, which are time-consuming and not easily scalable. With the advancement of computer vision, RGB-based methods have been proposed, and more recently, RGB-D-based approaches have further improved performance by incorporating depth information to capture spatial cues. While these methods have shown promising results, they still face challenges in complex food scenes, such as limited ability to distinguish visually similar items with different ingredients and insufficient modeling of spatial or semantic relationships. To solve these issues, we propose an Ingredient-Guided Semantic Modeling Network (IGSMNet) for food nutrition estimation. The method introduces an ingredient-guided module that encodes ingredient information using a pre-trained language model and aligns it with visual features via cross-modal attention. At the same time, an internal semantic modeling component is designed to enhance structural understanding through dynamic positional encoding and localized attention, allowing for fine-grained relational reasoning. On the Nutrition5k dataset, our method achieves PMAE values of 12.2% for Calories, 9.4% for Mass, 19.1% for Fat, 18.3% for Carb, and 16.0% for Protein. These results demonstrate that our IGSMNet consistently outperforms existing baselines, validating its effectiveness.
AbstractSeveral studies suggest that natural salicylates in plant‐based foods may benefit health. However, large variation in published values of the salicylate content of foods means that relating dietary intakes to disease risk is problematical. Consequently, we have systematically reviewed the available literature using prescribed selection criteria. By combining these literature values with in‐house analysis, we have constructed a food composition database describing median salicylate values for 27 different types of fruits, 21 vegetables, 28 herbs, spices and condiments, 2 soups and 11 beverages. Application of a validated food frequency questionnaire estimated median dietary intakes of 4.42 (range 2.90–6.27) and 3.16 (2.35–4.89) mg/day for Scottish males and females, respectively. Major dietary sources of salicylates were alcoholic beverages (22%), herbs and spices (17%), fruits (16%), non‐alcoholic beverages including fruit juices (13%), tomato‐based sauces (12%) and vegetables (9%). Application of the database to populations with differing dietary habits and disease risk profiles may provide further evidence for the role of dietary salicylates in the prevention of chronic diseases.
The perceived need to reduce dietary fat consumption has produced intense activity throughout the food industry. Previous exploratory work has indicated that flavour characteristics can influence consumer enjoyment of foods, and reducing the fat content of foods can adversely affect flavour characteristics in comparison with those of full‐fat equivalents. However, there is little work reported in this area in the scientific literature. The Leatherhead Food RA and the Institute of Food Research, Reading, are therefore collaborating on a MAFF‐LINK project with ten industrial partners on improving the flavour acceptability of reduced‐fat foods. The project aims to quantify and model the relationship between fat content and the perceived flavour and flavour‐release characteristics of processed foods and to provide guidance to the industrial partners in developing reduced‐fat foods with improved flavour characteristics.
When self selecting meat, consumers rank the colour of fresh meat as being the most important criterion in their purchase decision because it indicates freshness, while the most desirable eating quality of meat, after texture, is the cooked flavour. Details the well‐understood chemistry in relation to meat colour and reviews the less well‐understood chemistry of cooked meat flavour.
How safe is America’s food supply? In rich countries, the food choices available in supermarkets and restaurants are almost always free from dangerous levels of toxic or microbial contamination. Even when they are not healthful or nutritious, they at least can be considered “safe.” In...