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from the gives-new-meaning-to-"Who-cut-the-cheese?" dept.
Picture this: Three years from now, you open the fridge and unwrap a package of string cheese. You eat it. It tastes better, somehow, than the ones you ate as a kid. Then you eat the packaging. And your body thanks you for it.
That's the near-future envisioned by researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who are developing environmentally friendly food packaging made from milk protein, the American Chemical Society announced this week.
The material could replace the thin plastic film now stretched around blocks of cheese, packages of steaks and other foods at your supermarket. The kicker: This protein-based packaging isn't just biodegradable and edible – it keeps food fresher than plastic, too.
The film's protein, casein, bonds tightly, creating a packaging that's up to 500 times more effective than plastics at keeping oxygen away from food, researchers said. That means the packaging is better for the earth and better for your food, and it can be eaten, they said.
Dr. Laetitia Bonnaillie, a co-leader of the study, expects to see the casein packaging hit store shelves within three years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @11:48AM
Don't look too closely into how laws, sausage, or casein products are made.
(Score: 1) by GeriatricGentleman on Tuesday August 30 2016, @12:38AM
Many moons ago I used to work in a casein factory. Pretty good work too. In the end I quit, went to do software engineering and in my uni holidays worked in a biscuit factory. Bah, that was awful - an unbelievable amount of biscuits get touched by people during the manufacturing process - I don't eat biscuits, but I am definitely ok with the vast bulk of dairy products (at one time or another I worked on pretty much all of them).
Back to slightly on topic:
This was twenty years ago, but my recollection of the primary uses of the lactic casein we made were :
FOOD INGREDIENT: mostly when recombined as caseinate, as a binding agent and as a buff for protein levels. And as an animal feed (abalone farms used to buy a bit from memory)
TECHNICAL: buttons (lots of buttons!), used to coat the inside of CRT screens, glue, and I remember it being used to wrap hay bales so they could be stored outside (instead of in a barn) - the relevance of the last point was that it was marketed a biodegradable, edible product (although being outside for up to nine months, I always thought it was pretty stable for a biodegradable product!).
Anyway, long story short - this doesn't seem like that much of a new thing.