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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: 2) by VLM on Monday August 29 2016, @12:09PM
American singles are sold in plastic
Rather than inventing some weird artificial stuff for people to eat, wouldn't it be easier from an engineering perspective to issue blocks of cheese and invent a small scale way of chopping single servings off the larger block?
Not even entirely going for the snarky-mod, in that it would seem a fun engineering project to invent a "single block of cheese"-durability level of all or mostly plastic cheese cutter. End user shoves block of colby or swiss or WTF out of the package, then turns the dial or WTF and the cheese is sliced off an drops onto plate. Of course you'll have old people from the great depression keeping every slicer they ever buy, and idiots sticking their fingers in there to slice them off. There are always problems with any design I suppose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @01:51PM
Real cheese can be sold in slices, but you can't beat this [staticflickr.com].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @04:51PM
Are you familiar with spiral-sliced ham? it has a single helical slice in it when you buy it, then after cooking you make one cut to the axial bone, from one side, and the whole thing falls into c-shaped slices.
I wonder if a similar approach might be applicable to cheese -- obviously you need some paper-like liner in the helical slit to keep the cheese from sticking to itself, but it greatly simplifies the slicing apparatus if you only half to cut 1/8" or 1/4" thick, instead of a whole 1-3" width.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 29 2016, @08:09PM
I would imagine anything extrudable can be extruded into any shape... Imagine rotini pasta shaped cheese. Or elbow macaroni shaped cheese bits.
That combined with a chopper might be interesting.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday August 29 2016, @05:47PM
..I still think you are describing a knife.
They are slightly annoying because you need a (larger) workspace, and you need to clean it afterwards.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday August 29 2016, @10:39PM
It can't be a knife; he's looking at it from an "engineering perspective." That means either a laser or plasma cutter.
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