̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - food

Pledge to phase out toxic lead ammunition in UK hunting by 2025 has failed

jg533 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:14:35 +0000

̽��ֱ��pledge, made in February 2020 by the UK’s nine leading game shooting and rural organisations, aimed to benefit wildlife and the environment and ensure a market for the healthiest game meat food products.

But a Cambridge team, working with the ̽��ֱ�� of the Highlands and Islands, has consistently shown that lead shot was not being phased out quickly enough to achieve a complete voluntary transition to non-toxic ammunition by 2025. In a final study, published on 6 March in the journal Conservation Evidence, the team concludes that the intended transition has failed.

̽��ֱ��team has closely monitored the impact of the pledge every year since its introduction, recruiting expert volunteers to buy whole pheasants from butchers, game dealers and supermarkets across Britain and recover embedded shotgun pellets for analysis.

In 2025, the study - called SHOT-SWITCH - found that of 171 pheasants found to contain shot, 99% had been killed with lead ammunition.

This year, for the first time, the team also analysed shotgun pellets found in red grouse carcasses shot in the 2024/25 shooting season and on sale through butchers’ shops and online retailers. In all 78 grouse carcasses from which any shot was recovered, the shot was lead.

“Many members of the shooting community had hoped that the voluntary pledge away from lead ammunition would avert the need for regulation. But the voluntary route has now been tested - with efforts made by many people - and it has not been successful,” said Professor Rhys Green in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and lead author of the report.

Eating game meat killed using lead shot will expose people unnecessarily to additional dietary lead. Lead is toxic to humans even in very small concentrations; the development of the nervous system in young and unborn children is especially sensitive to its effects. As a result, many food safety agencies now advise that young children and pregnant women should avoid, or minimise, eating game meat from animals killed using lead ammunition.

Discarded shot from hunting also poisons and kills many tens of thousands of the UK’s wild birds each year.

Despite proposing the voluntary change, many shooting organisations and some individual shooters do not support proposed regulatory restrictions on lead ammunition.

Green said: “Private individuals pay a lot of money to shoot pheasants on some private estates - and people don’t like to change their habits. It’s a bit like wearing car seatbelts, or not smoking in pubs. Despite the good reasons for doing these things, some people were strongly against using regulation to achieve those changes, which are now widely accepted as beneficial. ̽��ֱ��parallel with shooting game with lead shotgun ammunition is striking.”

Danish shooters now say that the legal ban on lead introduced in Denmark around 30 years ago was justified. They say it has not reduced the practicality or popularity of their sport, and has increased its acceptability to wider society.

“Although a few large UK estates have managed to enforce non-lead ammunition on pheasant shoots, some have had to be quite draconian in order to do it, with the estate gamekeepers insisting on loading the guns for the shooters,” added Green.

In the 2020/21 and 2021/22 shooting seasons, over 99% of the pheasants studied were shot using lead ammunition. This figure dropped slightly to 94% in 2022/23 and 93% in 2023/24, with the remaining pheasants killed by ammunition made of steel or a metal called bismuth, before rising to 99% again in 2024/25.

Retail pressure

̽��ֱ��researchers also checked up on a pledge made by Waitrose in 2019 to stop selling game killed with lead ammunition.

They found that the retailer had been largely let down by suppliers, and that some of their shooters continued to shoot using lead despite making assurances to the contrary. As a result, Waitrose did not sell oven-ready pheasants at all between 2021 and 2023. It sold pheasants again in January 2024 and the 2024/25 season, but the researchers showed that the majority had been killed using lead shot.

In 2022 the National Game Dealers Association (NGDA), which buys game and sells it to the public and food retailers, also announced it would no longer sell game of any kind that had been shot using lead ammunition. But this pledge has since been withdrawn. ̽��ֱ��researchers bought 2024/25 season pheasants from three NGDA member businesses and found that all had been shot with lead ammunition.

Inside influence

̽��ֱ��researchers also analysed all articles relating to the voluntary transition published in the magazine of the UK’s largest shooting organisation, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. They found that articles near the beginning of the five-year pledge communicated clear, frequent and positive messages about the effectiveness and practicality of non-lead shotgun ammunition.

But by 2023, mentions of the transition and encouragement to follow it had dropped dramatically.

̽��ֱ��upshot

At the request of the Defra Secretary of State, the UK Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has assessed the risks to the environment and human health posed by lead in shot and bullets. Its report, published in December 2024, proposes that the UK Government bans the use of lead shot and large calibre bullets for game shooting because of the risks they pose to the environment and health. This recommendation is currently under review by Defra ministers, with a response due in March 2025.

Steel shotgun pellets are a practical alternative to lead and can be used in the vast majority of shotguns, as can other safe lead-free alternatives. But the results of this study indicate UK hunters remain unwilling to make the switch voluntarily.

Since 2010, UK governments have preferred voluntary controls over regulation in many areas of environment and food policy and have suggested that regulation be used only as a last resort.

“Shooting organisations did a lot of questionnaire surveys when the pledge was introduced in 2020, and the results suggested many shooters thought the time had come to switch away from lead ammunition. Those responses stand in contrast to what we’ve actually measured for both pheasant and grouse,” said study co-author Dr Mark Taggart at the ̽��ֱ�� of the Highlands and Islands.

Toxic lead

A previous study led by Green and colleagues found that pheasants killed by lead shot contained many fragments of lead too small to detect by eye or touch, and too distant from the shot to be removed without throwing away a large proportion of otherwise useable meat. This means that eating pheasant killed using lead shot is likely to expose consumers to raised levels of lead in their diet, even if the meat is carefully prepared to remove whole shotgun pellets and the most damaged tissue.

Lead has been banned from use in paint and petrol for decades. It is toxic to humans when absorbed by the body and there is no known safe level of exposure. Lead accumulates in the body over time and can cause long-term harm, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease and kidney disease in adults. Lead is known to lower IQ in young children and affect the neurological development of unborn babies.

̽��ֱ��studies were part-funded by the RSPB, Waitrose & Partners, and an anonymous donor. They were supported by a group of unpaid volunteers, who are co-authors of the reports.

References

Green, R E et al: ‘ ̽��ֱ��proportion of common pheasants shot using lead shotgun ammunition in Britain has barely changed despite five years of voluntary efforts to switch from lead to non-lead ammunition.’ March 2025, Conservation Evidence. DOI: 10.52201/CEJ22/EXYS6184

Green, R E et al.: ‘Sampling of red grouse carcasses in Britain indicates no progress during an intended five-year voluntary transition from lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition.’ February 2025, Conservation Evidence. DOI: 10.52201/CEJ22/YYWM1722

A voluntary pledge made by UK shooting organisations in 2020 to replace lead shot with non-toxic alternatives by 2025 has failed, analysis by Cambridge researchers finds.

̽��ֱ��voluntary route has now been tested - with efforts made by many people - and it has not been successful.

Rhys Green

Andy Hay, RSPB

Adult pheasant

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Ultra-processed food makes up almost two-thirds of calorie intake of UK adolescents

cjb250 — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 01:30:13 +0000

̽��ֱ��study found that UPF consumption was highest among adolescents from deprived backgrounds, those of white ethnicity, and younger adolescents.

UPFs are food items that are manufactured from industrial substances and contain additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, colourings, flavourings, and emulsifiers. UPFs vary greatly, but tend to indicate poor dietary quality, with higher levels of added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium, as well as decreased fibre, protein, and micronutrient content. They have been suggested as one of the key drivers of the global rise in diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

Globally, the availability and sales of UPFs have increased over time and previous evidence suggests that this has led to increased consumption among adolescents. To look at trends within the UK, researchers from Cambridge and Bristol analysed data from four-day food diaries of almost 3,000 adolescents in the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey between 2008/09 and 2018/19.

In research published today in the European Journal of Nutrition, the researchers found that a mean of 66% of adolescents’ energy intake came from UPF consumption during this period, though there was a slight fall from 68% to 63% between 2008/09 and 2018/2019.

Parents’ occupation, ethnic group and UK region all influenced the proportion of calorie intake from UPFs:

Adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds consumed a higher proportion of their calorie intake from UPFs compared to adolescents from less disadvantaged backgrounds (68.4% compared with 63.8%).
Adolescents from a non-white ethnicity consumed a lower proportion of their calorie intake from UPFs (59.0% compared with 67.3%).
Adolescents living in the North of England consumed a higher proportion of their calorie intake from UPFs compared with those living in the South of England and London (67.4% compared with 64.1%).
18-year-olds consumed a lower proportion of their calorie intake from UPFs compared with 11-year-olds (63.4% compared with 65.6%).

Dr Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the study’s first author, said: “Adolescents’ food patterns and practices are influenced by many factors, including their home environment, the marketing they are exposed to and the influence of their friends and peers. But adolescence is also an important time in our lives where behaviours begin to become ingrained.

“It’s clear from our findings that ultra-processed foods make up the majority of adolescents’ diets, and their consumption is at a much higher level than is ideal, given their potential negative health impacts.”

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that the observed reduction in UPF intake pre-pandemic could be partly explained by an increased public awareness and health concerns associated with sugar consumption, government-led campaigns, sugar-taxes in other countries and the reformulation of sugary drinks to reduce their sugar content.

Dr Esther van Sluijs from the MRC Epidemiology Unit at Cambridge, joint senior author, said: “Ultra-processed foods offer convenient and often cheaper solutions to time- and income-poor families, but unfortunately many of these foods also offer poor nutritional value. This could be contributing to the inequalities in health we see emerging across childhood and adolescence.”

Dr Zoi Toumpakari from the Centre for Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol, joint senior author, added: “Our findings suggest that disparities in consumption of ultra-processed foods are not just down to individual choices. We hope this evidence can help guide policymakers in designing more effective policies to combat the negative effects of ultra-processed food consumption among youth and the ripple effects this has on public health.”

This study was largely funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research School for Public Health Research.

Reference
Chavez-Ugalde, Y et al. Ultra-processed food consumption in UK adolescents: distribution, trends, and sociodemographic correlates using the National Diet and Nutrition Survey 2008/09 to 2018/19. Eur J Nutr; 17 Jul 2024; DOI: 10.1007/s00394-024-03458-z

Adolescents consume around two-thirds of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods (UPFs), new research from the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol has found.

Ultra-processed foods make up the majority of adolescents’ diets, and their consumption is at a much higher level than is ideal, given their potential negative health impacts

Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde

Juanmonino (Getty Images)

Boy eating a burger

Yes

AI predicts healthiness of food menus

cjb250 — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 08:00:27 +0000

Cambridge researchers have used artificial intelligence to predict the healthiness of café, takeaway and restaurant menus at outlets across Britain and used this information to map which of its local authorities have the most and least healthy food environments.

Robot ‘chef’ learns to recreate recipes from watching food videos

sc604 — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 01:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it.

In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own. Their results, reported in the journal IEEE Access, demonstrate how video content can be a valuable and rich source of data for automated food production, and could enable easier and cheaper deployment of robot chefs.

Robotic chefs have been featured in science fiction for decades, but in reality, cooking is a challenging problem for a robot. Several commercial companies have built prototype robot chefs, although none of these are currently commercially available, and they lag well behind their human counterparts in terms of skill.

Human cooks can learn new recipes through observation, whether that’s watching another person cook or watching a video on YouTube, but programming a robot to make a range of dishes is costly and time-consuming.

“We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author.

Sochacki, a PhD candidate in Professor Fumiya Iida’s Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, and his colleagues devised eight simple salad recipes and filmed themselves making them. They then used a publicly available neural network to train their robot chef. ̽��ֱ��neural network had already been programmed to identify a range of different objects, including the fruits and vegetables used in the eight salad recipes (broccoli, carrot, apple, banana and orange).

Using computer vision techniques, the robot analysed each frame of video and was able to identify the different objects and features, such as a knife and the ingredients, as well as the human demonstrator’s arms, hands and face. Both the recipes and the videos were converted to vectors and the robot performed mathematical operations on the vectors to determine the similarity between a demonstration and a vector.

By correctly identifying the ingredients and the actions of the human chef, the robot could determine which of the recipes was being prepared. ̽��ֱ��robot could infer that if the human demonstrator was holding a knife in one hand and a carrot in the other, the carrot would then get chopped up.

Of the 16 videos it watched, the robot recognised the correct recipe 93% of the time, even though it only detected 83% of the human chef’s actions. ̽��ֱ��robot was also able to detect that slight variations in a recipe, such as making a double portion or normal human error, were variations and not a new recipe. ̽��ֱ��robot also correctly recognised the demonstration of a new, ninth salad, added it to its cookbook and made it.

“It’s amazing how much nuance the robot was able to detect,” said Sochacki. “These recipes aren’t complex – they’re essentially chopped fruits and vegetables, but it was really effective at recognising, for example, that two chopped apples and two chopped carrots is the same recipe as three chopped apples and three chopped carrots.”

̽��ֱ��videos used to train the robot chef are not like the food videos made by some social media influencers, which are full of fast cuts and visual effects, and quickly move back and forth between the person preparing the food and the dish they’re preparing. For example, the robot would struggle to identify a carrot if the human demonstrator had their hand wrapped around it – for the robot to identify the carrot, the human demonstrator had to hold up the carrot so that the robot could see the whole vegetable.

“Our robot isn’t interested in the sorts of food videos that go viral on social media – they’re simply too hard to follow,” said Sochacki. “But as these robot chefs get better and faster at identifying ingredients in food videos, they might be able to use sites like YouTube to learn a whole range of recipes.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by Beko plc and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Reference:
Grzegorz Sochacki et al. ‘Recognition of Human Chef’s Intentions for Incremental Learning of Cookbook by Robotic Salad Chef.’ IEEE Access (2023). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3276234

Researchers have trained a robotic ‘chef’ to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate the dish itself.

We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish

Greg Sochacki

Robot ‘chef’ learns to recreate recipes from watching food videos

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Cambridge experts on UK drought and climate change

lw355 — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:25:55 +0000

From pollinators to profits, food to fires, here's what Cambridge experts say about the impacts of water scarcity – and what it signals about our changing climate.

Taste of the future: robot chef learns to ‘taste as you go’

sc604 — Wed, 04 May 2022 04:00:00 +0000

Working in collaboration with domestic appliances manufacturer Beko, researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge trained their robot chef to assess the saltiness of a dish at different stages of the chewing process, imitating a similar process in humans.

Their results could be useful in the development of automated or semi-automated food preparation by helping robots to learn what tastes good and what doesn’t, making them better cooks.

When we chew our food, we notice a change in texture and taste. For example, biting into a fresh tomato at the height of summer will release juices, and as we chew, releasing both saliva and digestive enzymes, our perception of the tomato’s flavour will change.

̽��ֱ��robot chef, which has already been trained to make omelettes based on human taster’s feedback, tasted nine different variations of a simple dish of scrambled eggs and tomatoes at three different stages of the chewing process, and produced ‘taste maps’ of the different dishes.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that this ‘taste as you go’ approach significantly improved the robot’s ability to quickly and accurately assess the saltiness of the dish over other electronic tasting technologies, which only test a single homogenised sample. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Frontiers in Robotics & AI.

̽��ֱ��perception of taste is a complex process in humans that has evolved over millions of years: the appearance, smell, texture and temperature of food all affect how we perceive taste; the saliva produced during chewing helps carry chemical compounds in food to taste receptors mostly on the tongue; and the signals from taste receptors are passed to the brain. Once our brains are aware of the flavour, we decide whether we enjoy the food or not.

Taste is also highly individual: some people love spicy food, while others have a sweet tooth. A good cook, whether amateur or professional, relies on their sense of taste, and can balance the various flavours within a dish to make a well-rounded final product.

“Most home cooks will be familiar with the concept of tasting as you go – checking a dish throughout the cooking process to check whether the balance of flavours is right,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author. “If robots are to be used for certain aspects of food preparation, it’s important that they are able to ‘taste’ what they’re cooking.”

“When we taste, the process of chewing also provides continuous feedback to our brains,” said co-author Dr Arsen Abdulali, also from the Department of Engineering. “Current methods of electronic testing only take a single snapshot from a homogenised sample, so we wanted to replicate a more realistic process of chewing and tasting in a robotic system, which should result in a tastier end product.”

̽��ֱ��researchers are members of Cambridge’s Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory run by Professor Fumiya Iida of the Department of Engineering, which focuses on training robots to carry out the so-called last metre problems which humans find easy, but robots find difficult. Cooking is one of these tasks: earlier tests with their robot ‘chef’ have produced a passable omelette using feedback from human tasters.

“We needed something cheap, small and fast to add to our robot so it could do the tasting: it needed to be cheap enough to use in a kitchen, small enough for a robot, and fast enough to use while cooking,” said Sochacki.

To imitate the human process of chewing and tasting in their robot chef, the researchers attached a conductance probe, which acts as a salinity sensor, to a robot arm. They prepared scrambled eggs and tomatoes, varying the number of tomatoes and the amount of salt in each dish.

Using the probe, the robot ‘tasted’ the dishes in a grid-like fashion, returning a reading in just a few seconds.

To imitate the change in texture caused by chewing, the team then put the egg mixture in a blender and had the robot test the dish again. ̽��ֱ��different readings at different points of ‘chewing’ produced taste maps of each dish.

Their results showed a significant improvement in the ability of robots to assess saltiness over other electronic tasting methods, which are often time-consuming and only provide a single reading.

While their technique is a proof of concept, the researchers say that by imitating the human processes of chewing and tasting, robots will eventually be able to produce food that humans will enjoy and could be tweaked according to individual tastes.

“When a robot is learning how to cook, like any other cook, it needs indications of how well it did,” said Abdulali. “We want the robots to understand the concept of taste, which will make them better cooks. In our experiment, the robot can ‘see’ the difference in the food as it’s chewed, which improves its ability to taste.”

“Beko has a vision to bring robots to the home environment which are safe and easy to use,” said Dr Muhammad W. Chughtai, Senior Scientist at Beko plc. “We believe that the development of robotic chefs will play a major role in busy households and assisted living homes in the future. This result is a leap forward in robotic cooking, and by using machine and deep learning algorithms, mastication will help robot chefs adjust taste for different dishes and users.”

In future, the researchers are looking to improve the robot chef so it can taste different types of food and improve sensing capabilities so it can taste sweet or oily food, for example.

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by Beko plc and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre of Doctoral Training on Agri-Food Robotics (Agriforwards CDT). EPSRC is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Fumiya Iida is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Grzegorz Sochacki, Arsen Abdulali, and Fumiya Iida. ‘Mastication-Enhanced Taste-Based Classification of Multi-Ingredient Dishes for Robotic Cooking.’ Frontiers in Robotics & AI (2022). DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2022.886074

A robot ‘chef’ has been trained to taste food at different stages of the chewing process to assess whether it’s sufficiently seasoned.

If robots are to be used for certain aspects of food preparation, it’s important that they are able to ‘taste’ what they’re cooking

Grzegorz Sochacki

Taste of the future: robot chef learns to ‘taste as you go’

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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British consumers complicit in forty-year ‘healthy eating’ failure, new study suggests

ta385 — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Supermarkets and food manufacturers have been excessively blamed for Britain’s unhealthy eating habits since the 1980s, according to Cambridge historian Dr Katrina-Louise Moseley.

In an article published in Contemporary British History, Moseley argues that far from being passive victims of manipulation in this period, consumers were ‘complicit’ in long-term behavioural shifts, proactively selecting, rejecting and sweetening advice from the government, the food industry and the media to fit their circumstances and to satisfy their appetites.

Rather than seeking to cast blame, Moseley asserts that we should think more carefully about how people rationalise their eating behaviours and interpret advice about food. Speaking ahead of a public event entitled 'Food on the Move' (9 July 2021), Moseley added that this is particularly relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a dramatic impact on eating behaviours.

“Food is a powerful coping mechanism in times of emotional distress, so it isn’t surprising that people have been buying extra packets of their favourite snack or eating more takeaways. I’m interested in the psychology of consumption and getting away from moralising language around food, which can be damaging”, Moseley said. As part of the event, hosted by the ̽��ֱ�� of Warwick, Moseley invites readers to complete an anonymous survey (closes 9 July 2021) to reflect on how their own food practices have changed during the pandemic.

In her article, Moseley contrasts the success of Britain’s anti-smoking campaign, which transformed attitudes to tobacco in the 1960s and 70s, with the failure of the ‘healthy eating’ campaign to counteract rising levels of obesity from the late 1980s onwards.

Moseley said: “ ̽��ֱ��state faced a really difficult task. ‘Don’t smoke’ was a clear-cut message but you can’t tell people not to eat. Food can't be rejected outright, it has to remain a part of everyday life, and that makes it so much more complicated. We’re still really struggling with this today.”

̽��ֱ��historian makes fresh use of consumer interviews and surveys conducted in England and Wales in the 1980s and 90s. These include a Mass Observation directive questionnaire on ‘Food and Drink’ completed in 1982; interviews and participant observations gathered from 1992–96 in response to the 1992 Health of the Nation report; and a collection of life history interviews undertaken with a sample of older people in 2017–18.

Moseley argues that a major problem facing Britain’s ‘healthy eating’ campaign has been its reliance, often unavoidable, on malleable language. Words like ‘balance’ and ‘moderation’ left themselves open to subjective interpretation. Moseley said: “These records reveal all kinds of people, not just the less affluent, leaning towards convenience foods while still trying to define their lifestyles as healthy.”

Looking at the 1982 questionnaire records, Moseley found that attitudes to convenience foods were 'shot through with contradictions'. Speaking for herself and her husband, one female respondent claimed, “neither of us can bear ready-made frozen dinners” – but she made “an exception for certain things from Marks & Spencer – their frozen cod in parsley sauce is palatable and their cauliflower cheese makes me a quick solo meal if Neil is out for the evening.”

Moseley said: “For health enthusiasts and cynics alike, official information about food didn’t always feel correct. Consumers continued to assert that foods had different effects on different individuals, that one could be overweight whilst leading a healthy lifestyle, and that – in the midst of a dizzying array of information, self-evaluation was key.”

̽��ֱ��study describes how supermarkets and food manufacturers seized on the idea of ‘healthy eating’ in the 1980s in response to new nutritional guidelines being issued. In 1984, Heinz began a 25-year-programme to reduce salt and sugar in its products; and in 1986 Mars produced a pamphlet entitled ‘Confectionary in a Healthy Diet’. Meanwhile Tesco and Sainsbury's turned their attention to nutritional labelling.

Moseley said: “We underestimate what a pivotal role the convenience foods sector played in producing and disseminating knowledge about ‘healthy eating’ in this period. Sometimes, as with Findus’ calorie-controlled ready meals, it was the food industry rather than politicians or doctors that gave people usable, workable public health messages. But increasingly people came to view big food companies, government and public health experts as one and the same: a mysterious force manipulating consumer behaviour.”

Testimonies collected in the 1980s and 90s emphasise that new jargon baffled many consumers. Puzzling over the term ‘polyunsaturated margarine’, one respondent to the 1980s questionnaire said: “I understand that poly means many and unsaturated means not chock full of something, so what is margarine poly unsaturated with or not with?” In 1985, a market research study of nearly 1,500 consumers in England and Wales found that 43% were uncertain whether saturated or polyunsaturated fat was better for them.

Moseley said: “Terms like ‘E-numbers’ and ‘saturated fats’ entered public discourse but that didn’t mean that everyone understood or accepted health advice, let alone changed their behaviours. Naturally, people embraced foods that made their lives easier and their mealtimes tastier, often using the language of ‘moderation’ to justify the consumption of highly processed, time-saving foods.”

̽��ֱ��study examines the rise of scepticism as consumers felt overloaded with confusing, contradictory and unreliable ‘healthy eating’ messages. ̽��ֱ��1992–96 interviews reveal that consumers became increasingly committed to using their ‘common sense’ when thinking about food. Moseley said: “Consumers didn’t respond as authorities hoped they would, but they weren’t irrational or lacking in judgement. People subscribed to their own, highly personalized logics.”

One 1992–96 interviewee said: “some days you just want mashed potatoes and I’m not going to feel bad about that because with the rest of my life… it’s balanced’.” Interviewees also sought reassurance from their childhood eating habits or those of older relatives, saying things like: “Nan lived to a good old age” or “it didn’t seem to do us much harm at the time”.

Testimonies from the 1990s also reveal the emergence of a new language linking food and feeling. One woman defined healthy eating as “that difference between… getting a good feeling from what you eat and getting this sort of not very nice feeling”. “Cheese especially” made another young woman feel “so ugh – you know it makes me feel so fat and just weighs me down”. She added that she felt “much healthier and brighter” if she avoided it.

Moseley said: “ ̽��ֱ��idea that different foods might cause individuals to feel a certain way in their bodies prefigured a major shift towards self-diagnosed food intolerances in the early twenty-first century.”

̽��ֱ��study accepts that some positive health trends did come about in the late 20th century but points out that consumers favoured easier quick-fixes like switching to brown bread and semi-skimmed milk, over sweeping dietary transformations.

Moseley said: “Medical researchers remain very worried about public scepticism, but their studies tend to lack historical context. Thinking about the history of trust and cynicism alongside developments in public health can help us understand and reconstruct the bigger picture.”

Reflecting on Britain’s food culture today, Moseley points out that economic, social and geographic constraints on ‘healthy’ choices lack public visibility: factors like deprivation, time poverty, and mental illness delimit the choices that consumers feel able to make. She said: “Too often, health education campaigns promote ‘informed’ decision making around food, as if social and economic disparities do not exist. Food has long been a site of inequality in Britain, and unfortunately it remains so today.”

Reference

K Moseley, ‘From Beveridge Britain to Birds Eye Britain: Shaping knowledge about ‘healthy eating’ in the mid-to-late twentieth-century’, Contemporary British History (2021). DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2021.1915141

‘Healthy eating’ campaigns have largely failed in Britain for the last four decades because consumers have adapted confusing advice, and incorporated fast and convenience foods into self-defined ‘balanced’ lifestyles, a new study argues.

These records reveal all kinds of people ... leaning towards convenience foods while still trying to define their lifestyles as healthy

Katrina-Louise Moseley

GinniDeville via Pixabay

Fish and chips

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A good egg: robot chef trained to make omelettes

sc604 — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 11:40:51 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with domestic appliance company Beko, used machine learning to train the robot to account for highly subjective matters of taste. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and will be available online as part of the virtual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2020).

A robot that can cook has been an aspiration of sci-fi authors, futurists, and scientists for decades. As artificial intelligence techniques have advanced, commercial companies have built prototype robot chefs, although none of these are currently commercially available, and they lag well behind their human counterparts in terms of skill.

“Cooking is a really interesting problem for roboticists, as humans can never be totally objective when it comes to food, so how do we as scientists assess whether the robot has done a good job?” said Dr Fumiya Iida from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research.

Teaching a robot to prepare and cook food is a challenging task, since it must deal with complex problems in robot manipulation, computer vision, sensing and human-robot interaction, and produce a consistent end product.

In addition, taste differs from person to person – cooking is a qualitative task, while robots generally excel at quantitative tasks. Since taste is not universal, universal solutions don’t exist. Unlike other optimisation problems, special tools need to be developed for robots to prepare food.

Other research groups have trained robots to make cookies, pancakes and even pizza, but these robot chefs have not been optimised for the many subjective variables involved in cooking.

Egg dishes, omelettes in particular, have long been considered a test of culinary skill. A popular piece of French culinary mythology states that each of the one hundred pleats in a chef’s hat represents a different way to cook an egg, although the exact origin of this adage is unknown.

“An omelette is one of those dishes that is easy to make, but difficult to make well,” said Iida. “We thought it would be an ideal test to improve the abilities of a robot chef, and optimise for taste, texture, smell and appearance.”

In partnership with Beko, Iida and his colleagues trained their robot chef to prepare an omelette, from cracking the eggs through to plating the finished dish. ̽��ֱ��work was performed in Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, using a test kitchen supplied by Beko plc and Symphony Group.

̽��ֱ��machine learning technique developed by Iida’s team makes use of a statistical tool, called Bayesian Inference, to squeeze out as much information as possible from the limited amount of data samples, which was necessary to avoid over-stuffing the human tasters with omelettes.

“Another challenge we faced was the subjectivity of human sense of taste - humans aren’t very good at giving absolute measures, and usually give relative ones when it comes to taste,” said Iida. “So we needed to tweak the machine learning algorithm - the so-called batch algorithm - so that human tasters could give information based on comparative evaluations, rather than sequential ones.”

But how did the robot measure up as a chef? “ ̽��ֱ��omelettes, in general, tasted great – much better than expected!” said Iida.

̽��ֱ��results show that machine learning can be used to obtain quantifiable improvements in food optimisation. Additionally, such an approach can be easily extended to multiple robotic chefs. Further studies have to be conducted to investigate other optimisation techniques and their viability.

“Beko is passionate about designing the kitchen of the future and believes robotics applications such as this will play a crucial part. We are very happy to be collaborating with Dr Iida on this important topic,” said Dr Graham Anderson, the industrial project supervisor from Beko’s Cambridge R&D Centre.

Reference:
Kai Junge et al. ‘Improving Robotic Cooking using Batch Bayesian Optimization.’ IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2020.2965418

A team of engineers have trained a robot to prepare an omelette, all the way from cracking the eggs to plating the finished dish, and refined the ‘chef’s’ culinary skills to produce a reliable dish that actually tastes good.

Cooking is a really interesting problem for roboticists, as humans can never be totally objective when it comes to food, so how do we as scientists assess whether the robot has done a good job?

Fumiya Iida

Can robots make omelettes?

Yes