Making hummus on the moon?🌙

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Read time today: 2:33 min

Hi friend,

It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.

Welcome to the 37 new readers who signed up in the last two weeks. You are in good company.

As always I hunted down five insights about food business and food innovation that deserve your attention.

Here they are:

Moon dust contains no nutrients, is highly water-repellent, and packed with toxic heavy metals. Not the kind of soil anyone seriously expects to farm.

And yet a US research team tried exactly that. And it worked.

They mixed simulated moon dust with worm compost and special fungi. These fungi form a symbiosis with chickpea roots, help with nutrient absorption, filter heavy metals, and improve the physical structure of the sharp-edged rock particles.

The result: harvestable seeds.

Whether the harvested chickpeas absorbed toxic metals and are safe to eat has not yet been investigated. Still, very interesting research to follow.

More about the moon chickpeas here.

I cry every single time when I have to cut onions.

After 20 years of R&D, researchers in Hokkaido, Japan, developed a tearless onion called Smile Ball. They identified the enzyme that makes your eyes water, lachrymatory-factor synthase, and blocked it using heavy ion beams. The result is eye-friendly, and supposed to taste like a raw apple.

They sell the onions for about $2 each in Japan. Sales are projected to grow fivefold over the next three years. In the US, they're rebranded as Goldies and already distributed nationwide.

I'd love to try it out of curiosity. But $2 per onion long-term? Probably not.

Dry your eyes and read the full story here.

A chewing gum that makes chocolate taste like nothing.

I tried Sweet Victory gum and it works.

The key ingredient is gymnema, an Ayurvedic plant also known as gurmar, Hindi for "sugar destroyer." Its molecular structure is similar to glucose, so it fills the same receptor locations on your taste buds. Sweet things stop tasting sweet. The effect kicks in within two minutes and lasts around two hours.

The gum was developed by an Israeli startup founded by a psychologist and a nutritionist. Their premise: sugar cravings are both physical and emotional. The gum addresses both.

If this is the low-cost GLP1 alternative, I'm not sure, but it was fun to try. Check them out here.

My grandma used to say: necessity is the mother of invention.

Japanese food company Kagome just proved it.

The price of orange juice in Japan has nearly quadrupled since 2020 due to poor harvests in Brazil, a weak yen and high import dependency. Some supermarkets have temporarily pulled orange juice from their shelves entirely.

Kagome's answer: a juice called Beyond that tastes like orange but contains no oranges at all. After two years of development, the company combined yellow carrots, apples, and other fruits into a flavor profile that mimics orange juice.

The product is now available in Japanese supermarkets and convenience stores.

Is this confusion for our taste buds or a great invention that can be applied to other scarce fruit products (which we will have more of with rising climate issues)?

What do you think?

In a world where AI handles execution, the people who think better will win. That's where the cognitive fitness angle comes in.

I predict this becomes the next wellness metric.

Just like 2 liters of water, 8 hours of sleep, 10,000 steps… we will have an arbitrary ~9 pages of reading a day recommendation that will go viral.

Stay awesome,
Lia

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