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10 ways to find out if your food is organic

Tired of eating stuff laden with chemicals but don't know how to go about choosing right? Jayashree Joshi Eashwar, co-founder, Dubdengreen, and Mridu Mahajan Pogula, co-founder, Nirvaaha Delhi, put together a 10-point primer to help you gauge whether the food you are picking up is organic. Kavita Devgan reports.

Your Insect Friends
Keedas (worms) in your grains are actually good news. Naturally grown sabut daals (like moong sabut, or urad sabut), atta, maida, brown rice, white rice and other grains will get keedas after two-three months and especially in the rains... because keedas too know that non-organic food is just not edible. So don't jump up and down when you see the worms; all you need to do is wash the grain or sun them out like our grandmothers would and still live on to a 100 years. Keedas don't contaminate your food, pesticides do. Similarly, if you see a few holes in the leaves of the greens you are buying, pick up the bunch; it means it is not heavily 'pesticided'. And one rule of thumb to follow with greens is this: after washing them well, give a final rinse of salt water for two-three minutes. This helps remove germs and residue.

Appearance
If it is naturally and organically grown, no two items will look identical... ever! It's just not possible to find two things that look absolutely alike in nature. No two leaves of the same mango tree will ever look 100% alike. Similarly, each apple, mango or even grain will always look different from another. Their colour, shape, structure will never be uniform. There will, for instance, be different shades of yellow in your moong dal instead of the uniformly bleached yellow of the regular packaged dal.

Size Up
Fruits, vegetables and grains won't be huge in size. So while it is okay to go "ooh aah!" over huge potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, eggplants, cauliflower, capsicum and the humble lauki, or bottle gourd, it is better not to transfer them to your plate. There are, of course, special cases in which people do grow large-sized fruits and vegetables organically as well, but they are not the norm and are difficult to find.

Tasty
Natural is just tastier. When you cook organic vegetables, you will realise that you need less spices as there is so much natural flavour. Similarly, organic fruits are juicier as they are allowed to ripen on the tree. Otherwise, fruits are usually plucked when green and then gassed to ripen and increase shelf life. In the case of a banana, your taste buds will speak up because the pesticide fruit has more water due to the spraying of acetylene gas. Unfortunately, most mangoes today are artificially ripened and apples have the maximum pesticides. The adage 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away' is actually only for organic apples.

Healthier
Organic feels healthier, is far lighter on the digestive system and also helps reduce acidity and gas related GI issues. You will feel a perceptible difference soon enough.

The Smell Test
The aroma and texture of organic food is totally different — very potent, in fact. Organic spices, for instance, will have a strong aroma and flavour as they retain their oil content. In non-organic spices, the oils have been extracted and sold separately so they are devoid of any oil. Plus they are usually adulterated, so you need to use more to get the same result. Try ajwain/laung/zeera... just eat it raw and you'll know the difference. Your tongue will have a strong sensation after half a teaspoon of organic ajwain. Similarly, organic apples have a divine fragrance; keep a crate of organic apples in the house to find out.

One problem though is that industries now do a good job of recreating the original smell. The smell of pure ghee, for example, is added in the lab. Some just add the fragrance to make you think you are buying pure ghee, whereas you could actually be buying something totally nutritionless and worthless. So be careful.

Cook Faster
Organically grown food always cooks much faster; in fact if you are a multi-tasker, be careful as you might just burn the dish if you go out to peep in the garden while it is cooking. Food with pesticides needs to be cooked for much longer periods.

Read
Please read the label and check for any preservatives present in the product; most preservatives are petroleum based — you surely don't want to be consuming those!

Certification
Though not a norm in India yet, sometimes fruits and vegetables meant for exports do land up in the local market and have a sticker on them that can be checked. (4 digit PLU — price look up code — the sticker basically means grown with pesticides; 5 digit codes starting with 8 means GM grown, 5 digit codes starting with 9 means organically grown. In India, we basically have the regular 4 digit PLU which indicates that it is grown with pesticides).

Shelf Life
It is a myth that organic fruits and vegetables spoil faster; stored in a refrigerator they last for a long time.

Human urine a goldmine for fuel-cell materials

Human urine may one day be used to generate power for vehicles and homes, according to a new study which found that pee could be the future of carbon fuel-cell technology. 

Scientists from Korea University in Seoul, South Korea, have demonstrated that carbon, a precious fuel cell material, can be extracted from dried urine and that it is a powerful conductor of electricity.

Fuel cells - devices which harvest energy from a chemical reaction - often use platinum as a catalyst, making them expensive to produce. 

Researchers found that doped collections of carbon atoms recovered from human urine have the right kind of properties to replace expensive catalysts in fuel cell applications, 'theregister.Co.Uk' reported. 

In the study, scientists collected urine samples from healthy individuals and heated them to evaporate the water, leaving behind a dried, yellowish deposit. 

Next, they super-heated various test samples of dried urine in a range between 700 and 1,000 degrees Celsius for six hours to carbonise the urine. 

The heating process caused salts and other elements to gasify and leave behind carbon, according to 'Discover Magazine (blog)'. 

Urine is loaded with other elements besides carbon, which makes the leftover carbon highly porous - ideal for fuel cell catalysts. 

The urine carbon was an excellent conductor of electricity, especially the batch that was heated to 1,000 degrees. Researchers said this is the first time carbon was extracted from urine using this simple method. 

The research was published in the journal Nature.

Coffee waste may fuel your car now

Scientists have created a new biofuel to get the cars running using ground coffee. The study by University of Bath found that different varieties of coffee, including Robusta and Arabica, have reasonably standard composition and relevant physical properties of fuel, suggesting that all coffee waste could be a "viable" way of producing biodiesel. Chris Chuck, a research fellow at the university, said that around eight million tonnes of coffee are produced globally each year, and ground waste coffee contains up to 20% oil per unit weight. 

This oil also has similar properties to current feedstocks used to make biofuels. Spent coffee grounds are waste and there's a real potential to produce a truly sustainable biofuel using these, he added. 

Infosys proposes 50 MW solar park in Karnataka

Infosys has proposed a 50 mw solar park in Karnataka, becoming the first software company in India to think of generating its own power that will meet a bulk of the electricity needs of its offices in Bangalore, Mysore and Mangalore. Karnataka's Energy Minister DK Shivakumar said that Infosys had held one round of talks with the state government in which it had expressed keenness to build the solar power facility. "The company will buy land on its own," he said. 

More accurate data on thousands of years of climate change.

Using a cutting-edge research technique, UCLA researchers have reconstructed the temperature history of a region that plays a major role in determining climate around the world. The findings, published online Feb. 27 in the journal Nature Geoscience, will help inform scientists about the processes influencing global warming in the western tropical Pacific Ocean. 

The study analyzes how much temperatures have increased in the region near Indonesia, and how ocean temperatures affect nearby tropical glaciers in Papua New Guinea and Borneo. Researchers also evaluated the accuracy of existing climate model predictions for that region. The findings illustrate that the region is very sensitive to climate change and that it has warmed considerably over the last 20,000 years, since the last ice age. 

Billionaire Vincent Bollore to support electric carsharing network in London.

Billionaire Vincent Bollore will back an electric carsharing network in London. The system will have thousands of electric vehicle charging stations and should be operating in late 2014 or early 2015. Bollore heads the Bollore Group, which is a family business focused on maritime freight and international trade. 

He took over the corporation that employs over 30,000 after being trained in investment banking. His company has implemented a similar EV carsharing scheme in Paris. The one in London will cost Bollore about $166 million and have approximately 6,000 charging stations.

 Consumers can rent electric cars in the network in fifteen minute intervals. The first launch in late 2014 or early 2015 will provide 100 electric cars, with up to 3,000 more in the next three years.

Strawberry trees offer free public solar charging for gadgets

In a bid to bring more renewable energy choices to the public, while educating people on the benefits of solar power, one Serbian startup is building public solar charging stations that will energize mobile gadgets and serve as a social hub.

The vision of Strawberry Energy is to make renewable energy sources more accessible for all people, and to show that solar power and other clean energy solutions aren't just abstract concepts, but are instead practical and desirable. The way they're helping to get that message across is through their public solar charging stations, dubbed Strawberry Trees, which offer free charging for mobile devices, and in some cases, free WiFi.

Because so many of us are dependent on our phones, our tablets, and our music players, all of which are likely to run out of juice just when we need them, offering a way for users to recharge them with the power of the sun might be a great entry point for showing how solar energy has a place in our everyday lives.

The Strawberry Tree public solar stations, which are designed to be permanently installed in busy public places, include 16 charging cords (so users don't have to have their charger with them), and can serve as a meeting place and WiFi hotspot.

Currently, 12 of the Strawberry Tree charging stations are installed in Europe, with ten of them in Serbia and two in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and have proven to be popular with the public. The company recently signed a US distribution agreement with 3fficient Energy of California, which could open the door for wider adoption of these public solar chargers. According to 3fficient, the California Community College system has already expressed interest in the Strawberry Tree system.

Strawberry Energy also makes two other versions of the solar chargers, the Strawberry Mini, which is a smaller portable model that could be used for festivals and events, and the Mini Rural, which is even smaller and is designed for offgrid and rural use in areas without electricity.

Su-kam makes its first solar installation in Tripura

Su-Kam Power Systems, a power back up solutions provider, has made its first solar installation at Agartala in Tripura. 

The off grid Solar PV (photovoltaic) plant has been installed in the Ujjayanta Market Complex in the city recently, Su-Kam said in a statement. 

The company was assigned to commission, install and maintain this solar project by Tripura Renewable Energy Development Agency (TREDA) in Agartala. 

"As part of our solar plan this fiscal, we shall continue making solar power available to both the residentialas well as commercial sector in North East India," Ashish Sethi, Vice President, Solar Business, Su-Kam said in a statement.

French developer EDF commissions 30 MW solar project in Madhya Pradesh

French developer EDF Energies Nouvelles is commissioning the 30MW Khilchipur solar project in India.

The facility in Madhya Pradesh is the developer’s first PV installation in the country and five further PV projects totalling 120MW are under development in Rajasthan.

EDF won the quintet in a call for tenders by the Indian government and the schemes are all due to be commissioned during 2015.

Work is being led by ACME Solar Energy Private Limited, in which EDF Energies Nouvelles has a 25% interest.