Food & Agriculture

A quarter-century after its founding, the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science is a place of groundbreaking discoveries, collaborations and educational offerings attracting top-notch students, scholars and researchers. 

A transformational gift of $25 million from the Robert and Margrit Mondavi family in 2001 established the RMI to study, advance and improve wine, brewing and food sciences.

As the climate warms, people are more exposed to heat stress, which depresses their productivity and the global economy. A study from the University of California, Davis, quantifies the cost of heat stress on global labor. 

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, estimates that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2025 cost $41 in lost productivity. 

What if the methane from landfills and wastewater treatment plants could become an affordable raw material for sustainable plastics? 

Some naturally occurring bacteria, called methanotrophs, can consume methane and use its carbon to produce biodegradable plastics, which are stored inside their cells. But producing plastic is only part of the puzzle. Recovering and purifying it from the bacteria contributes significantly to costs; thus, reducing these costs can help make methane-derived bioplastics economically competitive with conventional plastics. 

Tobacco products and food often share shelf space in neighborhood stores. A research team led by the University of California, Davis, examined those shelves to see whether a Sacramento city policy was actually increasing access to healthy food.

If you've been reaching for chips, mayonnaise or salad dressing labeled "made with avocado oil," there's a good chance the oil inside isn't pure avocado oil, despite it being the only listed oil ingredient. University of California, Davis, researchers tested processed foods marketed as containing avocado oil. They found 48 of the 54 avocado oil-labeled products were adulterated with cheaper oils. The study was published in Applied Food Research. 

Dean Ashley M. Stokes and Associate Dean Anne Todgham with the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis will participate in the first ever Agriculture Day at the California State Fair. 

The July 18 event is sponsored by the California Farm Bureau and the California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom. Events will run from 10 a.m to 11 p.m. in the Tractor Supply Company Big Barn.

A bag of groceries can feed a family, but it may not always feel like home. New research led by the University of California, Davis, finds that labeling foods that are meaningful to different cultures can help local pantries better serve the communities they support.

Two new studies examining gray wolves in California paint a complex picture of life on California’s ranching landscapes: Wolves eat cattle more than anything else, and the presence of the predators causes significant stress among livestock.

California’s San Joaquin Valley produces an enormous share of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables. But it takes an unsustainable amount of groundwater to do it. New state rules aimed at reducing groundwater use are expected to force up to 20 percent of the valley’s irrigated fields out of production – a blow to farmers and communities.

Worker bees are the first line of defense when it comes to removing contamination in honeybee colonies, but a queen has her ways, too.

A honeybee queen facing chronic exposure to pesticides will take up that contamination and pass it along to her eggs, a process researchers call maternal offloading. 

The findings, which document for the first time the extent a queen will go to survive, are published in the journal Current Biology. Research was led by the University of California, Davis.