Masticatory efficiency in individuals with extensive tooth loss has been widely discussed. However, little is known about jaw movement smoothness during chewing and the effect of differences in food bolus location on movement smoothness and masticatory efficiency. The aim of this study was to determine whether experimental differences in food bolus location (anterior versus posterior) had an ef...

BACKGROUND The provision of food in and through schools has been used to support the education, health, and nutrition of school-aged children. The monitoring of financial inputs into school health and nutrition programs is critical for a number of reasons, including accountability, transparency, and equity. Furthermore, there is a gap in the evidence on the costs, cost-efficiency, and cost-effe...

Food production and security will be a major issue for supplying an increasing world population. The problem will almost certainly be exacerbated by climate change. There is a projected need to double food production by 2050. In recent times, the trend has been for incremental modest yield increases for most crops. There is an urgent need to develop integrated and sustainable approaches that wi...

Food webs seem to possess scale invariant attributes among which efficiency has been recently included. Considering food webs as transportation networks it has been shown that minimum spanning trees, topologies that minimize cost for delivering medium, satisfy a universal scaling relation. It is not clear, however, whether resource distribution follows the criterion of minimum cost, because lon...

During the 52nd Conference of the Italian Society of Agricultural Economists (SIDEA), Italian agricultural economists have been given the opportunity to debate regarding internationalization, competition, and local development in agri-food systems. This special issue of the journal AFE contains four selected papers presented in this conference. These papers focus on three main issues that are s...

With the world’s population set to increase by 65% (3.7 billion) by ∼2050, the additional food required to feed future generations will put further enormous pressure on freshwater resources. This is because agriculture is the largest single user of fresh water, accounting for ∼75% of current human water use. At present ∼7% of the world’s population live in areas where water is scarce. This is p...

The indiscriminate use of antibiotics and the emergence of resistant microorganisms have become a major challenge for the food industry. The purpose of this work was to microencapsulate the bacteriophage UFV-AREG1 in a calcium alginate matrix using microfluidic devices and to study the viability and efficiency of retention. The microcapsules were added to gel of propylene glycol for use as an a...

nutritional incides have important role in economical efficiency of silkworm rearing. in order to estimate nutritional indices six silkworm hybrids including 103×104, 31×32, 107×110, 104×103, 32×31 and 110×107 which were commercially used in iran for cocoon production were tested. these hybrids were reared in spring 2003, spring 2004 and autumn 2004. the studied parameters were amount of ingest...