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Squeezing the oil from a seed or nut leaves a de-oiled solid material called press cake or press meal. This is a valuable commodity and it’s not always the by-product, sometimes the cake is the primary product and the oil is secondary. Take as an example hemp seed. Of course hemp seed oil is a valuable and very healthy oil but the original hemp seed contains not only oil but protein, fiber and other minerals, vitamins and a little water too. Let’s use an oil press to remove most of the oil from the seed. Now, since no protein came [...]

Rheology, not a new trendy pressure point therapy but rather the science of deformation and flow within a material. I’m going to apply it here to the pressing of seeds and nuts (and other oily materials). If the rheology is favorable then the oil press can cause a solid material to plastically flow without requiring excessive force or if it is a soft material without shearing which would cause it to stall within the press. When attempting to extract oil it is important that the material is in the ideal condition and the press is configured correctly for that material. [...]

Yes, that’s right: maggots! With the search for more effective, energy and land efficient ways to make foods while reducing or reusing food waste, attention has recently turned to Black Soldier Flies aka BSF larvae or nature’s ultimate food recyclers. One fly can lay 500 eggs and the resulting larvae thrive in high density environments happily crawling over each other looking for food, they eat almost anything - and a lot of it - taking only two weeks to increase their weight 15,000 times over. They are among the most efficient animals at converting their food into usable protein and [...]