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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Two hearts united against breast cancer | The Nation

Make this Valentine’s Day memorable and meaningful by giving your loved ones the true gift of love, caring and good health. Here we learn firsthand what true love means from a couple that has been together for 30 years and is still going strong. We meet Khunying Finola Chatamra, honorary adviser to the Queen Sirikit Centre for Breast Cancer (QSCBC) Foundation, and the foundation’s director, her husband Dr. Kris Chatamra MD. They have dedicated their lives to raising awareness and helping underprivileged patients in Thailand. The couple have worked closely and shared their vision, passion, love and care not just for themselves, but also others through the ups and downs of three decades together.

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/asia-pacific/40024786

Smart cooker lends amateurs star-chef touch to an app

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Cooking has long required a dash of skill and a knack for interpreting recipes. One needs the experience and intuition of a professional chef to get the heat and seasoning just right. But now, even this age-old art is being transformed by digitization.

Step by step
Tomomi Misawa, 43, a part-time employee in Tokyo, finds herself using, again and again, the Hestan Cue smart cooker she got in January last year after an acquaintance recommended the device. This made-in-the-US system works by pairing a special cooktop with an app via Bluetooth.

The app contains 450 recipes, ranging from home-style dishes such as sukiyaki and kakiage tempura, to those crafted by famous chefs around the world.

Users select a recipe and follow the steps shown in a video on their smartphone, making it easy to attempt new recipes. When you put in the ingredients listed, the cooktop reads the relevant program, adjusts the time and the temperature of the heat by as finely as 1 C and starts cooking. It’s just like automated driving.

“For many years, I didn’t really know how long I had to cook certain dishes such as stew before they were done. But with this cooktop, a beef and vegetable stew is done in about 10 minutes,” Misawa said. “I can prepare it in the optimum cooking time, which saves time and makes things convenient.”

Even her husband, a novice cook, now makes such complicated dishes as kakuni braised pork belly, she said.

According to Tokyo-based Felicidad, a distributor for the cooker, the Hestan Cue system was developed in 2015 from a desire “to provide a cooking experience free of glitches to everyone,” and it is currently being distributed in 20 countries. The price for a cooktop and pan set is rather steep at ¥88,000, but the product has nonetheless proved popular, especially among men and women in their 50s. Hestan Cue also sells a frying pan for the system.

Blending seasonings
Anyone intimidated by seasonings might find relief in Luna Robotics Inc.’s Colony, a seasoning printer. This boxy 30-square-centimetre machine stores up to 19 liquid seasonings, including soy sauce, sake, sesame oil and salt water, kept in printer-like cartridges, and outputs the appropriate amount of each.

Users connect the printer to a dedicated app and select a recipe, which causes the printer to automatically blend the necessary seasonings. All you have to do to make a tasty dish is simmer or bake the ingredients with the prepared seasoning.

The printer’s blending abilities cover several hundred recipes, including nikujaga meat and potato stew and ohitashi steeped vegetables, and new recipes are added regularly. Luna Robotics, based in Shizuoka Prefecture, will soon begin renting Colony printers to the food service industry and plans to sell them for household use in a few years.

Behind the demand for sophisticated kitchen appliances seems to be a change in family norms. According to the Cabinet Office, the number of two-worker households has been on the rise and reached 11.77 million in 2021. There are now twice as many such households as there are those composed of a working husband and a homemaker wife.

“There is a strong demand for simplified cooking, especially among two-worker households,” said Takahisa Ikegami, general manager of Sharp’s Kitchen Appliance Business Unit.

In 2015, Sharp released Hotcook, an automated cooking pot. Simply add the necessary ingredients and seasonings to the rice cooker-like pot, and sit back as it prepares such dishes as curry and chikuzen-ni simmered vegetables. Consumers have taken to the convenience, buying up some 500,000 of the devices.

“We hope to make people’s lives easy, and reduce their time spent on housework,” Ikegami said.

Cooking robots
The food service industry has struggled with Japan’s labour shortage and tried to cope by introducing robots.

E Vino Spaghetti, a restaurant that opened in Tokyo last June, employs one such machine. It juggles up to four frying pans at once, mixes sauces and loads plates into the dishwasher. Meals can be served in as little as 45 seconds.

“Our strength is that the taste is always the same,” said a spokesperson for Pronto Corp., the company that runs E Vino Spaghetti. “Many of our customers eat their food without realizing it was made by a robot.”

TechMagic, Inc., a Tokyo-based company that jointly developed the robot with Pronto, hopes to create cooking robots for home use in the future.

Wayo Women’s University Prof. Kyoko Oishi, who specializes in cooking science, said that despite the variety of recipes offered by such machines, some people may not be satisfied with dishes cooked in a one-size-fits-all way.

“The cooking process, in which you adjust seasonings according to your mood or who you’re eating with, is where the true pleasure of food lies,” she said. “I understand the convenience of cooking appliances, but their spread will be limited, I think.”

The Japan News

Asia News Network

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More than 21,000 people died in Turkey-Syria earthquakes

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Cold, hunger and despair gripped hundreds of thousands of people left homeless after the earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria three days ago as the death toll passed 21,000 on Thursday.

The death toll across both countries has now surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful quake hit northwest Turkey.

Hundreds of thousands of people across both countries have been left homeless in the middle of winter. Many have camped out in makeshift shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins, often desperate for food, water and heat.

Authorities say some 6,500 buildings in Turkey collapsed and countless more were damaged.

The death toll in Turkey rose to 17,674, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said. In Syria, already devastated by nearly 12 years of civil war, more than 3,370 people have died, according to the government and rescue service in the rebel-held northwest.

At least 78,124 people were injured across both countries, according to authorities.

In the Turkish town of Iskenderun, streets were flooded as a result of the tremors, as tractors were deployed to help clear the streets from thick residues of mud.

Ukrainian rescue teams searched through the debris of residential buildings in Hatay with the aid of sniffer dogs. Kyiv has sent 88 people to Turkey to help with the disaster. The team includes specialists in search and rescue operations, doctors, dog handlers and firefighters.

The German army unloaded relief goods for Turkish earthquake victims at Incirlik Air Base after being rerouted from Gaziantep.

According to the German army, three Airbus A400M transport planes carried tents, cots and electric heaters.

Incirlik air base, which hosts US nuclear warheads, is located some 220 km (136 miles) by road west of Gaziantep.

Greece sent thousands of tents, beds and blankets on Thursday to help those left homeless by the quake, in an act of solidarity with a neighbour that is a Nato ally but also a historic foe.

Many in Turkey have complained of a lack of equipment, expertise and support to rescue those trapped – sometimes even as they could hear cries for help.

After facing criticism over the initial response, Erdogan said on a visit to the area on Wednesday that operations were now working normally and promised no one would be left homeless.

Reuters

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Zelenskiy hopes for EU jets, gets standing ovation in Brussels

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2023

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that several European Union leaders were ready to provide Kyiv with aircraft to help it fight against Russia’s invasion.

Speaking during his first in-person meeting with all the 27 national leaders of a union Ukraine wants to join, Zelenskiy did not say who could provide jets, adding that some deals were still in the works, while others could not be made public.

EU countries have supplied large amounts of arms to Ukraine over the past year and have become increasingly comfortable with sending heavy weaponry such as battle tanks.

But they have yet to commit – publicly at least – to sending fighter jets and longer-range rockets, citing worries about a potential escalation of the conflict onto Russian territory.

“Europe will be with us until our victory. I’ve heard it from a number of European leaders… about the readiness to give us the necessary weapons and support, including the aircraft,” Zelenskiy told a news conference in Brussels.

He did not elaborate, but said more would be decided in bilateral meetings with some of the leaders later in the day.

With the EU preparing a 10th package of sanctions against Russia for the February 24th anniversary of the start of the war, Zelenskiy asked it to curb Russian tech exports and reduce Moscow’s ability to produce missiles for the war.

Ukraine, which wants to join the EU, is pushing for membership talks to start this year.

But while some EU countries are keen to give Ukraine the morale boost that would come with starting talks to join the bloc, others are much more cautious. They have stressed would-be members need to meet a range of criteria – such as cracking down on corruption – before they can even start negotiations.

Zelenskiy told EU leaders his country was “upgrading” its institutions.

“We are moving closer to the European Union. Ukraine will be a member of the European Union. Ukraine that is winning will be a member of the European Union that is winning,” he said.

The European Commission is set to say in October if Ukraine meets the criteria to start accession talks, and then it requires member states to unanimously agree on it.

Earlier in the day, in an address to the European Parliament, Zelenskiy expressed gratitude for the support of both politicians and ordinary citizens in the EU.

“Europe will always remain free until we are together and until we take care of our Europe, take care of the European way of life. I thank all of you…Glory to Ukraine,” he said, receiving a long-standing ovation from EU lawmakers, cheering and applauding, some of them wearing the blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag.

Reuters