Food in the 21st century, in addition to providing nourishment, should be healthy, safe and up-to-date with international trends, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said yesterday, adding that Taiwan's high quality agricultural products are ready to take center stage on the international market.
COA Deputy Minister Huang You-tsai (黃有才) made the remarks yesterday at a press conference announcing the 18th Annual International Food Exhibition, which is set to run from today until Saturday.
“The exhibition aims to attract both domestic and international buyers. There is no doubt that Taiwan produces good quality agricultural products, what we are demonstrating with this year’s exhibition is how we have applied advanced technologies to further improve our goods,” Huang said.
The exhibition will be divided into six sections: CAS-certified products, farm products, fishery products, forestry products, livestock products and prepared foods, Huang said.
A “resume rice” — which comes with details including its origin and grower — and plum-flavored miso will make their debut appearances to foreign buyers, the COA’s agriculture and food agency specialist Lao-dar Juang (莊老達) said.
Sashimi-grade fish, instantly frozen at minus 55°C to preserve 100 percent of its freshness and nutrients, will also be displayed, Juang said.
A company that sells deboned and frozen milkfish will also be presenting its products, Juang said.
“Milkfish contains 220 bones so it is not usually not favored by consumers; however, the company’s second-generation owner deboned his fish and created a recipe Web site and blog for his company, and in this way has improved sales,” he said.
But perhaps the most refreshing product at show is “bamboo water,” a beverage that has been developed and patented by the Forestry Bureau.
“Bamboo naturally contains nutritious fluids inside its soft linings,” the bureau’s senior technical specialist, Huang Miao-hsiu (黃妙修), said.
The fluid is extracted by a low-temperature, high pressure technology to create a drink that is low in calories (2.4 calories/100ml), tasty and good for the body, containing bamboo-leaf-flavonoids, an excellent anti-oxidant, and polysaccharides, Huang said.
With an international market, the bureau is projecting NT$3 billion revenue for the product, Huang said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to