Hunger and chronic undernourishment impact over 800 million people, which translates to ≈10.7% of the world's population. While countries are increasingly making efforts to reduce poverty and hunger by pursuing sustainable energy and agricultural practices, a third of the food produced around the globe still is wasted and never consumed. Reducing food shortages is vital in this effort and is often addressed by the development of genetically modified produce or chemical additives and inedible coatings, which create additional health and environmental concerns. Herein, a multifunctional bio‐nanocomposite comprised largely of egg‐derived polymers and cellulose nanomaterials as a conformal coating onto fresh produce that slows down food decay by retarding ripening, dehydration, and microbial invasion is reported. The coating is edible, washable, and made from readily available inexpensive or waste materials, which makes it a promising economic alternative to commercially available fruit coatings and a solution to combat food wastage that is rampant in the world.

Natural building blocks like proteins and hydroxyapatite (HA) are found in abundance. However, their effective utilization to fabricate environment-friendly, strong, stiff, and tough materials remains a challenge. This work reports on the synthesis of a layered material from entirely natural building blocks. A simple process to extract HA from bones, while keeping collagen intact, is presented. These HA nanocrystals have a high aspect ratio as a result of the extraction method that largely retains the pristine nature of the HA. To fabricate the materials, polymerized egg white is used to induce toughness to the crystals where it acts like a load transfer entity between the crystals. As shown by atomic force microscope modulus mapping, the result is a layered material with a modulus that ranges from 3 to 180 GPa. Furthermore, the material exhibits self-stiffening behavior. Hydrogen and ionic bonds are likely to regulate the chemical interactions at the egg white/HA interface and are likely to be responsible for the observed high toughness and stiffness, respectively. The use of the HA/egg white composite as printed scaffolds is also demonstrated together with their biocompatibility.

Mimicking the remarkable properties of natural materials such as toughness, self‐stiffening, self‐healing, etc., is useful for several structural, functional, and biomedical applications. The judicious combination of natural and synthetic building blocks to design hybrid materials could offer an alternative route to achieving the aforementioned properties of natural materials. This study reports easily scalable process to synthesize graphene oxide (GO)/egg white hybrid material (polyalbumene) by cross‐linking GO nanosheet with the amine‐based cross‐linker diethylenetriamine (DETA) and egg white. The result is a layered material like nacre, exhibiting high strength and toughness. Abundant functional groups on the GO allow covalent interactions between DETA and egg white protein amino acids. The atomistic simulations reveal that the insertion of GO into the composite has a sizeable impact on the composite's stiffness. As shown by experiments, the hybrid material has an elastic modulus of ≈41 MPa and a ductility of more than 25%. The hybrid material also exhibits a fracture repair property under laser exposure as well as CO2 absorption and stiffening over time, suggesting an adaptable behavior. This work explores the possibility that the combination of synthetic and natural approaches offers a better route to designing advanced, tough, strong, adaptable, and fracture recovering materials.

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