Fresh off her much-applauded announcement of important changes to the government-subsidized school lunch program, Michelle Obama has been sweeping the nation promoting the second anniversary of “Let’s Move” by judging an elementary school cooking challenge with Top Chefs, dancing the Platypus Walk at Disney Orlando, and doing push ups with Ellen DeGeneres. It’s uplifting to . . . read more »
Preserving Microbial Diversity Biologist have many ways of comparing species within an ecosystem, such as diversity of foods they eat and geographical ranges they inhabit. We can also consider them based on the diversity of microbes they possess, something biologists call their microbial repertoire. For humans, we tend to differentiate on things like blood type . . . read more »
Last night I was perusing Loss-Adjusted Food Availability spreadsheets available on the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) website (I know, get a life). Despite the boring title, the data is quite interesting as it provides per capita food availability in the U.S., adjusted for food spoilage, plate waste, “other” losses, and what we export and . . . read more »
The salad bar at your local grocery store is the closest most of us will ever come to eating like an ancestor. Sorry, Outback Steakhouse. Our not-so-distant ancestors consumed an extraordinary diversity of plants throughout their rounds on the landscape. While meat played a significant role in our evolutionary success, the vast majority of the . . . read more »
In a recent column in the New York Times, food journalist Mark Bittman nicely summarized the insanely out-of-control costs associated with treating the insidious diseases that plague America today. According to Bittman, the costs associated with treating pre-diabetes and full-blown diabetes alone by 2020 are predicated to top $500 billion a year. With a “disease . . . read more »
