Samina Cabral

The second largest coffeehouse chain in the country (and if you live outside the land of Starbucks you may have heard of them) the alliterative Caribou Coffee has buddied up with Project 7 to plant trees for Earth Month.

Project 7, founded in 2008 by entrepreneur Tyler Merrick, is a company that makes a small selection of everyday items like organic fair-trade coffee and t-shirts that can be purchased online at their website. While offerings like their sugar-free gum can be readily purchased at stores like Walmart or Target.

For every purchase of a Project 7 product, the company makes charitable contributions to non-profit organizations that correlate with the “seven areas of need:” Feed the Hungry, Heal the Sick, Hope for Peace, House the Homeless, Quench the Thirsty, Teach them Well, and Save the Earth.

Did you know that sourdough bread resists mold? I didn’t know that. But that may be because I haven’t had the luxury of letting a decent loaf (a honest-to-goodness loaf) of sourdough bread sit out to waste away since leaving the Golden State. I’m not even able to splurge on a Sourdough Jack from Jack in the Box because the fast food chain isn’t found in this region. I'm not bitter, I'm just hungry.

Fun Fact: The mascot of the San Francisco 49ers is named “Sourdough Sam” as a nod to the bread’s Gold Rush era heritage in Northern California.

The football team’s website says Samster’s favorite food is garlic fries. Shouldn’t his favorite food be sourdough bread? I’ve heard it said that you can make sandwiches with the stuff. No one could hate a sandwich.

In the summer of 2011 General Mills announced that a team of international researchers working at the University of California-Davis would receive a $200,000 grant to begin the Vanilla Sustainability Project.

The vanilla project, led by Dr. Sharman O’Neill,  a professor of biological sciences at UC Davis, was the winning entry in the Sustainability Challenge. General Mills invited universities to submit grant proposals with their best ideas for encouraging sustainable consumption, reducing waste, and using resources responsibly.

The research team will map the vanilla genome, research natural crop improvements, study natural and traditional plant-breeding methods to develop improved and hybrid vanilla varieties that are hardier, more disease resistant, and offer enhanced flavor.  

Ten pregnant Holstein cows, the quintessential black and white farm animal but the name is also used when referring to red and white cows, at Oregon State University’s dairy were fed different amounts of flaxseed because researchers were bored with cow-tipping. Just kidding!

They were looking for the optimal amount of the supplement to a dairy cow’s current diet: mixtures of corn, grains, alfalfa hay, and grass silage.  This diet leads to dairy products that are low in concentrations of omega-3 fatty acids and other polyunsaturated fats. This doesn’t mean items are unhealthy but researchers thought that products could be more nutritious.

Ideally, the supplement would transfer its nutritional properties to the milk that is then used for other dairy products but not affect the texture and quality of the final product sent to grocery stores.

The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has some good news about citrus trees affected with Huanglongbing disease (citrus greening disease) or the obviously less fun to say HLB: sick trees will always affect the taste of the fruit that is used in orange juice, a delicious breakfast beverage, but sometimes we won’t be able to tell.

A research team in Fort Pierce, Florida- where the United States Horticultural Research Laboratory is located- studied Midsweet, Hamlin, and Valencia oranges with or without HLB symptoms over two growing seasons. They found that orange juice squeezed from fruit with HLB symptoms  usually contained higher amounts limonin and nomilin. These two compounds gave the juice a bitter taste but even though the amounts were higher they were generally below the level that could be detected by people.

ARS researchers say the fruit that is affected need only be mixed with healthy fruit to produce a juice that is palatable. Now if you are anything like me and have had the luxury of fresh-squeezed orange juice the liquid was never drinkable until I had poured about two or three cups of sugar in it and then chased that down with three bowls of Frosted Flakes.

Doctoral candidate John Taylor, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Crop Sciences,  was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens that were being circulated by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Taylor told the university’s news office that of the NGO lists he saw one reported almost 700 urban gardens in Chicago.

700 urban gardens may seem like a lot but when you start to think about the size and population of the city that one list didn’t seem accurate to Taylor. He surmised that there were actually more than what the lists presented. The content of the lists weren’t always accurate either and Taylor said some of the greenery was just well, greenery: planter boxes or landscaping that did not produce food, at least not food for humans.

So Taylor partnered with Assistant Professor Sarah T. Lovell at the same department to obtain a more accurate count of urban gardens with the help of everyone’s favorite time-waster and map on the Internet- Google Earth.

On Friday NOAA submitted a mandated biennial report to Congress that identified 10 nations that had fishing vessels engaged in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in 2011/2012. A few of these countries weren’t doing enough to prevent the unintended catch (bycatch) of protected species last year. The report is a part of the High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act.

The U.S. will start work with or continue where they may have left off after the 2011 report with these 10 nations: Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, Venezuela, Panama, the Republic of Korea, Spain, Tanzania, Ghana, and Mexico. Portugal and the five countries listed above in italics have corrected some of their IUU issues with new laws and regulations.

Label reading at the grocery store has become for many shoppers a good habit. However, when we are in a rush and need to make snap decisions we only have time to look at the front packaging which is why companies slap easy to understand phrases and symbols on their products: “Low Fat!,” “0 Trans Fat,” and “No HFCS.” 

Stores, for example Walmart, have created in-house symbols to direct us to the healthiest products they sell but as we have all heard a million times before packaging phrasing is not always accurate or standardized.

A study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health looked at foods that are “whole grain" because even though we know we should eat whole grains that are nutritionally better for us than say a sweet, delicious vending machine honey bun, “no single standard exists for defining any product as a ‘whole grain.’

On Saturday I arrived in California for the Thanksgiving holiday and I’ve had real Mexican food, sunshine, shopping, citrus on my mind ever since. Yesterday I talked about what Spain might be doing to combat the Pezothrips kellyanus pest in their Valencia oranges and today I am going to talk about everyone’s favorite citrus snack: Cuties®, the funnest citrus snack of all time!

Last week Paramount Citrus announced the grand opening of their new facility in Delano, California. The Cuties® Plant, which needs a punnier, cuter name than what it has, is now over 640,000 square feet, or as big as 11 football fields, and is now the largest packing house in the world.

When things got tough the tough got going. Which means when the Norse weren’t able to farm as much as they had been as Greenland’s ancient environment changed, they just wandered on over to the beach and clubbed baby seals for dinner. Or perhaps the Vikings used a spear, sword, or battle axe, but the primitive and widely accessible club seems like the way to go.

According to new research that will be published serially in the Journal of the North Atlantic; anthropologists believe that by the 14th century seals made up somewhere between fifty or eighty percent of the Viking diet. The change in their dietary habits came far after they left Iceland to settle in Greenland and they may even learned how to hunt seals from the Inuit who arrived about 1200 from Canada to live with the Norse.

A team of researchers from Universitat Politècnica de València, in where else but Valencia, Spain, the University of Navarra in Pamplona (Fun Fact: The founder of the University of Navarra is also the founder of Opus Dei the “ultra-secret” Catholic organization featured in the bestselling thriller The Da Vinci Code), and a Belgian company Biobest Belgium NV have studied thrips: a disease that affects Valencia oranges and is transmitted by a tiny, winged pest and they may have found a bug to fight the bug.  

The guilty bug is called Kelly’s citrus thirps or Pezothrips kellyanus and whatever you do don’t do a Google image search for the insect- here is a link. You’re welcome.

Bad news this morning from Reuters and the BBC so you know it’s just gotten real. If you are standing up you are going to want to sit down and if you are sitting down you are going to want to stand up.  

Both news agencies are reporting the conclusion of a study that predicts climate change is going to threaten the ability of caffeine addicts the world over to function. Climate change might negatively affect the global production of Arabica coffee crops.

What’s that sound? It’s the sound of people’s coffee mugs hitting the floor in a fantastic ceramic crash mid-slurp and then because I’m a caffeine addict (average: four cups a day), “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”

There is only one week left until Halloween!

Green America, a non-profit member organization and creator of the National Green Pages, is partnering with zoos and aquariums in over 20 states and Washington DC to host “Boo at the Zoo”: kid- and earth-friendly activities to celebrate the season.

The organization is promoting their Green Halloween® program in addition to “Boo at the Zoo.” Partners for the program include Whole Foods Market and Honest Tea.

"There are many ways that families can do their part to reduce excess and unhealthy consumption around Halloween. Green Halloween® provides easy and family-friendly ways to help families celebrate green, as well as opportunities to participate in fun, eek-o friendly events, at zoos and in the community," said Elizabeth O'Connell, Green America’s campaigns director, in a statement this morning.

In addition to October being Vegetarian Awareness Month it’s also National Seafood Month, a NOAA-designated celebration of marine life, conservation, and awareness.

While the two themes aren’t exactly compatible because some vegans and vegetarians do not include fish in their diet, both are food-related. A month long look at the stuff we eat is a chance to think about the amount of food (and water) we waste and how our food is cultivated before it ends up on our table.

Researchers are doing more work with seaweed: specifically the types that are beneficial to humans nutritionally and have been eaten for centuries across several cultures.  Turning to seaweed for food could help lessen the agricultural impact that traditional cultivation has had on the Earth’s resources.

A team from Teagasc Food Research Centre in Ireland is building on previous research that has shown two species of red seaweed may be potential sources for developing inexpensive, nutrient rich food or ingredients.

The Chinese softshell urtle or Pelodiscus sinensis is native to China, Japan, and Taiwan. The turtle was introduced to Hawaii by Asian immigrants and it’s the only US state where they are currently established though there have been reports of the species on Maryland and New York.

The average length of its upper shell is 4.5 to 10 inches and it’s a standard looking turtle: olive in color with webbed feet. It sits at the bottom of a waterway lifting its head to catch fish or insects for dinner and snorkeling to the surface to breath.

The turtle is listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List website and this charming little paragraph under the “Threats” heading explains why:

“While this species is commercially farmed in vast numbers (several millions per year) for the food trade, the wild populations continue to be exploited for food and possibly farm founder stock, resulting in a decline in abundance throughout its wide range”

Just in case you read that quickly and didn’t catch the meaning of “food trade” it means this turtle is the creature featured in the traditional delicacy called Turtle Soup. Which is why the turtles were brought to the United States- to be eaten and that isn’t the weirdest fact about the Chinese softshell turtle.

In August the EPA announced the twelve winners of this year’s Environmental Awards in the Pacific Southwest Region (Region 9). This region includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands.

Nominations began in January and were open to individuals, businesses, groups, and non-profits organizations so long as they met the criteria outlined by the program and were committed to conservation and public health.

Presentation ceremonies for the winners have been ongoing since the announcements and yesterday the Sustainable Agriculture Champion, Dixon Ridge Farms of Northern California, was honored in a ceremony led by selected EPA officials and representatives for area congressmen.

Tomorrow the North American Vegetarian Society (NAVS) will kick off Vegetarian Awareness Month with World Vegetarian Day.

The society was founded in 1974 and three years later they designated October 1st as a vegetarian awareness day to encourage people to go veg because it’s healthier for you, the planet, and being a vegetarian is another way to be kind to our animal friends.

If it isn’t inclement weather threatening our fresh tomatoes (see hurricanes and cold snaps in Florida where about 50 percent of our country’s tomatoes are grown according to the Florida Tomato Commission) than it’s bugs like the whitefly.

The whitefly is an indiscriminate pest and its many species will destroy whatever vegetation it can by sucking or feeding off the host plant until it withers or in the case of tomatoes it forces the fruits to irregularly ripen. The whitefly is often difficult to control even with the use of chemicals.

In the quest to create a whitefly resistant tomato, and reduce if not completely eliminate the use of pesticides in open field cultivation (the method used in Florida), scientists have turned to genetic modification. Oh the irony of creating a genetically modified tomato to end the use of chemicals!

If you can read you can cook and if you are adventurous you can create dishes that are as good if not better than what you’d get from pre-packaged ingredients or restaurants.

These three books contain recipes for several of the same things like ketchup, mustard, tea, and bread but every cookbook has something different to offer because cooks are at different skill levels and have different needs and bellies to fill at their table.