- Editor: Shelby MacNab
- Author: DeAnna Molinar
For years the news and media have released reports that the holidays mean weight gain and ever-widening waistlines. All the hype leaves me asking: how many holidays between Thanksgiving and New Year’s do we actually have?
Ok, so take out your calendar and circle the holidays and potential “food-related” events you might attend. We have Thanksgiving Day, Hanukkah, Christmas Day, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve, and a Saturday or two of holiday parties to attend. When we look at it that way, it becomes more and more clear to us that Thanksgiving isn’t our ticket to eat foods laden with fat throughout the month of December! What it does do, however, is remind us of the food related events to...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
A UC Cooperative Extension specialist says there isn’t enough scientific evidence to warrant consumers making changes to their diets nor to their children’s diets based on recent media reports about levels of arsenic in rice. The issue arose from an analysis by Consumer Reports of white and brown rice from around the world and rice products like rice cereal, rice milk and rice pasta.
“In virtually every (rice) product we tested, we found measurable amounts of total arsenic,” said the article.
However, Carl Winter, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
The warmth and joy of the holidays often stirs the giving spirit, boosting donations to food banks. All contributions are welcome, of course, but food donors can add extra value to their gifts by making careful choices when scouring the pantry or grocery store for food contributions, say UC Cooperative Extension nutrition educators.
UCCE’s nutrition education program, known as UC CalFresh, teaches good-sense eating on a budget to low-income families throughout California. The educators’ extensive experience training families who face food insecurity has given them insight into the needs of food bank clients.
“People who get help from food banks are often at risk...
- Author: Penny Leff
It might be pouring rain today, but soon enough California will be dry again. As demand for water for a growing urban population and for environmental restoration increases, farmers throughout the state are working to grow crops using as little water as possible, and UC is working with them.
"Water supplies are being constrained. Farmers are facing reduced access to water," said Shermain Hardesty, a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis.
A team of researchers, led by Hardesty, is in the middle of a three-year investigation into the effects of different irrigation levels on the quality, shelf-life, nutritional...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
As we pushed ourselves away from the Thanksgiving table last week, my family, friends and I gave a collective groan from overeating. We are fortunate to have plenty to eat. In 2009, an estimated 3.8 million California adults went hungry because they could not afford to put sufficient food on the table, according to a policy brief by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. That’s up from 2.5 million Californians who went hungry in 2001.
To supplement their food supply, Californians can turn to the CalFresh program, which was formerly known as food stamps. The federal program is called the Supplemental Nutrition...