- Author: Iqbal Pittalwala
It’s easy to finish half a bag of chips, or more, while being spread out on a couch, watching TV, the remote near and handy. So robotic can such chip consumption be that it’s easy, too, not to glance at the chip parade traveling resolutely from bag to mouth. But glance we must, for had it not been for the work of a research team, those healthy potato chips for most of us today would be out of reach and pricey, crunched into a crisp footnote in potato history.
The research team, which rescued the potato chip industry from major losses, is the “Zebra Chip Research Team.” It has just won the Integrated Pest Management Team Award...
- Editor: Shelby MacNab
- Author: Brittanny Zweigle
Remember when you were a kid and it was Tommy’s birthday and his mom brought those delicious cupcakes with the mounds of frosting to school? Picture with me all that syrupy sweet frosting in dazzling colors piled to the sky on top of a fluffy cupcake. While we are visualizing cupcakes, let’s do some cupcake math. If a teacher celebrates 30 students’ birthdays during the year, or about one per week in a nine-month school year, in addition to holidays like Halloween, Christmas, Valentines, and St. Patrick’s day, that can add up to a lot of sugary treats.
MyPlate teaches moderation, so there is nothing wrong with a
- Author: Rachel A. Surls
Home vegetable gardening has always been popular in Los Angeles County. At the UC Cooperative Extension office in Los Angeles, we have a long history of teaching people how to garden through our Common Ground Garden Program. We began to get even more inquiries than usual from beginning gardeners starting three or four years ago. As it turned out, this was part of a larger trend. A national survey showed a 19 percent increase in edible gardening in U.S. households in just one year, between 2008 and 2009. We were excited about this new enthusiasm for home food production....
- Author: Penny Leff
Feel that chill in the morning air? Autumn's here, school's starting, and soon we'll be bustling about, wearing sweaters, cleaning rain gutters and raking leaves. But first, according to many traditions, it's time to take a break and celebrate the harvest with local farmers.
Many cultures throughout the Northern Hemisphere have long traditions of harvest festivals held around the time of the main harvest in autumn. Most harvest festivals feature feasting, music, romance, dancing and freedom from work, sometimes lasting for days.
In Asia, the Moon Festival is a popular harvest festival celebrated in September or early October by Chinese and Vietnamese people. The Jewish holiday Sukkot, celebrated for seven days in late...
- Author: Brenda Dawson
You’ve probably heard it millions of times in your lifetime, but it bears repeating: Not everyone has enough, good food to eat.
To that end, the Horticulture Collaborative Research Support Program at UC Davis builds global partnerships for fruit and vegetable research to improve livelihoods in developing countries.
Starting in September, those partnerships will include 14 graduate students from UC Davis, Cornell University, North Carolina State University and University of Hawaii at Manoa who will travel to work with smallholder farmers in developing countries.
Through Horticulture CRSP’s Trellis...