- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
When it comes to planting stone fruit at home, pluots are the way to go, says Chuck Ingels, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Sacramento County. Cherries are delicious, but with a new maggot pest, are hard to grow. Peaches and nectarines are susceptible to leaf curl disease, which is challenging to manage because the most effective products have been removed from store shelves. Apples and pears can suffer from fire blight and coddling moths worms.
“I think plums and pluots are the best choices for backyard trees,” Ingels said. “Especially pluots.”
“Pluot” is a trade name for varieties of interspecific plum-apricot bred by private Modesto...
- Author: Diane Nelson
People often complain about grocery store tomatoes, saying they’re too hard and don’t have the flavor we remember from the days of old. And we thought we knew why - because the millions of tons of tomatoes harvested in the United States and beyond have to be picked before they’re fully ripe and juicy in order to survive being shipped long distances. What’s more, many shoppers store their tomatoes in the fridge, which destroys both their flavor and texture.
But guess what? It’s not just how tomatoes are grown, harvested and stored that affect their flavor. A research team led by Ann Powell, a biochemist in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, has discovered a gene mutation that diminishes a...
- Author: Janet Byron
The news this past week that nearly three tons of Trader Joe’s prepared barbeque chicken salad were recalled due to possible contamination by Listeria moncytogenes had me wondering anew about this mysterious foodborne pathogen. And today, seven tons of Garden Fresh prepared salads were also recalled.
I’ve spent precious minutes worrying about E. coli (ubiquitous, especially in poop) and Salmonella (the reason we must take care with raw eggs), but why doesn’t...
- Author: Aubrey White
* - Updated 8/6/2012
As the local food movement scales up and consumers demand information about where their food comes from, more grocers and institutions are seeking wholesale access to local produce. To make the connection between producers and retail sellers, distribution networks are taking on an increasingly important role in the local food system. More and more, farmers are becoming part of values-based supply chains and ‘food hubs’ to pool their product with that of other farmers and move food more easily to market and complete the chain from farm to fork (*).
New reports released by the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) show that, while food hubs help close...
- Contributor: Ann King Filmer
- Author: Pat Bailey
An ambitious effort to sequence the genomes of 100,000 infectious microorganisms and speed diagnosis of foodborne illnesses has been launched by the University of California, Davis, Agilent Technologies, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Bart Weimer, professor in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, serves as director of the 100K Genome Project and co-director of the recently established BGI@UC Davis facility, where the sequencing will be done. Other collaborators include the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S....
