UC Food and Agriculture Blogs
Camping soon? Don't move firewood!
As you plan the last few camping trips of the summer, remember: buy firewood when you get to your destination. Don't move firewood! Buy it where you burn it. Why? Simply, we don't want wood-boring pests and diseases to be moved from one area in the...
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Have you tasted an avocado lately?
The lab of Mary Lu Arpaia, a Cooperative Extension subtropical horticulturalist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) and the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UC Riverside, hosts an avocado tasting each month on the UCR campus. Attended typically by about 60 people, the tastings have grown in popularity over the years.
Eric Focht, a staff research associate in the Arpaia lab, helps organize the tastings; the guacamole he prepares specially for the occasion serves as an additional attraction. Focht has been working on avocados since 1999, the year he joined UCR as a staff member. His relationship with the campus, however, began before then; his father, now retired, was a professor on campus.
Typically, participants of the avocado tastings sample six avocados which come from UC ANR's South Coast Research and Extension Center in Irvine. “Hass control fruit are purchased from or donated by a packing house,” Focht says.
First, participants do a visual assessment of the fruit, evaluating texture, size and color. Next they step into a room where they do the blind tastings.
“The data is compiled and used to assess, among other things, which of our new breeding selections shows promise and should be pushed for eventual release,” says Focht, whose duties include coordinating field activities, designing field layouts, generating maps and databases, selecting avocado varieties of interest, interacting with growers and the public, troubleshooting, and directing the day-to-day operations of the lab when Arpaia is away.
Focht's favorite avocado variety varies by year and season.
“Right now our 465518-99 has been performing very well,” he says, “but in former years, its peak season is February through April. In the fall, Reed is always a good fruit with good flavor and texture. I prefer a fruit that peels easily and has good flavor. If it doesn't peel clean from the skin, I tend to overlook it for something else with good flavor and convenient packaging.”
The avocado growing season varies from variety to variety. By planting out several varieties, it is possible to have avocados year round in one's garden. Focht explains that the growing season varies regionally as well.
“The season in San Luis Obispo is months later than it is in San Diego,” he says.
Most avocado acreage in California is currently in Northern San Diego County. Most avocado acreage in the U.S. is in California. Other states with avocado industries include Florida and Texas. Worldwide, avocados are grown in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Israel, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.
The California drought, now in its fourth year, is a concern for avocado lovers and scholars like Focht.
“An acre of avocado trees typically requires 2.5-4 acre-feet of water per year depending on weather and other factors,” he says. “The drought is resulting in lost acreage as farmers can either not afford or not find enough water for their trees. Successful farmers are having to modify their cultural practices to stay competitive.”
The next avocado tasting at UCR will be Aug. 12, 2015. For more information about the tastings, contact Focht.
The health impacts of sugary drinks
Americans consume nearly three times the recommended amount of sugar every day, and about half the U.S. population consumes sugary drinks on any given day.
Excess sugar consumption contributes to obesity, tooth decay, early menses in girls, and chronic diseases including diabetes and heart disease. To add to the damage, doctors are now attributing too much dietary sugar to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which can lead to cirrhosis of the liver.
It's enough to make you sit up and listen to the warnings about too much soda, sugary drinks, and sugar-laden processed foods.
What is a sugary drink? It's any beverage, more or less, with added sugar or other sweeteners, including high-fructose corn syrup. The long list of beverages includes soda, lemonade, fruit punch, powdered fruit drinks, sports drinks, energy drinks, sweetened coffee and tea drinks, and many flavored milk products.
People are becoming aware of the concerns of too many sugary drinks, and steps are being taken to reduce their consumption. Some K-12 school districts across the nation are limiting sales of soda, and the City of Davis will soon require that restaurants offer milk or water as a first beverage choice with kids' meals.
UC Cooperative Extension, the county-based outreach arm of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, is partnering with health agencies and conducting public service programs for youth and families about sugary drinks. UC ANR Cooperative Extension in San Joaquin County recently presented a "Rethink Your Drink" parent workshop in conjunction with the county's Office of Education, and Solano County Cooperative Extension is working with the California Department of public health to engage youth in "Rethink Your Drink" programs.
Lucia Kaiser, UC ANR Cooperative Extension nutrition specialist, co-authored a policy brief about California's rural immigrants who have poor-quality tap water, or perceive tap water to be bad. Kaiser, who is also a nutrition faculty member at UC Davis, noted that studies have found a link between water quality and consumption of sugary drinks, which is a concern in low-income communities that don't have resources for clean water.
As of this month (July 2015), UC San Francisco is no longer selling sugary beverages on its campus, and UCSF has launched a Healthy Beverage Initiative. UC Berkeley held a Sugar Challenge this year, and UC Davis is conducting a Sugar Beverage Study on women.
Scientists at UC San Francisco, UC Davis, UC ANR's Nutrition Policy Institute, and other universities are studying the health effects of sugar and implementing health outreach programs. And UC's Global Food Initiative is building on the momentum of excessive sugary-drink consumption.
A healthy alternative to sugary drinks? Water, of course. Many universities and public places are replacing traditional drinking fountains with water stations so that students and others can fill their own bottles and have water “on the go.” And UC President Janet Napolitano is working with the Nutrition Policy Institute on a bold and sensible request to place water on the USDA's MyPlate nutrition guidelines.
The next time you're thirsty, drink wisely to your good health.
Additional information:
- Sugary drinks are hiding under a 'health halo'; UC ANR Food Blog, Aug. 6, 2014
- Nutrition Policy Institute, UC ANR
- UCSF Launches Sugar Science Initiative, a national initiative
- Learn the Facts about Sugar: How Sugar Impacts your Health, UCTV Video, May 2015
- The Hidden Costs of Sugar; UCSF news release, Nov. 2014
- Why Sugar? Why Now?, blog article by Laura Schmidt, UCSF
IPM Pest and Weed Wheels Available for Purchase
The very popular IPM Pest and Weed Identifier Wheels are now available for purchase! The Pest Wheel helps the user identify and manage 12 common pests, including ants, snails, powdery mildew, and scale insects. The Weed Wheel covers 12 common garden and...
Pest Wheels
UC Global Food Initiative has fast start in first year
That is just a taste of the work underway as faculty, students and staff from across the 10-campus UC system focus their collective power on food issues.
The Global Food Initiative has been a galvanizing force for bringing people together in new collaborative efforts, said UCLA's Wendy Slusser, who serves on one of the initiative's two dozen systemwide subcommittees.
“It's been a lightning bolt of energy that helps pull people together,” she said.
UC President Janet Napolitano first launched the Global Food Initiative on July 1, 2014. She spanned the state that day, meeting with Alice Waters at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, the California State Board of Food and Agriculture in Sacramento, and UCLA students and campus leaders at their community garden in the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center.
The announcement was met with enthusiasm – and a bit of wonder at the audacity of the undertaking – as Napolitano and UC's 10 chancellors declared that UC would harness its people and power to put the university, state and world on a path to sustainably and nutritiously feed themselves.
A year later, the initiative is off to a fast start. All 10 UC campuses, UC's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have pitched in, building on existing efforts and creating new collaborations to develop, demonstrate and export solutions for food security, health and sustainability.
Strength in numbers
“The strength of the Global Food Initiative is its capacity to harness the resources and talents and energy around each of the UC campuses related to food in its broadest sense,” said Slusser, associate vice provost for the UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative. “The structure has allowed each campus to identify what it wanted to do, build on its strengths and learn from what the other campuses are doing.”
Napolitano has welcomed campus ideas, Slusser said. GFI is helping sponsor a UCLA food studies and food justice course/internship this summer for 20 undergraduate students. The course, which had a waiting list, will be offered again in the fall and next summer and could become a pilot for other UC campuses.
Slusser also praised the UC President's Global Food Initiative Student Fellowship Program. She will attend a July 20 symposium for GFI and Carbon Neutrality Initiative student fellows, noting that two UCLA fellows told her they now want careers in food. “They had never even considered it before,” Slusser said.
Sharing knowledge
Laura Schmidt, a UC San Francisco professor of health policy and lead investigator on the UCSF-led SugarScience initiative, serves on a GFI subcommittee that is organizing a workshop July 20 on leveraging research for food and agriculture policy change. The workshop will provide training on tools and ways that faculty members can interact with policy issues and policymakers.
“We have so much knowledge about health locked up in the ivory tower,” Schmidt said. “My role is to get information from scientific researchers into the hands of decision-makers and people who can move the dial on health. When the Global Food Initiative came along, it was, ‘Yes, I want to be a part of this.' The president is trying to get science out into the real world so it can have a positive impact on health.”
By providing policymakers with evidence-based information, UC researchers can help them address such problems as obesity and other chronic diseases, said Schmidt, who worked with supervisors on San Francisco's first-in-nation warning labels on sugary beverages. UC also can lead by example, she said, citing UCSF's new Healthy Beverage Initiative that phases out the sale of sugar-sweetened beverages at UCSF.
The Global Food Initiative's challenge is how to build on its momentum and create the infrastructure so that it sticks, she said.
“The food initiative spans agriculture, the environment and human health. That is really important. These issues intersect and overlap in powerful ways,” Schmidt said. “I think it was brilliant to bring this together.”
Here are some highlights of the Global Food Initiative's top accomplishments in its first year:
- Formed more than 20 systemwide working groups that are developing toolkits and best practices that can be shared with other UC campuses and beyond.
- Created the UC President's Global Food Initiative Student Fellowship Program with a first class of 54 fellows, who are addressing issues ranging from community gardens and food pantries to urban agriculture and food waste. In April, fellows toured Masumoto Family Farm near Fresno with Napolitano, who announced that she was extending the program for two years.
- Provided $75,000 per campus to support student food security and access. Each campus is forming a food security working group.
- Hosted Food Day events. As part of Food Day, Oct. 24, UC campuses, medical centers and other locations participated in a number of events that day and throughout the week, including lectures, discussions, film screenings, farmers markets, food demonstrations and special dining menus.
- Hosted other events, including the California Higher Education Food Summit and Food From the Sea Summit at UC Santa Barbara, a food and agricultural literacy symposium at UC Davis, and two lecture series on food equity and on healthy students/campuses/communities. Also, GFI helped present UC Berkeley's Edible Education 101 course and Napolitano participated in events such as a Brookings Institution-UC Davis event on the economic costs of obesity and the Childhood Obesity Conference.
- Launched UC Food Observer, a daily blog highlighting must-read national and international food news; produced California Matters, a video series with New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman that spotlights UC food research around the state; and launched a webpage that aggregates UC news and events about the initiative.
- Sponsored food-related student innovation contests involving Big Ideas@Berkeley and the CITRIS Mobile App Challenge at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Merced. The new Food System Innovations category at Big Ideas received 41 applications representing 125 students from nine UC campuses. The CITRIS Mobile App Challenge included seven food-related teams. Also, a UC Davis student won the GFI logo design contest.
- Other accomplishments: Campuses launched food-related institutes (UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health, UC Riverside California Agriculture and Food Enterprise) and initiatives (UC San Francisco SugarScience and Healthy Beverage Initiative), helped start the Genetic Expert News Service (UC Davis), and expanded access to food by opening food pantries (UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC San Diego). They also engaged in and influenced a range of projects such as ANR providing nutrition education, UCLA's Healthy Campus Initiative inspiring a national health and wellness program, UC Santa Cruz expanding its farm, and UC San Diego helping transform a vacant urban lot into a thriving community garden.
For more campus information, visit these sites: UC ANR, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Merced, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UCSF/SugarScience, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley Lab.