- Author: Jennifer Rindahl
On July 1, the University of California announced our new Global Food Initiative to address one of the critical issues of our time: How to sustainably and nutritiously feed a world population expected to reach eight billion by 2025.
UC's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources is already a critical partner with California's farmers and consumers, providing growers and ranchers with scientifically tested production techniques, educating families about nutrition, improving food safety and addressing environmental concerns. With programs in every California county, our research and extension network in California reaches from Tulelake to El Centro and more than 130 countries working to solve agricultural problems at home and...
- Author: Brenda Dawson
These days you can barely pick up a magazine, turn on the TV, or click open Facebook without being told how to eat, what to eat or what not to eat.
But the truth is, dietary advice is nothing new. Some of our rules for eating date back to ancient times as part of religious teachings, and food traditions are central to our understanding of culture. What is new over the last century or so is the application of science to our diets, so that we can know more exactly what nutrition science tells us is best when it comes to filling our plates.
A new book by a UC Davis researcher argues that modern dietary advice is not merely scientific, but also continues to have cultural, ethical and moral messages attached to...
- Author: Ann Brody Guy
“Food commands attention and brings people together,” says L. Ann Thrupp, executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute, a new interdisciplinary research center comprising five different UC Berkeley schools. “It touches on every aspect of human society.”
It’s bringing academia together, too. Food research centers have been springing up at campuses across the United States as higher education takes on the complex topic from multiple perspectives.
Global climate change, a growing world population, broad public health concerns from hunger to obesity, and a tangle of complex policies from the farm bill to food safety — these are...
- Author: Pat Bailey
There’s no better way to get acquainted with a country and it’s culture than to learn to appreciate its cuisine.
With that thought in mind, UC Davis and China’s Jiangnan University, along with China’s Ministry of Education, are establishing the world’s first Confucius Institute devoted to Chinese food and beverage culture on the Davis campus.
You’re invited to attend the new institute’s public opening celebration, complete with song and dance by performers from China, at 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 16, at UC Davis’ Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Admission is free and visitor parking is $8. More details are available at the Confucius Institute at UC Davis web site at:
- Author: Ann Brody Guy
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Moss is best known for coining the term “pink slime,” a reference to a meat additive that, thanks to Moss’s reporting, had a particularly bad PR day in 2009, when his high gross-out factor exposé was published in the New York Times. Products containing the cringe-inducing substance were subsequently banished from many grocery stores and schools.
In his most recent book, Salt, Sugar, Fat, Moss shined daylight on the happier sounding, but no less alarming phrase “bliss point,” a food industry term for the exact combination of those titular ingredients that stimulates our brain’s pleasure center and makes us — and our kids...