- Author: Brenda Dawson
I'll admit that one of my favorite things to do on a hot day is to walk into an air-conditioned room. That burst of cool air in those first moments can be so refreshing.
It turns out I'm not alone — fruits and vegetables like to be cool on hot days too.
“Temperature management, or cold chain, is the single most important factor in maintaining postharvest quality in fruits and vegetables,” said Elizabeth Mitcham, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis.
Controlling temperature helps regulate the aging process of a fruit, along with its water loss and microorganism growth. Storing fruits and vegetables at...
- Author: Cynthia Kintigh
One of the great "lost" arts making a comeback is home food preservation. Call it a return to basics, the influence of the slow food movement, or an offshoot of a renewed interest in home gardening - canning is back!
Making jam, preserves, or jelly using the waterbath method is one of the easiest ways to make an entry into canning. Several years ago I started a jam contest in my office as a covert way to get rid of my proliferation of Elephant Heart plums. At first, my co-workers were reluctant to join in the fray, until I told them, "You know that saying 'Easy as pie'? That's a lie. Pie is hard. Jam is easy." And easy it is.
If you're ready to try your hand at preserving, the University of California and...
- Author: Alec Rosenberg
Alice Waters (chef, author and UC Berkeley alum) spoke at UCLA's Science and Food event, Edible Education, about the ways in which food can be a catalyst for deeper transformations in education and culture.
Waters' commitment to education led to the creation of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. The...
- Author: Marissa Palin
I spent last week at the Childhood Obesity Conference in Long Beach representing UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. I had heard that obesity was an epidemic. I had heard it's an issue that needs to be tackled. But I hadn't ever heard the extent of it before.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood obesity has more than doubled in the past 30 years. Adolescent obesity has tripled. In 2010, more than one-third of children and adolescents were obese. Last week, the American Medical Association went as far as to
- 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...