- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
To meet the needs of today’s time-pressed consumers, UC Cooperative Extension nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisors collected the most pertinent food budgeting and healthy eating concepts together in a new curriculum that can be presented in four one-hour sessions. The curriculum is taught by UC CalFresh, a nutrition education program that helps recipients of federal food assistance (formerly called Food Stamps) make the most of their benefits.
Typically, participants are offered an eight-session course called “Eating Smart Being Active.” The UC advisors realized the audience couldn’t always devote that much time to nutrition education, said
- Author: Ann Brody Guy
Adapted from an article by Eileen Ecklund in Breakthroughs magazine.
Scaling up — that’s always the sticking point with organic farming when it faces the question of whether it can feed the world’s hungry millions.
But a group of UC Berkeley scientists say that continuing on our current path of industrial agriculture is simply not sustainable, given its enormous water, energy and chemical inputs, together with the new challenges posed by climate change, such as temperature and precipitation extremes.
With the launch of the interdisciplinary
- Author: Eve Hightower
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – a way of buying fresh produce and other foods directly from farmers – is growing rapidly in California’s Central Valley, according to a newly published study in the California Agriculture journal.
Membership in the CSAs surveyed for the study increased from an estimated 672 in 1990 to 32,938 in 2010.
The growth in Central Valley CSAs is one part of a bigger movement toward stronger direct relationships between farmers and consumers, said Ryan Galt, UC Davis assistant professor in the Department of Human and Community Development and co-author of
- Author: Brenda Roche
Nowadays, there are apps on our mobile devices that will do virtually anything. They help us get organized, give us the news, entertain us, help us plan trips and allow us to connect with friends. One thing that has become apparent as I peruse the online app store for my latest download is that there are many, many apps devoted to food, nutrition, health and most importantly - weight loss. The apps count calories, suggest healthier foods, encourage exercise, plan meals and provide useful grocery shopping tips. With boundless technology literally at our fingertips, I wonder if apps can actually help the average smartphone-wielding consumer make smarter, healthier eating decisions.
What does the research show?
- Author: Iqbal Pittalwala
One morning more than a decade ago I tried an “eating meditation” in Silverlake, about an hour’s drive from UC Riverside. We were about ten people – more Buddhish than Buddhist – in a dark and quiet room, seated on stiff chairs around a menacing-looking table. Each of us was handed a strawberry and told to await instructions.
I had never participated in an eating meditation before. I wasn’t even sure what was involved. Did one eat and eat, and meditate at the same time with eyes closed? I had tried two other kinds of meditation before – sitting and walking meditations. A meditation focused on food intrigued me, and it was simple curiosity that motivated me to try it out.
The...
