- Author: Roberta Barton
![Third grade students from Fremont Elementary School joined classmates on their way to Kearney's lettuce planting at last year's Farm and Nutrition Day.](https://ucanr.edu/blogs/food/blogfiles/42215small.jpg)
How are you celebrating American agriculture in your life? In advance of National Ag Week, March 19-25, and National Ag Day, March 21, Central Valley third-grade students were “learning with lettuce” how to bring more agriculture into their lives last week. The UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center offers the free lettuce plantings every year at Farm and Nutrition Day in Fresno County and Kings County, typically around the time of National Ag Week.
Students with the help of volunteers learned how to plant tiny lettuce seedlings into a pot of healthy soil to take home for transplanting later. In addition to helping the...
![Mouth-watering anticipation of holiday food is part of the science of sensory evaluation. (Photo: Pixabay.com)](https://ucanr.edu/blogs/food/blogfiles/33370small.jpg)
Holidays fan the flames of our love affair with food. As soon as summer melts into fall, our thoughts leap ahead with mouth-watering anticipation to family gatherings around a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast with all the trimmings. Months before the turkey is carved, you can almost smell it roasting in the oven. You can almost taste the salty goodness of stuffing and gravy. You can almost see colorful visions of home-baked treats dancing in your head.
Your sense of taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch sends signals to your brain that the holiday feasting season has arrived. These basic senses are the tools that influence how much you like – or dislike – the foods you eat.
Sensory evaluation also has...