Growers, grocers satisfy ripening taste for organic in Mexicomexico CITY Organic products are muscling their way onto grocery shelves in Mexico,
who grows organic coffee, bananas and other fruits in southern Oaxaca state. And it keeps growing at that pace.
Consider IME's report as food for thought the next time you reject a crooked carrot or a lumpy apple.
and flowerbeds of her garden filled with organic vegetables and fruits. Snails! she exclaimed--before finishing,
The mother of two teenage children speaks with pride and affection about her mangoes pomegranates, lemons and herbs and says she has switched completely her family s diet to organic food.
We can t control the toxins in our environment. But at least we can control it in our food,
and fruits in wholesale and retail markets in Delhi for ensuring that these commodities do not contain pesticides beyond permissible limits.
Honeybees pollinate close to 90 crops such as avocados, cucumbers, sprouts, apples, onions, broccoli, coffee and tomatoes.
Foods and beverages produced with the help of animal pollinators include almonds, apples, blueberries, coffee, melons and soybeans.
Pick your own strawberries, one of the signs implores. People want somewhere to go on the weekends.
In fact, the market share of locally grown vegetables and fruits has shrunk from 30 percent in the 1990s to 2. 3 percent in 2011, according to the government.
which include papayas, corn, bananas, ginger, sugar cane, lettuce and tomatoes. The farm is edged almost entirely by a babbling brook,
The rainwater filters through a teak patio and garden of cherry, orange and lime trees and carpets of lavender, mint and thyme into storage tanks.
grapes are the most popular fruit in the world(#371) or the most common name for a pet goldfish is Jaws(#471).
they think of blueberries and lobster, which are our signature foods, but there s really a wide variety of foods that are grown in the region here.
You get everything from kale and melon to eggs and dairy. We just have a short growing season.
Does this mean fruits and vegetables? Fresh foods are defined as foods that aren't on our official list.
They can bring up items like apples or oranges. Carrot sticks and celery will last a little while.
Some will bring up more delicate items, such as tomatoes or kiwi or avocado. But if there's any delay
Maybe we can start growing some fruits and vegetables or process wheat flour and make pasta
How urban farms in Detroit could feed the localsresearchers at Michigan State university discovered that urban farms can produce enough fruits
locals in Detroit could get 75 percent of their vegetables and 40 percent of their fruit this way.
which the plant s designers say is ideal for growing organic fruit and vegetables. Food waste accounts for more than half of the nearly 20,000 tons of garbage Beijing generates daily, most
Goldenway s latest PR strategy centers on fresh strawberries. In a series of plastic  polytunnels decorated with  pictures  of grinning cartoon fruit,
the company grows juicy strawberries using its fertilizer, which it hands out in immaculate white gift boxes.
Apple, pear and cherry trees will follow later this year, Yi said. Goldenway plans to IPO in the next two years,
but its success will depend on whether Chinese city dwellers can be persuaded to  associate food waste processing with the fragrance of freshly picked strawberries, rather than rotting meat.
Pictures: Goldenway Biotech; Tom Hancock
In Buenos aires, foldable housing for disaster reliefbuenos AIRES--Like many big ideas, Matã Â as Alter
like lemongrass and kaffir lime. I could not believe there was so much flavor in such a little creature,
me a sorrel leaf folded around a bit of cricket miso, beet reduction and lacto-fermented red currants.
One dish I tasted consisted of a fresh milk curd covered with wild blueberries mixed with ant paste.
At times people ask Redzepi why he doesn't just use a lemon. The question drives him mad.
The chaos prompted  Apple to announce that the device will now be sold by appointment only.
Then a line began to form outside the Apple store days in advance of the smart phone s in store sales
Among the regular Apple fans and tech junkies were small armies of Šprofessional queuers  who were being paid a fee by dealers to wait in line.
 Apple allowed 1, 000 customers to buy a maximum of five phones each in a frenzy of sales that lasted three hours.
In light of chaotic crowd conditions and public displeasure over professional queuers, Apple announced yesterday that other than these first 1, 000 customers,
all others will now only be able to buy the phone from Apple through its online appointment
is made from cereals not fruits; and is quaffed, not sipped. Â New trends have placed a traditional brew, makgeolli,
Innovative brews oe  some infused with such ingredients as berries and herbs oe flooded the scene.
spritzer-style grapefruit makgeolli last year that appears tailor-made for Western markets. And Vroon hopes that once his own brewery comes online, he,
if Apple seeded assisted-living homes with ipads? I believe such a measure would help bridge the gulf between the elderly and technology.
If you hung out at an Apple Store Saturday, you probably did not see many north of seventy eying Apple's ipad.
That's because because there's a digital divide that doesn't get much attention. It's escaped Apple's eye, too.
While Baby boomers (me) enter their later years with ipads under their arms and Blackberries in their pocket, there's still a generation of elderly technology is leaving behind.
Says a story from this morning's Boston globe: Older people are caught in a very big transition,
but if Apple dropped ipads into the laps of the elderly, I'd wager many would get hooked.
I nosed around the web for programs Apple might have for the elderly and surprisingly found nothing.
It's ok for Apple to have those hip TV ads with rockin'music to promote the ipad to Gen whatevers,
Apple CEO Steve jobs had a serious brush with his own mortality. He also turned 55 in February,
Another review said Apple has reinvented the netbook. The ipad strikes me as a bigger ipod Touch,
and the whole thing is driven by a weakling 1 Gigahertz Apple processor. DG/One, the first clamshell notebook TRS-80 Model 100 But the ipad addresses some of notebook's biggest weaknesses:
but in the Apple introduction video (below), Steve jobs says it's almost lifesize. It's a dream to type on.
Remember my Nov 3 post urging Apple to cut prices 25 percent to grab market share? The ipad embraces this idea with aggressive $500-$830 pricing
and is Apple's newest notebook, in my opinion. The Kindle had the form factor right,
But I'm not going to buy one for the main reason I don't buy Apple.
Apple Specifically with the ipad, it does not have a USB port, meaning I can't connect it to my Blackberry which doubles as a broadband modem.
I pay Verizon $30 a month for that service and the Blackberry works with all my PC notebooks and netbooks.
With the forthcoming 3g version of ipad, you pay $15 or $30 for broadband which will only work with that ipad.
In short, my Verizon broadband via my Blackberry is a better deal. update: I was just speaking with a Verizon exec,
and even give up the Blackberry, but I suspect you already know why I don't. I am a Verizon customer
and Apple has been all about giving AT&T the iphone monopoly. Hopefully, the rumors that Verizon will finally get an iphone this summer are true.
Only recently did Apple lift restrictions on voice over ip which has been standard fare on PCS for years and a savior for parents with kids overseas.
For many Apple fans these downsides are a small price to pay for what I grant you is wonderful technology.
Apple's secret plan to change thatwhen I started writing about biomedical tech, I figured ipads in hospitals would be the story to follow.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Apple has a secret plan to steal your doctor's heart. Apple is pushing the ipad into hospitals
playing against its well-polished image as the world's most successful consumer gadget company, Wired reports.
Apple employee Afshad Mistri is the company's secret weapon in a stealth campaign to get the ipad into the hands of doctors.
but if the FDA were to decide that Apple is marketing the ipad for regulated medical uses,
It's not entirely clear why Apple cares so much about doctors. Why have a guy like Afhsad Mistri spending his days talking to doctors and medical software developers?
Why is healthcare the one vertical market that Apple promotes on its ipad apps for business page?
Brinjal, papaya, snake-gourd and black sugarcane are just a few of the crops Keshav Tavre grows on his suburban plot on the outskirts of Mumbai--all of it from a supply of untreated sewage that snakes past his land.
Italian roses bloom under rooftop solar thermalfour generations of the Ciccolella family have relied on sunshine to cultivate the olives and roses on their farm in Puglia.
Specialty packaging called ripesense, once used to package pears in Wal-mart stores, displayed a dot that changed color with the fruit ripened, expelling ethylene gas.
Customers could choose, without squeezing the fruit or guessing the texture, whether they wanted crisp, firm or juicy pears.
Even more important than selecting crisp or juicy fruit, of course, is knowing whether that food is harboring a dangerous pathogen.
Researchers are designing packaging that could alert consumers to a pathogen in the food or to a food product that s nearing the end of its shelf life,
Cooksey said. A French company has developed a sensor that can detect if food has been abused Å temperature,
It has extended this purchasing to cocoa, and Kraft is now the biggest buyer of both coffee and cocoa from the Rainforest Alliance.
Watch for Kraft to become an even bigger activist related to this commodities, as well as palm oil. Deforestation will be another place it places its sustainability investments.
and identify fruit than those ubiquitous little stickers, but so far, that age-old solution has been a bit...
Laser etching that can effectively'tattoo'produce has been found to be effective to help identify fruit at the supermarket.
Invented by former University of Florida scientist Greg Drouillard--now with Sunkist Growers--the technology helps do away with sticky labels that can mar the fruit's skin
Microbiologist Jan Narciso at the ARS Citrus and Subtropical Products Laboratory in Winter Haven Fla.,
, and Florida researcher Edgardo Etxeberria first thought to apply the laser technology to fruit. The system works by using a carbon dioxide laser beam to etch information into the first few outer cells of the fruit peel.
The tattoo can t be peeled off, washed off or changed, preserving provenance. Better still, the permanent etching-hence tattoo--does not increase water loss, nor the entrance of food pathogens or postharvest pathogens.
Testing on a grapefruit has shown that the wax may be unnecessary, since the tiny holes etched into the fruit's peel are sealed effectively by the carbon dioxide,
stopping decay and food pathogens. Wax coverage is recommended still to prevent water loss. To test for decay, the fruit was inoculated with decay organisms and then etched with the laser.
No pathogens were found in the peel or the fruit interior. So how does it work?
The laser actually cauterizes the peel, making it impenetrable to microorganisms. But a grapefruit and an apple are two different challengesm
so testing is currently being conducted on tomatoes, avocado and other citrus fruits. Naturally, the process still must be approved by the U s. Food
and Drug Administration before it could be used commercially
Leafsnap combines biometrics and botany for electronic field guidewashington--This week behind the Smithsonian Castle, a research botanist and two computer science professors unveiled Leafsnap, a free plant identification
app for the iphone (available for the ipad next week and Android this summer) with broad potential for the future of image recognition.
flower, seed, fruit and bark on a black background. They can be magnified down to the fur on the petiole,
Mcdonald's tried to dodge all this by making apple slices an option, next to french fries, in its meals.
or a fruit and vegetable business can establish an online shop to sell food online
Clearly almonds have gotten a lot of press, peanuts are getting their turn in the spotlights, pistachios are good for you,
on-road transportation is both low-hanging fruit and the most impactful change to implement.
Steve jobs talks innovation, legacya newly-released video of Apple cofounder Steve jobs can give today's entrepreneurs food for thought.
Apple's dream: Automaker's nightmare? Google CEO: You won't'collapse in terror'because of Google glass Apple vs.
San francisco fountain: Retail power gone too far? Apple CEO: Wearable computing is'profoundly interesting 'What are the top 20 most valuable brands in the world?
Apple's tangled web of tax shelters
New battleground in beverage wars: sustainable packagingnot to be outdone by its arch-rival, The Coca-cola Co,
. beverage giant Pepsico has developed a green bottle that is designed to be recyclable AND that is made from plant-sourced materials including switch grass, orange peels and potato peels.
Actually, the agricultural materials that will go into these bottles are byproducts from its foods business,
The sensor works by detecting levels of ethylene, a ripening hormone in fruits and vegetables.
Tested on pears, bananas, avocados, apples, and oranges, the sensor was successful in measuring how much ethylene was secreted.
Warehouses have expensive systems to monitor gas composition in produce but this sensor provides a low-cost and easy to use alternative that could be used in smaller facilities as well.
Minnesota's School of Environmental Studies (SES) is an optional high school in Apple Valley, Minn.
blueberries and other produce that be used in the school's salad bar, Sudolsky said. A canopy-covered area can serve as an opportunity for miniature field trips
went to visit nearby farms which grow fruit and vegetables without pesticides. They discovered at least 12 organic farms in the Beijing area
That boils down to pumping more grains, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables into its product portfolio,
In the U k. alone, it's the largest purchaser of domestic potatoes and a top buyer of local oats and apples.
after a trial period, gives them refrigerators (manufactured in North Philly) for stocking fresh fruits and vegetables.
Unlike the average corner store, these had piles of oranges and bananas by the cash register,
and small refrigerator cases with greens, tomatoes and, in at least one instance, bags containing 50 cents'worth of grapes sold out on the day
whether or not cocoa beans are from a legitimate source or whether they might be from an area of conflict in the Ivory coast.
Do not rely on Apple's ios 6 Mapsaustralian police have warned that motorists should rely less on technology
when relying on Apple's disappointing mapping system--especially as the number of drivers ending up in peculiar locations is on the rise.
Apple was earmarked for criticism this September when Google maps was removed from ios 6, forcing the firm's customers to use their own brand of mapping technology on gadgets including the iphone and ipad.
Apple's maps met with poor reviews and inaccurate data when compared to Google's software
The force has asked Apple to fix the issue, but in the meantime, perhaps rival firm Google's mapping service or a traditional A to Z would be a better option.
Foxconn plans U s. manufacturing expansion Apple will begin manufacturing Macs in U s. next year Apple says app store has generated 300,000 jobs so far Apple rejects Ëoequestionable US drone strike tracker
What kind of monkeys are those that don't know how to peel a banana? There are strong emotions on both sides.
A few weeks after quietly putting Buycott in the Apple and Android stores, Pardo contacted journalists.
It was the top 10 app in the Apple and Android store. Then I started recruiting friends to help run the business.
Lots of fruits and vegetables are good, avoid fast food. But no one was focusing on specific biochemical or metabolic details of consuming food.
Reading, writing and raisins: how school food innovations are reducing childhood obesityon a chilly November morning,
â Â his classmates hoped the school would serve snacks of baby carrots or grapes rather than pretzels.
New lunch standards included reducing fat and sodium content, increasing whole grain foods and doubling fruit and vegetables.
Marks remembered visiting a Philadelphia elementary school where students experimented with tasting new fruits and vegetables.
He met a third-grade girl who had her first banana at school --and it became her new favorite fruit.
At Francis E. Willard, A k-4 school in North Philadelphia initiatives include color-based tastings,
where red foods like strawberries and cabbage grace the menu, and fundraisers promoting fruit salad and smoothies instead of candy and brownies.
But some now offer a fruit and vegetable bar instead. For a school lunch to be government reimbursable,
a fruit or vegetable must accompany the entree. With a fruit and vegetable bar, students decide
whether they â â¢re in the mood for orange wedges or bite-sized broccoli. â Å You â â¢re not putting something in their plate that they â â¢re not going to eat â
Schools that already serve apples might start there. â Å Can they substitute in a local apple?
and say, â Ëoehey, there Farmer Mike with his apples, â â¢â  she said.
Reversing radiation's bad PRWOULD you eat a banana? Would you install a smoke detector in your home?
You'll get far more radiation from your bananas, smoke detectors and trips to Yosemite than you ever ever will from a nuclear power plant.
Hargraves doesn't actually state that bananas and smoke detectors give us more radiation than nuclear plants do,
He does indeed point out that bananas and smoke detectors emit. To those of you who have seen the pro-nuclear film Pandora's Promise,
who can forget the irony-laced scene where the anti-nuke protestors take a break to eat sustenance-giving bananas?)
At certain points in time you might want to prune trees. We do the harvesting in the hot months down here.
home to the nation fourth-largest farming area and has supported long itself through the production of rice, fruits, vegetables, tobacco and silk,
A n entire acre will feature large chestnuts and walnuts in the overstory, full-sized fruit trees like big apples and mulberries in the understory,
and berry shrubs, climbing vines, herbaceous plants, and vegetables closer to the ground. Further down the path an edible arboretum full of exotic looking persimmons, mulberries, Asian pears,
and Chinese haws will surround a sheltered classroom for community workshops. Looking over the whole seven acres, you'll see playgrounds
sensitive crops such as wine grapes. But the horto domi concept shows the convergence of the maker culture, organic and local food advocates and high-and low-tech.
Strawberry pickers beware, the robots are comingon a windy morning in California's Salinas Valley,
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization fruits
Another company, San diego-based Vision Robotics, is developing a similar lettuce thinner as well as a pruner for wine grapes.
In Southern California, engineers with the Spanish company Agrobot are taking on the challenge by working with local growers to test a strawberry harvester.
it allows the robot to make a choice based on fruit color, quality and size. The berries are plucked
and placed on a conveyor belt, where the fruit is packed by a worker. Still, the harvester collects only strawberries that are hanging on the sides of the bed,
hence California's strawberry fields would have to be reshaped to accommodate the machine, including farming in single rows,
raising the beds and even growing varieties with fewer clusters. Experts say it will take at least 10 years for harvesters to be available commercially for most fresh-market fruit not a moment too soon for farmers worried about the availability of workers
said Lupe Sandoval, managing director of the California Farm Labor Contractor Association.""If you can put a man on the moon,
"Sandoval said, "you can figure out how to pick fruit with a machine
Aquaponic farm certified organicthe Farmedhere urban farming company, which has been successfully conducting urban farming work in the Chicago area
since 2011, has received USDA organic certification. The organic vertical farming practice makes use of derelict warehouses to produce food for the community.
and East Malling Research have come up with a novel way of using bumble bees to deliver minute quantities of bio-fungicide to strawberry flowers.
Grey mould (Botrytis cinerea) is a very damaging disease to strawberry crops worldwide. Symptomless infections can develop in strawberry flowers
and cause fungal growth on fruit as they ripen and after picking. Control currently consists of careful management
and conventional crop protection products applied to flowers to protect against infection. ADAS and East Malling Research have been using bumble bee pollinator hives
which are introduced already commonly to commercial strawberry crops to ensure good pollination. The experimental approach (not yet approved in the UK) involves the bees moving through a specially designed dispenser
which causes the fruit to rot. During the last two years of field trials this harmless bee-delivered control system was demonstrated to be a practical alternative to fungicide applications
while significantly decreasing any residue left on the fruit itself. Data from this Hortlink project and ongoing trials in Finland and Belgium, where this technique is already being adopted will be used to support an application for pesticide registration of this fungicide dispersed by bees in the UK.
These days, more and more people aspire to grow fresh vegetables and fruits right in their garden.
this petite kitchen garden serves an excellent way to grow fresh fruits and vegetables
Crop Mobscrop mob is primarily a group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to build
Bye bye Bananasamericans consume more bananas than apples and oranges combined. Dan Koeppel, author of Banana:
The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, gives us a primer on the expansive history and the endangered future of this seedless, sexless fruit.
Koeppel traces the ubiquitous yellow fruit back to the Garden of eden, where, he argues, it, not the apple, was the"forbidden fruit"that Eve offered Adam. In the 20th century,
he examines the United Fruit Co.'s maneuvering in the"banana republics"of Central america, and warns that the banana's unique reproductive system each new fruit is a genetic duplicate of the next makes it especially susceptible to epidemics
Banana peels clarify waterbanana peels don't get a lot of respect. Though we here at Shots have heard never actually of anyone slipping on one,
it seems they're stuck in the cultural lore as a nuisance, or even a hazard.
But a Brazilian researcher, who also happens to be a, has taken an interest in the lowly banana peel
and is helping to remake its image. The banana peel, it turns out, can take water dirtied by heavy metals from mining operations or other activities and turn it to clean drinking water.
Magic? No, actually, it's chemistry. Gustavo Castro is an environmental chemist at who says he'd heard for a long time that the peel of the banana was the best part of the fruit,
where most of the nutrients and proteins reside. So he decided to investigate its chemical composition to see
if these banana peel boosters were told right, he the American Chemical Society in a. What he found was that banana peels contain nitrogen, sulfur and organic compounds such as carboxylic acids.
Castro was pleased especially to find these acids because they can bind with positively charged metals that leach into rivers from industrial operations.
To test the peels Castro and his colleagues chopped up and dried a bunch of them
and mixed them with water from Brazil's Paranã¡River, which was polluted with copper and lead.
The peels performed as well or better than many typical filtering materials, like silica or carbon.
What's more, the peels are a cheap waste material. Castro found they could be used up to 11 times before they stopped working as purifiers.
The were published earlier this year in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a publication of the American Chemical Society.
The banana peel can't get rid of bacteria in water so don't strap one around your faucet just yet
Scientists say they have determined the complete DNA sequence of the tree that produces cocoa beans, an accomplishment that is expected to vastly accelerate efforts to assure a stable supply of chocolate
Still, scientists in both groups say that cocoa farmers, candy companies and chocolate lovers will benefit from having two sequences, of different varieties of cacao,
that can be compared. oethis will help guarantee a sustainable future for cocoa for the farmers,
the consumers and Mars Inc.,Howard-Yana Shapiro, the head of plant research at Mars, said in an interview.
The cocoa crop in Brazil, for instance, was decimated some years ago by a fungal disease called witches broom.
and analyze the cocoa genome, in a project involving the Department of agriculture, I b m. and some academic collaborators.
while Mars would gain from larger supplies and potentially lower prices for cocoa, the company would have no special advantage over other companies. oewe have a sustainable supply of cocoa,
but so does everybody else, he said. Mark J. Guiltinan, a professor of plant molecular biology at Penn State, a leader of the other effort, said his group also intended to make its data freely available,
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