From famous observation decks to stylish bars, these decks, patios, or even just dirty roofs with lawn chairs give New yorkers something they covet:
Today, the farmers continue to produce organic produce for local vendors that include tomatoes, peppers, herbs, fennel, greens,
the farm was created in the spirit of farm-to-table dining, and the owners of local restaurants contribute
and sustain the farm's flourishing growth. Flanner first started Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in 2009, the first of its kind,
The goal, according to the farm's website, is to improve access to very good food
to connect city people more closely to farms and food production, and to make urban farming a viable enterprise and livelihood.
and quality of life of the community, continues their description, bringing people together through green business and around good food.
Fifth-graders can participate in the school's garden to cafe program, growing tomatoes, zucchini, squash,
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
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and end the use of food crops like corn for fuel.
The end goal is to improve sanitation in a world where 1. 5 million children die every year due to diarrhea caused by food
direct and focused with a solar dish and concentrator, to disinfect liquid-solid waste and produce biological charcoal that be used as a replacement for wood charcoal or chemical fertilizers.
Earlier this summer, Smartplanet's Stacy Lipson reported on graphic cigarette labels released by the US Food and Drug Administration which included pictures of rotting teeth
Where once they would simply fume scrolls with tea today they are raising bugs and mice for the purpose of adding bite marks to pieces.
wheat straw, switchgrass and other nonfood crops--into sugar which can then be fermented into fuels, feed and chemicals.
But with a more robust network of city farmers urban agriculture can have a major impact on food security in neighborhoods where fresh,
NYC has the infrastructure to support an urban ag boom There are substantial opportunities to take advantage of underused existing refrigeration, food processing,
which are all critical to delivering food from the urban farm to the consumer. Urban farming is becoming be a legitimate business In addition to selling food directly to the public,
farmers have developed direct marketing relationships with restaurants and institutions, initiated revenue-generating education and training services,
and can profit from the environmental services they are providing, such as tipping fees for collecting compostable waste.
One answer to toxic food fears in Chinathe fear among Chinese of biting into a toxic-laden morsel has created a potentially huge market for food safety products in the country.
China has had a long list of food safety scandals in recent years, including the 2008 melamine milk contamination incident that killed six children
aluminum-tainted dumplings and cadmium-laced rice is enough to make anyone wary of what they're eating.
Now, scientists at the Tianjin University of Science and Technology are working on an at home food testing indicator paper.
The test paper which expected to hit the Chinese market soon, can help consumers determine if their food is contaminated with pathogenic bacteria
and excessive amounts of drug residue by identifying more than 60 varieties of chemicals, reported China's official Xinhua news agency.
Food safety testing usually involves complex machines and procedures conducted in laboratories. This test paper can identify harmful substances in a few minutes, Wang Shuo,
They're special sugars called human milk oligosaccharides (HMO. And until now, they've been too prohibitively expensive ($1000 Â pre gram) to put into formula.
in the lab. They did this by engineering a strain of  E coli bacteria to produce the sugar for them, quickly and cheaply.
We put food safety before profit  Liu Yujing, one of the League s founders, said.
including saloon cars, spacious apartments, and (at least domestic) air travel for their vacations. But these parents are worried about the threat pollution poses to their quality of life.
 China has been afflicted by a string of food safety scandals in recent years, from lethal baby-milk powder to fake pig-trotters.
It seemed like there was some new food safety scandal every other day, Â Yujing said. We wanted to guarantee that our food was safe.
 Green league staff prepare produce for delivery. Yujing and the other mothers (the founders were all female),
Combined with rapidly rising food prices (Beijing s food price inflation was over 13 percent this September),
if more people could enjoy food as clean as this
Overlooked Los angeles through the lens of Bruce Davidsonknown for his iconic images of Brooklyn street gangs in the 50s, East 100th street in Harlem,
Masson turned hers into a grazing pasture. With a low-voltage solar-powered electric fence and no additional food or maintenance costs, the project didn't require too much investment,
but Masson did say that plenty of research was needed before she gave the whole project the green light.
Pepsico goes off the water gridthe potato is about 80 percent water. The potato chip? Well, by the time the potato becomes a crispy chip,
That's what Pepsico hopes to do in four of its Walkers'Crisp factories in the United kingdom. Walkers boasts that all of its potatoes come from The british countryside,
and to somehow capture the water vapor that burns off when the potatoes cook. The Guardian quotes Walter Todd, Pepsico's vice president of sustainability in Europe:
Water is still an emerging issue. Three to five years ago it was talked not much about
orange juice for our Tropicana brand and oats for Quaker oats. There has been a risk assessment at a high level
According to Pepsico, Walkers'biggest factory cut its water usage by 42 percent between 2001 and 2007.
Pepsico says it will also experiment with different types of potato that require less water to grow.
Pepsico and Flickr/Debs Koritsas Via:
Pepsico invests in growing healthy snacks segment in Mexicomexico CITY--Pepsico has chosen one of the world's fattest nations-Mexico-as a home base for the development of its global healthy snacks initiative.
The food and beverages company is pumping $30 million annually into its Mexican subsidiary in an effort to bolster the health profile of its products
and fund a new center for product research on healthier snacks destined for markets worldwide.
The Mexican government has undertaken a major effort to promote healthy diet and lifestyle, and marketers of healthier snacks are hoping to piggyback on the promotion from the public sector. Pepsico's new $20 million Global Center for Innovation in Baking
and Nutrition based in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon will focus on research and development in baking processes and the creation of innovative options that meet changing consumer preferences both in Mexico and globally, said Pepsico Mexico spokeswoman Monica Bauer in an emailed response to questions.
The center is part of Pepsico's commitment announced in 2009, to invest $3 billion in Mexico over five years.
That boils down to pumping more grains, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables into its product portfolio,
which includes the Quaker line of oatmeal, snack bars and cookies. It also means using healthier oils and fewer fats and sugars.
We re conscious of the lifestyle change of our consumers, Bauer said. The transformation of our portfolio is part of the actions we're taking to bring attention to the problems of obesity and excess weight in Mexico.
Pepsico Mexico, which operates as Sabritas SRL de CV, produces the top five selling brands in the Mexican sweet and savory snacks category;
Sabritas and Ruffles potato chips, Cheetos and Doritos led their respective categories in 2010, according to Euromonitor International.
But Pepsico says its Doritos and Ruffles snack brands have 30 percent to 35 percent less fat than traditional varieties.
Pepsico's leadership has come under fire recently for training its focus on nutritious products at what critics say has been at the expense of its core soda business.
Chief executive Indra Nooyi who took the helm of Pepsico in 2006, has set a goal of more than doubling revenue from healthier snacks to $30 billion by 2020.
Pepsico has reduced spending on the marketing of its soda brands, and soda sales have flagged. The company is undergoing a strategic review of its businesses;
a verdict is due out in early February. The Wall street journal reports that the review is likely to result in beefed-up spending on marketing in the core soft drinks business
and cost reductions to assuage investor concerns over the company s direction. Pepsico's investment in Mexico,
however, points to the potential growth market that Latin america represents in the nutritious snacks category.
The country could prove to be an ideal training ground for the expansion of international manufacturers aiming to extend their healthier snack offerings into emerging economies in the region, according to Euromonitor.
Pepsico rolls out intelligent crop management tech to farmerspepsico on Tuesday announced that it would deploy its new intelligent crop management technology to its farmers around the world.
said Pepsico U k. and Ireland president  Richard Evans in a statement. The American food and beverage giant--Quaker
Tropicana, Gatorade and Frito-Lay are all brands--says it's already testing the system at 22 farms in the U k. It didn't offer any further details as to how it works, however.
That's important because of Pepsico's largesse in the agriculture space. In the U k. alone, it's the largest purchaser of domestic potatoes and a top buyer of local oats and apples.
when it comes to food policy, thanks to a forward-thinking mayor and nonprofit organization The Food Trust,
who are working together to provide better access to fresh food for the  City of brotherly love's  poorest citizens through the taxation of soda.
I toured town with Food Trust staffers Yael Lehmann, Brian Lang and others. We visited corner stores in North Philadelphia that have enrolled in the Healthy Corner Store Initiative,
 In 2000, Philadelphia had the second-lowest number of grocery stores per capita of 21 major U s. cities.
For more on this topic, Sustainable Cities Collective has a great interview with urban food researcher Nevin Cohen on the subject.
The Food Trust
Philadelphia's ambitious green infrastructure, clean water planthe City of Philadelphia announced that it will move forward on a plan to invest $2 billion over the next 25 years on green infrastructure to clean up the city's water.
and food products companies to apply the sensors to measuring the isotopes in foods. The intention:
help food companies spot check and confirm the origins of the ingredients more cost-effectively. In effect, Picarro's technology can be used to double-check that what the label
and what the food itself tells you are the same thing. Iain Green, vice president of business development for Picarro, said every food gives off a unique isotope signature.
It's nature's bar code, he said. So, for example, it would be possible to distinguish corn-fed cattle from Vermont from their cousins from Texas or Idaho.
Technology for tracing food origins has been available for decades. What is different now is that it is now cost-effective enough to be used more widely in food quality control operations
or on processing plant manufacturing floors, Green said. Picarro's technology costs about $100, 000,
Picarro expects food companies to use its technology to prove the authenticity of food origins, and the company is already working with a number of the larger ones.
and consumers understand that there is more of an imperative for people to know where their food is really coming from,
This is another evolution in food tracing and sourcing verification. Related stories: PG&E first utility to embrace new gas leak detection technology From predicting weather to tracking greenhouse emissions
or nonexistent when it comes to issues like beekeeping, chickens, or selling produce. But last week Pittsburgh's city council adopted new rules to better align the city with its residents, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
it partnered with Dupont to find cost effective ways to bring corn stover-ethanol to market.
 Once the stovers, husks and leaves are collected and milled, they are broken further down by  enzymatic hydrolysis,
a process that  converts the cellulose and hemicellulose into sugars, which are fermented and made into ethanol.
Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception.
bottle and coke-can missiles, the occasional building on fire and riot police come to mind. In Brussels, there is a new weapon of choice--milk.
When Europe is without food, we will see how we will survive. But the way it is going,
It is called The Value of Producing Food, Energy and Ecosystem Services within an Agro-Ecosystem.
where both food crops and biofuels are produced, as evidence. The study reaches back into 1995 for its data.
and raise animals for food--chickens, bees, et cetera. Another aspect of the study is to  work on a standard lease agreement that can be used by various city departments with vacant land to make it easier to lease those spaces for community gardens.
There is a burgeoning interest in local food, and this study will help facilitate that. We're also working on a variety of other types of projects that aren't considered traditional planning work,
when her daughter dragged her to the Buffalo Zoo. An associate professor of law at the  University at Buffalo, State university of New york, Braverman found herself flooded with questions.
But mainly, she wondered, how does this work? In her new book, Zooland: The  Institution  of Captivity, Braverman explores the evolution of zoos,
when my older daughter was old enough to drag me to the Buffalo Zoo, it was my first encounter with a zoo.
It started with the Buffalo Zoo. I started interviewing her staff. It was like a snowball.
It grew in ways that were unforeseeable. It became this huge project that encompassed almost 80 interviewees from across North america and other countries.
An elephant eating breakfast at the Safari Zoo in Ramat Gan, Israel/By Irus Braverman
Is Whole Foods Market spearheading a new form of advertising? Vadan Less and Jacob Ellenberg, cofounders of Dark Rye.
 On the entire Dark Rye website, the Whole Foods logo is nowhere to be seen.
says the online magazine does not mean to hide that it published by Whole Foods Market.
the online magazine presents stories that are not necessarily about food or products, but use inspirational storytelling to bolster the cultural ideologies of Dark Rye parent brand.
What motivates Whole Foods to publish an online magazine that isn directly about food? Jacob Ellenberg:
So Whole Foods doesn want to create more of that. From what I â â¢ve heard through the business channels,
Whole Foods traditionally had very small marketing budget. While this falls under that, we â â¢re lucky to be able to produce content that relevant to people.
We want to tell the Whole Foods Market story and we believe Dark Rye is part of that.
when we come across a supplier of Whole Foods who really interesting, we â â¢ll include them.
but we will sometimes re-purpose that material and put it on another channel, for example Whole Foods Twitter Account or Whole Foods Facebook.
Whole Foods does not do traditional advertising. I shouldn say it doesn, it does a little here and there,
Whole Foods is a huge, successful company. Why is the marketing budget so small? Jacob Ellenberg:
They â â¢ve got about 137,000 members at this Point the way it works is each member can scan any product barcode they come into contact with--whether it food or from the pharmacy or hardware store.
'The buffalo in the prairies are our brothers and the same thing for the deer.
but lifted the bar to 100 million customers for each company I'm starting. We're creating companies in water
Are they overweight or short of  nutrition? How many cabbages are they growing in their field?
It's essentially still a disease of chickens. I imagine there are a great number of flu strains that are carried by animal populations at any given time.
In the animal population there is a whole soup of flu viruses. We are not good at determining
it kills chickens. And it's associated with severe disease in humans. Even though H7 can also do that,
It does not cause a lot of disease in chickens, quails, etc. So with the H5n1 you see a lot of disease in your birds
With the H7 you cannot tell just by looking at the chickens. You have to be swabbing these birds regularly to find it.
So the chickens are contagious before they show any symptoms. Isn't that the case with most viruses?
Through the whole infectious course the animals can be unprotected wandering around That's pretty serious.
We would like to be on course toward a universal flu vaccine. We have vaccinated against the H1
Rob Rhinehart, creator of Soylent, on super-fast foodrob Rhinehart is a young engineer who sees food as an interruption in life.
food has apparently become a bother. Grabbing slices of pizza and fast-food burgers became a dangerous habit for Rhinehart
so he decided to create a healthy food that required almost zero prep. The idea came to him only a year ago
and after months of research, he produced a formula for liquid food that could completely supplant regular meals,
was easy and cheap to prepare, yet fully satisfied all nutrition requirements. He self-experimented with it for three months.
He made some tweaks. He now has $3 million in funding--$1. 5 million from aâ crowdsourced campaign that was matched then by various venture capitalists.
His team is poised to launch the product via an e-commerce distribution this winter. Soylent (yes, the name comes from the sci-fi novel,
It will cost about $3 per meal, and is meant to provide 2, 000 healthy calories per day.
who will give up a filet mignon or truffles for a plain liquid drink, and why Soylent may one day help extend our average life span.
It's food, both chemically and in the traditional sense. It has all the calories and all the nutrition that the body requires.
It comes as a powder that has a very long shelf life. Â All one has to do is add water and drink it.
Although some people add extras to it such as coffee or flavors. But the default version is everything the body needs and nothing else.
Muffins and pancakes, even tiramisu. I'm not much of a cook myself but it's interesting to see how far people have taken it.
On your blog you mention that it tastes like a sweet, succulent, hearty meal in a glass,
but The Economist called it tasteless. So which is it? It's a little sweet, a little savory.
It has salts, fats, and good carbohydrates that interact with taste buds in different ways.
It's nonspecific actually. Which is a good thing, because if you had a very specific flavor then you would get sick of it.
The soft drink industry uses this same tactic of nonspecific tasteâ called sensory specific satiety. So for the same reason people don't get tired of drinking sodas you will not get tired of drinking healthier Soylent.
What ultimately inspired you to make Soylent? For a long time I'd been thinking: What if we had a food pill that could take care of hunger
when you didn't want to spend time preparing food. At the time I was working on a start-up and
I was very busy. I didn't have much free time and I didn't have much money.
It was frustrating to solve the problem of making food over and over again. I don't like to repeat myself.
And as an engineer I thought, 'What if I could automate this?''You could still eat whatever you wanted
Before I was living on foods that were calorie dense because those were easiest, a lot of pizza, cheeseburgers, and fast food.
You didn't want to be bothered with prepping more healthy meals? When I work on something that
I find very interesting and very stimulating it's frustrating to get out of the flow.
Would you say you enjoy food? Do you like eating? Yes. I have my favorite foods, like sushi and barbecue,
and I really enjoy the whole experience of eating. But to do it three times every single day seems kind of repetitive
and takes a lot of time. Since Soylent makes up a majority of my intake I enjoy eating a lot more
because it's something that I choose to do. On my terms. And I don't have to worry about eating well
because my default meal (Soylent) is balanced so. In your blog you mentioned that there is little reliable data in the field of nutrition science where you found that poor stats conflict with other studies.
So you chose to ditch the nutrition studies and went straight to biology. Right. I spent a long time on reading nutrition papers.
Food is extremely complex. It's made of thousands of different chemicals and you're testing on people who could have any manner of different lifestyles.
It is impossible to control for every variable as something on a macro level like nutrition.
I wasn't getting anything useful from the nutrition and diet studies. A lot of it just confirmed the assumption like:
Lots of fruits and vegetables are good, avoid fast food. But no one was focusing on specific biochemical or metabolic details of consuming food.
There lot of weak correlations, but not a lot of mechanisms of action, not a lot of falsifiable data. So I focused on
what is actually going on within this biological machine. It seemed a lot more clear-cut: This mineral is used in this enzyme.
I know you spent a lot of time researching and educating yourself but who did you speak with to check your formula?
Having to be concerned with all this stuff for every single meal would be an incredible burden.
Well, first of all, it's got to be healthier than the typical diet which, for most, is unbalanced horribly.
Food processing has lowered significantly the cost of food and given us greater control. People are spending much less time on working on food consumption than before and
I think that's encouraging. I think people should have the option. I think in the future cooking
and eating will be an art and a cultural activity, something that we'll be doing purely for leisure.
In the developing world a lot of people don't have a lot of micronutrients or calories that they need in a day.
which they can plan a good food behavior schedule. On average, in the U s.,it takes about 90 minutes out of a person's day to prepare
Soylent is regulated as a food and not a supplement. There are products on the market that would be designed a supplement
Most are filled with lot of simple sugars, saturated fats, basically a very poor nutrient ratio. They are designed not to be lived on.
But the design of Soylent is to act as a food. Soylent gives you all the calories that you would need in a day
Seeing how food and agriculture behavior has been changing over centuries, we're heading in the direction of not being able to provide for everybody.
Focusing on the constituents of the food, by looking at it on an elemental and chemical basis we can basically cut out these very wasteful,
As well as in the food that we eat. Roughly half the people on the planet would not be around
how school food innovations are reducing childhood obesityon a chilly November morning, the auditorium at the Philadelphia School District office was sweltering.
much of this youth summit meant to encourage students to promote healthy changes at their schools was focused on food.
the students from 40 city schools enjoyed a breakfast of Greek yogurt and listened as administration officials gave shout outs to school-based food successes,
such as a salad sale at a North Philadelphia elementary school. There much to celebrate here. Over the past several years, Philadelphia has revamped its school food offerings with striking success. Over a lunch of wraps and baked chips
the students split into small groups to brainstorm with classmates about how to keep the momentum going.
A handful of Southwest Center City middle schoolers dreamed up innovative ways to bring healthy change to their school--where many students eat at least two meals a day.
While eighth-grader Terell Greennagh resolved, â Å lunch is going to be hard to change,
â Â his classmates hoped the school would serve snacks of baby carrots or grapes rather than pretzels.
Terell seventh-grade sister Terria lamented that recess ended at sixth grade. â Å We used to go outside and play double-dutch every day
â Â she said. â Å Instead of just sitting there for lunch, they should let us do something. â Â Conversations like these are happening in school district offices,
national and regional healthy food initiatives are targeting schools. â Å Why are we going to schools?
Because that where the kids are. â Â Children consume as many as half their meals in schools, according to the U s. Department of agriculture,
with more than 5 billion school lunches served in 2011. With children spending so much time--and so many calories--in school, it the ideal place to promote nutrition,
Marks said. â Å If school is a healthy place, â Â he said, â Å they get used to that. â Â A recent study showed the efforts are paying off.
school food was revamped in 2010 with the passage of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act,
New lunch standards included reducing fat and sodium content, increasing whole grain foods and doubling fruit and vegetables.
Though the USDA is offering a 6-cent reimbursement rate increase for the new meals,
according to the U s. Census bureau, Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the United states Â--the school food movement there made strides.
The district banned soda machines, restricted portion sizes and sodium in snacks, introduced a lunch menu with more whole grains, educated parents about healthy eating and established school wellness councils.
where red foods like strawberries and cabbage grace the menu, and fundraisers promoting fruit salad and smoothies instead of candy and brownies.
At a fall wellness event there, Elaine Rosario, the parent of a fourth-grade girl, said she glad the school instills healthy habits.
some Iowa schools shied away from offering lunchtime salad bars because of difficulties monitoring food distribution for government reimbursement,
co-director of the nutrition team at the Iowa Department of education. â Å We heard schools saying they were just putting their salad bars into storage,
But some now offer a fruit and vegetable bar instead. For a school lunch to be government reimbursable,
Scheidel said, 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
 Scheidel said. Businesses join the fight Behind the scenes, businesses are playing a growing role in the healthy school food movement,
especially since the new standards, said Lawrence Soler, president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Healthier America, a nonprofit working with the private sector in the childhood obesity fight.
The cookware giant All-Clad agreed to donate $2 million worth of cooking equipment to schools partnering with chefs to improve nutritional education,
he said. â Å There been marked a increase in the amount of interest we â â¢ve had from vendors and private sector companies,
â  Soler said. â Å They â â¢re going to play a critical role in ensuring that options offered in school food are appreciated healthy
When Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey of Revolution Foods set out to build a company offering delicious and nutritious school meals,
and a Slurpee--evidenced by red teeth and blue tongues. â Å If we â â¢re not setting kids up for success with what they â â¢re eating in school,
â Å we â â¢re not going to set them up for success academically. â  Revolution Foods ignored critics who said kids would never give up junk food.
Since its 2005 launch, the company has served more than 50 million meals, many in low-income communities,
and one of its most popular items is a five-ingredient hotdog made with grass-fed beef. â Å Food has to taste good in order for kids to want to eat it,
And while Tobey admitted that healthy food tends to cost more than highly-processed, preservative-packed food,
she said Revolution Foods offers meals that can be reimbursed by the federal government. Farmers have been another private sector partner in the movement to make school food healthier.
The USDA Farm to School program, which helps bring local or regional food to school cafeterias, is complementary to the new nutrition standards,
said Colleen Matts, farm to institution specialist at the Michigan State university Center for Regional Food Systems. â Å If we can introduce new and different healthy foods to kids,
â Â she said, â Å those are things that can last with them through their lifetime. â Â Before connecting them with farmers,
Matts helps schools determine which farm-fresh foods to incorporate into their menus. Schools that already serve apples might start there. â Å Can they substitute in a local apple?
such as interacting with students through cafeteria chats and after-school programs. â Å The students will see them
Cafeteria staff accustomed to heat -and-serve meal preparation need training to handle fresh food, Matts said,
and some schools don have the space and equipment to store and prepare it. And while the USDA works to make local food accessible to all schools through its system,
Matts predicted success was a long way off. Vendors need to be certified USDA to participate,
and not a single Michigan farmer has signed up for the expensive certification process. â Å They â â¢re talking about doing the school food system differently,
â Â Matts said. â Å It been institutionalized for so many years. â Â Obstacles outside school walls might pose the biggest threat to the school food movement.
After school, neighborhood kids frequent a pizza shop where slices sell for $1. 50. Scheidel of Iowa said the childhood obesity fight needs to move into homes and communities. â Å When
I didn really like school lunch, but I loved my mom well-balanced meals, â Â she said. â Å It almost like we switched roles over the years. â Â Now,
Scheidel said, parents say their children don like the new healthy options. â Å If they â â¢re not eating fresh foods and whole grains at home,
â  she said, â Å they â â¢re not going to like school lunch. â  Still,
school food officials believe we â â¢re headed in the right direction. Another four years with the Obama administration--and a first lady who has prioritized children health--will help institutionalize positive changes,
Matts said. And it â â¢ll give schools time to catch up to the new standards by finding available fresh food
and learning to handle the products. â Å I don think all schools were ready,
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