Pantry Moths in Your Lunch? A Super-Gross Reason to Avoid Processed Supermarket Food If you’ve opened the pantry door or a bag of rice and had a moth fly in your face, you may have wondered: How did the bug get in there? Sarah Bryce asked herself that question when she found a pantry moth larva burrowed into a banana she had picked up to eat, before discovering dozens more inside packages of dry food in the cupboard of her Boston apartment. “We were so disgusted,” Bryce remembers. After throwing away all her dry food except for a few items—“probably $100 worth”—Bryce bleached the cupboard and hoped she’d solved the problem. What she found would be perhaps the most disgusting revelation of all: that she’d most likely purchased the affected products from the supermarket with the pests and their eggs already living there. But moths show up in food even before the supermarket, says Phil LaQuaglia, owner of Greenhouse Pest Management, an organic exterminating company in Acworth, Georgia. What can consumers do to prevent pantry moths?
Northern California County Votes To Secede From California By Ian Millhiser "Northern California County Votes To Secede From California" The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday in favor of seceding from California to form a new state called “Jefferson.” Siskiyou also plans to invite nearby counties in California and southern Oregon to join with them in casting off the bonds that have tied them to their fellow Californians and Oregonians for generations. Residents attending the supervisors meeting were virtually unanimous in supporting the predominantly Republican county’s secession. According to the Redding Record Searchlight, a local paper, one member of the board of supervisors raised a laundry list of complaints related to “regulation, restriction of rights, lack of representation, regionalism and restoration of limited government.” Siskiyou’s effort to form a new, presumably Republican state is not an isolated incident.
The Washington Post is Wrong About Farmed Salmon The Washington Post is Wrong About Farmed Salmon Posted Wed, Sep 25, 2013 by Justine Hausheer to atlantic salmon, chilean salmon aquaculture, farmed salmon, Save the Ocean: Feed the World, washington post Parasitic sea lice from farmed salmon can spread to wild fish nearby. (Photo: Pure Salmon Campaign ) Today the Washington Post ran an article in their Food section lauding advances in the salmon farming industry. We’re here to set the record straight: farmed salmon are not a sustainable seafood choice, and they’re not good for the oceans. When you eat farmed salmon, you’re really eating another fish called the jack mackerel, or any number of other wild fish being fed to salmon. Even if the ratio of wild fish to farmed fish it 1 to 1, you are still eating a pound of jack mackerel or another wild species—which are likely in trouble—when you eat your farmed salmon. It’s fair to say that salmon farming is better than it used to be, but it used to be horrendous.
GIVE THESE PEOPLE AIR! There is a scene in Total Recall (I refuse to see the "remake" and refer, of course, to the 1990 film) wherein a corrupt profiteer named Cohagen shuts off the supply of breathable air to part of a city managed by his corporation to "teach them a lesson" for hiding Arnold Schwarzenegger's character. It provides us with one of the more famously bad Schwarzenegger quotes from his Eighties "I haven't totally mastered English. Or acting." phase: "Give these people air!" It's no "Get to the choppa!" but it'll do. We've all realized by now that the 1987 Paul Verhoeven splatter-fest RoboCop was actually a documentary about how Detroit would look in 25 years; there may not be police-robots but Omni Consumer Products is getting ready to take over. Well it turns out that last week's power outage in Detroit was done intentionally by the Rick Snyder-appointed "city manager" or someone in that office. There hasn't been a peep about this from the media, of course. Be Sociable, Share!
9 Food Lies People Are Telling You, From Casual Myths To Straight Up Betrayal Sometimes, someone will tell you something about food that just doesn't sound right. You'll think, "That doesn't totally jive with me, but maybe they're right." We're here to break the news to you: people are telling you food lies, and some of them are your family and friends. Sorry to be the ones to break it to you. These common food lies run the gamut from harmless myth to outright betrayal, and we're here to expose them once and for all. Some of these might be painful, but we promise it's for the best. LIE: Spaghetti Squash Is A Great Substitute For Spaghetti Listen, just because something looks like something else doesn't mean it's the same. WikiMedia Yes we will.
Lifelines for Poor Children What’s missing in the current debate over economic inequality is enough serious discussion about investing in effective early childhood development from birth to age 5. This is not a big government boondoggle policy that would require a huge redistribution of wealth. Acting on it would, however, require us to rethink long-held notions of how we develop productive people and promote shared prosperity. Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch Everyone knows that education boosts productivity and enlarges opportunities, so it is natural that proposals for reducing inequality emphasize effective education for all. While education is a great equalizer of opportunity when done right, American policy is going about it all wrong: current programs don’t start early enough, nor do they produce the skills that matter most for personal and societal prosperity. The cognitive skills prized by the American educational establishment and measured by achievement tests are only part of what is required for success in life.
Craze Sports Supplement Reportedly Contains Meth-Like Compound Researchers say a cousin of methamphetamine was found in the sports supplement Craze. According to ABC’s David Kerley: Researchers, including one from Harvard, and a testing group that works for the supplement industry, looked at three samples: two purchased online – one from a store. They say they found a chemical in craze that is a cousin to methamphetamine.[...]In the short study, just published, the researchers go as far as to call the compound a potentially dangerous designer drug. But they admit, it’s not been tested. According to ABC News, an attorney for the company that makes Craze says that the researchers are incorrect, adding that their own testing found no trace of any chemical resembling methamphetamine in its product. However, the researcher from Harvard is urging the government to step in and do something about Craze and, along with his research colleagues, is warning consumers about their findings.
How to Survive a Mass Extinction - Even One Caused by Us Scatter. Adapt. Remember. Click here for an audio sample from the book on organisms that unleashed planetary catastrophes in the past (along with the usual array of super-volcanoes and asteroid impacts). As I first wrote in 1992, an organism — Homo sapiens — is jogging important Earth systems right now, but unlike the cyanobacteria that transformed the atmosphere through the great Oxygen Catastrophe some 2.4 billion years ago, we’re aware (to some extent) of what we’re doing with the greenhouse buildup. Can we survive ourselves? I explored this and other questions about planetary hard knocks with Newitz by video hookup the other day. I thought of Newitz’s book quite a bit late last week when I was listening and speaking at a fascinating meeting at the Library of Congress exploring “The Longevity of Human Civilization: Will We Survive Our World-Changing Technologies?” Read this Live Science post on the meeting by Tanya Lewis to get a sense of the discussion. The question:
Why Does My Dog . . . Eat His Food Away from His Bowl? | Pets By Colleen Oakley ThinkstockIt can be a peculiar sight: After you put food in your dog's bowl, he takes a mouthful, walks across the room, drops it onto your carpet and then munches away. And he repeats this curious ritual until his chow is all gone. It doesn't seem like an efficient way to eat - not to mention that he's getting crumbs on your rug. So what gives? Possible Reasons Behind the Curious Mealtime Behavior The answer to this propensity lies in two words: pack mentality. When dogs in the wild make a kill, the outranked animals drag pieces of food away so they don't have to fight the leader or a more dominant canine for it, says Dr. "Fighting is obviously very risky, so most animals, especially subordinate ones, will go to great lengths to avoid an altercation," says Dr. See Also: Why Does My Dog... Although the competition in your house may not even be real - particularly if you only have one dog - it's his evolutionary instinct taking over. More on Vetstreet.com:
Two-State Illusion Josh Cochran Oded Balilty/Associated Press A barrier in the West Bank city of Hebron. With barbed-wire coils, hills scarred by patrol roads and weather-beaten guard posts, Israel has been shaped like few other countries by its borders. True believers in the two-state solution see absolutely no hope elsewhere. It’s like 1975 all over again, when the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco fell into a coma. True, some comas miraculously end. Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government. All sides have reasons to cling to this illusion. Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority and it shields the country from international opprobrium, even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.
How Coconut Water Effects Farmers Coconut water can seem almost too good to be true. Offering less sugar (and a heftier price tag) than soda, ultra-hydrating electrolytes, and a whole array of other health promises, this relatively new beverage manages to come across as an intelligent choice that is also just a little self-indulgent. Coconut water’s image is best summed up by a recent scene from the popular television show Parks and Recreation, in which the character Anne Perkins (played by Rashida Jones) reveals she’s more into the amenities in her current boyfriend’s deluxe apartment than she is into him. The apartment, described as “Girl Heaven,” has “fresh flowers and gossip magazines on every table,” is heated to a consistent 80 degrees, and includes an “an entire shelf in the fridge just for coconut water.” Indeed, this tropical beverage has been labeled the “next big thing” in the industry for several years running, and it appears to be living up to its name.
Political Deadlock in Tunisia: 9oddem el UIB The stage at the Bardo Square sit-in moments before Hamma Hammami, a member of the National Front party, speaks to the crowd, Tunis, Tunisia. Photo by Nadia Ayari, August 24, 2013. To readers unfamiliar with conventions used for text messages and online chatting in Arabic: please note that the number 9 refers to the phonetic sound of the letter Qāf (ق). Additionally, 3 refers to Ayin (ع) and 7 to Hā (ه). “Hani 9oddem el UIB,” says Sarah Zaafrani, a 33-year-old Tunisian lawyer speaking to her friend on a cell phone. Days earlier, Zaafrani had expressed her skepticism of the Bardo Square sit-in, a sentiment shared by many in her community: “I think the opposition’s demands are off-putting. Sarah Zaafrani (right foreground) gathering with fellow protesters at Bardo Square, Tunis, Tunisia, with the National Constituent Assembly in the distance. “What is most frustrating is that the people in power today were not present at the revolution. Tonight the atmosphere at Bardo is buoyant.