I just love these prints. Yesterday, I was standing in my backward watching my homing pigeon forage on the ground for seeds. Out of nowhere, a red tail hawk swooped down, grabbed the pigeon and flew away. R.I.P. Commander Squeaks.
Allan Grant, Cat Eats Corn, 1951. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.
(via oldtimeycats)
Harvard is opening a new display called “Tangible Things” where they are pulling out all the oddball items from their back storerooms, including this corn tortilla made in Mexico in 1897.
Click here for a gallery of items: http://www.livescience.com/14583-gallery-harvard-collection-oddities-strange.html
Recent technology that identifies varieties of fish by their gene sequences has shown that 20-25% of seafood products are mislabeled, usually with something cheap being labeled as something more expensive.
Dana Miller, a doctoral student who worked with Dr. Mariani in Dublin studying the mislabeling of cod, the most popular fish in Ireland, said, “we expected with all the policies and legislation and inspections, the numbers would be pretty low.” But 25% of samples of fresh cod and haddock and over 80% of the smoked products, were in fact something else. Irish cod stocks are overfished.
If you can’t trust the name of the fish on the package, how can you trust anything else about what the label says? The group Cleanfish is experimenting with an electronic tagging system through which each fisherman or processor would enter his code onto a tag on each fish, making its journey from the sea to the plate fully transparent.
As the planet warms, dire predictions of coastal flooding, inland droughts, ruined farmland, and global food shortages fill the news and research journals. But for all the talk of the future, scientists have little data on how climate change has already affected agriculture.
Scientists from Stanford University report in Science that yields of corn and wheat declined from 1980-2008 by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with what they would have been without global warming. Rice and soybean production remained the same. But the trends vary considerably from region to region. Unlike most other regions, the United States and Canada saw no climate-linked decline in food production during this period. This is consistent with data and predictions put out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Pouring extra cooking grease down the drain is causing problems for some workers. Study researcher Joel Ducoste, of North Carolina State University, has discovered that fat, oil and grease turn into hardened deposits of a soaplike substance as they travel from your home to the wastewater treatment plant. The grayish white deposits look like stalactites!
Food tastes less fatty to overweight people. Most people can easily detect the presence of oil in foods, but the threshold for tasting this fat is only about half as high in lean men as in heavy ones, Australian scientists conclude in the April American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Oh yeah, and America is really fat.
