food (Page 10)

It’s BUGS! – If you’re a fan of spicy food, you owe a lot to bugs, both the crawling kind and ones you can see only with a microscope. New research shows they are the ones responsible for the heat in chili peppers.

The spiciness is a defense mechanism that some peppers develop to suppress a fungus that invades through punctures made in the outer skin by insects. The fungus destroys the plant’s seeds before they can be eaten by birds and widely distributed. The pungency comes from capsaicinoids, the same chemicals that protect them from fungal attack by dramatically slowing microbial growth.
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It’s evil corn at work again: A secret World Bank report says that the production of biofuels is using up land that used to produce food, leading to a 75% increase in global food prices despite the US government’s allegation that biofuel production has only increased food prices by 3%.

The World Bank report, which was completed in April, has not been publicly released so as not to embarrass the Bush administration. In the July 4th edition of the Guardian newspaper Aditya Chakrabortty quotes a World Bank official as saying, “It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House.”
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Now that the food shortage problem has reached the West, many people are considering growing their own vegetables in their back yards. But what can people in cities do? The answer: grow skyscraper gardens!

In the July 15th edition of the New York Times, Bina Venkataraman writes: “What if ‘eating local’ in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?”

She quotes city planner Scott M. Stringer as saying, “Obviously we don?t have vast amounts of vacant land, but the sky is the limit in Manhattan.”
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It’s either almost worthless or downright dangerous?and we STILL eat too much of it! – Global warming isn’t the only reason that food isn’t as nutritious as it used to be, and some things, like popcorn, may be downright dangerous. Many of the foods we eat every day, including eggs and bacon, used to be full of essential nutrients, when the animals they came from were eating grass, insects, and other green foods. Now that our livestock eat mostly seeds and grains, that’s no longer the case.
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