Eideard

A four-year-old U.S. boy who announced to his teacher at school snack time that he wanted to share pulled nine bags of marijuana out of his jacket pocket…Police in Meriden, Connecticut were called to Hanover Elementary School Tuesday afternoon after the young special needs student displayed the drugs, authorities said.

Meriden police said the nine individually wrapped bags of marijuana appeared prepared for sale…

“What’s so disheartening is this is really an adult issue and problem and adult behavior put a student at risk,” Meriden schools superintendent Mark Benigni told Reuters.

“This student had no idea what he brought to school or what the substance was,” he added.

Authorities are not releasing the names of the student or parents and police said there is a possibility for arrests pending the outcome of the investigation.

The coppers should smack daddy on the wrist for being extra dumb about hiding his retail stash. Unless he was more than extra dumb and just wanted his kiddie to build up his business with free samples?

Motorway being covered with mud to stop government spotting it by satellite

The new road, in a suburb of Xiangyang city, Hubei province, was built illegally earlier this year and was quickly spotted on satellite maps of the area.

Instructions were sent from Beijing to tear up the road and return the land to local farmers, but instead of complying, local officials decided to try to hide the road. They covered its surface with plastic sheets and then spread a thin layer of soil over the top, in which they planted vegetables. The ruse worked for about a month, until angry farmers, whose land had been seized, reported the trick to the government.

“The workers turned up in May, dug up our crops and just laid the road over our land,” said Mao Huancheng, a farmer. “They never gave us any compensation for the land. And then they spread the earth to try to avoid a national inspection and trick the higher-up officials,” he added.

The deputy director of the district said that the road was a vital link to a new industrial park, which was supposed to attract investment to the area. However, it has now been demolished and the local government faces a hefty fine.

Not the first attempt at camouflaged logistics.

Last September, officials in the central province of Shaanxi attempted to make an area blighted by stone quarries look like it had been planted with trees by painting the mountains green. “This is very advanced, we learned how to do it from the internet,” said a spokesman from the local mining office.

Har. Must be watching Clean Coal commercials.

First Lady Michelle Obama joined Walmart on Thursday as the retail giant announced a plan to make thousands of its food products more nutritious — a move supported by her campaign to reduce childhood obesity.

Walmart is promising to work with suppliers to reduce the salt and sugar in packaged foods, cut the costs of healthful fruits and vegetables, and develop a logo that consumers can use to choose healthier items. As part of its five-year plan, the company will also build stores in areas not already served by groceries.

As the nation’s biggest grocery retailer, Walmart has the clout to potentially transform the whole food marketplace, said Obama, whose “Let’s Move” campaign is targeted at combating obesity in children.

“When 140 million people a week are shopping at Walmart, then day by day and meal by meal all these small changes can start to make a big difference for our children’s health,” said the first lady, who was joined by Walmart executives as they announced the plan at a community center in Washington, D.C….

Obama said that when she first decided to take on the issue of childhood obesity, she was skeptical as to whether it could work or whether anyone was interested in making the needed changes.

“But today, when I see a company like Walmart launch an initiative like this, I feel more hopeful than ever before that the answer to these questions is yes,” she said…

Something always welcome. Whether you evaluate capitalist economics as history or global process, the buying power and collateral market effects of a giant like WalMart can be a positive as easily a negative. This is one of the former.

Among students of the contemporary metropolis, “food deserts” have become a widely known problem. The term is generally used to describe urban neighborhoods where there are few grocers selling fresh produce, but a cornucopia of fast-food places and convenience stores selling salty snacks (though, strictly speaking, the term can be applied to rural or suburban areas, too). Often the problem afflicts low-income areas abandoned or shunned by food businesses that focus on better-off consumers; the residents of food deserts, apparently, are not providing enough profit to be offered more healthful grub. These are places where the market for nutritious sustenance has essentially failed.

Perhaps the marketplace can reverse its own failure, but a little prodding from other entities may be required. One example emerged this summer in Chicago when Walgreens, the drugstore chain founded in that city more than 100 years ago, started selling an expanded selection of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, at 10 locations selected because they were in food deserts. The experiment in creating these “food oases” is intriguing because it involves a well-known retail brand not typically associated with groceries — and, really, because it involves a well-known retail brand at all…

A drugstore might not seem the obvious venue for solving a grocery-store problem, but Walgreens offered something useful: ubiquity. “That’s the exciting thing about Walgreens, they’re in so many places,” Mari Gallagher says. (It was during her research on Detroit that she was struck by the fact that pharmacies were practically the only mainstream chain presence, aside from fast food, in many neighborhoods.) Thus the pharmacy chain did not have to open new stores in food deserts, because it was already operating in plenty of them, and could use Gallagher’s data to pick locations for its experiment. Still, refitting the stores to offer 750 or so new products, including whole new categories, without expanding their actual size was a big undertaking. (About 20 to 25 percent of the square footage in each participating store is now given over to food.) And Walgreens had to line up new suppliers and adjust to the risks of selling things like lettuce and bananas that can go bad on the shelf if not bought quickly, says Jim Jensen, the chain’s divisional merchandise manager for consumables.

Then again, if you’re a big retailer looking to explore a new category, there are advantages to knowing in advance that the market isn’t exactly saturated. Walgreens is offering few specifics about how the test run is going. (The company put me in touch with Bridgett James, manager of the 67th and Stony Island Avenue location, who said that customers love it.) But Don Whetstone, senior director of new format development, frames groceries as a business opportunity. “We didn’t build this just for Chicago” he says…

RTFA. “Food deserts” is’t a concept new to these eyes. I’ve lived in a few. Gallagher – and looks like some of the marketing folks at Walgreens – sees this experiment as a decision to let the marketplace help expand business.

Heading out for groceries

A team of scientists has begun exploring what can be learned from the diet of cavemen who lived more than two million years ago. Research will focus on how the food eaten by hunter-gatherers could enhance modern day nutrition.

Our ancestors in the palaeolithic period, which covers 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago, are thought to have had a diet based on vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots and meat.

Cereals, potatoes, bread and milk did not feature at all. It was only with the dawn of agriculture (around 10,000 years ago) that our diets evolved to include what we think of as staple foods now…

In contrast to the cereal crops we rely on now for the basis of our food, the pre-farming diet contained fewer carbohydrates, less fat and more vegetables. So was it a healthier diet?

“It seems so,” said Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London. “Palaeolithic man may have died earlier than we do now, but he didn’t die of bad nutrition…”

Although we have adapted to a very different diet over thousands of years, Professor Thomas says: “There is a mismatch between the diet we’ve evolved for and the one that we have.”

He cites milk as an example of something humans have adapted to over time.

“Ten thousand years ago, humans had access to milk but couldn’t drink it. We couldn’t digest it. Now we’re 100% adapted to a milk-rich diet.”

I have long been a student of the anthropology of nutrition. One reason anthropology, paleontology, has fascinated me has been learning not only how our ancestors lived; but, what supported that life.

We know they needed more calories because they worked so much harder to provide everything that was required to sustain life and family. Now, we’re learning more about what provided those calories – and the side benefits of those sources.

Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington have developed imaging technology to be used in an intelligent harvesting machine that could minimise wastage and solve an impending labour shortage for UK farmers.

Annual waste for certain crops can be up to 60% – which can mean up to ₤100,000 of lost revenue for an average farm every year, according to farmers who were consulted during research. Falling number of migrant labourers means that healthy crops cannot be gathered and so farms are losing crops due to harvesting at the wrong time.

NPL ‘s scientists are working with KMS projects and Vegetable Harvesting Systems (VHS) to turn the technology into an intelligent harvesting machine, which can look beneath the leafy layers of a crop, identify the differing materials, and enable precise size identification.

This can be used to develop a fully automated harvesting robot, which would be able to fill the gap left by the labour shortage.

The most appropriate technologies to use are radio frequencies, microwaves, terahertz and the far-infra red. These four parts of the electromagnetic spectrum all have potential to safely penetrate the crop layers and identify the size of the harvestable material for a relatively low cost…

A successful demonstration of the imaging technology was given recently at the Fanuc Robotics site in Coventry, showing its huge potential for the harvesting of cauliflowers, lettuces and other similar crops. This has attracted further commercial support from G’s, one of the largest lettuces grower in the UK, to take the project forward and develop the complete product, which could be available as early as next year.

Agribusiness in the United States has talked about this sort of achievement for decades. Every time someone took a couple of baby steps another wave of undocumentados rolled in from Mexico and made the question moot. As long as the cheapest labor on the continent was ready and available, why waste time and money on something like efficiency?

Apparently, a parallel situation in the UK is ending. No doubt our farm industry will soon be able to buy appropriate competitive harvesting machinery – from Great Britain.

Poultry was the most commonly identified source of food poisoning in the United States in 2006, followed by leafy vegetables and fruits and nuts, according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

After a concerted campaign by the federal Department of Agriculture to improve the safety of chickens, the number of people sickened by contaminated poultry in 2006 declined compared with an average of the previous five years, according to C.D.C. researchers.

But problems persist. Most of the poultry-related illnesses, the centers found, were associated with Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium that commonly causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea usually within 10 to 12 hours after ingestion. The spores from this bacterium often survive cooking, so keeping poultry meat at temperatures low enough to prevent contamination during processing and storage is critical.

Researchers counted leafy vegetables, fungi, root vegetables, sprouts and vegetables from vines or stalks as separate categories. Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, noted that if all of the produce categories were combined, outbreaks associated with vegetables would have far exceeded those in poultry…

While poultry is the most common source of illnesses among the 17 different foods tracked by federal officials, the C.D.C. found that two-thirds of all food-related illnesses traced to a lone ingredient were caused by viruses, which are often added to food by restaurant workers who fail to wash their hands. Such viruses often cause what many people refer to as a “stomach flu,” one to two days of nausea and vomiting that is unrelated to the flu virus.

Salmonella, the bacteria found in nationwide outbreaks of contaminated peanut butter, spinach and tomatoes, was the second-leading cause of sole-source food illnesses, the centers found.

Wonder if the Party of No will get off their rusty dusty and join in the legislation for food safety currently before Congress? Or will they maintain allegiance to their corporate masters.

No matter. The important task is – even though I think the U.S. does a better job than most other nations at safety through the food chain – let’s raise and codify better food standards while we have the chance.

EU nations have given the green light for bent cucumbers and other “wonky” fruit and vegetables to be sold in supermarkets and elsewhere, as part of a drive to cut red tape…

Which is where they belong. Except in terms of quantity, they’re still in place.

In all, marketing standards for 26 fruits and vegetables are being scrapped, paving the way for the return to shopping trolleys of forked carrots, onions that are less than two thirds covered with skin and the bent cucumbers among other deviant vegetables.

“This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot,” said EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel…

She added that in the current climate of high food prices and economic woes “consumers should be able to choose from the widest range of products possible. It makes no sense to throw perfectly good products away, just because they are the ‘wrong’ shape…”

Standards are kept in place for 10 others, including several of the most popular items in European kitchens; apples, citrus fruit, kiwi fruit, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, table grapes and tomatoes…

Vendors will be able to sell deviant versions of the still proscribed items as long as they are labelled as a “product intended for processing” or similar.

Idiots. Where have governments gotten to when they feel called upon to act on behalf of the Straight Fruit Growers Guild or some such nonsense – when all they accomplish is additional traffic management and higher costs to the consumer?

Eating broccoli could reverse the damage caused by diabetes to heart blood vessels, research suggests.

A University of Warwick team believe the key is a compound found in the vegetable, called sulforaphane. It encourages production of enzymes which protect the blood vessels, and a reduction in high levels of molecules which cause significant cell damage…

The Warwick team, whose work is reported in the journal Diabetes, tested the effects of sulforaphane on blood vessel cells damaged by high glucose levels (hyperglycaemia), which are associated with diabetes.

Lead researcher Professor Paul Thornalley said: “Our study suggests that compounds such as sulforaphane from broccoli may help counter processes linked to the development of vascular disease in diabetes.

“In future, it will be important to test if eating a diet rich in brassica vegetables has health benefits for diabetic patients. We expect that it will.”

Fortunately, I learned to cook from the Italian side of the family. Pasta aglia olio con broccoli is a favorite I grew up with.

Houseguests learn soon enough they’re going to experience this dish once a week.