Six on Food: ‘Schools Are Not in Any Way Situated to Produce Food, Good Food.’; Why Superfoods Are Superfluous — at Best; Her
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"Dan Giusti, founder of Brigaid, talks about the challenges, three years in, of trying to change public school lunch"
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"While farmers in much of the US spend the late spring patiently waiting for their crops to mature, a small band of sea farmers have taken to the cold ocean waters of Alaska to harvest the state’s newest cash crop: kelp.
Huge demand for seaweed, hauled up in slimy green bunches from the Pacific Ocean, has kickstarted an industry that existed as a mere fantasy only five years ago.
“There’s lot of interest in sustainability,” says Beau Perry, head of Blue Evolution, a California-based company at the centre of Alaska’s nascent seaweed boom. “As we deal with climate change and the movement towards plant-based diets, all of those trends play towards seaweed being a new sort of star ingredient.”
"The lanternfly is one of the latest foreign invasive insect pests to become established in North America. And it isn’t a picky eater. Dozens of crops and native trees are go-to foods for this destructive bug.
While it apparently hasn’t made it to this region yet, it is entrenched farther south. Entomologists are watching nervously. “For landowners and orchards they’re a nightmare . . . a total menace to society,” said Judy Rosovsky, the Vermont state entomologist.
The lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula, was found in 2014 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, northwest of Philadelphia. Berks and 13 other Pennsylvania counties are now under quarantine, as are three in New Jersey. And it has been found in New York and Virginia.
Despite its name, the lanternfly isn’t a fly. It’s a planthopper. It flies poorly, but jumps well. It attacks some 70 types of crops and trees in North America. It really likes stone fruits — peaches, plums, cherries. It likes hops and grapes. And hardwood trees like maple, oak, poplar, walnut, birch, and willow. Its preferred host, the tree of heaven, Alianthus altissima, is itself an invasive species from Asia now naturalized in the U.S.
Unlike some other imported pests, the lanternfly doesn’t kill trees directly. It just sort of beats them down. “They have piercing, sucking mouthparts. They stick them in the plant and suck its sap,” causing weeping wounds that serve as portals for debilitating molds and fungi, said Rosovsky. Lanternflies also excrete massive amounts of sticky honeydew. Since they tend to congregate in huge numbers, the result is less than appetizing."
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