vegetables (Page 2)

It’s come to this: the flowers in Regent’s Park in London may soon be replaced by vegetables.

The park may be divided up into parcels so that city residents can grow their own vegetables. In the Guardian newspaper, Sam Jones quotes parks’ executive Colin Buttery as saying, “We very much want to support the idea of people growing their food by doing small-scale demonstrations.” His idea was actually inspired by the communal vegetable gardens that have been created in many US cities.

Jones quotes sustainable foods expert Ben Reynolds, of Sustain as saying, if food shortages and prices continued increasing, and climate change gets worse, “We’ll get people saying ‘Well, bugger this, if I can’t get the food I want, I’ll grow it myself.'”
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It was once dangerous to buy spinach, now even McDonalds is removing tomatoes from of its hamburgers. What’s going on? It turns out that the KIND of tomatoes you buy are what’s important.

The FDA reports that people in 16 states are becoming ill from a fruit-borne form of salmonella, which has been linked to raw red tomatoes. The illness lurks in the STEM end of the tomato, then spreads to the rest of the flesh. You can avoid getting the disease by buying only “cluster” tomatoes, which are still attached to the vine on which they were grown, or cooking them for a short period of time (such as running them under the broiler). Cherry tomatoes are safe to eat raw.

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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New research shows that eating vegetables, not fruit, helps keep us mentally alert as we age, BUT another study shows that eating strawberries is good for our memory.

In determining whether there was an association between eating vegetables and fruit and cognitive decline, researchers studied 3,718 residents in Chicago, Illinois, who were age 65 and older. Researcher Martha Clare Morris says, “Compared to people who consumed less than one serving of vegetables a day, people who ate at least 2.8 servings of vegetables a day saw their rate of cognitive change slow by roughly 40%. This decrease is equivalent to about five years of younger age.”
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