Americans are obsessed with coffee. It is estimated that as a country, we consume 146 billion cups a year, making us the world’s largest consumer of java. And although locally owned coffee shops get a lot of love, the big coffee chains and their drive thrus are clearly here to stay. This on-the-go coffee culture [...]

Many parents and school lunch workers will tell you that getting kids to willingly eat their vegetables is no easy feat. But Whole Foods and Chef Ann Cooper think they have a solution to the problem: salad bars in school cafeterias. Whole Foods and Cooper have already raised over
$1.4 million to put salad bars in [...]

Whether it is burgers loaded with saturated fat or french fries with calorie counts that are through the roof, it is no surprise that fast food isn’t too great for us. But if the nutritional information isn’t enough to keep you away, maybe this will: new research shows that chemicals from wrappers and packaging are [...]

Ah, the USDA Food Pyramid — we all learn in school that it’s the dietary guidelines that we should try to follow if we want to live healthy lives, but how many people actually take the pyramid’s advice? And how many people have seen the pyramid since their school days or even know that it [...]

By now we’ve all heard of First Lady Michelle Obama’s crusade to fight childhood obesity with her “Let’s Move!” campaign. With “Let’s Move!” Mrs. Obama hopes to “provide schools, families, and communities simple tools to help kids be more active, eat better, and get healthy.” Which is why I find the campaign’s newest supporter to [...]

Now that the BP well has finally been plugged up, and some fishermen are returning to work, many people are wondering whether or not it is safe to eat seafood from the Gulf of Mexico. The government’s “sniff test” (smelling seafood to determine if it is contaminated with oil) is the first line of defense [...]

As people everywhere become more conscious of what they’re eating and lawmakers work to find a way to combat high rates of obesity and diabetes, calorie counts are beginning to show up in many fast food and family restaurant chains around the country. And now these numbers are making their way into some school cafeterias. [...]

By now we’ve all seen those commercials for High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) on TV — you know the ones where someone offers their friend a beverage or a bite of their food and then the friend turns it down noting that the offered item contains HFCS. The person then replies that HFCS is made [...]

In the past I’ve written about overfishing and how a computer application in Italy was working to ensure that fishermen were connected with consumers, so that none of their catch would go to waste. Now a small fishing village in Maine is taking a low-tech spin on this idea of connecting potential buyers to the [...]

FarmVille is one of the most frustrating megatrends on the Internet today. 60 million people log a mind-boggling 70 million hours each week (or almost 8,000 years) tending to their virtual crops. What could be a massive teaching opportunity — FarmVille commands a huge captive audience of people who are have at least [...]