food

This summer, New York City is expanding food waste recycling into more neighborhoods, with an eye toward eventually making the program mandatory. Officials are hoping the changes will help improve on the city's dismal recycling rate, which remains stuck at 15 percent.

The Greeks have been eating octopus since ancient times, but there's an art to grilling these tentacled sea creatures. An octopus has to be dried in the sun for at least a day first. Otherwise, the flesh just steams and turns into "a rubbery mass."

A study finds there may be a way to boost some of the beneficial compounds in plants by simulating the light-dark cycle after crops are harvested. Plants use circadian rhythms to help them judge when to turn on their chemical defenses.

Vegetables plucked from grocery store shelves can be made to respond to patterns of light and darkness, according to a report in the journal Current Biology. Janet Braam and colleagues found that cabbages change their levels of phytonutrients throughout a daily cycle.

Among the many culinary treats Italy has given the world is gelato, a frozen dessert with roots in ancient Mesopotamia. Gelato lovers from all over the world are flocking to a university outside Bologna, Italy, to master the art of gelato-making. Here's a free lesson: Don't call it ice cream.

A civil lawsuit that shifted into U.S. district court in Idaho last week alleges that the United Potato Growers of America has become a veritable OPEC of spuds. The group is accused of using high-tech, strong-arm tactics to inflate potato prices.

A fraternal agriculture organization known as the Grange must bring in younger members to survive. But the new generation's interest in environmental issues and food politics is clashing with the Grange's support of industrial farms.

Carbon emissions are slowly acidifying ocean waters, forcing marine life to adapt. Oysters and other shellfish, for example, may have a harder time building their shells, according to NOAA's Richard Feely. At Quilcene, Washington's Taylor Shellfish Hatchery, research director Benoit Eudeline says he's already seeing those effects.

Investors like Gates are betting that our planet can't sustain the current rate of growth in animal-based foods for too much longer. Products like Beyond Eggs, a plant-based substitute, are designed to fill the void.

After teaching cooking classes for 20 years, Victoria Dougherty says she has ended up with some pretty random ingredients in her classroom cupboard — like juniper berries and fish sauce. Chef Raghavan Iyer offers some advice.

Postwar marketing of convenience foods pushed our grandmothers to take many shortcuts in the kitchen that modern foodies might find unpalatable. Many involved Jell-O. Cookbook author Jeremy Jackson updated his grandma Mildred's famous strawberry cake recipe to remove this old-school secret ingredient.

In the past three years, Midwestern farmers have seen flooding, then record-setting drought, and now flooding again. "As much as we think we have things cornered and we know what's going to be happening, you just don't know what will happen," a meteorologist says.