Much of this recent spike in bee mortality is attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious condition where all the worker bees in a colony simply fly off as a group and never make it back to the hive. Scientists have been studying this odd phenomenon for years and they still aren’t sure why it is happening.

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As for me, I’ve been learning to can jam, bake bread from scratch in my Dutch oven (though my husband is better at it), and make my own tomato sauce from a bushel of ugly tomatoes I bought at the farmer’s market.

My grandmother, were she not dead (the cigarettes), would no doubt look at me like I’m crazy.

“Don’t you know that you can buy that stuff ?” she’d ask.

But it’s not about buying stuff these days, it’s about making it (if you’re middle-class, liberal, and white, that is). Homemade, from scratch, DIY, straight from the backyard, fresh baked, artisan.

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Apart from flashing my curmudgeon credentials, I'm trying to say that in this department, my bar is set pretty high. There are three food writers I will listen to. Two are true cooks (not chefs): the peerless Mark Bittman, who understands what does and does not matter about how we cook and eat, and Martha Stewart, who -- say what you will! -- taught me everything I know about baking. (Julia Child seems delightfully down-to-earth, but I'm not very interested in French cooking.)

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The sprawling and lovely 34,000-acre ranch headquarters is located at the northernmost corner of California, near the Oregon border, with the volcanic Mount Shasta providing a scenic backdrop for the sometimes thousands of grazing cows. Prather’s web site describes the operation as “a unique closed-herd operation that raises its own hay, breeds its own cattle and does its own slaughter and processing.” The ranch was one of the first ranches to be certified organic for beef products and to gain Certified Humane Raised and Handled approval.

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Raised in the hamlet of Frankenstein in central Missouri, a few miles from where he still lives, Kremer wasn’t even old enough to attend grade school when his father gave him the job of bottle-feeding orphaned piglets in the house. By age six, he had graduated to tending sows and their litters. At eight, Kremer’s father handed him a recently weaned female and said, "She’s yours." Kremer named her Honeysuckle and raised her like a pet, often lying beside her in her stall. She gave birth to 15 young -- a challenge because she only had 13 nipples. Normally, at least three piglets would have died, but Kremer switched the babies on and off their mother during the critical early weeks. All 15 survived.

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This problem – the desire to get closer, down in the trenches of the daily life of a person who belongs to a world not one’s own – can never find its solution in television, because the medium is too distorting, and there is too much money at stake to offer the kind of screen time that a closer look would require, and, anyway, the presence of the documentary cameras would change the behavior of everyone involved so much that any hope for closeness would be dashed.

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In two separate instances in 2011 and 2012, quantities of ionizing radiation were found in samples of bluefin tuna that had migrated from waters near the site of the Fukushima disaster, where the large fish spawn, to the southern California coastline, where they were eventually caught. In the first of these instances, Daniel Madigan, a marine biology graduate student at Stanford, bought 15 tuna steaks from dockside fishermen in San Diego and sent them off to a lab for testing. Madigan knew the migration patterns of the bluefin; at the time, which was less than six months after the accident, he was acting on little more than a hunch.

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Food Starch-Modified, Maltodextrin, Enriched Wheat Flour (Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Chicken Fat, Wheat Flour, Salt, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Monosodium Glutamate, Dextrose, Palm and Canola Oils, Mono- and Diglycerides, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Natural and Artificial Flavor (with Hydrolyzed Corn Protein, Milk), Caramel Color (Treated with Sulfiting Agents), Onion Powder, Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate, Spice, Spice Extractives, with Not More Than 2% Silicon Dioxide Added as an Anticaking Agent.

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The lack of attention belies the significance of the decision, both for food consumers around the world and for U.S. businesses. Experts who have examined Monsanto’s conduct say the Justice Department’s decision not to act all but officially establishes the firm’s sovereignty over the U.S. seed industry. Many of them also say the decision ratifies aggressive practices Monsanto used to entrench its dominance and deter competition. This includes highly restrictive contractual agreements that excluded rivals, alongside a multibillion-dollar spree to buy up seed companies.

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I've read your column for years and have finally decided to come to you for advice on an issue that's very painful for me.

I am 32 now. During my childhood and adolescence, my parents had very maladjusted approaches to food and eating. For my father, this is a kind description of his food madness. A few years ago, he ate nothing but soybean flour mixed with water to form gruel for every meal. This sort of obsession with a type of food (if you could call it that) is completely normal for him, and has been happening most of my life. My mother was simply weight-obsessed — she used diet pills and constantly denied herself food, even though she never weighed more than 140 pounds. She didn't deny me food, but constantly made comments about the fact that I should eat less, and denied herself dinner most nights while watching me eat. When we went out, she would binge on food and desserts because she "loved food," and then feel great shame and regret for it later.

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PETA’s Mimi Bekhechi was quick to issue a response, pointing out (correctly) that meat consumption is a key driver of a host of ecological and social ills, among them world hunger and global climate change, but failing to dispute the core argument at hand – that is, that Western demand is pricing out poor folks.

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And now, three years later, two chefs and the ownership of the Hump's parent company are being charged with nine counts of conspiracy to import and sell whale meat, felonies that could carry hefty prison sentences.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times:

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After I wrote about Cory Booker's decision last month to take the SNAP Challenge – to take "a view of what life can be like for millions of low-income Americans" – I couldn't get the idea of it out of my head. The challenge is simple in concept but demanding in its execution: see what it's like to live for one week on a food budget equivalent to your state's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program's (SNAP) benefits. Participants can use their existing spices and condiments, but no other foodstuffs, nor they can accept food "from friends, family, or at work." Because I live in New York, I'd have a slightly more generous allowance than New Jersey's Booker got – a total of $36.86 for a week of eating. And because my two daughters are awesome, they said they wanted to do it too as I soon as I mentioned it to them. So for the past week, we've been eating on a little over five bucks a person per day.

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New York Times columnist Mark Bittman argues that the almost 50 million people who receive SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) should not be allowed to spend the funds on soda and other junk food. The idea has “been gaining momentum in the last few years” Bittman writes, since “no one without a share in the profits can argue that [a sugary drink] plays a constructive role in any diet.”

Bittman’s column highlights a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“It’s shocking,” says [Dr. David] Ludwig, [director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center and one of the article’s authors] “how little we consider food quality in the management of chronic diseases. And in the case of SNAP that failure costs taxpayers twice: We pay once when low-income families buy junk foods and sugary beverages with SNAP benefits, and we pay a second time when poor diet quality inevitably increases the costs of health care in general, and Medicaid and Medicare in particular.”

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We lived in a small town in northern New Jersey. My parents — poorly educated but quite literate Jews from within the czar’s Pale of Settlement — had made their home in that town perhaps 20 years before. My father, who was deft and a quick learner, had first washed dishes there, then become a cook and then became the owner of a hotel, a restaurant, a big house (for those days) and much else.

Just as he was preparing to congratulate himself on his business acumen, however, the crash came. It took only a tormented year or so before he was back in an apron serving rib-eye steaks and fries. He’d managed to save from his creditors a truly forlorn two-story shack where he would eventually reopen his business, though there was hardly a customer in sight. Today, people would say he had a serious cash flow problem: I would be sent down the street to buy two pounds of tomatoes or hamburger, but not both at once. I learned how to two-finger type a menu because neither of my parents could print legible English. Overall, they had both lowered their sights considerably.

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The dips are slight: Between 2006 and 2011, the obesity rate among schoolchildren fell by about 5 percent in New York City and Philadelphia. However, health professionals viewed the results optimistically: “It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City.

The decline in childhood obesity in some parts of the country coincides with national campaigns in recent years to bring the issue to the fore. According to the Times:

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On Nov. 18, the mayor busted out a little Plutarch for his Twitter followers, quoting, "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics." Those were fighting words to some who took umbrage with the notion, prompting Booker to follow up: "We pay 4 HUGE back end govt programs: prisons, police, etc. If we invested in Schools, nutrition, etc we’d save $ & create wealth."

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People sometimes think that Chinese cuisine is the equivalent of French cuisine or something like that, but actually China is more a continent than a country. One of the main characteristics of Chinese food is that it is so varied and multi-faceted, which makes it an over-simplification to talk about Chinese cuisine. For example, Sichuan province, where I lived for some time and about whose cuisine I wrote my first book, is roughly the size of France. But there are certain cultural things that the different cuisines of China share.

How effectively does Yan-Kit So draw those out?

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