Meet The Team / Leora Broydo Vestel

In response to pressure from lawmakers and peanut producers, The United States Department of Transportation has promised to comply with a federal law that prohibits the agency from imposing peanut restrictions on airplanes unless a scientific study verifies there are serious in-flight medical problems from airborne peanut particles.

The agency is considering several controversial measures to accommodate people with peanut allergies, including an outright ban on the serving of peanuts and all peanut products by both U.S. and foreign airlines. The proposed peanut restrictions are part of a broader proposal to enhance airline passenger protections.

In a letter sent to members of Congress last week, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood affirmed the agency would abide by a 1999 law that prohibits it from imposing any restrictions on "airline peanut practices."

Reusable shopping bags are a must-have for environmentally minded shoppers. But a new study suggests that those who use "green" totes may get more than they bargained for, namely, a whole lot of bacteria.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona, Tucson and Loma Linda University in California, found "large numbers" of bacteria in every reusable bag they tested. E. coli, specifically, was found in about 12 percent of the bags examined.

More after the jump...

There's a lot of moaning and groaning about the quality of food in hospitals. Indeed, eating mystery meat with a side of mushy vegetables can be a painful experience.

But it looks like a growing number of hospital kitchens are finally responding to the bad reviews and dishing up more healthful fare.

A report today on National Public Radio describes the results of a pilot program initiated by hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area which focused on serving sustainably-raised beef, pork and poultry to patients and staff, in smaller portions than is customary.

According to NPR, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future assessed the program and found that it not only provided health benefits (sustainably-raised meat has less cholesterol and more vitamins, they argue), the reduction in meat purchases could save the hospitals just over $400,000 annually and trim their carbon footprint.

Here's some promising news for the more than 1.5 million Americans with peanut allergies: Researchers with the United States Department of Agriculture say they are getting closer to developing a safer, hypoallergenic peanut.

In a presentation this week at the congress of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) in London, USDA research scientist Soheila Maleki described how her team measured the allergen levels of 900 peanut varieties and found that some with genetic mutations lacked, or had lower amounts, of a major allergen.

They also discovered it was possible to breed these varieties to get peanut seeds with lower levels of allergens, and that these allergens were less able to bind to antibodies that cause allergic reactions.

Three journalism students at St. Michael's College in Vermont have made a documentary film that examines the nocturnal adventures of "freegans" – people who rummage through dumpsters in search of discarded, but still edible, food items.

Carolyn Smith, one of the filmmakers, said that when she took to the streets with freegans in New York City and Burlington, Vermont, she expected to see garbage bins filled with the likes of half-eaten pizzas.

Instead, she was amazed by "the amount of good stuff" that was pulled from the trash, including fresh fruit and vegetables, intact eggs in cartons, and packaged foods (some of it not yet past the sell-by date), all of it tossed out by various food markets and eateries.