"nature" news and stories

Last December, while I was in Portland visiting my parents for the holidays, I met up with occasional Slashfoodie Sarah Gilbert at the Park Blocks Farmers Market. We spent some time wandering around, buying up some of the most gorgeous produce I've ever seen and taking lots and lots of pictures. I remember taking a picture similar to this one of a small mountain of turnips.

The thing I especially like about this picture of these parsnips is the contrast between the white of the root and the vivid, fresh green of the tops. I am constantly in awe of how beautiful the work of nature is! Big thanks to Clayirving, for adding this one to the Slashfood Flickr pool!

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Robert Tomey, a McDonald's franchisee owner, has put his leftover french fry grease to a good use: fueling his car. His stores, he says, produce about 10,000 gallons of excess oil each year and, after having a simple conversion performed on his car, he now has more than enough to get wherever he's going. In fact, Tomey says that 20-30 cars could be powered by that amount of oil. The grease is processed in a way similar to regular diesel fuel.

And Tomey is not the only one who does this. His conversion kit was purchased at Grease Car. Their conversion kits can cost up to approximately $2,000 and their emissions statistics are intended to provide potential consumers with an idea of how they'll be helping the environment if they convert a diesel car to run on vegetable oil. There seem to be many people who have successfully converted their cars, so it is possible we may see even more of them in the future, especially if McDonald's began to recommend this as an option to their franchisees, since it does seem like a great use for leftover grease.

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Though it may seem as though the food processing industry is constantly trying to improve on nature, twisting it into new and more appealing forms, sometimes it turns out that they are not trying to improve on it as much as they are trying to help it compete with the ever growing range of packaged products. With consumers asking for more natural and more organic products, it would seem that they would turn back to old standbys, like nature's single-serving snack: the apple. The problem with the apple is that it is not as easy to eat as a bag of chips, there's a low "munchability" factor that would drive you to reach for more. Today's consumers are used to having a product go straight from the package to their mouth, without having to pick it apart - or bite off pieces a bit at a time. Packaging Nature's finest into a convenient, ready to eat form takes more work that you would think, despite the fact that apples come off the tree ready to eat. The New York Times Magazine did a great job chronicling the fascinating development of the prepackaged, non-browning apple slice. No longer will modern snackers have to contend with slicing, disposing of cores or trying to avoid the previously inevitable browning of their flesh because almost every store now carries the fruits, perfectly preserved and ready to finally be eaten.

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