"professor" news and stories

A University of Arizona professor is turning the process of selecting a price of fruit from "an art [to] a science." He has come up with a new way to help let people know when fruit is ripe and ready for eating, eliminating all that sniffing, poking and prodding of fruits in the market. His creation is a sticker called RediRipe that changes from white to blue as ethylene gas, a natural ripeness indicator, is released from the fruit or vegetable.

The first batch of the stickers will go straight to growers, who will be able to use them to monitor their crops and prevent spoilage of over-ripe fruits by shipping out the fruits ripening the fastest, first. It is worth mentioning that the stickers do not change to indicate overripe fruit themselves, so something that is "ripe" according to the sticker, may actually be too soft on the inside.

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I hate to be the one to break this to lifestyle reporters everywhere, but whining about the names of the drinks and the options at Starbucks is old. Very old. We've been there, we know what the names are and we have a great deal of pity that you find the option to have non-fat, low-fat or whole milk in your coffee to be "dizzying." They have medications to treat that sort of thing, you know.

If you want to cover something interesting, why don't you take a look at what cultural and social anthropologists (or historians masquerading as such) are studying when they visit Starbucks. Bryant Simon, a professor at Temple University, observes the patrons who visit Starbucks instead of the coffee shop's menu. He has done research at hundreds of Starbucks in six countries, looking at behaviors of the modern coffee consumer and learning about "cafe culture" in an age of globalization. He believes that Starbucks help fill "some kind of deep desire for connection with other people" without actually having to interact with them. The coffee shops, Simon says, are "selling comfort," letting people be anonymous together in an atmosphere that doesn't vary much from place to place; predictability is actually a somewhat rare virtue in a rapidly moving and changing world. And the effect spreads beyond America's borders, as patrons in other countries often exhibit similar behaviors and look for the same comforting things.

His paper, his "opus," will be titled Consuming Starbucks and will reach publication in 2008.

[Photo by Sarah Gilbert]

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