??No passengers were injured after two planes clipped wings Wednesday afternoon at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Twenty-four people were evacuated after a cargo plane made contact with an American Eagle regional jet around 1 p.m., the Chicago Fire Department said.
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By Bettina H. Lilley
Having a pest exterminator in your budget is a crucial element of good home maintenance, one that everyone should invest in. Just as you water your lawn, routinely power wash the exterior walls, and invest in small home improvement projects, pest control is just another part of maintaining a good environment.
There is a widely spread, but misguided belief, that pest control is something that one should search for only after they have experienced an issue with pests. Truthfully, it is ideal that you find someone to begin preventative maintenance of this type soon after you buy your first home. Although a thorough cleaning regimen will decrease the risk of many sorts of infestation from ever occurring, some insects, like termites, can sneak up on you and begin a path of systematic destruction, regardless of how clean you keep your home.
Mice, termites, and other types of pest are capable of rapidly destroying the foundation upon which your home was built, taking down walls and annihilating electrical wires before you even know they are there. Having regular, preventative maintenance through a contracted exterminator can help to reduce your risk of ever having to deal with these types of tragedy. Those people who put off calling in some help until the problem is starring them directly in the face, quite frequently find that there is little they can do to control the rampant damage that has already taken place. There are way too many houses in the world that have eventually had to be reconstructed or bull dozed, after a large enough troop of insects quietly and methodically ate their way through the walls. It is important to note that some pest control companies offer their clients a contract that functions much like insurance, with this type of set up if the damage occurs while you are under contract it is often covered. That is just one more advantage to having a good contract in place from the day you purchase your home.
When you get ready to buy your first home, it is important that you consider including a pest exterminator contract as part of your maintenance budget. This sort of maintenance is as important to most home owners as any other practice. Though it is not cheap or always easy, having an open contract with one of these types of companies is the ideal way of ensuring your home remains intact for generations to come. As long as you find an exterminator soon after making you first mortgage payment and stick with them, you shouldn?t have to worry about things going poorly.
If you would like additional perspective on this topic, go to Pest Exterminator or you might be also be interested on Pest Control Jacksonville FL.
BEIRUT???President Bashar Assad's forces killed at least 50?civilians, including 13 children, in central Syria on Friday, activists said, in one of the highest death tolls in one specific area since an internationally brokered cease-fire went into effect last month.
Syrian troops using tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns pounded the area of Houla, a region made up of several towns and villages in the province of Homs, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees activist groups.
Both groups said at least 50?people were killed. The Observatory, which has a network of activists across the country, said the dead included 13 children. It added that about 100?people were wounded.
An amateur video posted online by activists showed more than a dozen bodies lined up inside a room.
"Houla was subjected to a massacre," a man could be heard saying inside the room.
The Observatory said in one incident in Houla, a family of six was killed when their home received a direct hit.
Homs has been among the hardest-hit provinces in a government crackdown since the uprising against Assad's regime began in March last year. The U.N. said several weeks ago that 9,000 people have been killed in Syria in the past 15 months. Hundreds more have died since.
Attacks have persisted despite the deployment of more than 250 U.N. observers who have fanned out across Syria to monitor a cease-fire brokered by international envoy Kofi Annan.
Despite the daily violations, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said Thursday that there was no "plan B" for the Annan initiative.
The northern city of Aleppo, a major economic hub, has remained largely supportive of Assad throughout the uprising, but anti-regime sentiment has been on the rise in recent weeks.
On Friday, Syrian forces fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse thousands of protesters in Aleppo calling for Assad's ouster, killing five people, activists said.
Aleppo-based activist Mohammad Saeed said more than 10,000 people were protesting.
"The regime is desperately trying to put down the protests in Aleppo, but all this violence will backfire," he said.
He added that security forces shot dead five people, including a 12-year-old boy, identified as Amir Barakat.
Also Friday, a group of Lebanese Shiites who were kidnapped in Syria were released in good health, three days after gunmen abducted the men as they returned from a religious pilgrimage.
The kidnappings fueled fears that Lebanon is getting drawn into the bloody conflict in neighboring Syria. Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the men were "in good health and on their way to Beirut."
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This undated image released by PFCAuctions shows a vial containing Ronald Reagan's dried blood residue. A Channel Islands online auction house has angered Ronald Reagan's foundation by claiming to offer a vial that once contained his blood. The auctioneers say it was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was hospitalized after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington. Bidding for the vial had passed the 7,000 pound ($11,000) mark Tuesday May 22, 2012. (AP Photo/PFCAuctions)
This undated image released by PFCAuctions shows a vial containing Ronald Reagan's dried blood residue. A Channel Islands online auction house has angered Ronald Reagan's foundation by claiming to offer a vial that once contained his blood. The auctioneers say it was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was hospitalized after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington. Bidding for the vial had passed the 7,000 pound ($11,000) mark Tuesday May 22, 2012. (AP Photo/PFCAuctions)
This undated image released by PFCAuctions shows a vial containing Ronald Reagan's dried blood residue. A Channel Islands online auction house has angered Ronald Reagan's foundation by claiming to offer a vial that once contained his blood. The auctioneers say it was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was hospitalized after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington. Bidding for the vial had passed the 7,000 pound ($11,000) mark Tuesday May 22, 2012. (AP Photo/PFCAuctions)
LONDON (AP) ? A European auction house Thursday canceled the planned online sale of a vial containing dried blood residue said to be from Ronald Reagan after complaints from the late U.S. president's family and foundation.
The PFC Auction house said in a statement that the seller had withdrawn the item, which was linked to the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan, and plans instead to donate it to the former president's foundation.
The statement said the seller, who has remained anonymous, had obtained the vial at a U.S. auction earlier this year.
The decision not to sell the controversial item was praised by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in California, which had earlier announced plans to try to stop the sale through legal means.
"We are very pleased with this outcome and wish to thank the consignor and PFC Auctions?for their assistance in this matter," said John Heubusch, executive director of the foundation. He added that he was pleased the late president's blood will be kept "out of public hands."
The item being donated is a five-inch (12.5-centimeter) glass vial that is one half-inch in diameter and has a green rubber stopper. The auction house said it clearly contains traces of dried blood. It is said to have been taken from a laboratory that tested Reagan's blood for lead in the days after he was seriously wounded by a would-be assassin.
"While we contend that the removal of the vial from the hospital laboratory, and the U.S. auction sale in February 2012, were not legal acts in our opinion,?we are grateful to the current custodian of the vial for this generous donation to the Foundation," Heubusch said.
Reagan's family, his foundation and his surgeon had earlier this week criticized the proposed sale. They said it was a violation of the family's privacy for medical items linked to his treatment to be sold on the open market.
Online bidding on the item had reached more than $30,000 when the sale was suspended. It had been set to conclude Thursday evening.
In its statement, the auction house, which is based in the Channel Islands between England and France, revealed new details about the aborted sale.
It said the seller had purchased the item at a public auction in the United States earlier this year for $3,550. It quoted the seller as saying he was a serious collector of presidential memorabilia who had donated to museums in the past.
"I would personally be delighted to see this important artifact put on public display by the Foundation," the seller said.
Reagan required emergency surgery after he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel shortly after speaking to labor union officials on March 30, 1981. Hinckley fired six shots at the president from close range. All six missed, but one bullet ricocheted and hit Reagan.
The president was wounded just two months after taking office. He suffered a punctured lung and severe internal bleeding that required life-saving surgery.
His popular press secretary, James Brady, was left paralyzed after being shot. Two people protecting Reagan also were wounded.
Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He remains in a psychiatric facility in the Washington area but has been allowed to spend some time outside the facility with his family.
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Iran says it will take part in another round of nuclear negotiations in June after meetings in Baghdad with six world powers ended on Thursday. NBC's Ali Arouzi reports.
By Reuters and news services
Iran and world powers agreed to meet again in Moscow next month for more talks to try to end the long-running dispute over Tehran's nuclear program, but there was scant progress to resolve the main sticking points between the two sides.
At the heart of the dispute is Iran's insistence that it has the right to enrich uranium and that economic sanctions should be lifted before it stops activities that could lead to its achieving the capability to make nuclear weapons.
Western powers insist Tehran must first shut down enrichment activities before sanctions can be eased.
But both sides have powerful reasons not to abandon diplomacy. The powers want to avert the danger of a new Middle East war raised by Israeli threats to bomb Iran, while Tehran also wants to avoid a looming Western ban on its oil exports.
UN nuclear chief: Deal reached with Iran over suspected weapons program
After discussions in Baghdad extended late into an unscheduled second day between envoys from Iran and the six powers, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said it was clear both sides wanted progress and had some common ground, but significant differences remained.
"We will maintain intensive contacts with our Iranian counterparts to prepare a further meeting in Moscow," she told a news conference in Baghdad.
Sanctions have taken a toll on the Iranian economy. The government is reluctant to admit it. Inflation is high. The number of young unemployed is a growing concern. NBC's Ali Arouzi reports.?
Ashton leads the negotiations for the six-country group made up of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - which together with Germany is known as the P5+1.
The next meeting, the third in the latest round of talks that began in Istanbul last month, will be held in Moscow on June 18-19.
Ashton said the six powers wanted practical steps from Iran to address concerns over its nuclear work.
Chief among such concerns is Iran's ability to enrich uranium to a fissile purity of 20 percent. That is the nuclear advance most worrying to the West since it hurdles technical obstacles to reaching 90 percent, or bomb-grade, enrichment.
"Iran declared its readiness to address the issue of 20 percent enrichment and came with its own five point plan, including their assertion that we recognize their right to enrichment," Ashton added.
Iran insists on its rights
Iran says it will not exceed 20 percent and the material will be made into fuel for a research reactor.
"Talks were intensive and long," said Iranian chief negotiator Saeed Jalili. "They were detailed, but are left unfinished."
Mohammed Ameen / AP
Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari walks with the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton upon her arrival at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq, Wednesday, May 23, 2012.
"The atmosphere of these talks was positive for the two sides to talk about their issues in a clear way. We believe the result of these talks was that we were able to get to know each other's views better and more."
But enriching uranium, he said, was "an undeniable right of the Iranian nation".
Iran has hinted at flexibility on higher-grade enrichment but Iranian media said it would not give away its most potent bargaining chip without significant concessions on sanctions.
World powers, Iran trade proposals on possible nuclear deal
Jalili denied the P5+1 had offered a new package of proposals during the meeting: "They proposed one suggestion about the issue of uranium enrichment. We have said that any cooperation (in this area) would depend on the preservation of Iran's right to enrich uranium."
While there was little if any concrete progress, the fact that the two sides agreed to continue talks was a sign of progress in itself, after more than a year of not meeting at all before the latest round of negotiations began in April.
"The two sides' commitment to diplomacy in the absence of any clear agreement is a positive sign," said Ali Vaez, Iran expert at the International Crisis Group think-tank.
"All parties should be commended for returning to the negotiating table. Obama should be commended for having turned diplomacy into a process rather than the one-off meetings that existed in the past," wrote Trita Parsi, President of the Washington-based National Iranian American Council.
"Both sides entered negotiations with their maximalist positions, and neither budged," he said. "Looking ahead, now the hard work begins."
According to The Associated Press, a senior U.S. official said the pace of the talks would speed up in upcoming rounds.
"We are urgent about it, because every day we don't figure this out is a day they keep going forward with a nuclear program," said the U.S. official on condition of anonymity.
"We still think we have some time for diplomacy, but it's not indefinite."
The United States and its allies suspect Tehran is trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability and have imposed tough sanctions on Iran's energy and financial sectors to try to force it to compromise and open up its activities to scrutiny.
EU states are set to introduce a total embargo of Iranian crude oil purchases in July. Diplomats say that potentially persuasive measure will not be cancelled unless Tehran takes substantial steps to curb its nuclear activities.
Worries about war
The powers want Iran to send its stockpile of more highly refined uranium abroad and close an underground plant devoted to 20 percent enrichment and largely invulnerable to air strikes.
In return, the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany have offered fuel to keep Iran's medical isotope reactor running, assistance in nuclear safety and an end to an embargo on spare parts for Iran's aging civilian aircraft.
Rising tension over the past year has pushed global oil prices upward as the West has broadened sanctions to bar Iran's crude exports and the specter of Middle East war has increased with the threat of possible Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear installations.
Israel is believed to be the only Middle East country with nuclear weapons but regards Iran's nuclear aspirations as a mortal threat given its calls for the demise of the Jewish state.
Iran, the world's No. 5 oil exporter, says it is enriching uranium only in order to generate electricity to serve the needs of a burgeoning population, and for a medical research reactor.
The Islamic Republic has repeatedly ruled out suspending all enrichment as called for by several U.N. Security Council resolutions, saying nuclear energy is a matter of national sovereignty and pride in technological progress.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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By Al Olson, Senior editor
Mortgage rates have continued to fall over the past week,?again setting a record low for a 30-year contract, mortgage giant Freddie Mac said Thursday.?
The 30-year benchmark dipped to 3.78, down from 3.79 a week ago. The 15-year fixed-rate mortgage remained unchanged from last week at 3.04 percent. ?
"Mortgage rates were virtually unchanged this week with fixed-rate loans remaining at record lows and helping to drive homebuyer affordability," said Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist for Freddie Mac. "The National Association of Realtor's Housing Affordability Index reached an all-time record high in the first quarter of this year since records began in 1970. In April, existing home sales rose to the highest rate since January with an annualized rate of 4.62 million homes with purchases increasing in all four Census Regions," Nothaft added.?
As the rates continue to fall, there are some signs that the housing industry is slowly starting to rebound.?
Existing-home sales rose 3.4 percent from March to April, the National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday.?
Year over year, home sales were 10 percent higher in April while median home prices touched $177,400, a 10.1 percent spike from April 2011, the NAR said.
But it's not all rosy on the homefront.?Nearly 16 million homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their home was worth in the first quarter, or nearly one-third of U.S. homeowners with mortgages. That?s a $1.2 trillion hole in the collective home equity of American households, msnbc.com's John Schoen reported on Wednesday.?
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One of the greatest things you can do when starting up an online business is to make certain you get the very best domain name possible. Should you be unaware, the domain name for an Internet site is what you'll be keying into your browser when you want to go to that web page. When you decide to build a website or have a website developed for you it is imperative that you select the best domain name for what ever specific niche market you will be entering. Something that you are going to find out is that a good domain name can decide if you are going to be prosperous or if you are setting yourself up for failure.
The first thing you have to know is that there are many different extensions with regard to domain names. For people who don't know exactly what an extension is, it's the part of the domain name that comes after the dot, as an example .com and .net. The most professional looking domain extension will be the .com, even so there's also other reasons that you want to get a .com domain name. You are almost certainly one of the people who normally just automatically enter .com after the site name that you enter. Allow me to try and explain exactly why this is critical, if you own healthissues.net, there is a good possibility that somebody that types your domain name in their Internet browser, they will probably type in healthissues.com and you lose a visitor to your site. Because of this one of the most significant things when choosing a domain name is making certain you get a .com.
You now can get started thinking about the actual domain name that you are going to choose for your Internet site. For this example we will be working with the widget niche. A domain name such as wehavegreatwidgetsatgreatprices.com is not a good choice as it is way too long and individuals will not want to enter this into their Internet browser. An excellent domain name for a widget website would be something like buywidgets.com. A domain name that will be short like this is something that people will enter into their web browsers and it is in addition something that folks will remember. At this point I think you can understand why picking a short, unique name is so essential.
Something else that is important to bear in mind is that you want your domain name to focus on your niche. To clarify this a little better, and adhering with the widget niche, you'll want to locate a domain name that has widget or maybe widgets in it. Also do a little keyword research to see if there are a lot of folks in search of "cheap widgets". As soon as you do your research, and if it turns out that there are truly a lot of people in search of that phrase you need to then check to see if the domain "cheapwidgets.com" is a domain name that is available. This will wind up helping you to get ranking for that keyword phrase, so when folks are searching for that they will have a better chance of finding your site.
Some men and women know that they ought to try to get a keyword specific domain name, however they will still end up picking a different domain name merely because it may sound cooler. If you think about that for a minute, if you are advertising and offering widgets, a domain name like redrockcanyon.com will not be a very good domain name. Because of this it is essential that you match your domain name to your niche market.
I am certain by now you understand how significant it is to select the right domain name for your Internet business. The recommendations above were designed to help you get targeted visitors from the search engines and if you don't stick to them you might find that getting top search engine positions may be hard.
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Dubai: Pyramid Health & Fitness | Massage, Nutrition, Weight Loss & More ? Dubai, UAE
Pyramid Health and Fitness are not just another ?keep fit? business. We pride ourselves on being a small friendly company who care about our members and like to give that little bit extra. We believe that keeping fit should be fun, and we make all of our classes as fun and friendly as possible, and encourage members to get to know each other both at class, and outside.
We organise regular social do?s, walks and other events where members can get to meet people from other classes and who knows, maybe find an exercise buddy to come to class with! We also like to give something back each year too, and organise different charity events, with the sole purpose of raising money for a particular charity. This year our chosen charity is a local one ? The Child Bereavement Charity in West Wycombe. We run over 20 classes a week including Body Blitz, Bootcamps, Bollywood Aerobics and Body Conditioning, Boxercise, Fitness Pilates, and Zumba!
We offer keep fit classes in High Wycombe and surrounding areas including: Amersham (Zumba), Bledlow Ridge (Zumba), Great Kingshill (Bootcamp and Body Blitz) Hazlemere (Bootcamp and Zumba), Holmer Green (Boxercise and Zumba), High Wycombe (Fitness Pilates, Sculpt and Tone, Zumba), Speen (Zumba Gold) and Wooburn Green (Zumba).
Classes:
* Zumba
* Fitness Pilates
* Boxercise
* Body Blitz
* Zumba Toning
Pyramid Health & Fitness
Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Tel: +971 4 3240000
http://www.pyramidfitness.co.uk
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It i? here, wher? the role of the computer repair service providers and laptop repair service providers com? int? action. One ?f th? m??t important reasons of people t? usuall? opt f?r ? laptop r?ther than ? traditional desktop computer ?? convenience. It ??n be carried anywhere, anytime. But ?t m?y becom? n?ce?s?r? to seek for a proper laptop repair service provider anytime.
If your computer i? facing problems w?th ?t'? overall performance and speed, ?r it ?s showing ?om? unusual content ?r displaying pops on screen, or y?ur computer's home page i? changing w?th?ut ??ur knowledge, th?n y?ur computer might b? infected with virus or spyware. On this occasion, ?ou have t? contact computer ?nd laptop repair service provider t? install concern antivirus or anti spyware security program on y?ur computer t? prevent y?ur computer w?th m?re infection. One time installation ?f the antivirus ?nd antispyware security program ?? n?t enough. You need t? g? for virus ?nd spyware upgrades too, wh??h ?s ?ls? available. Network installation expertise will ensure addition ?f new equipments t? ??ur network qu?t? easily. This will h?l? you t? make faster and effective deployment w?th negligible disturbance in y?ur business process.
Computer maintenance ?s ?ne of th? mo?t essential things, es?eci?ll? if ??ur computer is us?d for your business. The complete computer repair service package includes diagnosis of hardware and software, hardware and software upgrades, network upgrades ?nd oth?r n???s?ary repairs. When ?t c?m?s t? ?ny problem w?th your laptop or desktop, ?t i? be?t sorted ?ut b? th? experienced technical expert. For b?th computer repair service ?nd laptop repair service th? total charges ar? broken ?nt? tw? parts, th? Flat Labor Rate + the Cost of The Hardware parts. There ?s n? hidden cost and clients ?r? provided w?th the complete break up of th? total expenses.
All of the companies provide th? computer ?nd laptop repair services with th? wide range of operation ?n major cities. For senior people, ?t takes ? huge time ?nd effort to catch up with the latest technological innovations. Owning a personal computer, ?sp?c?all? Laptop ?? ? big deal wh??h signifies how th?y ?re trying t? make them??lv?? ? part ?f the world of technology. Along w?th that, people may encounter difficulties l?ke downloading and uploading applications or ?ven worse, the?r laptop computer crashing. But th?re ?? n? n??d t? worry. After all, th?re ar? service centers, manuals and other self-help guides th?t w?ll aid th?m ?n laptop repair services.
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Yogurt Makes Mice More Masculine | Care2 Healthy Living
Does yogurt make the man? According to preliminary research by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it just might.
Care2 Healthy Living
HeartChase Event This Saturday Promotes Healthy Living
'Medicine in May' celebrates healthy living, exercise
(WMC-TV) ? You might get a little healthier by visiting the The University of Tennessee ? Memphis campus this Friday, May 18. The UT Center for Health Sciences welcomes everyone to its Student Alumni Center located on Madison at Dunlap from 10 am until ?
See all stories on this topic ?
Coffee drinkers live longer; Decaf or regular brew offers healthy benefit ?
Jamba Juice Takes Leadership Position in Health and Wellness
Jamba Juice Company (NASDAQ:JMBA) , a leading healthy, active lifestyle company, took an unprecedented step in the fight against obesity, announcing today their formation of the Jamba(R) Healthy Living Council established with the goal to provide ?
See all stories on this topic ?
Healthy Living: Bike Fit
Kent4Health offers free talk on healthy living
? at the Kent Senior Activity Center, 600 E. Smith St. According to Kent4Health liaison Pam Clark, the event is an opportunity to ask questions and learn directly from the experts about exercise, balanced diet, disease prevention and healthy living.
See all stories on this topic ?
Parents need to stress healthy living, says doctor ? WSMV Channel 4
Doctors said overweight children could be looking at a life-long problem if they don't resolve the issue soon.
www.wsmv.com/?/parents-need-to-stress-healthy-living-says-?
Monday Announcements: 05.14.12 | Healthy Living Blogs
Heather rambles on at Then Heather Said, often waxing poetic about healthy living being MORE THAN nutrition and fitness, and focusing on making one healthy ?
healthylivingblogs.com/?/monday-announcements-05-14-12/
Clevon Harris explains healthy living with MS | al.com
ATHENS, Alabama ? Author Clevon Harris, 36, of Athens, who is living healthfully despite having multiple sclerosis, has just re-issued his practical guides to ?
www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2012/?/healthy_despite_ms.html
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Copyright ? 2012 National Public Radio?. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
IRA FLATOW, HOST:
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. If you live in a big city, there's no shortage of places to buy groceries. You've got your supermarkets, your delis, your farmers markets, your sidewalk fruit stands. It seems like a limitless supply of food, right? But if you stop the delivery trucks, experts say a city's food would run out in just three days.
So to be on the safe side, why not grow more food in the city instead of trucking it in from someplace else, some other country, some other hemisphere? That's what's on my next guest's suggestion list in her new book "Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution."
And urban agriculture is not just about fruits and veggies. People are raising chickens and pigs in cities, too. They're farming fish. They're even making honey on rooftops. And if urban farming is not for you, how about eating the greens already growing wild, the weeds in your yard? That's right, try frying up some dandelion heads for a delicious snack, adding the leaves themselves to a salad.
One of my next guests is a professional forager, and she has some tips and recipes for us. So if you want to talk about urban gardening, about foraging for food, how to find food on your own, give us a call. Our number here's 1-800-989-8255. Maybe you've got some tips for us on some of your favorite foraged foods, or you've got a favorite urban farm that you're trying to set up. Maybe we'll give you some tips. 1-800-989-8255. Also, you can tweet us @scifri, and go to our website at sciencefriday.com and leave some messages there, also.
Jennifer Cockrall-King is a food journalist and author of "Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution." She joins us from the CBC in British Columbia. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING: Hello.
FLATOW: Hey, there. Mary Seton Corboy is the cofounder and chief farm hand at Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia, and she joins us from WHYY in Philly. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
MARY SETON CORBOY GREENSGROW FARM: Thank you. Nice to be here.
FLATOW: Tama Matsuoka Wong is a forager, and she is a forager for the Restaurant Daniel in New York City. She's also author of the forthcoming book "Foraged Flavor: Finding Fabulous Ingredients in Your Backyard or Farmers' Market." She joins us from Atlantic City, New Jersey. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Tama.
TAMA MATSUOKA WONG: Thank you for having me, Ira.
FLATOW: You're welcome. Mary, let's start with you. You started Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia 15 years ago. Wow. You've been at the game for a while.
FARM: I was seven when I started, yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FARM: There was no child labor laws for farms, at least not ones that I knew anything about.
FLATOW: I'll bet. Tell us what - what's the definition of an urban farm?
FARM: I would say set inside a city, and in our case, we happen to believe that it's an operation that is - that exists to grow product for sale or for trade, as opposed to for your own pleasure and consumption.
FLATOW: Do you have to go out and find the real estate, some abandoned lot, on your own?
FARM: Well, in Philadelphia, that wasn't terribly hard to do. We have about 30,000 abandoned lots in Philadelphia. But yes, we did have to go out and find a lot, and we found an old EPA cleanup site that fit the bill.
FLATOW: Did people think you were crazy at that time?
FARM: I'm pretty sure they still think I'm crazy, but yes. They particularly thought I was crazy then.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: Jennifer Cockrall-King, your new book "Food and the City" surveys all sorts of urban farms and the history of the idea. How far back does this idea of urban agriculture go?
COCKRALL-KING: Well, originally, we moved to good farmland, and we built cities, basically, on top of good farmland. So, you know, growing food in cities and building cities on good farmland is as old as, you know, settling together. But, you know, we tend to think of urban agriculture - which is the new term for growing food and producing food in cities, you know, that's the new term.
But when you think back even two or three generations, we had vacant lot gardening, victory gardens, relief gardens in the Depression. So this is not a new concept.
FLATOW: You start your book in Paris, right, the birth of modern urban agriculture?
COCKRALL-KING: Yeah, Paris. It was interesting for me to find out that, you know, in medieval times in Paris, they developed gardens with a bunch of different techniques, I guess you'd call them. So we still call it French intensive agriculture, so using stone walls to enclose gardens, cold frames and raised-bed gardenings, and lots of compost. And all these things came together in Paris to create a really fantastic flourishing of urban agriculture in the mid-19th century.
FLATOW: Now, you are a forager, and you have an interesting history of how you got connected with the Daniel restaurant. Tell us how that happened, that you happened to be eating dinner there, and brought some stuff with you?
WONG: Yes. I guess I - I should say that I do have an obsession with plants, and so I'm always looking at plants and seeing what they are. And I was eating dinner there, and some friends that were taking us urged me to bring in some stuff that I knew was edible and that we'd been eating at home to the restaurant.
And so they decided to make a couple things on our - for our dinner, and that's - I went down to the kitchen, and they asked me what else I had in my meadow, and I said to the chef de cuisine, Eddie Leroux, what do you want? And he said: Bring me everything. So I started.
FLATOW: Wow. And the rest is history. How much stuff did he want after a while? Did you just bring bags and bags of stuff?
WONG: Well, in the beginning, it was really almost like a research project. So I would bring in tons and tons of samples of different things, maybe hundreds of plants and parts of plants at different times of the season. And so it was only after more than a year of going through everything that he decided which things he wanted to put on the menu and wanted in more volume.
FLATOW: Does foraging have seasons? Are we in a good foraging season now, the spring, early summer?
WONG: Yes, spring is probably one of the best times. But I pretty much forage about 10 months of the year in the mid-Atlantic region.
FLATOW: And what makes spring so good?
WONG: Spring is good because everything's new and green and tender and hasn't really gone to seed yet.
FLATOW: You mean weeds?
WONG: Yes, well...
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FLATOW: There are a lot of weeds in the spring. But you don't call them - we should not call them weeds if we're eating them, right?
WONG: Oh, I think we could call them weeds. I just think we have a bad - it's more our attitudes or our concept of what we've been thinking are weeds, are things that we don't like. But actually, weeds are just things that aren't growing where we want them to grow. So it could actually be a culinary delight from another country.
FLATOW: What would be the most common weed we could go out now and harvest from our backyard or...
WONG: Well, right now, I was actually - I actually went out this morning because I had to do a presentation to Slow Food after this. And so I went out to bring some samples from my little vegetable three-by-six-foot container vegetable bed. And I found in there chickweed, some wild mustards, ground ivy, lambs quarters, Asiatic day flower, wild garlic and dead nettle.
FLATOW: Wow.
WONG: So - and my peas have not come up yet.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: This is all before the quote-unquote "conventional" veggies come up.
WONG: So I - yeah. I think anybody could find things in just a - you know, whether it's a container or a small planter, even.
FLATOW: How about dandelions?
WONG: Actually, I do still have a few dandelions, although it's getting towards the end, with the hot...
FLATOW: Tell us about that. You have to know how to - when to harvest a dandelion, right?
WONG: Yes. So the other thing I would say is that just because something is edible doesn't mean it's going to taste good, that we're not - that when we're talking about urban agriculture, at this point I don't think we're trying to talk about survival food, or we're talking about Space Shuttle-type food. So you really want to pick the things that taste good and also the right ways to prepare them.
And that's why I really worked with a chef who could help that. So with dandelions, I would say the leaves are really great before the plant flowers. And you would probably want to have it in some kind of a vinaigrette, because the vinegar cuts any kind of bitterness or bite, or with a fatty meat.
FLATOW: Now, Mary, when you set up an urban farm, do the neighbors like you?
FARM: Yes and no, I would have to say.
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FARM: I'd like to think, in our neighborhood, they like me.
FLATOW: Did you have to get them to have - you've become an acquired taste, so to speak.
FARM: Kind of like dandelion weeds, yes. Yes, when we started out, they just really - they just didn't get what we were doing. So I - certainly, when I talk to people who were interested in starting urban farms, I'd say that you really - not everybody wants an urban farm in their community, and you really have to do a fair amount of work to work with the community and get community buy-in, because you probably - particularly if you're in a distressed neighborhood or something, your farm's not going to last very long if there are neighbors that don't like you.
FLATOW: You could put it...
FARM: There's many things one can do to disturb the life of a farm.
FLATOW: I'll bet. And your farm is in a low-income community in Philly. Can you get local fooderies to buy from your urban farm?
FARM: We started out selling exclusively to restaurants - ironically, mesclun salad greens 15 years ago, which were considered weeds. So it's all a matter of the packaging, I guess. Now they're sort of ubiquitous, and we've gone on to do other things. But the people in our immediate neighborhood, I would say, are probably not as interested.
There's not as much buy-in to the buy-local or organic movement as there are in other neighborhoods. It's an economic indicator, certainly, and it's also a matter of what their particular food history is.
FLATOW: Do you have to get special zoning in cities so you can - you know, I know there are a lot of pocket parks that were going bad in New York for a while, and people tried to turn them into little farms or little gardens and had trouble doing it.
FARM: Well, you do. And every city is very different, and there are some cities - I think in Seattle, they had it be year of the urban farm. In Philadelphia, they're rewriting the zoning code, and they are including - for the first time in the modernist revision of the zoning code - they are including urban agriculture. So you can have the kind of outbuildings that are generally associated with having a farm.
But not every place is going to want one. As I said, two years ago, the city of Philadelphia itself tried to start an urban farm project on land that it owned, and the neighborhood resoundly rejected it. And, as a matter of fact, they had their city councilmen fight it and have legislation that said that you couldn't have any farms there.
So you definitely have to have zoning. You have to have - you should have licenses. You have to have permits. You have to have insurance. It's not very different from having any other business, quite honestly.
FLATOW: We're going to take a break and take all your calls about foraging and urban farming with Jennifer Cockrall-King, Mary Seton Corboy and Tama Matsuoka Wong. 1-800-989-8255 is our number. You can tweet us @scifri, S-C-I-F-R-I. Don't go away. We'll be right back with some suggestions and even recipes for what to do with some stuff you can forage. Stay with us.
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FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.
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FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour about urban agriculture and foraging for veggies and wild things in your own backyard, your own neighborhood. Our number is 1-800-989-8255. Let's go to the phones. Tim in Portland, Oregon. Hi, Tim.
TIM: Hi there, Ira.
FLATOW: Hi there. Go ahead.
TIM: My comment is regarding the - using these rooftop systems in inner-city applications and also where there are large industrial buildings. And I've been reading also about not just growing vegetables but also using them as wildlife habitats for wild birds and animals. And I think that's really good for the environment, I really applaud that, but it seems like it's in conflict with the pushes for solar energy and solar panels in these same locations.
And from a benefit-to-man point of view, I'm curious which would win out over that.
FLATOW: All right, thanks for your question, good question. Jennifer, you want to take that on?
COCKRALL-KING: Sure. Well, you know, we - you have solar panels to create energy, and you just have to ask why you're creating this energy. If you've got a rooftop garden that's mitigating the heat loss from your building, or it's, you know, saving you from running your air conditioner during the summer, you're definitely ahead of the game because you actually have food production as a byproduct as well, with a rooftop garden.
And, you know, if you're providing a habitat for things like urban bees, you're doing a great service to your food ecosystem. One mouthful in three in our diets is directly or indirectly benefitting from honeybee pollination. So, you know, you think about it as a global picture and you ask yourself, well, why do we need this solar energy, what, you know, what are we using this energy production for. If we can actually just cut our energy consumption, you're ahead of the game with some fresh veggies.
FLATOW: In your book, you write about a place many people might think of as a hotbed of urban agriculture, and that is Cuba.
COCKRALL-KING: Yeah, Cuba went through an energy shock in the 1990s where they had to figure out how to feed 11 million people with no fuel to run tractors for conventional agriculture, no fuel to transport the food into cities, where - Cuba is very similar to North America: 80 percent of the people actually live in cities.
And so they had to figure out a distribution system, and one thing about urban agriculture, we talk about how are we going to feed our global population of seven billion people and counting - we actually over-produce food right now anyways. It's - a lot of the problems with food security is a distribution problem.
If you can move the food production into cities, you're actually solving that distribution problem right away, where you don't have to transport that food quite so far. So Cuba, they went through a very serious and sustained energy shock, and the way that they kept, you know, the population of Cuba from starvation was to build just hundreds and hundreds of urban farms right in cities.
And these are about, you know, two to three-acre farms, and they're almost like our little neighborhood grocery stores. And so instead of a grocery store, there's an urban farm within a neighborhood, and on your way home from work, you just pop into the kiosk and see what 10 or 12 vegetables are available for you that day, and you carry on.
FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255 is our number. Let's go to the phones, to Cynthia(ph) in Denver. Hi, Cynthia.
CYNTHIA: Hi.
FLATOW: Hi there.
CYNTHIA: I've always loved the idea of urban gardening. I have my little herbs in the window sill, which is all I can do in my apartment. But I have these two concerns kind of in the back of my mind when I think about it, both of them having to do with the environment of the city. Basically, how does the city pollution affect the soil and the air that is getting into this food?
And then also weather. You know, some places aren't so sunny or don't have as much access to water, like, you know, Arizona. And I know that both of those things could maybe create another level of problems if it goes into a bigger scale. You know, if you've got this vision of, as I do, you know, seeing like urban gardens, you know, in every neighborhood, can we actually do that with the city environment?
FLATOW: Good questions. Let me ask Mary to react. Mary Seton Corboy?
FARM: Well, I would say in answer to the question about water, one of the things that we have looked into, that Greensgrow's been engaged in for many, many years, is growing hydroponically, which is a water system that is a re-circulating system. So you're actually using very little water to grow your plants. And that works and is very much a - no pun intended - growing concern in places like Arizona.
As far as the pollution issue, that is something that certainly is a top priority both in terms of capillary uptake, particularly in old cities that may have had industrial pasts, as Philadelphia and most of the cities in the Northeast Corridor, and also in terms of airborne particulate matter. So you definitely have to keep those things in consideration.
But I have to say you have to keep those things in consideration in a rural environment also, where you have drift from the farmer next door who may be using pesticides. You have - we all have 95 corridors running right through, interstate corridors running right through rural areas. And so the EPA has done a fair amount of work as regards to looking at the issue of soil contamination and previous industrial reuse and what the standards should and could be.
As a concern, we have always looked at that issue, and we have always tested for that issue, both from the top and the bottom of the plant. But I think that to say that you're not going to grow just because there's no sun, or not as many moles of light of day as you might like or that the plants might prefer or because of the water issue, those things can be mitigated by - there are tremendous advances in growing and particularly in controlled environment agriculture.
And that may very well be the future of what happens in cities, is that we're not going to take the exact replication of rural farms. We're going to be inventing new ways to farm in cities. That's where the advantages can come in.
FLATOW: Tama, in your book, "Foraged Flavor," you have 88 recipes. We have a couple of those recipes up on our website at sciencefriday.com, and one in particular, chickweed crostini, I just had a harvest of chickweed on my lawn.
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WONG: I know. The chickweed is having a huge year this year. It's supposed to be finished by now, but because, I don't know, the weather this spring was very strange, and it's just come back with a huge resurgence. And...
FLATOW: Well, you say to harvest and eat it. You have chickweed crostini on our website. What is that?
WONG: Yes, well, so - I also like to say I never have to water my chickweed ever. So...
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WONG: But...
FLATOW: The thought of me eating chickweed is not...
WONG: Yes, yes, and so - you know, people come, and they say - and actually this is why we try to make it and do little demos because people are so surprised at how amazing it tastes. And I think one of the problems that I think is because it doesn't really taste that good raw, at least from our point of view, meaning the chef, myself, my family. It kind of just tastes like grass if you eat it raw.
And sometimes you look at these books that may say, you know, put it in a salad, and we think it just tastes like grass in a salad. So if you cook it, not too long but cook it, you know, sort of wilted, and then you sort of are balancing it with other things, like the crostini is just like - you know, on top of bread, with a little bit of cheese and onions, and then all the flavors kind of balance each other, and the chickweed flavor of that green and freshness is just sort of brought out by everything else. And then it's fantastic.
FLATOW: (Unintelligible) a bumper crop this year. 1-800...
WONG: Yeah, it is a bumper crop.
FLATOW: It's amazing. 1-800-989-8255. Mark in Clover, South Carolina. Nice name for a city today.
MARK: I appreciate you guys taking my call. I'm a former homeless advocate, or I'm really still a homeless advocate. I'm formerly homeless. And I had - I met a guy at a motel one time who had a set of flashcards, it was all about edible plants. And I wondered if any of the panelists there, anybody had given any thought to providing the educational materials to homeless shelters and that sort of thing. Can we educate homeless people so that they can be fed, so they don't have to worry about whether they can get their next meal from the Salvation Army or whatnot?
FLATOW: Good question, Mark. Now, let me get an answer for you. Anybody want to jump in? Tama...
WONG: I can - I mean, I guess I could say that, you know, I'm not really - I think it depends on where the shelter is and what the program is. But I definitely think there could be workshops, and you could bring things. But I think you would want to be, you know, careful about identification and other things. You wouldn't just want to hand them a bunch of flashcards, I would think.
COCKRALL-KING: Yeah, I wouldn't want people to be...
FARM: And it's not going out and picking mushrooms and thinking that they're all a good idea.
FLATOW: Alright.
MARK: Certainly I understand that. I appreciate that, folks.
FLATOW: Thanks, Mark.
WONG: And I definitely think a supervised program could be something you could do.
COCKRALL-KING: And SNAP recipients can - they can buy seeds for gardens, for community gardens. So you can use your SNAP food stamps, essentially, to buy vegetable seeds.
FLATOW: Is there - could there be jobs for people who are out of work, you know, collecting and foraging for restaurants? (unintelligible)
WONG: Yes. I...
FLATOW: You're looking for people?
MARY SETON CORBOY: The foragers I know are...
WONG: Yes, I am.
CORBOY: ...usually out of(ph) work.
WONG: I am looking for some, so, yeah.
COCKRALL-KING: There's a very interesting community garden - or not a community garden, but a commercial garden in Vancouver on the Downtown Eastside, which is known as Canada's poorest postal code, zip code. And it - it's a commercial garden that teaches people from the Downtown Eastside how to grow, how to market, how to retail, do accounting. And, you know, we talk about, you know, re-skilling people and farming in cities.
You've got a labor force that's available. And so the SOLEFood Farm, actually, is a great training ground for all sorts of things, like farming and accounting and marketing and retailing for people who need assistance to get back into the workforce. So it's - community gardens and commercial farms in cities are very effective, because that's where you generally have more labor force available for agriculture.
FLATOW: Jason Calhoun(ph) tweets a message, and something I've wanted to know myself. He says: My eight-year-old asks if we can eat the wild raspberry, strawberries growing in the backyard.
WONG: The wild raspberries. OK. So you mean the strawberries or raspberries?
FLATOW: Either one. Raspberries or strawberries that you see growing.
WONG: OK. So raspberries - as long as, you know, they're berries and they've got lots and lots of those tiny, little globules, it's not one big glop, those are edible. And if it's - if your eight-year-old has a question, they can post it to our website with a photo. The strawberries are pretty much easy to tell, identify, also. But I don't find the ones that are growing wild around mid-Atlantic that are not alpine strawberries, we don't find the flavor to be very good.
CORBOY: Yeah. They're kind of bland.
WONG: Right. Yeah.
CORBOY: Yeah. Actually kind of bitter.
WONG: But if they have a question, they can - especially eight-year-olds, I think, are great. They're naturals at - in the field. And if she's...
FLATOW: What's the website?
WONG: Meadowsandmore.com. You can post a photo, and we have a botanical community that will answer.
FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255 is our number. Let's go to Gabe in Portland. Hi, Gabe.
GABE: Hi. Thanks for having me on. Longtime listener. I'm a student at Portland State, and at that school we do a lot of study in urban agriculture. And it dawned on me that there's really not a whole lot of education provided for children in the public school system as far as growing your own fruits and veggies. You know, I was taught mathematics and literature and things like that, but I have no idea how to grow my own fruits and vegetables.
So when we're talking about how to provide a workforce or anything like that, people out of work, it helps if they're already trained and educated. But I was wondering if there's any movement afoot at the federal level or at any state level to provide legislation and funding so that our public schools can start teaching children how to garden.
FLATOW: Hmm. Mary Seton Corboy?
CORBOY: Well, I think this has been - certainly Alice Waters and Berkeley school projects have been in or no longer consider the cutting edge. It's been in - it's been around for quite some time. More and more schools, we find, have adopted some kind of growing programs. I believe in Pennsylvania, you may have to take a class in agriculture to graduate. We're basically still an agricultural state.
So I think that it's probably something that a lot of places would like to have programs in. I would also imagine that it's also - it's going to be something - it'll be one of the first things to be cut because...
FLATOW: Yeah.
CORBOY: ...it's considered sort of a fringe activity...
FLATOW: Just like music.
CORBOY: ...as opposed to whatever is considered the major thing that you're supposed to be learning in school today. But if I can go back to...
FLATOW: I remind everybody that this is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. And then you can go ahead now. I'm sorry to interrupt. Go ahead.
CORBOY: Oh, I just wanted to say, going back to this issue, there are an awful lot of urban farms that are being used for re-skill, retraining, re-entry programs. And I think that it's very valuable and it's valuable work. We do have to - people who are interested in getting into urban agriculture do have to realize that they're going to have to make a distinction. Urban agriculture, like anything, can't be the answer to everything. And it's very hard to...
FLATOW: Well, maybe you could - let me go to this question, because we're running out of time. Maybe you can answer...
CORBOY: OK.
FLATOW: ...that question from Shawn(ph) in Cincinnati. Hi, Shawn.
SHAWN: Hi, Ira.
FLATOW: Hi, there.
SHAWN: Hey. My question: What is the point?
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FLATOW: All right. It's succinct and to the point.
CORBOY: Well, I - yeah. I needed a job. That was my point. So...
SHAWN: That's what I'm wondering.
CORBOY: Yeah. Well, it's my job. It's what I do. For us, it's a commercial interest...
SHAWN: No. Like what's the point for the rest of us? You know what I mean? I mean, it just seems to me - that seems to make sense on paper. Lower our overall energy consumption, as opposed to finding more ways to consume energy. But is that realistic? I mean...
FLATOW: Well, Shawn, what's the point of gardening?
SHAWN: What's the point of gardening? Well, actually - when did they ever teach gardening in schools? That's what I want to know. I just...
FLATOW: Yeah. That's what our last caller wanted to know. Thanks for the question. I mean, he is trying to say, I guess, something about: What is the point of all of this?
CORBOY: Well, I think the question, the bigger question is whether or not - you know, if we had a better food system, would urban agriculture be deemed necessary now? And urban agriculture is, for a lot of people, an answer to a food system, a large food system that has failed, where the urban consumer doesn't have a lot of say in what's produced and how it's produced, where the urban demographic has not necessarily paid attention to.
It's a green mechanism for cities. There's a myriad number of reasons why you would want to have urban agriculture. For us, as I say, it's a commercial concern. We have 20 employees and sales of over a million dollars a year. So that's the reason for it for us. It's about job creation. It's about economic development. And it's about developing relationships with not just us, but developing relationships with our rural farming families and bringing that food into the city.
FLATOW: All right. We're talking with - I got to interrupt because we have to go to a break. Talking with Jennifer Cockrall-King, food journalist and author of "Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution," Mary Seton Corboy, co-founder and chief farmhand at Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia. Tama Matsuoka Wong is a forager for the Restaurant Daniel in New York, author of the forthcoming book "Foraged Flavor: Finding Fabulous Ingredients in Your Backyard or Farmer's Market."
We're going to take a break, come back and talk lots more about food and urban farming. Flora Lichtman's going to be here with a little video of our own little search, foraging for food in the park. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.
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FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking about urban farming, foraging for food with Jennifer Cockrall-King, Mary Seton Corboy, Tama Matsuoka Wong. Our number: 1-800-989-8255. A few more minutes to go. For urban farmers, Mary, if - or let me ask Jennifer. Jennifer, if you wanted to start your urban farm, you got to have a thick skin, it sounds like.
COCKRALL-KING: Yeah. And it's a lot of hard work, too. I mean, sustainable living is about sweat equity, a lot of the time. So it's civically demanding, as Mary can probably tell you. So you have to have a thick skin. You have to find out if your city allows certain types of urban agriculture activities where you live. And then you have to get to work. And a lot of people will say to you: What's the point of it? But my question to them would be: Do you eat? How often do you eat?
It's a necessity of life to eat. And if we have, you know, a three-day supply of food within a modern city only, and there's a problem, everybody gets pretty hungry at the end of the third day. So that, to me, is the point. It's a little bit of self-reliance and resilience and not depending on these supply lines to, you know, continually resupply our grocery stores, because what happens if they don't?
FLATOW: Tama, do you think everybody can do what you did and go to their local higher - maybe higher-end restaurant with a bag of foraged stuff and say, would you like more of this, it tastes good, you know, that sort of thing?
WONG: No. I think it was just fate. I was very lucky. And also, I'd say that even if you say you're going to do that, it was a huge amount of work, like, to learn everything and get where we are. So hopefully people can have the result of our efforts, because it was a huge amount of work, in the end.
FLATOW: And, Mary Seton Corboy, do you think, you know, Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia, you say it's a million - it grosses a million bucks and employs a lot of people, suggest that for other people?
CORBOY: With a big vat of sunscreen, yeah.
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CORBOY: A big vat of sunscreen.
FLATOW: What about mosquitoes, how do you take care of them?
CORBOY: That's not so much a problem at our particular site, but just about everything else is, so...
FLATOW: All right.
CORBOY: ...don't wish anything on me, Ira.
FLATOW: I'm not. I'm only wishing you the greenest and the rainiest of seasons, because we had a drought, as I'm sure you did, too. And we're all hoping to be able to eat chickweed next year...
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FLATOW: ...if I don't mow it all down, because I now learned something new. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. Tama Matsuoka Wong is a forager for...
WONG: Thank you.
FLATOW: ...a restaurant, Daniel, in New York and author of the forthcoming book "Foraged Flavor: Finding Fabulous Ingredients in Your Backyard or Farmer's Market." It's got 88 recipes. We have a couple of those recipes up on our website at sciencefriday.com, if you'd like to see how to make chickweed into a delicious salad. Mary Seton Corboy is a co-founder and chief farmhand at Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia and Jennifer Cockrall-King, a food journalist and author of "Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution." Thanks for being with us all today.
CORBOY: Thank you.
WONG: Thank you.
COCKRALL-KING: Thank you, Ira.
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FLATOW: We're not done with foraging for food, because for dessert...
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FLORA LICHTMAN, BYLINE: Sure.
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FLATOW: Flora Lichtman is here, and she's got a - you want a lesson on how to forage for food in the most unusual place, Flora has got it this week, right?
LICHTMAN: Yes. We looked at foraging in New York. I mean, everyone knows New York is a place where you can find food, right? But you can also find food in New York, if you know what I mean.
FLATOW: Ooh, nice. That's very nice.
LICHTMAN: Thanks.
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LICHTMAN: This is radio. Anyway, so we looked at a few different foragers, sort of case studies in foraging. And you can find mushrooms in the park, and we talk about that, and sea rockets at the beach, which is in the mustard family...
FLATOW: Sea rockets?
LICHTMAN: Yeah. Punch up your sandwich...
FLATOW: Wow.
LICHTMAN: ...when you're picnicking. One unusual foraging case study was Ari Glogauer(ph). He's looking for snails in his backyard, escargot.
FLATOW: Escargot. (unintelligible).
LICHTMAN: Local (unintelligible).
FLATOW: No. OK.
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LICHTMAN: And the stars of our video this week really are Anya Pozdeeva and Christopher Toole, and their vertically integrated farms. And they have this interesting story. They were in finance, and traded their jobs for a new mission: They want to turn New York into a food production center, basically, through a whole bunch of different means. So they're growing tilapia at a community center in the Bronx and in their apartment, I should also say...
FLATOW: There have fish in their apartment?
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LICHTMAN: ...and in other people's apartments. We visited another apartment in the Bronx and seen some tilapia. They're foragers. In fact, one of their recipes is garlic mustard, which you can find - it's an invasive. It's all over. Check out the video. You can see what it looks like. You can turn it into pesto, it turns out.
FLATOW: Is that right?
LICHTMAN: Yeah. It was - I had it raw on our shoot.
It was actually pretty good.
FLATOW: Yeah. And what's also interesting is that they have gone to the parks here in New York. And it's sort of like Johnny Appleseed, Johnny something.
LICHTMAN: Johnny...
FLATOW: Johnny planter.
LICHTMAN: Johnny food farmer in the city.
FLATOW: Food farmer. It is his secret that - well, not anymore. You've got them on video planting in the park system here.
LICHTMAN: Yeah. This was - this idea really captured my imagination. The idea is to turn New York City's parks sort of clandestinely into edible forests, food forests. So we were in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and if you walked through with Anya and Christopher, they can show you their secret spots where they've planted blueberry bushes and raspberry bushes. And when I was there with them, they were sort of turning a hill that was a little bit hard to get to - it was sort of a treacherous shoot - into a lavender grove, which was really neat. And so I asked, you know, the first question that came to my mind was like, aren't you gonna get in trouble?
FLATOW: Sure, sure.
LICHTMAN: What will the parks say about this?
FLATOW: You see a cop with his baton.
LICHTMAN: Yeah, exactly.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LICHTMAN: And they said that...
FLATOW: So you're planting food here? Yeah, right. We've heard it all, you know.
LICHTMAN: But their point of view is that it's a public park, and they've talked to the park rangers. And they said, you know, if you saw a pumpkin growing, would you smash it? And, of course, the park ranger said, no, you know, we wouldn't do that. So their idea is your adding biodiversity to the park and especially if you plant local things that are endemic, like a blueberry bush, you know, what's the harm done?
FLATOW: What's the harm, yeah.
LICHTMAN: It was an interesting idea.
FLATOW: Yeah.
LICHTMAN: And if you go to Van Cortlandt Park, you might be able to score some berries.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: But, you know, this stuff grows wild in all the different parks, right?
LICHTMAN: That's right.
FLATOW: And these people - I'm sure people like them must be spread out all over the country.
LICHTMAN: I think so. I wonder if this is a sort of secret underground - anyway, that's their goal.
FLATOW: That's their goal.
LICHTMAN: And, you know, they also sort of give foraging tips. And they wouldn't say just go pick anything you see. You know, they're experts.
FLATOW: Right, right. As our food people said before...
LICHTMAN: That's right.
FLATOW: ...you have to know what a raspberry really looks like.
LICHTMAN: Yeah. This is not ? SCIENCE FRIDAY is not encouraging people to just go out and just start like filling a bag.
FLATOW: Stay away from those mushrooms...
LICHTMAN: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: ...unless, you know, these are professionals, you know.
LICHTMAN: That's right. They - people are professionals. And when I was walking around with Anya, you know, she just knew - she had a very deep knowledge of the plants and how to prepare them. So, you know, Artemisia, you know, you might see it. You don't want to eat it raw. You want to turn it into a tea, but I didn't know that until I had an expert with me to explain.
FLATOW: Yeah. So Flora went up there to Vancouver Park and...
LICHTMAN: Van Cortlandt.
FLATOW: Excuse me, I said Vancouver. We're talking about Vancouver all day today but...
LICHTMAN: Yeah, yeah.
FLATOW: ...Van Cortlandt Park. And you took your video camera, and they showed you the stuff that they were collecting, but it's not a lesson in indentifying the plant. It's a lesson in what you can do with the park.
LICHTMAN: Yeah.
FLATOW: So if you really want to indentify the stuff, you need a real manual, you need to know what you're doing.
LICHTMAN: Go get a field guide, find someone who knows.
FLATOW: Right.
LICHTMAN: Yeah. But you can see this is sort of how people who are foraging, you know, how they're doing it.
FLATOW: All right. Thank you, Flora.
LICHTMAN: Thanks, Ira.
FLATOW: It's up there in our website as sciencefriday.com. It's a great little video and if you're into it, this is really something you might want to do.
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National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency via AP
A set of images released by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency show a scale model of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was killed, The Associated Press reports.
The model was built by the agency and used by military and intelligence leaders to plan the raid. The once-classified model is scaled at 1 inch to 7 feet and each object in the model existed at one time at the original compound.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency via AP
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency via AP
Farooq Naeem / AFP - Getty Images
U.S. forces found and killed the al-Qaida leader in the affluent Pakistani town of Abbottabad, where he had been living in a large compound.
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Abbottabad - One year after Osama bin Laden
Report: Bin Laden told followers to kill Obama, Petraeus
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A year after Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces, President Barack Obama and his national security advisors recounted the meticulous planning and intense meetings held before the president made his final decision to go forward with the mission against bin Laden. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
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8 hrs.
Wednesday brought reports that Verizon would be ending its policy of allowing grandfathering in of contracts when purchasing a new phone. The company ?clarified the news Thursday, saying that only purchasers of subsidized phones (like the iPhone 4S and other flagship devices) would have to adopt the new pricing plan.
Verizon included the policy change while announcing new shared data plans that can be accessed by multiple devices. But being able to retain a previous contract often has benefits, as the wording or pricing on promotional or just older contracts occasionally gives a user a better deal than anything offered by the carrier at present. So the news was poorly received by thrifty, longtime subscribers.
The company said Thursday that making the change to the new data plans could be avoided by not buying carrier-subsidized phones:
When the new options are introduced, Unlimited Data will no longer be available to our customers purchasing handsets and signing a new contract. Customers who choose to purchase phones at full retail price and are currently on an unlimited smartphone data plan will be able to keep that plan. The same pricing and policies will apply to all 3G and 4GLTE smartphones.
This follow-up?announcement should temper the anger somewhat, though very few people will opt to pay full price up front for the latest phones.
Many are barely willing to pay even the $200 price for a new top-of-the-line handset; the $650 price for high-end phones like the iPhone 4S, Galaxy Nexus, and Droid Razr Maxx would probably give most consumers sticker shock. Verizon is likely relying on the past behaviors by customers to opt for the subsidized price and pay more over their two-year contract than if they had they bought the phone outright.
But in the meantime, you can keep your contract and your phone as long as you'd like if you don't try to pick up something new. And any phone capable of reaching the 4G LTE network will be able to do so with no new restrictions?? some carriers reduce the speed of a phone after a certain number of gigs, but a Verizon representative told msnbc.com this won't be the case for any subscribers on their network.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
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Enlarge iStockphoto.com Don't rely on luck to keep kids safe from lead.
iStockphoto.comDon't rely on luck to keep kids safe from lead.
Preventing the exposure of kids to lead is a great idea, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today.
The public health honchos agreed with an expert panel that recommended in January that anything greater than 5 micrograms per deciliter of blood for kids 5 and younger should be considered dangerous. That's half the current standard and represents the first reduction since 1991.
With that change, the number of kids in the U.S. who would be considered to have lead poisoning that needs medical attention would rise to nearly a half-million, almost double the number before the change.
"This new definition of childhood lead poisoning will provide an enormous public health difference for all young children in the U.S., because it is evident that the prior level of 10 micrograms/deciliter did not protect the developing brains of young children," John Rosen, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital at Montefiore in New York, told Shots in an e-mail.
?Lead is a neurotoxin that's particulary dangerous for children, even in small amounts. The damage it wreaks can't be reversed.
But the CDC acknowledged in its response to the panel's recommendations that it doesn't have the resources to fulfill several of them, such as implementing a national policy to prevent kids from being exposed to lead in the first place, even though it agrees with them in principle.
Dr. Robert W. Block, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, praised the CDC's decision in a statement, saying it "affirmed what pediatricians have recognized for decades: there is simply no safe level of lead exposure for children."
Budget cuts have reduced CDC's funding for lead prevention from $30 million to around $2 million this fiscal year. Block said pediatricians "call on Congress to reinstate funding for lead prevention programs" at the CDC "as soon as possible."
"Despite the near elimination of CDC funding for lead poisoning, this is the right policy for the nation's children. Parents will now have the information they need to protect their families from lead," Rebecca Morley, executive director of the National Center for Healthy Housing, said in a statement.
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