iPhone-Inspired Touch-Screen Vending Machines

Jahi Chikwendi, Washington Post

Want a Snickers? There's an app for that.

The newest vending machines are interactive, utilizing iPhone technology touch screens and replicating iPhone apps. Instead of seeing physical packages of candy and other snacks, you get virtual images, the Washington Post reported.

When customers press one of the digital images, the animated snack gets larger and slowly rotates to reveal its ingredients and nutritional stats.

Kraft Foods' Diji-Touch was among the cutting-edge vending machines on display on Capitol Hill, where the National Automated Merchandising Association has been lobbying for jobs this week. Unemployment is a concern for the trade group because the country's widespread layoffs mean there are fewer office workers to buy snacks.
"We started with a simple concept: How can we bring vending machines to the forefront of the industry again?" said Kraft's Frank Guzzone. "It has a little bit of fun. It's playful."

Coke also has jumped on the iPhone-imitator bandwagon. The Coca-Cola Interactive Video Vendor uses touch-screen technology too, plus animation that sends color cascading from fingers that tap the machine.


[via Washington Post]

Debate Raging Over Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations

Photo: Daniel Pepper / Getty Images

It's a particularly tense debate being played out in rural communities across the country, but most recently at a heated meeting in Knox County, Missouri, where residents voiced concerns over local concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) and whether or not the county's health ordinance is being properly enforced.

The conversation is especially timely. Here's a round-up of activity just this month: In Missouri, House Bill 209 and Senate Bill 187 would restrict compensation for damages caused by CAFOs. In Idaho, lawmakers are considering a move to shield data related to CAFOs from the public. In Iowa, lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it illegal for activists to film farm operations while undercover; while a Florida bill was introduced that would make photographing a farm a felony. (That bill has since been amended to target those who trespass on private land.)

Add to that, two weeks ago a federal court of appeals ruled that the EPA cannot require livestock farmers to apply for Clean Water Act permits unless manure from the farms are actually discharged into U.S. waters.

At the same time, concerns over drug resistant bacteria and its connection to antibiotic use in livestock is mounting. That's certainly a worry for Lynn Bradley who attended the Knox County meeting on Monday.

Bradley's neighbor put up a hog CAFO that could house up to 10,000 baby pigs or 4,500 adult hogs shortly after Bradley moved back to her childhood farm a few years ago. There are a total of 13 CAFOs in Knox County.

"If the wind comes from the west, the smell can be horrifying," she says. "I worry about the antibiotics used in the feed and how they're affecting people's health and antibiotic resistant bacteria. They're starting to make links," she told Slashfood.

According to the Herald-Whig, local farmers there say CAFOs are key to their ability to make a living, while state funding limitations have impacted regular unannounced inspections of CAFOs.

"With agriculture the backbone of our economy, I hope the commission doesn't enforce unnecessary laws so we can continue to make a livelihood off our CAFOs," said farmer John Good, quoted in the Herald-Whig story.

Monday's meeting over enforcement of the health ordinance may not result in immediate action, however.

"As commissioners, we'll take that information, but we have more research we need to do on the issues and legalities of it before we amend the health ordinance," Knox County Presiding Commissioner Evan Glasgow told Slashfood.

But, he says, it won't impact existing CAFOs.

Celery Makes Men More Attractive

We love to eat food for the sake of, well, eating delicious food -- but sometimes a higher purpose calls.

According to a medical study recapped by Asylum, eating celery "increases the pheromone levels in men's sweat, making them more attractive to women."

How exactly does this work? And how much celery will you men need to tear your teeth into to up your game? Head over to Asylum to find out. Forget the GTL routine -- all you need for a successful night out are some crunchy green stalks.

read more at their website

Wine-fed Okanagan: The Next Great Beef?

It looks like some folks in British Columbia are aiming to give purveyors of Kobe beef a run for their money. If they have their way, wine-fed Okanagan beef may soon be turning up next to Japan's prime bovine on the menu of high-end steakhouses.

That's right, "wine-fed" cattle -- as in, each cow gets a liter of Okanagan Valley red wine mixed into its feed every day for the last 90 days before it is processed. Yes, it seems strange at first, but when you stop to think about it, red wine and beef are one of the most classic pairings imaginable. What seems even stranger, then, is why didn't someone think of this sooner?

According to the Vancouver Sun (Vancouver is about four hours west of the Okanagan Valley), the genius credit here goes to Janice Ravndahl, a local meat purveyor from the town of Kelowna who also happens to come from five generations of Canadian cattle ranchers.
Oddly, though, Ravndahl's first instinct was to give the cows beer, as she'd seen Gordon Ramsay do with pigs on The F Word. Her brother, however, said no way: beer would cause the cows to bloat. Living in one of British Columbia's premier wine-growing regions, Ravndahl's next logical thought was: vino!

Local gourmet chefs at places like the Mission Hill Winery and the Delta Grand Okanagan resort are raving about the "pre-marinated" beef, which is produced from free-range, hormone-free Angus cattle.

As for the cows themselves, well, if you've only got three months to live, it's hard to judge what's better: a liter of wine a day or, as is the case with their pampered Kobe cousins, regular massages.

In any case, it appears that, come feeding time for Ravndahl's cows, the scene isn't markedly different from your average five o'clock happy hour.

"Once they have [the wine], they're happy to have it again," she told the Sun. "They moo at one another a little more and seem more relaxed. There are a few that lap it up out of the pail. After they've had it for a while, when they see us coming with the pitchers, they don't run, but they come faster than usual."

Christopher Garlic Plant in Gilroy,CA

All you need is a clove from a bulb to grow garlic

Seafood Restaurants Signalling S.O.S.

Seafood lovers, where are you?

That's the question surf-centric restaurants are asking, from titanic-sized chains like Red Lobster to mom-and-pop clam shacks. Though other types of restaurants are starting to see their sales increase as the country slowly recovers from the recession, it appears that it's going to take more than another all-you-can-eat shrimp special to lure diners in for fish again.

As the Orlando Sentinel reports, sales at America's largest seafood chains during the recession sunk far faster than at other restaurants, in part owing to the fact that cash-strapped customers were shying away from higher-priced fare like lobster tails and seared salmon. While major restaurants overall saw their sales fall .8 percent in 2009, sales at seafood chains dropped 5.2 percent. Take Red Lobster, for example. Its parent company, Darden Restaurants, also owns the Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse. During the last quarter of 2010, sales at those two chains were up 2 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively, while Red Lobster sales were down 1.6 percent, causing Darden to revise its growth target for the year, according to Reuters.

Darden has set aside $350 million to renovate all 700 Red Lobster locations during the next four years, but mod lighting and wood-fired grills may not be enough to right this ship's course. Consumers continue to be wary of seafood in the wake of last summer's oil spill in the gulf (despite the fact that only 2 to 3 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from there), and prices are skyrocketing. Darden told analysts that it expects it's going to have to pay 11 percent more for its seafood in the coming year and a half.

Organic Milk Beats Conventional Milk for Nutrition

It's long been exasperating to the organic food industry -- the oft-stated belief that organic food is most notable for what it doesn't give you – all those yummy pesticides and chemicals. Nutritionally, common wisdom goes, organic food is no better for you than the conventional stuff.

Maybe not.

A study by researchers at Newcastle University,in England, published in the Journal of Dairy Science, has poked a hole in that thinking, showing that organic milk does have some nutritional advantages over conventional -- less saturated fat and more "good" fatty acids -- specifically omega-3s.

Testing 10 organic and 12 conventional milks sold in British grocery stores (not raw at the farm), seasonally over two years, lead researcher Gillian Butler found the organic milk more consistently showed healthier fat levels, which she believes is a result of the cows' greater reliance on grazing and their ingestion of larger amounts of clover -- typically planted in organic operations for the nitrogen that conventional fertilizers would otherwise provide.
"Switching to organic milk and dairy products provides a natural way to increase our intake of nutritionally desirable fatty acids, vitamins and antioxidants without increasing our intake of less desirable fatty acids," Butler told the British newspaper, The Independent -- not a claim normally heard from a researcher, and not included in the study results. "By choosing organic milk you can cut saturated fats by 30 to 50 percent."

None of this shocked the folks at the New Hampshire-based organic milk and yogurt producer Stonyfield Farm. They've been seeing these same results in their own studies for a while, says Nancy Hirshberg, Stonyfield's vice president for natural resources.

Her reaction to the British study results: "Oh yeah, that's what we found too."

Since 2008, Stonyfield has been involved in something they call the Greener Cow Project. Its goal was to reduce the greenhouse gas methane produced by cow burps (no kidding) by altering what the cows ate -- more grass, less grain -- though for cows producing organic milk, U.S. regulation requires they be fed grass at least 120 days a year.

But the French scientists working with Stonyfield and making the various nutrient measurements on the milk told Hirshberg, "'Wait 'til you see about the health stuff,'" she recalled.

"When we started getting the numbers back and seeing the difference between organic and nonorganic, I was really shocked," said Hirshberg, who says she's pretty conservative when it comes to making nutritional claims about organic food.

"I've said to all my friends since then, 'If you ever complain again about paying too much for organic milk -- there really is a difference.'"

And she believes the British study results are transferrable to the American organic milk industry, even with the differences in geography, not just between the two nations, but also around the U.S. itself.

"I believe healthy soil, creates healthy plants, which gives us healthy animals," she said. "We all intuitively know, when cows eat well, we do, too."