Sandwich Monday: Chicken And Waffles

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Even the sandwich is smiling.

Even the sandwich is smiling.

Chicken and waffles is a great dish nobody would deny that, except for chickens. But it's not always the easiest thing to eat. You've got bones to deal with, plus sticky syrup, and worst of all, finite stomach capacity. Chicago restaurant Bel 50 has a solution: a boneless fried-chicken sandwich, on waffle bread.* Also in there: apple slaw and honey mustard glaze.

Ian: It looks like my breakfast ate my lunch.

Miles: The waffle does an excellent job absorbing the tears of gratitude I'm shedding over the fact that this sandwich exists.

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Eva contemplates replacing all the bread in her life with waffles.

Eva contemplates replacing all the bread in her life with waffles.

Eva: Bread is feeling pretty inadequate right now.

Ian: Yup. Somewhere, someone is putting maple syrup on two slices of white bread and wondering why life is so hard.

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A look within

A look within

Robert: This is a perfect solution to my problem of not getting my fingers greasy enough during lunch.

Ian: As far as breakfast fried-chicken recipes go, this really beats Kellogg's short lived "Special K-FC" cereal.

Miles: I hope other European countries follow suit. I for one am looking forward to fried chicken on a bed of haggis.

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Robert tries it.

Robert tries it.

Miles: I'm running through the whole range of emotion here, from "Belgi-Um?" to "Belgi-YUM!"

Ian: Uh-huh.

Miles: I mean, it's good, but the texture of the sauce is a little phlegm-ish.

[The verdict: really quite delicious. Not only is this a well-constructed sandwich, but the laws of physics dictate that it also gets the normally huge chicken and waffles serving down to an almost reasonable size.]

*As The Salt has reported previously, some consider boneless chicken and waffles to be a deal breaker.

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me.

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Selling Kids On Veggies When Rules Like 'Clean Your Plate' Fail

Experts say that positive encouragements work better than dinnertime rules like "no second helpings" to get kids to eat some foods.

If you're a parent, you've probably heard remarks like this during dinner: "I don't like milk! My toast is burnt! I hate vegetables! I took a bite already! What's for dessert?" It can be daunting trying to ensure a healthy diet for our children. So it's no wonder parents often resort to dinner time rules.

In our new poll, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 25 percent of families tell their children to eat everything on their plate, and 45 percent report setting restrictions on the types of foods eaten. Increasingly common are rules like "clean your plate," as well as newer strictures such as "no second helpings of potatoes," "no dessert until you eat your vegetables" and "sodas and chips only on special occasions."

This is all well-meant advice. But does it work? Kelly Brownell, who directs the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University, says "No."

"By demanding that children eat things like vegetables before they have a dessert, it makes it seem like there's something wrong with eating vegetables, and that you have to swallow medicine before you get to the good part," Brownell says.

Not only that, rules like this can backfire, according to Kristi King, a registered dietitian at Texas Children's Hospital and a spokesperson with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. "Some of the studies have shown us that when they were put in a situation where somebody is saying 'finish this,' or 'finish that,' the kids actually had more negative responses and actually consumed less of the food than the kids who didn't have that reinforcement of 'You need to finish.'"

On The Run: How Families Struggle To Eat Well And Exercise

The better option, King says, is creative negotiation. Take, for example, what she calls "Try It Tuesdays." On a "Try it Tuesday," parents, along with their children, pick out a new food to sample. It helps to involve the kids in preparing the dish as well, she says. This investment in the new food increases the likelihood the child will try it and even enjoy it.

If they still say no, King suggests "no thank you bites" something her friends made up for their 3-year-old daughter. It goes like this: The child just has to take a bite, and if they don't like it, they can say "no thank you," and that's that. But typically in this family, the "no thank you" turns into a "thank you," as the 3-year-old watches her parents eating and enjoying the food.

"You see her little hand reach across to the fork, and it kind of goes over into the vegetable," King says. "The next thing you know, you turn around and she's eaten the entire vegetable."

And, it turns out as with most other behaviors your kids are watching you, King says. "I had a parent who came into clinic not too long ago, and I said, 'OK, what's our goal for being here today?' And he looked at me and said, 'Make him eat vegetables!' And, my question back was, 'Well, do you eat vegetables?' And his answer was, 'No, I don't like them.'"

Dad mentioned he loved grilling, so King suggested he try that with vegetables. By their next visit, he'd become an avid veggie griller.

"Zucchini and squash and carrots and eggplants and onions and tomatoes you name it, he was grilling it," says King. "[It's] a dietitian's dream getting an entire family involved in eating more healthy foods."

As for dessert, Yale University's Brownell says there's nothing wrong with an occasional treat. "That doesn't mean that the only options are things high in sugar or fat or salt. There can be wonderful combinations of things like sorbet, sherbet, fruits things like that can make outstanding desserts and be really good for people."

Some parents worry that having only healthy foods at home will lead kids to overdo it with junk food when they head off to college. But Brownell says there's no evidence to support this worry. And, in fact, the reverse is probably true.

Even if the young adults indulge in unhealthy foods at first, they're far more likely to return to the healthy foods they grew up with. "Having only good foods around the house makes all the sense in the world, and research supports this," he says.

So, Brownell says, fill your kitchen with healthy food, don't buy junk food and watch what you eat. Your kids will follow your lead.

This story is part of the series On the Run: How Families Struggle to Eat Well and Exercise. The series is based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. If you want to dive deeper, here's a summary of the poll findings, plus the topline data and charts.

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Family Keeps Jewish Soulfood Alive At New York 'Appetizing' Store

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Russ and Daughters, which opened on the Lower East Side in 1914, specializes in smoked fish.

Russ and Daughters, which opened on the Lower East Side in 1914, specializes in smoked fish.

It's been more than 100 years since Joel Russ started peddling herring from a barrel on the streets of New York.

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"The House the Herring Built" has served New York City for more than a century.

"The House the Herring Built" has served New York City for more than a century.

Today, the restaurant Russ and Daughters is a destination for fans of smoked salmon, whitefish and caviar, among other delicacies. Longtime owner Mark Russ Federman has written a memoir about the family business called Russ and Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House the Herring Built.

"An appetizing store has the mingling odors of salt, smoke, pickle and sweet," says Federman, who ran Russ and Daughters from 1978 until he retired three years ago. "So, all of that coming together makes for a unique sensory experience."

A century ago, the Lower East Side was packed with "appetizing" shops, where merchants would compete to satisfy the noshing needs of the neighborhood's Jewish clientele: pickled herring, smoked whitefish, sable and salmon, bagels and bialys, along with dried fruit, chocolate and candy.

Selling fish is in Federman's blood. His grandfather Joel Russ immigrated to New York from what's now southeastern Poland and opened the store in 1914. Russ didn't have any sons but he did have three daughters. And Federman says he put them to work behind the counter.

"Down here, there were 20, 30 appetizing stores. And a lot of them had a sign over the door that said, 'Saperstein and Son,' 'Cohen and Son,' whatever, and sons. Sons. Nobody had, 'and daughters,' " Federman says. "So, he put a sign that said Russ and Daughters. That made him unique."

Federman says Hattie, Ida and Anne helped the business in other ways, too.

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Mark Russ Federman's mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939.

Mark Russ Federman's mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939.

"These pretty young girls would be fishing herrings out of barrels, and slicing lox, and charming and disarming the toughest of New York's customers," he says. "And these were tough customers."

Unlike his aunts and mother, Mark Russ Federman did have a choice about working in the family business. Federman went to law school. He got a job at an uptown law firm and hated it.

In 1978, Federman came back to run the family business. And he was shocked at how hard the job was.

"We're dealing with a finicky product," Federman says. "We're talking about fish, most of it wild. Every fish is different. Every customer is different. Every employee is different. And the idea is to be able to line up fish and customer and counterman perfectly hundreds of times a day."

Today, the men and women behind the counter aren't all Russes. Some of them aren't even heaven forbid Jewish. Herman Vargas has been working here for 32 years, ever since he arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic.

"There is something called bashert in Yiddish, which is like destiny. Now I can say [it is] so," Vargas says of his chosen profession. "But when I first came in no, no way."

Russ and Daughters survived long enough to be rediscovered by foodies and food writers. Now, Mark Federman has handed the business over to a fourth generation of Russes his nephew, Josh Russ Tupper, and his daughter, Niki Russ Federman. They've tried to bring the store into the 21st century gently, with innovations like ordering over the Internet. Though not all of their customers are interested.

"People will come back at me almost as if I've offended them," says Niki Federman. "One person even said, 'Don't take my joy away from me. I have to come. I have to talk to Jose. He's my favorite counter guy. I've been seeing him for 30 years.'"

All the Russes acknowledge that the success of the store is about more than the quality of its fish. That helps, says Federman.

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Mark Russ Federman (center) stands with the next generation of Russ and Daughters owners: his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh Russ Tupper.

Mark Russ Federman (center) stands with the next generation of Russ and Daughters owners: his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh Russ Tupper.

But even after writing a book about the store, Federman says he's not quite sure why Russ and Daughters is still in business when so many appetizing stores aren't.

"This store has a soul a neshama, as we say in Hebrew," says Federman. "Some of the Russes get that. And that's what keeps us doing this kind of thing."

Even in retirement, Mark Russ Federman hasn't lost his enthusiasm for the store's products. His lunch order? Smoked salmon and sable on a bialy with cream cheese and tomato. "To me, it's heaven," he says. "If somebody asks me and they have, actually what's your dying meal, this is it."

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Documentary 'A Place At The Table' Is A Call To Action On Hunger

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The poster for the documentary A Place At The Table.

The poster for the documentary A Place At The Table.

One nation underfed. Really?

Many of us don't think of the U.S. as the land of the underfed.

In this era of the expanding waistlines, we hear far more concern about obesity than we do about hunger. But the two are more closely connected that many of us realize.

A new documentary, A Place at the Table, peels back the curtain on the problem of food insecurity, weaving the stories of low-income Americans who struggle to put healthy food on the table, despite the fact that they have jobs.

As we've reported, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about about 50 million Americans fall into this category of "food insecure" meaning they don't always have the resources to buy the food they need. This includes nearly 17 million children in the U.S.

I attended a screening of the film - along with a panel discussion with the producers and folks from Participant Media (the people behind Food Inc.). Judging from the reaction of the audience, the film works. At a gut level, the story of Barbie, a single mom from Philly who grew up in poverty, is wrenching.

As Barbie tries to break the cycle, she finds at times that she makes too much money to qualify for federal food assistance. And her paycheck runs out long before the end of the month.

As we watch her open cans of cheap pasta and peer into her near-empty fridge, our hearts leap.

The film includes the voices of hunger and nutrition experts, as well as advocates who criticize federal farm subsidies of crops such as wheat and corn. These crops supply the bulk of our nation's processed foods, which tend to be calorie dense, and nutrient poor.

Food policy expert Marion Nestle points out there are no subsidies for fruits and vegetables one reason, perhaps, that they're so much more expensive. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, weighs in, too.

But as producer Lori Silverbush (married to chef Tom Colicchio, who appears in the film) pointed out during the after-screening discussion, subsidies are just one part of a complex story.

The bottom line, according to hunger advocate Billy Shore of Share Our Strength: "Childhood hunger in this nation is a solvable problem." Shore says we have enough food and good nutrition programs.

"What we need is to make sure the kids who need the food are able to access the programs," Shore says.

Participant Media, which helped embolden the food movement with Food, Inc., is hoping that the film serves another call to action.

They've launched a website that will serve as a hub for for all sorts of hunger-related advocacy. And groups including Bread for the World, Feeding America, FRAC and Share Our Strength are all represented.

And back to that idea that hunger and obesity live in close quarters. I think Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post summed it up best in a review of the documentary:

"The problem, as Table shows, isn't that the next meal never comes. It's that when it arrives, too often it is filled with empty calories," O'Sullivan writes.

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How Did Our Brains Evolve To Equate Food With Love?

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At some point in human evolution, our brains became wired to remember food events and the people associated with them.

At some point in human evolution, our brains became wired to remember food events and the people associated with them.

If food is love, Americans must love their kids a lot. About one-third of children and adolescents in the U.S. are overweight or obese.

And our emotional response to food may be one of the reasons so many kids eat so much, according to a poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. The poll found that in more than a quarter of families, food is considered an important way to show affection.

That result is no surprise to Carol Cassie, who lives in Great Falls, Mont. For many years she ran a restaurant there called Mama Cassie's, where the front of each menu proclaimed, "Food is love."

"I wanted my customers to know as soon as they came into the restaurant that I was caring for them," says Cassie, who is also the author of Mama Cassie's "Food is Love!" Cookbook.

On The Run: How Families Struggle To Eat Well And Exercise

Customers at the restaurant really did feel like family, says Erin Duffy Osswald, who used to work at the restaurant and edited the cookbook.

"People would get engaged at Mama Cassie's," Osswald says. "They would satisfy their pregnancy cravings on turtle cake from Mama Cassie's. They would bring their babies into Mama Cassie's later, and Carol would walk around the restaurant with them."

Cassie says she loved running the restaurant. But looking back, she says, there's something that concerns her. Some of her customers, including whole families, didn't seem to know when to stop.

"They'll have big plates of whatever, like a big pork sandwich that was just oozing with cheese and pulled pork and the meat sauce," Cassie says. And then, "they would have a piece of cheesecake afterward."

Just plain gluttony? Or did customers at Mama Cassie's think more food meant more love?

Love is probably at least part of the answer, scientists say, because of the way humans have evolved.

You can see some aspects of human food behavior in our animal ancestors, including marmoset and tamarin monkeys. These monkeys are like people in that fathers and siblings help raise the offspring, and all the adults make a big deal of providing food to youngsters in the family, says Adrian Jaeggi, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The older monkeys give a special call when they find a special treat, like insects that are "big and juicy and very nutritious," Jaeggi says. Then they adopt the "food offering posture" to present the young monkeys with the treat.

Chimpanzees, an animal ancestor that's even closer to humans, take the food-is-love concept to the next level. Chimps share food with individuals outside their own families.

The sharing often involves a precious food: meat. And a chimp who makes a kill doesn't share the meat with everyone, Jaeggi says, only the chimps in his group who are long-term allies. Sharing food appears to be a way of strengthening the alliance and ensuring future cooperation, he says, not unlike a business lunch.

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Bonobos share a piece of fruit at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bonobos share a piece of fruit at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bonobos are another of our close relatives in the ape world. But unlike chimpanzees, bonobos live in groups run by females, and emphasize cooperation over competition. And like people, Bonobos use food to make new friends, not just to keep old ones.

Researchers showed this in a series of experiments done at the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The experiments involved a plate of food. "What we call it is the giant salad bowl, so we have apples, bananas, peanuts, papaya and cucumber all mixed together," says Jingzhi Tan, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University.

Researchers give the salad bowl to a bonobo in a locked enclosure. The bonobo has two neighbors in adjacent enclosures who don't have food. One of the neighbors is a bonobo they know, and one is a stranger.

Only the bonobo with the salad bowl can unlock the doors that would let a neighbor in. "So basically we create a situation that they can eat or they can share," Tan says.

And most of the time, the bonobo with the salad bowl did share but not with the bonobo they already knew. "The majority of the time, they chose to share with the stranger," Tan says.

What was most surprising, though, is that often the stranger who had just gotten access to the food would let the third bonobo in, and all three bonobos would eat together, Tan says.

And that brings us back to humans. It's not clear how long our human ancestors have been sharing food. But it appears that the social importance of food took a big leap forward about 1 million or 2 million years ago, says John Allen of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He's the author of The Omnivorous Mind, a book about how our relationship with food has evolved.

That's when humans began hunting really big animals, like mammoths, Allen says. The animals were so big that they couldn't be eaten by a small number of people. "That in effect provides a little arena for sharing and social exchange," Allen says.

In other words, the feast is born. Then when agriculture came along, we added harvest feasts, which eventually led to Thanksgiving.

And somewhere along the way, our brains became wired to remember these food events and the people associated with them, Allen says. It's probably no accident, he adds, that the digestive system produces hormones like insulin, leptin and ghrelin that act on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory.

Allen says the gut-brain connection probably exists because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they remembered clearly where they got their last good meal. And he says this same link between gut and brain is probably why he responds the way he does to a dish his mother used to make him called ketchup fried rice.

"Every time I make it I think of my mother," he says. Allen says he makes ketchup fried rice for his own children in hopes that they will always associate the dish with their father.

And if his kids really like that ketchup fried rice, another system in the brain will kick in to help create a lasting memory. It's the brain's dopamine system, which rewards us with feelings of pleasure.

The dopamine system becomes active in people when they look at someone they love or a favorite food, Allen says. So in our brains, at least, food really is connected to love and a sense of well-being.

And until recently that was probably a purely good thing, Allen says.

"There's never really been any incentive ever to limit calories," he says. "You know when you had a feast, when the food was there you ate it."

A lot of us still think that way. In the poll NPR did with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, about half of families said they treat celebrations as a time to take a break from concerns about overeating.

And in a world where it's possible to feast every day, that can be a problem. But it doesn't have to be, says Cassie, the cookbook author in Great Falls.

"You make that one day of celebration, or a weekend if you're going away for a weekend," she says. "But then you go back on Monday and you say, 'OK, now we have to get back to real life.' "

This story is part of the series On the Run: How Families Struggle to Eat Well and Exercise. The series is based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. If you want to dive deeper, here's a summary of the poll findings, plus the topline data and charts.

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Sugar's Role In Rise Of Diabetes Gets Clearer

A performer drinks a soda in Ahmedabad, India in 2010. A study found that rising diabetes prevalence in countries like India is strongly tied to sugar consumption.

Robert Lustig wants to convince the world that sugar is making us very sick. And lately he's turned to an unconventional field econometrics to do it.

Lustig rounded up statisticians and epidemiologists to look at the relationship between food and diabetes risk. The paper, published this week in the journal PLoS One, found that the more sugar on the market in 175 countries, the higher the country's diabetes rate.

"I'm not suggesting sugar is the only cause of diabetes," Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Franciso, tells The Salt. "But in this analysis it was the only thing that predicted it. And it was worldwide and over a decade."

The researchers found that for every additional 150 calories of sugar (the amount that's in a 12-ounce can of soda) available per person per day, the prevalence of diabetes in the population rose 1 percent. They compared that against an additional 150 calories of from any type of food, which caused only a 0.1 percent increase in the population's diabetes rate over the past decade.

The findings controlled for obesity, physical activity, and a number of economic and social variables.

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman called the new study "the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see" for the relationship between sugar and diabetes.

But not everyone agrees this paper is the "smoking gun" for sugar.

Frank Hu, an expert on diabetes epidemiology at Harvard, tells The Salt that while the study's findings track with other research linking sugar intake to the diabetes epidemic, Lustig's study by itself is "weak evidence of a causal link."

Why? Because, he says, epidemiologists don't consider ecological studies like this one, which take a statistical snapshot, as reliable as prospective cohort studies, which follow a group of people over time.

Hu notes that he was also surprised to see that other foods did not predict diabetes risk nearly as strongly as sugar in Lustig's study. "I don't know why this happened, because we know other foods are associated with diabetes risk like highly refined grain products, white rice, bread, and other starchy foods. Those foods are not very different from sugar. But maybe sugar is a better indicator of certain dietary habits of population."

Lustig himself is the first one to admit that proving that any one thing causes a disease, especially a chronic disease, is tricky business. And Lustig's co-author Sanjay Basu admitted on an epidemiology blog this week that "we can't 'prove causality' through any amount of statistics."

But Lustig insists that nailing down sugar's role in the rise of obesity and diabetes is useful, because it will give people a starting point.

"The point is, if [diabetes is caused by] many things, you can handle each one, one at a time," says Lustig.

Where to start, then? Well, Lustig says, we could start by regulating it better, with stricter guidelines for sugar consumption, and taxes on it.

Sounds like he'll soon be pushing for legislation especially since the doctor is pursuing a law degree.

He's certainly no lightweight when it comes to getting out the message. His YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has attracted millions of viewers since it went viral in 2010.

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Seeking A Grain Of Truth In "Whole Grain" Labels

Whole wheat, stone-ground, multi-grain. Have food labels got you confused? Joanne Slavin, a nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota, and David Ludwig, a pediatrician and obesity doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, discuss the meaning of "whole grain," and whether intact grains like wheat berries pack more nutritional punch than their ground-up counterparts, such as whole wheat flour.

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Why Processed Food Is Cheaper Than Healthier Options

Earlier in the week in our "On the Run" series, we heard a mom explain how mac and cheese was more affordable than fresh fruit. We were chewing on this, and reached out to Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill a nutritionist and economist to explain why that would be true.

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Why Process Food Is Cheaper Than Healthier Options

Earlier in the week in our "On the Run" series, we heard a mom explain how mac and cheese was more affordable than fresh fruit. We were chewing on this, and reached out to Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill a nutritionist and economist to explain why that would be true.

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Wild Bees Are Good For Crops, But Crops Are Bad For Bees

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Wild bees, such as this Andrena bee visiting highbush blueberry flowers, play a key role in boosting crop yields.

Wild bees, such as this Andrena bee visiting highbush blueberry flowers, play a key role in boosting crop yields.

Some of the most healthful foods you can think of blueberries, cranberries, apples, almonds and squash would never get to your plate without the help of insects. No insects, no pollination. No pollination, no fruit.

Farmers who grow these crops often rely on honeybees to do the job. But scientists are now reporting that honeybees, while convenient, are not necessarily the best pollinators.

A huge collaboration of bee researchers, from more than a dozen countries, looked at how pollination happens in dozens of different crops, including strawberries, coffee, buckwheat, cherries and watermelons. As they report in the journal Science, even when beekeepers installed plenty of hives in a field, yields usually got a boost when wild, native insects, such as bumblebees or carpenter bees, also showed up.

"The surprising message in all of this is that honeybees cannot carry the load. Honeybees need help from their cousins and relatives, the other wild bees," says Marla Spivak, a professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota. "So let's do something to promote it, so that we can keep honeybees healthy and our wild bee populations healthy."

Unfortunately, a second study, also released in Science this week, makes it clear that wild bees aren't having an easy time of it.

That study essentially follows in the century-old footsteps of Charles Robertson, "one of America's great scientists that nobody knows about," says Laura Burkle, an ecologist at Montana State University.

Robertson taught biology and Greek at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Ill., and he was fascinated by the close connection between insects and flowers. He spent years in the forests around Carlinville, carefully noting which insects visited which wild flowers at what time of year.

Burkle and Tiffany Knight, a colleague at Washington University in St. Louis, went back to Carlinville to see how much of the ecosystem that Robertson observed still exists today.

Much of the forested area around the town has been converted into fields of corn and soybeans or suburbs. In the fragments of forest that remain, Burkle and Knight found all of the flowering plants that Robertson recorded in his notes a century ago. Of the 109 species of bees that Robertson saw, though, just over half seemed to have disappeared from that area.

"We don't know why," says Burkle.

One possibility might be a loss of nesting sites for these bees. But a changing climate may also play a role.

The bees that disappeared tended to be species that depended on just a few kinds of flowers for food. For those bees to survive, their preferred flowers have to be blooming when the bees start flying and need food. The warming trend might have thrown off that timing.

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Hired beekeepers work to pollinate an almond orchard near Snelling, Calif. Wild bees play a critical role in helping honeybees pollinate crops, but they often can't survive on modern monoculture farms.

Hired beekeepers work to pollinate an almond orchard near Snelling, Calif. Wild bees play a critical role in helping honeybees pollinate crops, but they often can't survive on modern monoculture farms.

In fact, Burkle says, if you map the interactions between flowers and bees, they seem more tenuous now. Some flowers may get visited by just one or two kinds of bees, and maybe just for one week.

"I don't know that these systems can take a lot more environmental change without something drastic happening," she says.

Many bee researchers are trying to figure out how to help those native bees and how to help farmers who benefit from them.

Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who's a co-author of the first study in Science, says one of the biggest problems for wild bees is the agricultural specialization that has produced huge fields of just one crop.

The almond groves of California, for example, are a sea of blossoms in February. It's a feast, as far as the eye can see, for honeybees that come here from all over the country.

"But for the rest of the year, there's nothing blooming," she says.

That means there are no bees. "In fact, in places where we have very large monocultures of almond, we don't find any native bees anymore," Kremen says.

Planting other flowers in and around these almond groves, maybe as hedgerows, blooming all summer long, would help, she says.

Even better would be farms with smaller fields, and lots of different crops flowering at different times. Wild bees, Kremen says, need diversity.

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Dispatch From Poutine Fest, Chicago's 'Love Letter' To Canada

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Missy Ruminski prepares The Peasantry's entry. Note that poutine is not only a delicious snack but also a source of light and warmth in the universe.

Missy Ruminski prepares The Peasantry's entry. Note that poutine is not only a delicious snack but also a source of light and warmth in the universe.

There is no greater mystery in America than this: Why is poutine not available everywhere?

French fries with cheese curds, covered in gravy there's nothing more American than this Canadian dish that's not actually American. And while you can find it stateside more easily than you used to, poutine should be in every restaurant in the country, and probably somewhere on our flag.

For one day in Chicago, at least, poutine gets its due, at the Poutine Fest. There's no particular poutine connection to Chicago, except that we like things that are perfect.

The creators call the festival "the first of many love letters exchanged between a tipsy, slurring Chicago and picturesque French Canada." It's also 11 restaurants battling for poutine supremacy, and for a trophy with a gravy boat on top.

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The "King of Poutine" trophy

The "King of Poutine" trophy

When I walk into the back room of Haymarket Pub & Brewery, where the festival was held last Sunday, the first thing I notice is there are lots of beards, and the air itself has been deep fried.

I meet up with my friend Dan Pashman, who hosts the Sporkful podcast and who you hear sometimes on Weekend Edition Sunday. He believes poutine would be better if it were served with the gravy on the side, so you could mete out perfect bites and avoid sogginess. I tell him you could also ask for a bunch of cans of paint instead of Starry Night, but I'll trust Van Gogh on it.

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A poutine from El Ideas, which tastes way better than it photographs.

A poutine from El Ideas, which tastes way better than it photographs.

The Publican is one of my favorite Chicago restaurants, so I'm happy to see they've got a station. But they're having some "electrical issues," and aren't serving yet. Two tiny pieces of chicken sit, rather sadly, in a lukewarm deep fryer.

I start with a very fancy poutine from El Ideas. It's got duck sausage and foie gras. And those little green things on top are just there as a reminder there are people who've made healthier choices than you, and they're probably deeply unhappy.

But is the foie gras overkill?

"It's cheating," says El Ideas chef Phillip Foss.

It's delicious, but I think it's a little over-the-top for a dish most likely to be eaten drunkenly at four in the morning. Foss isn't so sure.

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Art Jackson of Pleasant House Bakery prepares his take, which uses skirt steak, and chunky British chips in the place of fries.

Art Jackson of Pleasant House Bakery prepares his take, which uses skirt steak, and chunky British chips in the place of fries.

"Depends on what you're drinking."

Poutine just seems like one of those things that isn't invented so much as discovered. These things are just meant to be together, like coffee and cream, or The Beatles.

I try the Haymarket's take: smoked ham hock, Andouille sausage, and lemon-soaked apples. I ask the young woman preparing it if she thinks poutine is the next big food trend. Could it replace the cupcake? Could it replace bacon? She laughs, as if to say bacon is not going anywhere. Bacon is forever, like a diamond.

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Little Market's poutine served in its traditional dish, a seven-passenger boat.

Little Market's poutine served in its traditional dish, a seven-passenger boat.

I take another pass by the Publican's station. No luck.

If I made a list of the reasons the Midwest is objectively superior to the rest of the world, the ready availability of deep-fried cheese curds would be right at the top. So when I see that Little Market is deep-frying their curds before putting them in their poutine, I head right over.

It's a formidable poutine: In addition to the fried curds, it's got red wine-braised short ribs.

The more poutine you eat, the more useful the iPhone's panorama function becomes.

Says chef Ryan Poli, "We call it Vladimir Poutine."

Four or five poutine boats in, I start to wish I'd been pacing myself. I'm slowing down. I head over to try Red Door's entry it's got duck confit, chorizo verde, and pickled jalapeno. Their poutine is right between Mexico and Canada, just like us.

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When zooming in on his iPhone to see if this picture was in focus, the photographer left two pretty gross chicken grease streaks on the screen.

When zooming in on his iPhone to see if this picture was in focus, the photographer left two pretty gross chicken grease streaks on the screen.

I'm done. Completely full. I could not eat another bite. These are the lies I'm telling myself when Ryan from Little Market yells out, "The Publican has poutine! Form a line!" Love of poutine, you see, is bigger than competition.

The Publican's take has fried chicken tail and blue cheese. It is worth the wait. I'm too full to try the entry that would eventually win, a wild boar and pickled red onion concoction from The Gage. It'll be days until I'm again hungry enough to be disappointed about missing it, but that day will come.

Ian Chillag is a producer/humorist with Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!

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China's Horses May End Up In Russia's Kabobs

China isn't a good place to be a horse, if your goal is to avoid ending up as the Russian kabobs known as shashlik.

China exports the most horse meat to the global market, while Russia has the biggest appetite for horseflesh, according to a new infographic on the continuing European scandal over horse meat sold as beef.

Mike Stewart, editor of the newish blog Australian Food Safety News, tried to write a post untangling the many threads of the European horse meat scandal. "But it was all so complex and confusing, it seemed like the simplest way to explain it was to do an infographic," he told The Salt.

So he dug into data from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization on horse meat production, import and export, to find that some of the biggest players n the global market aren't in Europe at all.

If you'd fancy a more Eurocentric version, England's The Guardian did a nice job tracking the (legal) movement of horseflesh through Europe. Polpettine, anyone? The Italians imported twice as much horse meat as the French in 2012.

Via: The Australian Institute of Food Safety

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Ag Department Warns Budget Cuts Will Affect Food Inspectors

The secretary of Agriculture says if the sequester cuts go into effect, he'll have to furlough food safety inspectors. What would that mean for food companies and consumers?

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Ag Department Warns Budget Cuts Will Affect Food Inspetors

The secretary of Agriculture says if the sequester cuts go into effect, he'll have to furlough food safety inspectors. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports on what that would mean for food companies and consumers.

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Budweiser May Seem Watery, But It Tests At Full Strength, Lab Says

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Plaintiffs accuse Anheuser-Busch of misleading consumers about the alcohol content in Bud Light, Budweiser and other products. The brewer denies the claims.

Plaintiffs accuse Anheuser-Busch of misleading consumers about the alcohol content in Bud Light, Budweiser and other products. The brewer denies the claims.

Anheuser-Busch is accused of misleading beer drinkers about the alcohol content of Budweiser and other products, in lawsuits filed against the brewer in several federal courts. The plaintiffs say Anheuser-Busch waters down its beers and then misrepresents their final alcohol content. The brewer says the lawsuits have no merit.

Like many mainstream U.S. beers, Budweiser has long been accused of tasting watery and low-powered in comparison with strong and flavorful American craft and European traditional brews. But the lawsuit's main contention is not that a crime against taste has been committed.

The plaintiffs allege intentional "mislabeling" of at least 10 beers' alcohol content, after the brewer added water to boost the amount of beer produced from raw materials. The suit also accuses the giant brewer of engaging in false advertising and unfair business practices.

Peter Kraemer, Anheuser-Busch InBev's vice president of brewing and supply, calls the lawsuits' claims "completely false," in an email to Bloomberg News. "Our beers are in full compliance with all alcohol labeling laws," Kraemer says.

Update at 6:15 p.m. ET. Beer Is At Full Strength, Tests Say

Samples of Budweiser, Bud Light Lime, and Michelob Ultra were found to be in line with their advertised alcohol content, according to lab tests conducted at NPR's request. Our colleague Dan Bobkoff, who reports on that side of the story on Thursday's Morning Edition, got the test results from White Labs in San Diego.

As analytical laboratory specialist Kara Taylor tells Dan, the lab's analysis showed that "the alcohol percentages inside the cans were the same as what was stated on the can."

"Some of them were spot on," she says. "Others deviated within a hundredth of a percentage" within federal limits.

Dan spoke to the lawsuit's lead attorney about the tests; you can hear the audio of that conversation after Thursday's show airs. Our original post continues:

The lawsuit, versions of which were filed in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and elsewhere, seeks a broad classification that would allow it to represent millions of consumers.

On Twitter and other social media networks, news of the lawsuit was greeted by jeers and jokes. But the practice of adding water to beer before it's packaged is common among large brewers. It's called high-gravity brewing, and it involves blending a potent brew with water.

The process is very efficient and that can mean higher profits for companies like Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world's largest brewer.

"In high-gravity brewing, you can make a lot more beer by stretching the beer that you have fermented," explains Dan Kopman, co-founder of Schlafly Beer, a craft brewery in Anheuser-Busch's ancestral home of St. Louis. (AB InBev is now headquartered in Belgium.)

Kopman says that adding water can help a brewer "stretch" the amount of the final product by at least 5 or 10 percent without changing the beer's flavor.

"This is primarily done in very large breweries, and it works well for lighter lager beers," he tells The Salt. "I would assume that all major brewers in the world high-gravity brew. It is not unique to AB."

As an example, Kopman says, Anheuser-Busch might brew high-gravity Bud, with an alcohol content of around 5.5 percent after fermentation.

"Then in packaging they will add deaerated water," he says, to achieve the desired flavor and alcohol content. Deaerated water has low oxygen levels, to help the beer "keep" on the shelves.

Brewers who use this process monitor alcohol content closely; most also verify it with a lab test after packaging. But that's where the newly filed lawsuit claims there are problems. The plaintiffs say the alcohol content printed on Budweiser, Bud Ice, Michelob and other beers' labels isn't accurate and that the discrepancy is intentional.

"AB never intends for the malt beverage to possess the amount of alcohol that is stated on the label," according to the suit, which also says Anheuser-Busch has the ability to measure alcohol content to a hundredth of a percent.

"As a result, AB's customers are overcharged for watered-down beer," the lawsuit claims, "and AB is unjustly enriched by the additional volume it can sell."

The suit claims that the practice of watering down beers was "vigorously accelerated" after Anheuser-Busch merged with InBev to form a mammoth global corporation in 2008. But the documents posted online do not cite lab tests of the beers.

"Our information comes from former employees at Anheuser-Busch, who have informed us that, as a matter of corporate practice, all of their products mentioned [in the lawsuit] are watered down," Josh Boxer, a lead attorney in the lawsuit, tells The Associated Press.

But Boxer "stopped short of saying the beers had been independently tested," the AP reports. And the lawsuit doesn't cite specific numbers to back up its claim, saying only that Budweiser has "significantly lower alcohol content" than what its label announces.

Two plaintiffs in the California suit, Nina Giampaoli and John Elbert, say they regularly purchased Budweiser over the past four years, taking the "stated percentage of alcohol into account" when they made their decisions to buy the beer.

Documents posted online to support the lawsuit include a Dec. 18, 2012, letter in which Boxer offers Anheuser-Busch a chance to "replace, refund or otherwise rectify the violations" on behalf of consumers who bought the brewer's products in the past four years. The suit says it will seek more than $5 million.

In a financial report released Wednesday, AB InBev said its fourth-quarter profit dipped slightly, to $2.5 billion. For 2012, the corporation reported a $9.4 billion profit a 19 percent rise, despite revenue growth of just 2 percent compared with 2011.

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Video: Machine Unlocks The 'Physics' Of Separating Oreos

Eat them whole or divide and conquer? That's the eternal question when it comes to Oreos, those little rounds of chocolate cookie hugging creme in the middle.

Over the years, the marketing folks at Nabisco have issued some well-known directions on how to enjoy their beloved processed cookies: You can twist 'em, lick them, dunk 'em. Now, it seems, you can also use a robot to take a hatchet to them.

In a new satirical video that's quickly making the rounds online, self-described physicist David Neevel (he's actually a copywriter with advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy) explains how he spent "0.4 years" building the OSM that's short for "Oreo Separator Machine" a robotic device to carefully scrape the crme from the sides of the cookie.

The four-minute video perfectly channels the intensity of a documentary, with Neevel narrating his herculean effort to rid the snack cookie of unwanted crme.

As Neevel intones in a delightful deadpan, "One of the hardest things to overcome was to learn to build robots and make them work. But it was also difficult to keep my hands warm and the back of my neck warm."

The video is part of Nabisco's Cookies Vs. Crme campaign to market Oreos, which turned 100 last year. Still, it struck us here at The Salt as a bit ironic that Nabisco should choose this time to advertise the "scientific side" of its iconic cookie.

After all, the science of processed food is really mostly geared at seducing consumers' taste buds. And it has gotten a lot of scrutiny over the past week, following the publication of an excerpt from Salt Sugar Fat in the New York Times Magazine. The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss, explores how manipulating those three ingredients has become central to the success of the processed food industry. If you're curious, you can hear more from Moss' interview on Fresh Air Tuesday.

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Do Parents Really Know What Their Kids Are Eating?

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Youth Radio reporter Chantell Williams likes to munch on Popchips, which are marketed as a healthy snack.

Youth Radio reporter Chantell Williams likes to munch on Popchips, which are marketed as a healthy snack.

After school and evening are "crunch time" for most families. It's the time when crucial decisions get made that affect kids' fitness and weight. And that includes snacking.

To get an idea of what parents thought their kids were doing during this time, NPR conducted a poll with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

We also spoke to parents, like Deborah Richards from Oakland, Calif. She thinks she has a handle on her son Donta's eating habits.

"He's fussy but he eats healthy," she says. "He eats healthier than me."

But Donta doesn't think so. "I know for a fact I don't," he says. "My breakfast, I can say on the daily, is a pack of Skittles. I make sure I get one every morning."

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Donta Jackson's snack of choice is a bag of Skittles.

Donta Jackson's snack of choice is a bag of Skittles.

"Skittles?!" gasps Richards. "I try to teach him better!"

Richards isn't alone. According to the poll, 87 percent of parents report their children are eating healthfully. But do parents really know what their kids especially older kids are eating?

Not according to high school senior Felix Pieske, from Portland, Maine.

"Middle school might have been the last time that I really talked to my parents about like, 'Oh, what did you eat today?' " he says.

I still talk to my mom, Oya Autry. She thinks I have a good diet lots of juices, water, fruits and salads, and not a lot of chips or fried foods.

And that sounds about right. Although, to be honest, I don't make it a point to keep track of what I eat.

However, some people, like 18-year-old Jorisha Mayo, know that they indulge, and do so starting right after school ends.

"I do occasionally eat unhealthy. I eat a lot of sugary foods and snacks," admits Mayo, from Concord, Calif. "I think I snack probably around the 3 to 4 [p.m.] zone. Then when it gets later, 11 or so, that's when I snack on my cookies and ice cream, and crackers or chips and stuff."

That's pretty normal. According to the poll, nearly half of children snacked on sweets, and a quarter ate chips the day before.

On The Run: How Families Struggle To Eat Well And Exercise

Lydia Tinajero, an expert on pediatric weight management at Oakland Children's Hospital, says some kids sneak their snacks.

"Some of the kids I work with that are overweight, they feel bad that they're eating things maybe they shouldn't," she says. "And so they sort of try and hide it, because at times they feel bad and they're a little embarrassed by it."

I don't intentionally hide food from my mom. But at the same time, I don't tell her every single thing I eat in a day, and she doesn't ask.

But for this assignment, I decided to keep a food diary, which I reviewed together with my mom.

I made some unhealthy choices during the week, including a bowl of crab fried rice and four Dorito chips for breakfast one day. But I also snacked on things like apples and granola bars.

Overall, my mom was pretty happy.

"Even those horrible snacks and weird breakfasts that I heard on the list, I think even those are still fairly healthy four Doritos versus four bags of Doritos," she says.

However, I'm not convinced. I've always thought of myself as a healthy eater, but when I look at my food diary, I'm less sure.

Which got me wondering, where do we teenagers get our ideas about what healthy even means?

"That's a good question: What does healthy mean?" says Tinajero. "With pediatrics, healthy is about being balanced. I always tell kids ... are you putting the best thing into your body?"

Tinajero says that if you're in tune with your body if you notice when you've had your fill of junk food for the week and decide to start eating better then you're body will begin to tell you what it needs.

Which means my mom doesn't have to.

This story was produced by Youth Radio (with additional reporting from Blunt Radio).

The story is part of the series On the Run: How Families Struggle To Eat Well and Exercise. The series is based on a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. If you want to dive deeper, here's a summary of the poll findings, plus the topline data and charts.

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