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There’s nothing a tortoise likes better than a fresh tomato -just ask any tomato gardener! Kevin is no exception, but he desperately needs a teeny little pair of tortoiseshell glasses. He has terrible depth perception. The poor thing does get a bit or two eventually. -via Buzzfeed
To-may-to, to-mah-to … fruit, vegetable – whatever you call it, one thing’s for sure: people love it. But if you have only tasted tomatos bought from the supermarket shelves, you’re missing out on flavor.
Barry Estabrook of Politics of the Plate blog has the inside story of the dirty little secrets of supermarket tomato over at NPR:
… the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. "As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — ‘I don’t get paid a cent for flavor,’" Estabrook says.
There’s an even darker side to the modern commercial tomato, too, he says. Up until recently, workers on many of Florida’s vast industrial tomato farms were basically slaves. "People being bought and sold like animals," Estabrook says. "People being shackled in chains. People being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough, or being too weak or sick to work. People actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850′s slavery to me, and that, in fact, is going on, or has gone on."
Estabrook adds that there have been seven successful slavery prosecutions in Florida in the past 15 years.
Link (Photo: Robert Browman)
This chart makes me hungry. From Abstruse Goose. Link -Thanks, Oscar!
Have you ever wondered why tomatoes, potatoes, and some other plants have hairy stems? Of course not. Neither have I, until I encountered an explanation in the Telegraph yesterday.
Botanists have discovered for the first time that the plants are carnivorous predators who kill insects in order to “self-fertilise” themselves. New research shows that they capture and kill small insects with sticky hairs on their stems and then absorb nutrients through their roots when the animals decay and fall to the ground. It is thought that the technique was developed in the wild in order to supplement the nutrients in poor quality soil – but even domestic varieties grown in your vegetable patch retain the ability.
The fact that they are capable feeding on small insects has been overlooked because domesticated varities are typically grown in rich soils where such dietary supplementation is unnecessary. They of course also lack the dramatic apparatus shown below in the outstanding video of the Venus flytrap, or the adaptations shown by the sundew and pitcher plant.
Link. Photo credit Tom Bullock.
