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Farming

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Can Chemistry Make Healthy Foods More Appealing?

Making healthy foods like tomatoes more palatable may increase our desire to eat these foods while decreasing our gravitation towards sugary snacks

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How Hot is That Pepper? How Scientists Measure Spiciness

How does the Scoville Scale rate the relative spiciness of a chili pepper?

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Your Genetic Future: Horse-Dogs, Plantimals and Mini-Rhino Pets

A kids’ magazine in the ‘80s hoped that by now we’d have a whole new array of pets to choose from

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Where Does Your Thanksgiving Meal Come From?

Take a closer look at where the staples of the holiday dinner originate — from farms across the country, both large and small

Monsaro’s snakefruit, freshly plucked from a nearby village.

Meet the Salak, the Ubiquitous Indonesian Fruit You’ve Never Heard Of

It may not be the biggest or brightest of southeast Asian fruits, but the snakefruit is the locals snack of choice

Roasted cauliflower

Five Ways to Cook With Cauliflower

Roasted, grilled or pureed, the versatile vegetable can be served many ways beyond one mother’s love of deep-frying it

Cover of the Jan 1950 issue of Redbook

Aldous Huxley’s Predictions for 2000 A.D.

The famous author envisioned a brave new world where swelling populations would put tremendous strain on the Earth’s resources

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The Halloween Tradition Best Left Dead: Kale as Matchmaker

Be happy this Scottish tradition is passé, your future marriage may have depended on it

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Predictions From The Father of Science Fiction

Hugo Gernsback’s predictions give us a look at the most radical of technological utopianism from the 1920s

The Black Sapote fruit develops a distinct “chocolate pudding” flavor after it has softened on the ground for a week or two.

All the Insane Australian Fruit You Can Eat

What the heck are black sapotes, carambolas and pomelo fruits?

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Why Do Students Give Teachers Apples and More from the Fruit’s Juicy Past

The perfect back-to-school treat has a colorful past that once brought the wrath of an axe-wielding reformer

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Today Was the World’s Biggest Food Fight, Welcome to La Tomatina

What does it look like when 40,000 people start throwing 100 metric tons of tomatoes at each other?

The farmer of the year 2031 works at his large flat-panel television (1931)

1931′s Remote-Controlled Farm of the Future

The farmer of tomorrow wears a suit to work and sits at a desk that looks oddly familiar to those of us here in the year 2012

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The Peas that Smelled the Leaky Pipe

In 1901, a 17-year-old Russian discovered the gas that tells fruits to ripen

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The World’s Most Expensive Vegetable

Long before hops cones were used to make beer bitter, hops shoots were eaten as a spring green

Peanuts

The Legumes of War: How Peanuts Fed the Confederacy

Food shortages were a problem for both military and civilians. But even in these hard times, people could find relief in peanuts

A microbiologist collects a manure sample

Mysterious Exploding Foam is Bursting Barns

One explosion raised a barn roof several feet in the air and blew the hog farmer 30 or 40 feet from the door

Nouveau Pac Man Cuisine

Food and Video Games

Video games may be the art medium of the 21st century, but they’re also an advertising medium. Here are five notable games that promoted foods

Laboratory technician injects tomatoes on the "factory farm" of the future (1961)

Super-Sized Food of the Future

How do you eat an eight-foot-long ear of corn?

Fourth-grader Lisa Gilvar's Jetsons-inspired bubble-top homes

1970s Children Draw Robot Presidents and Nuclear Apocalypse

Kids predict the darndest things

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