A spring salad

Here's an unbeatable mixture: Fresh English peas, asparagus, new onions, shaved fennel, frisee, roasted pistachios, Virginia ham sliced thin and crisped with a little garlic. Toss with a little high quality olive oil, sprinkle with a little kosher or sea salt and pepper to taste. Mmmmm, spring!

Getting to the nut of the matter

Like a lot of folks who prefer scientific curiosity to spreading alarm or sticking one's head in the sand, I've been reading a lot on salmonella lately. The Internet is indeed a boon and a curse. Some of the most popular hits contain the most appalling ignorance, such as calling salmonella a virus; one top hit is the Yahoo Answers, where someone asked if a pizza oven can kill salmonella and the answer voted "best answer" was "no..."

As far as the sites go, there's a lot of good info on salmonella.org, although the two San Diego State researchers who work on it emphasize that they are not medical doctors and to go see one if you have symptoms.

As Margie Lee, a microbiologist at UGA's College of Veterinary Medicine, was quoted in a University of Georgia Research Magazine article a while back:

Salmonella infections also have been associated with vegetables. "Because of organic gardening, people use manure," she said, "And a lot of it hasn't been composted," which kills most types of salmonellae.
Each year, there are 23 million reported cases of illness caused by all food-borne bacteria, and of these, 9,000 are fatal. Of those, salmonella is the least threatening, Lee said.
Even though people become sick from salmonella poisoning, it rarely becomes deadly. "[Salmonella] doesn't merit the public's fear. Car accidents kill more people," Lee said. "You have to look at what is really lost, and on the whole, it's seldom life."
But since the genetic markers that indicate the deadly strain of the bacteria are not even visible under a microscope, people should play it safe. "Cook your chicken and eggs well," Lee said. "That's the bottom line."

Pistachios: Nuts not all bad

Love to munch on pistachios? If they are salted and roasted, there's no chance that you can get salmonella from them; the roasting process kills the bacteria.

Kraft last week had to recall trail mix that had tainted pistachios in it, mostly because the California plant that processed the pistachios were mixing raw and roasted nuts together, a big no-no.

But as big a producer as California is, it's not the largest supplier of pistachios. That falls to Iran, where the pistachio was first domesticated. Here's a chart showing where most of the world's pistachios come from.

Country               Share of 2005 production
                          (in tons)
Iran                     190 000
United States       140 000
Turkey                 60 000
Syria                   60 000
China                   34 000
Greece                 9 500
Italy                     2 400
Uzbekistan             1 000
Tunisia                     800
Pakistan                   300
Madagascar             160
Kyrgyzstan               100
Morocco                     50
Cyprus                       15
Mexico                         7
Mauritius                     5

Statistics from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Kid food scientist

(To read the full story, click on the title above)

A University of California, Davis, professor's son discovered that a major agricultural pest prefers pistachios over other nuts.

Gabriel Leal, 11 and a student at Willet Elementary School in Davis, thinks pistachios taste better and theorized that navel orangeworms share a similar preference.

The hypothesis runs counter to past research, including a report recently published in the California Agriculture journal, which indicates the pest prefers almonds.

Gabriel conducted the research in his father's UC Davis lab under the voluntary supervision of Zain Syed, a chemical ecologist.

Gabriel placed mated and gravid, or egg-filled, females in a cage. He used four commercially available navel orangeworm traps and filled one with 50 grams of shelled pistachios, one with 50 grams of almonds, one with 50 grams of walnuts and left the fourth empty to serve as the control, Syed stated in the release.

The eggs laid in the traps were counted for two consecutive nights.

Enough eggs were laid in the pistachios to demonstrate that female navel orangeworms prefer pistachios over the other nuts.

Walter Leal reported the findings at the state almond industry conference last month in Modesto.

Researchers and growers typically use traps baited with a mix of almond meal and almond oil to attract the pests in the field. But during the hull split, the chemical from the real crop competes with the synthetic material in the traps, Leal said.

If pistachio-derived sources are used in the almond fields, it could eliminate the problem throughout the flight season, he said.

The pest attacks tree crops planted on more than 1 million acres throughout the state.

Science should never underestimate an idea, said Leal.

"That's why the academic environment is so enriching," he stated in the release. "Students come with new ideas, but I never imagined we would benefit so much from a science project for elementary school."