Daily Archives: June 3, 2015

Local Gold?

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As the market has shown saffron at times has toppled gold with its price per gram and in ancient times was used as currency. Here’s a nice piece about very local “saffron” from LuckyPeach.com

I was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, visiting my mom recently, when I spied a long-forgotten fixture of the local supermarket checkout aisle: a display of Mosemann’s saffron packages, each one carefully stapled to a card background, just beyond customers’ reach. We bought one, and as I examined the familiar Pennsylvania Dutch-styled packaging, I noticed that Mosemann’s saffron comes from Spain, which struck me as odd. I’d always believed it was locally grown in central Pennsylvania. It made me wonder: was “Pennsylvanian saffron” just a local legend?

 

White House Meeting Elicits Pledges to Reduce Antibiotic Use

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The Obama administration convened representatives of hospitals, food producers, professional medical societies and restaurant chains on Tuesday and extracted pledges to reduce the use of lifesaving antibiotics, whose effectiveness is waning because of overuse.

The meeting at the White House highlighted the problem of antibioticresistance, a public health crisis that every year kills at least 23,000 of the more than two million Americans who fall ill from infections that are impervious to the drugs.

The event was part of a series of efforts that began in the fall whenPresident Obama’s science advisers announced a national strategy to curb the overuse of antibiotics. It was the first time a presidential administration had taken on the problem, but consumer advocates said the strategy so far has fallen short of getting tough on antibiotic use in agriculture.