The surge in popularity of home chicken-raising is astounding. From cities to farms, more and more people are keeping small numbers of chickens for egg production, as family pets, and sometimes for meat production. The city of Davis, Calif. even had a “Tour de Cluck” recently – a bicycle tour of 25 home chicken coops in Davis (the tour sold all 500 tickets and served as a local educational fundraiser).

The amount of attention and care that families spend on their chickens shows that chickens are a labor of love, much as any family pet. Every hen I visited on the Tour de Cluck had a name, and each owner assured me that their “girls” all have their own personalities. Some of the chicken coops were woodworking pieces of...

Healthy eating has gotten complicated. Fresh fruits and vegetables pack the produce aisle as never before. And new food products with added health benefits are being introduced all the time. Yet the food supply, and the agricultural system that supports it, has become increasingly criticized for its impact on the waistlines of millions of people in the United States.

“Agriculture and conventional food systems have provided the basis for long and healthy lives, and much of that improvement can be traced to healthier diets,” says UC Davis plant sciences professor Alan Bennett. “At the same time, we are faced with a growing critique that conventional food...

A wise man once said that God made weather so farmers would have something to complain about. Or maybe he was just a wise-acre.

One very wet spring a few years ago I was talking with another wise man, the late UC plant pathologist Joe Ogawa. I told him that the fruit trees must be enjoying the rainy weather. Joe's response: "Oh, the trees are probably enjoying it—but the fungi are so excited they're jumping up and down!"

I was working that spring with Joe and his colleague Harley English on their book, Diseases of Temperate Zone Tree Fruit and Nut Crops. Sure enough, our meetings were often interrupted by phone calls from farm...

Workers sort tomatoes at Russell Ranch

Part of our mission at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis is to ensure access to healthy food. So we’ve focused much of our work on the intersection between agriculture and human nutrition.

An interesting new field of study in this area looks at flavonoids, which are compounds in fruits and vegetables thought to have beneficial antioxidant effects and other medicinal value – they may even help reduce cancer risk.
Measuring the amount of flavonoids is one way we can figure out just how...

There are a number of short (two-minute) NewsWatch segments on the UC Davis YouTube channel on various aspects of food. These timely and straightforward videos are easy to view and educational. Some food-related topics of interest include:

• Shaking up salt perceptions [link]


• Do we obsess about being fat? [link]


• Why diets don’t work [link]


• UC Davis creates “bettermilk” (dairy goat milk that protects against...