It takes a lot of chutzpah to reduce one of the most powerful men on Earth to a pile of fruits and vegetables.

Luckily for art lovers, Giuseppe Arcimboldo had nerve to spare.

Arcimboldo created this unorthodox produce portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II back in 1590. By that time, the Italian artist had been painting for the emperor and his powerful Habsburg family for more than 25 years, so presumably, they'd grown used to his visual jokes. (The emperor has "peachy" cheeks and "ears" of corn, get it?)

Though he also dabbled in the angels and saints that were the standard stuff of art in his day, Arcimboldo is best known for his "scherzi" or "capricci" — "meaning jokes or games," as David Brown, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, explains in this video.

"It's very clear that's how they were meant to be seen," Brown says. "They were a source of amusement or entertainment, because there was this element of surprise."

That they also often feature an element of fruits, berries or other foods is partly a reflection of the Renaissance blossoming of natural sciences, like botany.

"At a distance, they just look like heads in profile or three-quarter view," Brown says. "Up close, they look like an incredible variety of nature's wonders."

That talent for upending the viewer's expectations helps explain why Arcimboldo — whose work, Brown says, fell into "virtual oblivion" after his death — found new champions among 20th-century modernists. (Picasso and Salvador Dali were among his fans).

The latest to pay homage to this Renaissance man is American Philip Haas, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for Angels and Insects) and contemporary artist. This weekend, the New York Botanical Garden opened a new exhibit featuring Haas' giant, 15-foot-high fiberglass sculptures based on Arcimboldo's "Four Seasons" — winter, spring, summer and fall personified as people, crafted of foods, trees and other natural elements.

As in the originals, Haas' sculptures contain clues to the foods of the 16th century, when Arcimboldo painted. Winter is a craggy-faced old man, and his "cravat" is made of oranges and lemons — imported from the warmer south, they were one of the few fruits that could be seen in Renaissance Italy during the colder months.

Summer's bounty — in the shape of a young man, naturally — includes eggplant in his skull and corn ears, two crops introduced to Europe from Asia and the New World.

A fall-ripening gourd caps Autumn's head. Figs dangle from his ears. The grapes that tumble from his head like hair and fill his wooden barrel chest both nod to Italy's fall wine-making season.

Like Arcimboldo, Haas says he was attracted by the idea of playing with context and viewer's expectations. "Arcimboldo was making a painting from the natural world, and then he turned it into a painting and [others] stuck it in a museum," Haas tells The Salt. "I took it out of the museum and put it back into the natural world."

The sculptures have been on a tour of Europe and the U.S., where they were most recently on display at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.

By transforming Arcimboldo's seasons into colossal 3-D sculptures, Haas says he aims to change how the viewer experiences not just the art but the natural world that surrounds them, too.

"Summer's head has a cucumber for a nose," he notes. "When that head was in Phoenix, suddenly it looks like a cactus. The works are quite elastic — they respond to the environment."

Back in 2009, Katie Shelly was craving an eggplant Parmesan. Small problem: She'd never made it before. But she remembered that a college roommate used to make it, so she called her up and asked for the recipe.

The friend told her she needed to start with three bowls — one for breadcrumbs, one for egg and one for flour, salt and pepper. "In that moment, it was totally natural for me to just draw the three bowls instead of writing all that out in words," says Shelly, whose day job is as a visual designer.

As the friend continued the recipe, Shelly continued drawing it out with arrows and eggplant slices on a tray. When she pulled out the scrap of loose-leaf in the kitchen, she found it much easier to cook from that than a traditional recipe that relies on numerical steps.

And that's where the idea for Shelly's upcoming cookbook, Picture Cook, originated. The book is filled with 50 illustrated recipe "blueprints" for basic meals — from snacks like Krispy Kale to more hefty dishes like White Lasagna. Her recipes are bound to appeal to visual learners; Shelly hopes they're also less daunting than traditional recipes.

"If you pick up a book from Emeril Lagasse or Julia Child or Mario Batali or whoever, there's a little bit of intimidation there. ... But this book is just coming from little old me. You don't have to feel like you're going into a Top Chef competition with whatever you create."

In fact, she doesn't think she's "exceptionally culinarily inclined" — "I make food that is tasty and does the job," she says. But she learned to cook by experimenting with her friends and hopes learning by seeing will encourage others to improvise as well.

Already, lots of people seem to have responded to her novel approach to recipes: Traffic to her website exploded after the illustration blog Drawn featured her carrot soup recipe in 2010.

Other design blogs picked up the illustrations, Mark Bittman tweeted about her, and people were emailing to ask where they could buy her book. Picture Cook didn't exist yet, but all the positive feedback from the online community motivated her to start talking to publishers. Three years later, her book is close to hitting the shelves: It comes out in October but is available for pre-order now.

Shelly recognizes that while some people love the illustrated recipes, others find them confusing.

"It's just another way of slicing information," she says. "There will always people who prefer the original way of doing recipes, and if you're in that camp, then no need to buy this book. I'm not suggesting that the whole world switch over to this format. But I think for people who are into it, if it works for you, then that's awesome."

Flax is the oily seed usually spotted in the nutritional supplement or cereal aisles. It's marketed as a superfood because of its high levels of omega-3 fatty acids and fiber.

Omega-3s may do all kinds of good things for humans — like protect against Alzheimer's, heart disease and even cancer — so it seems reasonable to think they could also protect the health of animals.

That's what has Jim Drouillard, a professor of animal sciences and industry at Kansas State University, wondering whether flax might be good for beef cattle. In a series of experiments over the past 10 years, he found that feeding flaxseed to cattle in the five months before slaughter reduced inflammation and the need for antibiotics, and offset some of the negative effects of a corn-based diet. It also had an unexpected benefit for consumers.

"We were interested in improving the health of the animals, but we also saw that we could get a large increase in omega-3s in the [meat]," Drouillard tells The Salt.

Drouillard had stumbled upon omega-3 enriched beef, and some people who sell beef took notice. Their hunch was that consumers might prefer to get their omega-3s from beef rather than salmon, tuna or walnuts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture got on board, too.

"Assuming a lot of people are not going to eat flax or be able to afford salmon, one of our arguments [for flax-fed beef] is that there are a lot of people who like to eat beef," says Scott Kronberg, a research animal scientist with USDA's Agricultural Research Service who has done his own research on the benefits of flax-fed beef.

Earlier this year, a Kansas startup, NBO3 Technologies, launched its GreatO ground beef product at a grocery chain in Buffalo, N.Y. The company says a 4-ounce serving contains 200 to 350 milligrams of omega-3s (that's less than a fifth of the amount of omega-3s found in a similar portion of salmon).

And in Osceola, Iowa, Peter Woltz is giving his cattle flax for the omega-3 enriched beef sticks, summer sausage and jerky products he sells online and at farmers markets under the brand name Timber Ridge.

Before he got into the flax-fed beef business, Woltz raised cattle on a conventional feedlot. But he says he decided to sell it because it required too much crisis management.

"There's always the risk of disease," he says, "so you have a very active antibiotic program, and sometimes you give it to them whether they need it or not. That turned me off."

When Woltz heard that there were opportunities to produce "all natural" beef without hormones, additives or antibiotics, he was intrigued. "It sounded like a more sane, responsible way of producing beef," he says. Drouillard's flax feed also appealed to him as a way to make a niche product.

About one-fifth of Woltz's cattle now eat flax in the last 100 days before slaughter, when it makes up about 8 of their feed. And he says those cows are healthier than the ones that don't get flax.

"It was a real surprise to us how big the health benefits to the [flax-fed] herd were," he says. "Pinkeye outbreaks are very common in raising cattle, but in six years of doing this, I have never seen a flax-fed cow with pinkeye."

Woltz says he believes his herd of flax-fed cattle will continue to grow. "It's just a question of how fast do we want to expand the herd."

But Kronberg of the USDA cautions that the economics of flax-fed beef aren't yet well understood. "Flax is pretty expensive nowadays, and the profitability of beef production is not always so good," he says. "So it will be interesting to see how these companies do."

Across the pond in Europe, animal science researchers are enthusiastic about flax, too. They're feeding it to dairy cattle to improve their digestive health and reduce methane emissions from their belching.

Two seemingly common-sense, bipartisan food reforms have gotten mugged on Capitol Hill in recent days. If you're a loyal reader of The Salt, you've heard of them.

First, there's the proposal — backed by an odd-couple alliance of egg producers and animal-welfare activists — to set minimum standards for the housing of egg-laying chickens. Second, the Obama administration wants to change the way the United States provides food aid to people in foreign countries, buying more of that food close to where it's needed.

Neither proposal seems, at first glance, controversial. Changing the rules for food aid should save money, according to most independent analyses, allowing the program to feed more hungry people. Similar reforms, in fact, were proposed by President George W. Bush. The "egg bill," meanwhile, is a remarkable instance of pragmatic compromise between bitter adversaries.

Any change, however, threatens somebody, and both of these proposals have run afoul of politically well-connected people.

In the case of food aid, the skeptics include American shippers and dock workers, who will get slightly less work if the U.S. sends cash to buy food abroad. They, in turn, have a powerful friend in Congress: Sen. Barbara Mikulski, proud native of the port city of Baltimore and chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In an e-mail to NPR, Mikulski wrote that "we need to find a sensible center that will allow us to implement smart reforms without jeopardizing U.S. jobs, particularly those in the maritime industry."

In part because of Mikulski's resistance, advocates of reform are now trying a different route entirely — a free-standing bill that's been introduced by Edward Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Its prospects are uncertain.

The "egg bill," meanwhile, has some influential supporters. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack brings it up frequently as an exemplary compromise between large-scale agriculture and its critics. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, actually tried to include it in her draft of the farm bill, which is up for renewal (again) this year.

Pork and beef producers, however, object in principle to the notion of federal regulation of farm animal housing — even though, in this case, the egg producers themselves are asking for federal regulations as a way to pre-empt state rules that are more troublesome.

When the agriculture committees of both House and Senate finished their versions of the farm bill this week, all mention of guaranteed living space for egg-laying hens had vanished.

In fact, the House committee adopted a provision that could make it more difficult for states to set such standards. This amendment, offered by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, would prohibit any effort by state governments to control the way that their food is produced by out-of-state farmers. The measure is aimed specifically at California's Proposition 2, which is set to ban farmers in Iowa or Idaho from selling their eggs in California if those eggs come from chickens housed in traditional cages.

American gourmets and lovers of Italian food products, your days as food smugglers are over.

No more stuffing your suitcases with delicacies bought in Italy, hoping the sniffer dogs at JFK or other American airports won't detect the banned-in-the-USA foodstuffs inside your luggage.

In the U.S., they're called cured meats, the French say charcuterie and in Italy, the word for cured-pork products is salumi.

Starting May 28, a four-decades-old ban on the import of many Italian salumi will be lifted.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that the Italian regions of Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Piedmont, and the provinces of Trento and Bolzano, are free of swine vesicular disease. Imports of pork products from those areas, says the USDA, present a low risk of introducing the disease into the U.S. The disease was first detected in the 1960s and can survive cooking and even long curing.

Up to now, only a few Italian pork products were approved for import to the U.S.: prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto di San Daniele, as well as mortadella — which was also banned until 2000.

Starting soon, as long as they receive USDA approval, hundreds of artisanal products will arrive on American tables. It's not yet clear, however, what standards the producers will have to meet and what the costs will be. But even without a ban, Italian cured meat producers must pay hefty fees as part of the process of getting certified for importation.

For centuries, Italians have been making some of the highest-quality cured meats in Europe. It's time to start learning some of their names: sopressata, a slow-cured dried pork, similar in appearance to salami; pancetta, bacon made from the pork belly, but unlike the American variety, which is smoked, Italian pancetta is cured in salt and spices; coppa or capocollo, made from pork shoulder or neck and seasoned with wine, salt and spice.

What's the secret behind the high quality of Italian salumi?

Many say it's the quality of the pigs, the climate where they're raised and what they're fed.

Every Italian region and province, and even many towns have their own distinctive salumi, many of them celebrated in weeklong folk festivals. There are fans of Coppa Piacentina or those who swear by Coppa di Parma; there's an infinite variety of salamis — from Brianza, Vicenza, Cremona and many more, spiced with garlic, juniper and myrtle berries, fennel and red wine.

One of the delicacies that may soon reach U.S. shores is salame di Felino, named after the small town of the same name near Parma.

According to the website prosciuttopedia, salame di Felino traces its origins to the Middle Ages. The oldest pictorial representation is found in the Parma Baptistery, where one can see two salamis draped over a saucepan. And in 1905, the wording "Salame di Felino" was officially included in the dictionary of the Italian language.

But what cured meat aficionados are most eagerly waiting for is the king of Italian salumi, culatello, a product of the flatlands of Zibello and neighboring towns near Parma — a product whose secret ingredient is the dense winter fog that hovers at a particular bend in the Po River.

Culatello dates back at least to the 15th century. It's made with the muscular part of the hind leg of pigs born, raised and slaughtered in the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions.

The Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, a culatello enthusiast, wrote in 1891, "It is aged only in the square of land surrounding Zibello, where the air of the Po is often humid and good for the mold that preserves this fatless cut of meat."

I first experienced culatello at the Trattoria La Buca di Zibello, a long-established restaurant run for four generations solely by women. A huge room is dedicated to curing the zibelli — hundreds hang from the ceiling. The women told me one of the key steps is a loving massage that helps salt penetrate the meat.

Culatello is an expensive delicacy even in Italy, and of the two culatelli produced by the same animal, one is always better than the other: It's said that pigs are animals of habit and always sleep on the same side, which ends up being the less tender of the two thighs.

But there are some cured pork products that won't soon be imported to the U.S. The region of Tuscany is still on the USDA-restricted list. So, you'll still have to travel there to savor wild boar sausages (my favorite) and finocchiona of Siena, a fennel-flavored salami.

And then there's that most sinful of products (sinful for those who have to watch their cholesterol intake), lardo di Colonnata, the small town perched above the marble quarries of Carrara. That velvety white lard — pork fat from the back of the pig — is cured in marble vats. Locals claim it's the porous quality of the stone that's responsible for its unique, refined taste.

Buon appetito.

A study published online recently in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives documented slightly elevated levels of arsenic in samples of chicken purchased at grocery stores in 10 cities in the U.S.

So how did trace amounts of this toxin end up in supermarket poultry?

Well, arsenic-based drugs are approved for use in chicken and turkey production. At the time of the grocery-store testing, back in late 2010 and early 2011, a drug called Roxarsone was still being used in chicken feed to stave off infections with parasites. (The drug was voluntarily pulled from the market in June 2011 by its manufacturer.)

"We did the study to learn whether using arsenic-based drugs leads to increases in the toxic form of arsenic in meat," explains researcher Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins. And it turns out, it does. A little.

The researchers documented 2.3 ppb — that's parts per billion — of inorganic arsenic (the more toxic type of arsenic) in the meat of chicken that had measurable levels of Roxarsone.

By comparison, the meat from chicken that had no detectable levels of Roxarsone had 0.8 ppb of inorganic arsenic. That's three times less.

But it's important to point out that these low levels are far below the 500 ppb tolerance levels set by the FDA.

The researchers found no measurable trace of the arsenic-based drug in the 25 organic samples they tested (Roxarsone is not allow in organic chicken). By comparison, 20 of the 40 samples of meat from chickens raised conventionally did contain the drug.

The National Chicken Council released a statement calling the study's conclusions misleading. Broiler chicken producers, the council says, are no longer using any arsenic-based drugs.

In lieu of Roxarsone, which had been used to prevent intestinal parasites, chicken producers have switched to drugs known as ionophores.

"Today, folks [chicken producers] are just doing the best they can without" Roxarsone, says Tom Super of the National Chicken Council. He says the ionophores are not as effective against the parasites.

The FDA, in this Q & A, says another arsenic-based drug known as Nitarsone is still being marketed. It's approved for use in chickens and turkeys. Though the FDA does not disclose animal drug sales data, the drug is used to prevent outbreaks of blackhead, an infection caused by parasites, in turkeys.

The National Turkey Federation says Nitarsone is used primarily in the turkeys' first few weeks of life and used more heavily during the summer months, when blackhead is more likely to occur. The industry depends on the drug as a preventive, since there's no effective treatment once an outbreak occurs.

The authors of the new study say they hope the FDA considers their conclusions in making decisions about the approvals for these drugs.

"Roxarsone still continues to be sold by [drug company] Zoetis in Latin America" and is still approved for use here, Johns Hopkins' Nachman says, despite the fact that it was voluntarily pulled from the market in 2011.

The FDA says it continues to investigate all uses of arsenic-based drugs in food-producing animals, and agency spokesperson Jalil Isa says the agency "will take the appropriate action to protect public health."

Plenty of celebrities leverage their star power to raise awareness of complicated food issues. Some of the biggest names include Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver, Prince Charles and Paul McCartney.

Down in New Orleans, actor Wendell Pierce, who stars in David Simon's Treme and, previously, The Wire, has been taking on food insecurity in low-income communities with brand new convenience stores. Pierce has received plenty of attention for his efforts and appeared this week on NPR's Tell Me More to talk about the opening of the first grocery store in his New Orleans-based Sterling Farms chain earlier this spring.

Even though New Orleans' restaurant sector is booming — there are over 1,200 in the city, even more than before Hurricane Katrina — many communities outside the center have been waiting in vain for supermarkets to return. That's because of investors' "economic apathy," Pierce says.

A food desert is defined as an area where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away. And New Orleans has plenty of them, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new Food Access Research Atlas shows. "For me, growing up in New Orleans, where so much of the culture is based around food, it's unacceptable [to have them]," Pierce told Tell Me More.

But even with Pierce's leadership (he was recently named one of FastCompany's 100 most creative people in business) and investment dollars behind the effort, a host of stumbling blocks still make it hard to get fresh, healthful foods to people living in these areas. And as food activists are discovering all over the country, grocery stores alone won't make the food desert bloom.

This isn't Pierce's first foray into rebuilding New Orleans: After Katrina, he set to work building new energy-efficient homes in his neighborhood of Pontchartrain Park. That process was beset with delays and snafus — not unlike a lot of the scenarios that appear in Treme and The Wire. "It's life imitating art, and art imitating life," Pierce told the New York Times last year. "The shows influence me, and the work I do influences the shows."

Like his housing initiative, Pierce's retail food plan has been moving slowly. In addition to marshaling private funds, Pierce and his partners went after grants awarded through the Obama administration's Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Even with them, coming up with the financing for the project hasn't been easy.

"The most difficult part is making sure that everybody is on board when it comes to the banking institutions," Pierce said. The bankers, he said, had to be convinced that grocery and convenience stores would be viable business models in these communities.

Sterling Express is now operating two convenience stores, along with the new grocery store. The success of these ventures is ultimately going to depend on how well they can meet the needs of the communities they serve.

One issue is transportation. Sterling Farms is offering shoppers who spend $50 or more a free shuttle ride home — which might be more convenient than boarding a public bus with armloads of groceries. That option prompted this comment on Tell Me More's interview with Pierce: "Genius idea, as lack of transportation is a major stumbling block to folks getting access to quality, competitively-priced, heavy, fresh food choices!"

And as we reported last year, studies show that shoppers don't just care about cost and proximity to fresh produce — they also need choice and quality if they're going to buy it.

Mike Kantor, co-chairman of the New Orleans Food Policy Advisory Committee, commends Pierce's program. But he says there's another key part of the puzzle: making sure the poorest people in these communities are getting the food stamps, or SNAP benefits, they're entitled to.

"When we talk about food deserts, we can't just focus on location and geographic access," Kantor tells The Salt. "We have to talk about economic security, which means talking about programs the people going to shop at stores rely on in order to afford the produce that's sold there."

According to Kantor, more than 20 percent of households in the state of Louisiana live under the federal poverty line. While 77 percent of the people in the state who are eligible for SNAP are participating in the program, that coverage could be higher.

"And the actual benefit amount," he notes, "is barely enough for people relying on the program."

Climate change is gradually altering the fish that end up on ice in seafood counters around the world, according to a new study.

"The composition of the [global] fish catch includes more and more fish from the warmer areas, and cold-water fish are getting more rare, because the temperatures are increasing," says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, a co-author of the study.

As oceans warm — a result of climate change — fish maintain their preferred water temperature by moving away from the equator and toward the poles.

So, for example, people in Denmark are now encountering swordfish, which you'd normally find in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Africa.

"In British Columbia, where I live, we have Humboldt squid, giant squid from Mexico," Pauly says. "They eat all the herrings and stuff, and people don't know them. They are stranded on the beach, and people think they are sea monsters."

And fishermen have scuffled over Atlantic mackerel quotas, as the fish moves north to new grounds around Iceland.

The new study in Nature shows these anecdotes aren't simply a fluke. Data from fish catches from around the world show it's happening everywhere the ocean is warming — which is just about everywhere.

This trend isn't obvious at American fish counters. That's because 80 percent of our seafood is imported, and we don't know whether fishermen are catching our swordfish in the tropics or the North Atlantic. Also, half of all seafood is now produced in enclosures — not caught in the wild.

But if it's invisible to us, that's not the case for many people who rely on their local fisherman for protein.

"In the tropics, there are lots of developing countries' fisheries where their ability to adapt to changes in the resources is much lower," says William Cheung, the report's lead author. Like Pauly, he's at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center in Vancouver.

The paper documents a migration of some species out of the tropics, as they seek cooler waters. But there are no fish to replace the ones that are leaving. As a result, "these fisheries in the tropics will be most vulnerable to climate change impacts," Cheung says.

The United States will gradually feel the effects as well.

"Imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast," Pauly says. "That reef fish will not find reefs. It's like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house. That is the problem."

Many fish will have a hard time adapting to this very rapid change, he says.

Mark Payne at the National Institute for Aquatic Resources in Denmark was not involved in the research, but he's impressed by the result.

"This is suddenly a wake-up call," he says. "It's a strong suggestion that climate change is here. It's real, and it's really starting to affect what we catch and, therefore, what we eat."

Americans are repeatedly told to cut back on salt to reduce the risk of heart disease. But there are new questions being raised about the possible risks of reducing sodium too much.

So, how low should we go? Currently, the government recommends that Americans should aim for 2,300 milligrams per day. And people older than 50, as well as those with high blood pressure, diabetes or kidney disease are advised to reduce sodium even further, down to 1,500 mg per day.

But a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine concludes in a new report that "the evidence on direct health outcomes does not support recommendations to lower sodium intake ... to or even below 1,500 mg per day."

Why? We asked the committee chairman, Brian Strom, a dean and professor of public health at the University of Pennsylvania, to summarize the panel's findings for us. "The net conclusion is that people who are eating too much sodium should lower their sodium, but it is possible that if you lower it too much you may do harm."

Strom says a lot more research is needed to better understand how ultra-low-sodium diets may be beneficial or harmful. Strom pointed to an Italian study of people with congestive heart failure as an example of research that has hinted that diets too low in sodium may be problematic for certain people.

"The people on the low-sodium diet actually did worse [compared to those on medium-sodium diets]," says Strom. "They had more hospital re-admissions and they had a higher mortality rate." He says it's unclear if the results would be the same for Americans with congestive heart failure, since treatments here are different than they are in Italy. But, he says, the findings raise questions.

The American Heart Association, which recommends a low-sodium (1,500 mg) diet for all Americans, released a statement stating that it disagrees with the key findings of the new report.

And some preventive health experts are critical, too. The World Health Organization has concluded that elevated blood pressure is the leading cause of preventable death, which suggests that staving off high blood pressure with low-sodium diets is an important strategy.

"Sodium reduction remains a critically important component of public health efforts designed to ... prevent cardiovascular disease," Lawrence Appel of Johns Hopkins University writes in an email.

Appel points out that the studies that suggest that low-sodium diets are harmful tend to focus on "sick populations in which illness leads to low sodium intake rather than the reverse."

Some groups of Americans, including older adults and African-Americans, are especially sensitive to the blood-pressure lowering effects of cutting sodium, Appel says. So the strategy of aiming for low-salt diets has "tremendous potential to reduce racial disparities in blood pressure-related cardiovascular disease."

The bottom line, according to Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is that Americans are eating way too much salt, on average about 3,400 milligrams a day.

"And we know that much is harmful," she says. "It increases blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke."

And she says focusing on the potential risks of a very-low-sodium diet distracts from the more important conversation about how to get Americans to start consuming less.

To better understand just how much salt is found in the typical lunch out, I met Liebman at a food court.

Our first stop was McDonalds, where it turns out burgers have about twice as much salt as the fries: 1,000 mg, and up to 2,000 if you get the Angus bacon burger, Liebman says.

Put the burger and fries together and you've already reached the recommended daily sodium intake. Liebman says it's a similar story at every chain, from Subway to Chipotle to Pizzeria Uno. (McDonalds has pledged to reduce sodium 15 percent across its menu by 2015.)

So even though the new study raises questions about potential harms of ultra-low-sodium diets, with a food supply like ours, most of us consume way too much salt, not too little.

Amid the media phenomenon that is Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, you may have overlooked his turn as the International Space Station's top chef.

The Canadian astronaut, who landed back on Earth Monday along with two other ISS crew members, wasn't just hamming it up during his five months in space. (Although ham it up he did: In the past couple of days, his rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," shot in orbit, has gotten nearly 7 million YouTube views.) While still aboard the space station, Hadfield also took the time to enlighten viewers about the intricacies of meal prep in space.

"In the early days of space exploration," he informs us in one video, "food was mostly squeezed out of tubes and brought up in dehydrated packets. But today, we can have quite a variety of food. ... We just need some minor adaptations."

Such as swapping tortillas for bread when making sandwiches — mostly, he explains, because bread makes crumbs, and in space, crumbs don't fall, they float away. Apparently, the tortillas that astronauts eat are specially packaged in an oxygen-free environment, which makes them "good for 18 months."

Still, dehydrated foods remain a reality of astronaut menus, as Hadfield demonstrates in another video on prepping spinach (just add water). While it's great to see our space cadets getting in their vegetables, you'd be hard-pressed to call the mushy green concoction that Hadfield displays before the camera appetizing.

So in the scheme of things, perhaps it's a blessing of sorts that in space, astronauts lose their sense of smell — a key factor in how we experience the flavor of food — and get a hankering for hot sauce. Faced with that spinach dish, we'd probably reach for the Tabasco, too.

Yes, we talk a lot about eating bugs here at The Salt. We know, because some of you have complained about it.

But insect cuisine isn't just a crazy fad for Bay Area and Dutch foodies, or for Israelis plagued by locusts: In a report out this week, the U.N.'s agricultural arm makes the case for why insects should be an option for dinner.

The Food and Agriculture Organization has been pondering bugs as a protein source since 2003, but in the new report, the agency argues that insects might be essential to feeding a planet of 7 billion people. Why? They're nutritious, better for the environment than other protein sources and can generate jobs, according to the FAO.

"Insects are pretty much untapped for their potential for food, and especially for feed," Eva Muller, director of FAO's Forest Economics, Policy and Products Division, said in a statement.

Of course, 2 billion people worldwide already enjoy insects with gusto — in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia. As The Salt previously reported, some efforts have focused on "grow-your-own-insect" kits as a form of emergency food aid for African refugees. Among the most popular of the 1,900 species consumed are beetles, caterpillars, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. But rich nations have turned up their noses at them, and the FAO says it's high time for that to change.

There are some signs that investors are warming to insect farming, as climate change has a lot of people rethinking where we get our protein. And insects are now looking like a pretty appealing alternative: They emit considerably less greenhouse gases and waste than other animals, they require little to no land, and many species can consume waste products like animal blood, which means we wouldn't need to produce feed (like soybeans or corn) especially for them.

And if you want to talk about feed efficiency, insects use just 2 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of meat. Cattle, at the other end of the spectrum, require 8 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of beef, the FAO says. Locusts beat out beef when it comes to essential nutrients like iron, too: between 8 and 20 milligrams per 100 grams of dry weight of locusts, compared with 6 milligrams per 100 grams of dry weight of beef.

In addition to bugs to feed people, the FAO is optimistic about opportunities to raise insects to feed to animals. As we reported last year, fly farming in South Africa is starting to get off the ground. Just last week, entrepreneur Jason Drew, who's raising flies to feed salmon and chicken, won the highly competitive U.N. Innovation Prize for Africa.

So why haven't we seen a big insect farming boom yet?

There's the disgust factor, for one thing. But there are also big regulatory hurdles: In many countries, the FAO says, regulations on producing insects for food aren't very clear. (Ironically, in the U.S., regulations allow for a certain amount of insect bits to make it into our food, but they don't cover insects as the main meal, according to the FAO.)

Then there are all sorts of food safety concerns. For example, if you were to raise flies on animal blood — a normal source of food for the insects — what happens if you then feed the flies to chickens meant for human consumption? The FAO is calling for more research to untangle such questions.

But FAO says the future is bright for edible insects. "Although it will require considerable convincing to reverse [feelings of disgust], it is not an impossible feat," the report states. British artists seem to agree: A recent exhibition at the U.K.'s Wellcome Collection showcased 3-D printing demos of "possible novel insect foods" of the future.

Last year, almost the entire Michigan apple crop was lost because of 80-degree days in March and then some freezing April nights. This year, the apples are back, but everything always depends on the weather. The state was under a freeze warning Sunday night — a scary prospect if you're an apple grower and your trees have just come into bloom.

Tim Boles and his agribusiness colleague Case DeYoung were driving to work one morning in late April 2012 after a killing frost had hit the apple orchards in The Ridge, a region of ridges and rolling valleys in the west-central part of the state close to Lake Michigan. They stopped at a high point and knew things were bad when they saw the helicopters hovering, hoping to push down a warmer layer of air.

"Some of the farmers from the area had gone down south and brought back smudge pots to generate some warm air and smoke to try and help warm the trees," Boles says. "So you had the sound of the helicopters — thump, thump, thump — and the smoke and the rising sun, and Case and I both remarked that it was like Apocalypse Now."

Suanne Shoemaker and her family's farm on Six Mile Road could only harvest 1 percent of their 30 acres of apples in 2012. But this year, "It looks great," Shoemaker says. "We're all excited, all the growers are. Everybody's happy around here this year."

Every Wednesday morning during apple season, growers show up at a local restaurant at 7 a.m. for a free breakfast (paid for by one of the farm chemical companies) and a briefing from Amy Irish-Brown, an extension educator from Michigan State University. She talks about spores, beetles, aphids and especially the weather.

"It's surprising how dry it is, and that's partly because we haven't had any rain but also because relative humidity has been extremely low. That's what's drying things out fairly quickly," she says. She wants the growers to keep this in mind as they're planting new trees. And she leaves them with a caution about the freeze coming on the night of Mother's Day.

As it turned out, there was frost on The Ridge — just at full bloom time. But, in an email, Irish-Brown says, "We should be OK. Perhaps a little damage but still have the potential for a full apple crop."

For decades, scientists have believed our ancestors took up farming some 12,000 years ago because it was a more efficient way of getting food. But a growing body of research suggests that wasn't the case at all.

"We know that the first farmers were shorter, they were more prone to disease than the hunter-gatherers," says Samuel Bowles, the director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, describing recent archaeological research.

Bowles' own work has found that the earliest farmers expended way more calories in growing food than they did in hunting and gathering it. "When you add it all up, it was not a bargain," says Bowles.

So why farm? Bowles lays out his theory in a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The reasons are complex, but they revolve around the concept of private property.

Think of these early farmers as prehistoric suburbanites of sorts. The first farmers emerged in less than a dozen spots in Asia and South America. Bowles says they were already living in small villages. They owned their houses and other objects, like jewelry, boats and a range of tools, including fishing gear.

They still hunted and foraged, but they didn't have to venture far for food: They had picked fertile places to settle down, and so food was abundant. For example, one group in what is present-day Iraq lived close to a gazelle migration route. During migration season, it was easy pickings — they killed more animals than they could eat in one sitting. They also harvested more grain from wild plants than they knew what to do with. And so, they built "pantries" — structures where they could store the extra food.

These societies had seen the value of owning stuff — they were already recognizing "private property rights," says Bowles. That's a big transition from nomadic cultures, which by and large don't recognize individual property. All resources, even in modern day hunter-gatherers, are shared with everyone in the community.

But the good times didn't last forever in these prehistoric villages. In some places, the weather changed for the worse. In other places, the animals either changed their migratory route or dwindled in numbers.

At this point, Bowles says these communities had a choice: They could either return to a nomadic lifestyle, or stay put in the villages they had built and "use their knowledge of seeds and how they grow, and the possibility of domesticating animals."

Stay put, they did. And over time, they also grew in numbers. Why? Because the early farmers had one advantage over their nomadic cousins: Raising kids is much less work when one isn't constantly on the move. And so, they could and did have more children.

In other words, Bowles thinks early cultures that recognized private property gave people a reason to plant roots in one place and invent farming — and stick with it despite its initial failures.

Bowles admits that this is just an informed theory. But to test it, he and his colleague Jung-Kyoo Choi built a mathematical model that simulated social and environmental conditions among early hunter-gatherers. In this simulation, farming evolved only in groups that recognized private property rights. What's more, in the simulations, once farming met private property, the two reinforced each other and spread through the world.

Bowles' theory offers a more nuanced explanation that ties together cultural, environmental and technological realities facing those first farmers, says Ian Kuijt, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in the origins of agriculture.

But, he says, the challenge is to figure out who owned the property back then and how they ran it. "Was it owned by one individual?" Kuijt says. "Was it a mother and father and their children? ... Does it represent community or village property?"

Chicago's Tamale Spaceship food truck happened to land near our office this Sandwich Monday. We considered it our duty as hungry earthlings to eat as many tamales as it takes to ensure we're never called up for NASA's astronaut program.

The tamale heroes who run Tamale Spaceship wear Mexican wrestling masks. They do this to intimidate you into spending $4 on a single tamale and to protect themselves from flying tamale debris.

Miles: I think an entire fleet of Tamale Spaceships could reignite American interest in the space program.

Robert: Houston, we have a cholesterol problem.

Miles: One small step for man, one giant leap for pant sizes.

Eva: I was a little offended when I went to space after eating one of these and there was still gravity.

Mike: I hope in space, someone can hear me ask for more.

Robert: Major Tom would have a hard time stepping out of his capsule if he were aboard the Tamale Spaceship.

Mike: Yeah, Hal would totally open the pod bay doors for these guys.

Eva: I think they have to count down from 10,000 to lift this spaceship off the ground.

Miles: This is a clear rip-off of my chain of Schnitzel Submarines.

Eva: The pork one is delicious. I'm not sure how I feel about the one filled with losers from the last big wrestling match.

Robert: If I could surround all my food in masa I'd die happy. And I'd be dead right now.

[The verdict: Four dollars per tamale is steep, but that's about 1/1 millionth of what it costs to go to space as a space tourist. So consider it a good deal. Also, they're enormous.]

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that when farmers use patented seed for more than one planting in violation of their licensing agreements, they are liable for damages.

Billed as David vs. Goliath, the case pitted an Indiana farmer against the agribusiness behemoth Monsanto.

Almost all the soybean farmers in the U.S. use seed that is genetically altered to be resistant to weed killers like Roundup. That allows farmers to spray for weeds without killing the soybeans. But the seed is three times more expensive than regular unpatented seed, so some farmers have tried to use regenerated seed to save money.

Case in point, 75-year-old farmer Hugh Bowman, who regularly bought Monsanto's Roundup-resistant soybean seed for his first growth and signed a licensing agreement promising to use all the seed and not to use any regenerated seed for future use. But Bowman also had other riskier, lower-yield plantings, and for those, he wanted "a cheap source of seed."

So he went to the local grain elevator where farmers drop off their harvested soybeans, and he bought and planted some of those, knowing that those beans would likely also be Roundup-resistant.

He eventually produced eight separate crop yields using the second and third generations of the grain elevator seed, and he was quite open about what he was doing.

"I couldn't imagine that they'd give a rat's behind," he said.

But they — namely, Monsanto — did. The company sued Bowman, as it has sued other farmers. Bowman lost in the lower courts and was ordered to pay $84,000 in damages to Monsanto. He appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There the question before the justices pitted two legal doctrines against each other. One doctrine, known technically as patent exhaustion, says that once you buy a product — say, a cellphone — you can do with it whatever you want. You can use it, sell it, give it to your kids, whatever. But a second patent doctrine says you are forbidden to copy it.

So which rule applied in Bowman's case? The Supreme Court said unanimously that Bowman's actions amounted to illegal copying of a patented product, a sort of farming piracy.

Writing for the high court, Justice Elena Kagan said that Bowman is perfectly free to purchase grain elevator beans to eat or feed to livestock, or even to resell, but he could not do what he, in fact, did: plant the beans from the grain elevator in his own fields, test them for weed resistance, and then harvest, re-harvest and re-harvest multiple times, without paying Monsanto for use of its patented product.

Without this protection for Monsanto, said Kagan, the company would get "scant benefit" from its invention, and Bowman and other farmers would reap great rewards from the weed-resistant seed without paying for it.

Kagan also rejected Bowman's argument that since soybeans naturally self-replicate by sprouting, it was the soybean, not Bowman himself, that made replications of the Monsanto's patented invention.

"We think the blame-the-bean defense tough to credit," said Kagan. Bowman, she noted, "was not a passive observer of his soybeans multiplication." Instead, Bowman himself produced eight separate crop yields using the grain elevator beans to maximize regeneration of the beans.

Monsanto and other agribusiness enterprises were predictably pleased by the decision.

"The court's ruling today ensures that long-standing principles of patent law apply to breakthrough 21st century technologies," said David Snively, Monsanto's executive vice president and general counsel. "The ruling also provides assurance to all inventors throughout the public and private sectors that they can and should continue to invest in innovation that feeds people, improves lives, creates jobs and allows America to keep its competitive edge."

Meanwhile, critics of the industry were just as predictably disappointed. Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, called the decision a "disaster" for farmers and consumers, because it ensures that Monsanto's soybean seed patent will dominate the market even more, meaning that prices for both farmers and consumers will soar.

The court's decision, however, was explicitly limited to cases like Bowman's, where an individual takes steps to replicate a patented product. Justice Kagan said the court was not deciding how to handle all self-replicating products — products that range from patented DNA molecules to computer software.

Or as John Whelan, George Washington University associate dean of intellectual property law put it, the court has "left for another day" the question of how to treat a product that "automatically reproduces itself with no intervention." In the modern world of complex new inventions, it seems the court is not eager to get ahead of itself.