Food Creator Dies & Florida Freeze

Food Creator Dies & Florida Freeze plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

For those of us in the northwest cold temperatures are a normal occurrence but for those in the south it has turned devastating. Florida has seen below normal temperatures for a couple of weeks now and could see the loss of many crops like tomatoes and oranges. Meteorologist Brad Rippey.

RIPPEY: And that has created a situation where I think that even flooding the orchards or icing up the fruits probably has not protected all the fruit. Some of the colder pockets have undoubtedly sustained some fruit damage at this point.

Consumers likely will be paying more for tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers and other produce from Florida.

The creator of a product that captured a generation has died. Donald Goerke was 83. For years he worked for the Campbell Soup Company and Goerke was marketing research director of Campbell's Franco-American line in the early 1960s when his group started dreaming up pasta in shapes that would appeal to kids. He chose the o's. They were marketed with the unforgettable tagline, "The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon, Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs." Later, he helped introduce Chunky Soup, a hearty ready-to-serve soup that stood out from the company's traditional line of condensed soups.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

If you happen to see a honey bee buzzing around that appears to be wearing a backpack don’t worry, you’re not seeing things and you haven’t been transplanted into a Pixar movie, you just happen to be witnessing scientists’ newest technological attempt to find out where in the world bees are disappearing to. What might look like a backpack is actually a teeny tiny microchip designed to work with equipment installed at the entrance of hives in order to record bees’ movement. It’s pretty well common knowledge that bee populations have been on a steady decline over the last twenty years. What isn’t known is why. A continuous decline of beehives around the globe could have a serious impact on the agriculture industry. By USDA calculations the bee population is twenty-five percent lower than it was a mere twenty years ago and with seventy-five percent of our food crops relying on bee pollination the interest in monitoring bee relationships and behavior goes way beyond a mere scientific curiosity; it’s about discovering how to help this tiny creature that helps us in such an enormous way.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.