Better French Fries & Lyme Disease

Better French Fries & Lyme Disease plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

I have a weakness when it comes to food. Different types of fried potatoes. There have been many attempts to make really crisp fries with a minimum of oil to make them healthier. Now new research is showing some promise when it comes to the use of infrared heat. USDA researcher Zhongli Pan.

PAN: We could use the heat to pretreat the fry. Once the barriers are produced when the fries are fried they absorb less oil.

Less oil absorbed of course means a better product with less oil. Can’t wait to try it.

Anyone who frequents the out doors is familiar with ticks and deer ticks can mean Lyme disease. Now the CDC says that upwards of 300-thousand people may have the disease. That is 10 times more than previously thought. Why? Because most cases are never reported by doctors. Symptoms include a fever, headache and fatigue and sometimes a telltale rash that looks like a bull's-eye centered on the tick bite. Most people recover with antibiotics. If left untreated, the infection can cause arthritis and more severe problems.

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

Slap the Beatles’ songs “Here Comes the Sun” and the “Taxman” together and you’ll have pretty good idea of what’s going on in Arizona this summer. Last month Arizona’s largest electric utility, Arizona Public Service, announced a new proposal to start charging solar paneled homeowners a “fee” of up to $100 a month to sell clean power back to the grid. APS refers to it as a “convenience charge”. This plan to drastically change net-metering, which is the way homeowners with solar paneled rooftops sell their excess power back to the grid, would in essence negate the economic attractiveness of having rooftop solar panels. So why does a state that certainly isn’t lacking in sunshine suddenly decide to “tax” solar power? Well, perhaps APS has read the “writing on the wall” and is trying a desperate attempt to ward off the eventuality of their own slow demise. The more popular and affordable and widespread the use of solar power becomes for the average consumer, the more it equates to lost sales for the electric utilities. For now, instead of taxing net-metering, perhaps electric utilities should focus on providing electricity at a rate that’s competitive and affordable.

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