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For several years now, the food-service company Bon Appétit has been celebrating Earth Day with an event dubbed Low Carbon Diet Day. The idea is to try to reduce your food's carbon footprint by buying, preparing, and eating locally or more efficiently produced food.

This year, the company generated carbon-friendly recipes: an almond-fruit smoothie, a cheeseless pizza, and an edamame burger with carrot-peel topping. (Almonds, for example, may not be local to where you live, but the production of almond milk generates fewer greenhouse gases than cow’s milk.) Check ‘em out!

The pregnancy and booze battles

Conflicting advice

By Culinate staff

It’s bad. It’s not so bad. Who knows?

Corn, corn, everywhere

It ain’t going away

By Culinate staff

Two looks at our dependence on corn.

Paper over pixels

Why cookbooks are (sometimes) better

By Culinate staff

Especially when the power’s out.

Smelly cells

The entire body can respond to odors

By Culinate staff

From the cutting edge of science comes this wacky scent report: Cells throughout our bodies have the same odor receptors as those in our noses.

“It opens the door to questions about whether the heart, for instance, ‘smells’ that fresh-brewed cup of coffee or cinnamon bun,” reported the website Science Daily.

The research field even has a name: sensomics, which “focuses on understanding exactly how the mouth and the nose sense key aroma, taste and texture compounds in foods, especially comfort foods like chocolate and roasted coffee.”

The beef-stroganoff affair

Yvonne Brill’s obituary goes viral

By Culinate staff

What do you want to be remembered for? Your job, or your cooking?

Bacterial news flashes

From NPR’s food blog, The Salt

By Culinate staff

In your freezer, on your plants, and in your meat.

The do-gooders

Grocery stores and food forests

By Culinate staff

Wendell Pierce sells produce in New Orleans, and the city of Seattle plants edibles.

Food & drink, again

The NY Times speeds up its annual ritual

By Culinate staff

Seems like it was only yesterday that we were flipping through the pages of the New York Times’ annual Food & Drink issue. (Actually, it was last October.) But really: yesterday, it turned up again.

The April 7 issue offered a sprinkling of articles about food politics: Mark Bittman and his take on healthful fast food, Camas Davis and her Portland Meat Collective, and Bill Heavey and his efforts to hunt, kill, and cook his own dinner.

The rest of the issue, however, followed glossy magazine pattern: restaurants and chefs, bars and drinks, trendy travel destinations, and other foodie favorites. The best of these is an esoteric profile of a maker of high-end spice blends that gives an entertaining history of the spice trade.

Kickstarting your food project

Using the Web to raise dough

By Culinate staff

Lately, we’ve noticed, a number of Culinate contributors have popped up on Kickstarter, raising funds for various projects. Former blogger Sarah Gilbert pulled in funding for her parenting magazine, Stealing Time. Former columnist Matthew Amster-Burton got his latest book project, a memoir about eating in Japan, greenlighted via the site.

Now contributor Camas Davis is hooking dough to replicate her Portland Meat Collective across the nation. (And yes, we here at Culinate have been happy to contribute to all of these endeavors.)

Even if most Kickstarter projects focus on tech products, the site’s Food category is a busy one, with hopefuls plugging everything from homemade sauce to beer to cookbooks to urban-farming projects. Entrepreneurs beware, however; not every project gets funded, of course, including a recent attempt at drumming up cash for Food Politic magazine.

No foolin’

Maple-tree technology

By Culinate staff

Back in 2005, National Public Radio ran a now-classic April Fool’s news story about how New England's untapped maple trees were exploding.

What’s not a joke, however, is the fact that climate change is shrinking the sugaring-off season. So it was interesting to read in the New York Times about high-tech ways to get more from maples:

As a result, United States maple syrup production hit a new high in 2011. In Vermont, the top-producing state, sap yield per tap has risen over the past decade.

As for that bacon-flavored mouthwash to go with your pancakes? That’s one of this year's fooled-ya gags.