Antique apples
Spend a morning walking through Poverty Lane Orchards with Steve Wood, and you'll come to believe that apple trees grow stories as well as fruit.

Many popular apples - such as Red Delicious - have been cultivated for over 100 years. However, "antique" commonly refers to apples which are no longer grown commercially.

Use this guide to pick a peck of old-variety apples.

Bird Feeding
Bird feeding guide: Birds begin to eat early in the day. Fill your feeder before you go to bed at night so that there is plenty of food for those cold little bodies in the morning.

Coffee
Shade-grown coffee is grown in the understory of ecologically diverse native forest. This is the traditional way of growing coffee. In fact, coffee plants naturally need only four or five hours of sun per day.

Growing coffee. The coffee harvest happens over a 15-day period. Usually, each harvest consists of three passes through the "cafetal," or coffee field. The first two pickings are of red cherries only, and the final picking is of any remaining beans, green or red.

Co-op Garden Programs
Volunteers from the Co-op community tend the Harvest Partners Garden. Working together, they raise fresh summer vegetables to donate to local food pantries.

Community Garden plots are available to Co-op members for a modest fee. The garden has twenty plots, each measuring 20 feet square.

Foot and Mouth Disease and Mad Cow Disease
Americans are currently hearing about two very different diseases affecting cattle in Europe: Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease. While the end result for affected animals and their herd-mates is similar – slaughter and cremation – the two diseases pose different threats to human consumers.

Genetically-Engineered Food
GE Sleuth Handbook Review
Many consumers want to avoid genetically engineered (GE) food. They find this increasingly hard for two reasons: the Food and Drug Administration has not mandated that GE foods be labeled, and the number of genetically engineered foods is increasing. Posted 5.28.01

"GE Food and the New Legislation Session." Posted 1.08.01.

"Answering GE Food Questions." Originally published in the August 2000 issue of the Co-op News.

"GE Foods One Year After the Terminator." Originally published in the April 2000 issue of the Co-op News.

"Biotechnology Panel Discussion Reaps High-Yield Education." Originally published in the November 2000 issue of the Co-op News.

"Do Consumers Deserve to Know?" Originally published in the November 2000 issue of the Co-op News.

"Seeds of Frightening Change." Originally published in the October 1999 issue of the Co-op News.

Organic Foods
For those who wish to make a gradual change toward eating more organic foods, a list published by the non-profit organization Mothers and Others for a Liveable Planet may be of assistance.

Year-round, the Co-op Food Stores offer a wide variety of organic products in the produce, dairy, meat, bin bulk, grocery, frozen, beverage, and health and beauty aids departments.

Plastics
Plastics, Food, and Personal Health
The potentially-damaging effect of some plastics on human health has again come into the news.

rBGH
Co-op Dairy Suppliers and Bovine Growth Hormone
A list of which dairy products at the Co-op do or do not contain synthetic bovine-growth hormone (rBGH). Status as of April 2001. Updated yearly

Drinking milk is as American as apple pie. But the introduction of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has raised questions in some consumers’ minds.