The White House

The First Lady at the White House garden

​As part of her "Let's Move!" nationwide health campaign for fitness and healthier food, First Lady Michelle Obama will be making a stop in Inglewood today -- the second day of her two-day visit to Los Angeles. She'll speak to supporters at a future site for a Northgate Gonzalez Market.

The "Let's Move!" campaign provides California with a $264 million FreshWorks Fund to help finance grocery businesses in areas underserved by traditional supermarkets.
She'll speak on the progress of the market and the importance in food development projects like it in underprivileged communities.

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Flickr/WayTru

Six EU countries have outlawed genetically modified corn.

​Occupy cornfields! Support is growing for a petition calling for the ouster of Michael Taylor, a senior adviser for the FDA who formerly served as vice president of Monsanto, the controversial agricultural multinational at the forefront of genetically modified foods, the Washington Post reports. President Obama took a lot of flak when he appointed Taylor to the position three years ago. As the second highest-ranking official at the FDA, Taylor is responsible for implementing the day-to-day policies that govern food safety laws in the U.S.

Tipping off the current anti-Taylor campaign is his alleged practice of going after small raw-milk producers, including the Amish, while letting large factory farms responsible for huge food-borne illness outbreaks go scot-free. As an example, activists cite the fact that Iowa agribusinessman Jack DeCoster -- who was responsible for the more than 500 million salmonella-tainted eggs that were recalled in 2010 -- has not been fined or arrested by the FDA, while Amish dairy farmers have been subjected to yearlong stings and hauled away in handcuffs.

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Flickr/Calgary Reviews

A 10-piece serving of McNuggets packs 470 calories, 270 of those pure fat.

​McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are causing all sorts of mayhem lately. First there was the woman who allegedly tried to trade sex for McNuggets (no word on what kind of dipping sauce she wanted). Now, a British teenager has collapsed after a lifetime of eating McNuggets, and only McNuggets.

According to the Daily Mail, 17-year-old factory worker Stacey Irvine of Castle Vale, Birmingham, has consumed no food items other than McNuggets since the time she could chew food (age 2). (Well, apparently Irvine also eats French fries, and has tried toast and potato chips once or twice.) She says she has never tasted fresh fruit or vegetables.

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Flickr/superiphi

​Did cavemen sit around the fire stuffing their hairy faces with popcorn? After analyzing recently unearthed ancient corncobs, researchers say people in what's now Peru were eating popcorn 2,000 years earlier than previously thought -- up to 6,700 years ago, National Geographic reports.

Previously, evidence of corn as food before about 5,000 years ago had come from only microscopic remains that didn't reveal exactly what kind of corn was being eaten. Using radiocarbon dating and other tests to examine the newfound corncobs -- along with husks, tassels and stalks -- scientists determined that the oldest cobs were popcorn. The really, really stale corn remains were unearthed at the Paredones and Huaca Prieta archeological sites on Peru's northern coast.

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Yahoo Sports

Marshawn Lynch enjoying some Skittles on the sideline

​The toughest, most bruising running back in the NFL has been fined $10,000 for wearing Skittles shoes. Nicknamed "Beast Mode," Marshawn Lynch is most widely known for running through eight defenders in a 67 yard touchdown run to beat the Saints in the playoffs last year. The Seattle Seahawks player also has an obsession with Skittles candy, dating back to high school when his mom gave him a bag of Skittles before each game. Only now, his love of the rainbow-colored candy has gotten him in trouble with the league.

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Miami Herald/Mike Jachles

Passion for Pastry's Althea Hickman with the $3,000 cake that was rejected and ultimately left unpaid.

​Only the best for the King. So went the line of thinking when a $3,000 birthday cake was deemed unworthy of Miami Heat basketball player LeBron James and promptly discarded. And now no one's left to pick up the tab.

The Miami Herald reports that Boca Raton baker Alethea Hickman had received a frantic, all-caps e-mail requesting a cake two days before James' birthday party, to be held at the Shelbourne South Beach hotel. The hotel staff asked Hickman to waive the cost of the cake in exchange for the free publicity. After all, she'd be making the birthday cake for the most talented basketball player on the planet. But when Hickman checked online the day after hand-delivering her cake to the party, she saw that the cake featured in photos with James was ivory, decorated with sparklers and it definitely wasn't hers.

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jgarbee

Fresh & Easy Shopping Bag

​Fresh & Easy is closing seven Southern California stores citing sluggish sales, reports the Los Angeles Times. Not that it's much of a dent in the El Segundo-based company's 184 retail grocery outlets in California, Arizona and Nevada, as the company is reportedly rolling out two dozen more stores in the coming months throughout L.A. and Orange County.

What's more interesting is that retail food consultant Jim Hertel attributes part of the struggles to American versus British produce culture clashes (Fresh & Easy is a subsidiary of Tesco, a British retail company). At Fresh & Easy, the produce is all wrapped in cellophane, reportedly to preserve freshness. Hertel says that Americans consider plastic-wrapped food less fresh (though Trader Joe's seems to have somehow surmounted their suffocating produce issues). And perhaps more culturally significant, we prefer to squeeze our tomatoes before buying them.

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​If you've been stockpiling Twinkies since childhood, it's time to load up even more. And no, not because they're having a Hoarders casting call. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Hostess Brands Inc., the maker of Twinkies (and Wonder Bread, if you fetishize that too) is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, possibly as soon as this week.

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Flickr/Suede Bicycle

Panda Express chow mein

​If you have issues with your Kung Pao chicken ending up on your shirt as often as it does in your stomach -- eating while driving being as problematic as texting while driving -- then this news should make you pretty happy. The folks who brought you Panda Express, the Rosemead-based Chinese fast food empire, have announced that they're opening a chain of dry cleaning stores. Consider it the transitive property of fast food.

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R.E.~/Flickr

Cupcakes were one of the most Googled terms of 2011

​Much to our chagrin, the cupcake is a trend that just won't die: according to Google's 2011 Year-End Zeitgeist, cupcakes were one of the most popular Food and Drink search terms of the year. Other fascinating revelations about our food-related search engine habits: everyone in the world was constantly on the hunt for pizza, and Canadians sure do love making pork tenderloins.

As it has done every year since 2001, Google analyzed the billions of the terms that we users typed into its search box in 2011, filtered out spam and constructed "lists that best reflects the spirit of the times." Most of the search terms are ranked by popularity, though a few lists reflect the "fastest rising" searches - that is, the most popular queries in a particular category are compared to their popularity last year, then ranked based on their increase in search volume.

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