BLAME THE WEATHER: BITS & PIECES
News briefs on increasing cloudy days in the United States, growing mushrooms in railway tunnels, aluminum utensils and organic food, H.J. Heinz Company refuses crops treated by potential dangerous pesticides.
July/August 1987
By the Mother Earth News editors
Issue # 106 - July/August 1987
RELATED CONTENT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY R.J. KAUFMAN
If your days don't seem as sunny and bright as they used to be, don't blame your attitude—it's the weather. A recent study indicates that the country is becoming cloudier. Using U.S. National Weather Service data, William L. Seaver of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and James E. Lee of the MITRE Corporation compared the number of cloudless days in 45 U.S. cities during two periods, 1900-1936 and 1950-1982. All but one of the cities, they found, had more sunny days during the first half of the century than during the second half. St. Louis dropped from 7.2 to 4.7 cloudless days per month, Washington, D.C., went from 5.3 to 4.4 sunny days and Los Angeles lost nearly three days of sun per month—from 10 cloudless days to 7.6. Fort Worth, Texas, showed an "insignificant" increase in sunny days: from 7.4 to 7.5. Climatologists don't know for sure why the change is occurring. One theory suggests that jet contrails are "seeding" the skies, encouraging condensation and cloud formation. Another blames air pollutant particles for creating the seeding effect. And a third theory holds that the polar weather front has been shifting southward and is bringing in more clouds.
Tunnel Vision
In an attempt to find ways to augment its otherwise dwindling income, Japan National Railways has discovered that old railway tunnels are perfect for growing mushrooms. The abandoned tunnels—dark, moist and stable in temperature—offer ideal conditions for growing shimeji mushrooms, popular in Japan. The company is turning the cast-off caverns into profitable fungus farms.
Natural-foods cooks have long scorned aluminum utensils, saying that the metal binds with certain minerals—such as phosphorus and calcium—and robs foods of nutritive value. Recent evidence linking aluminum with Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders has added to their case, particularly in light of studies proving that aluminum compounds can be released from pots and pans during cooking. Now more fuel has been added to the fire: Experiments indicate that the leaching process is "dramatically enhanced" by water containing fluo-ride, at levels normally used in municipal fluoridation. In a letter published in Nature magazine, scientists report that water containing one pan per million (ppm) of fluoride frees nearly 200 ppm of aluminum when boiled 10 minutes in aluminum utensils— that's 1,000 times the amount of aluminum released in nonfluoridated water. Prolonged boiling raises aluminum concentrations even higher, to about 600 ppm.
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