Eliza Barclay

When we picture hungry Americans, we may see the faces of children, or single moms. But many of the people who struggle to fill their bellies are beyond age 65. Some of them are even malnourished, a condition that sets them up for all kinds of other health risks, like ...

A bittersweet YouTube video is making the rounds this week showing cacao farmers — some of the most impoverished in the world — enjoying chocolate for the very first time.

"Frankly, I do not know what one makes from cocoa beans," farmer N'Da Alphonse tells Selay Marius Kouassi, a ...

Let me guess how you feel about your urine: Get that smelly stuff away from me as fast as possible?

A small group of environmentalists in Vermont isn't as squeamish. Instead of flushing their pee down the drain, they're collecting it with special toilets that separate No. 1 and No. ...

While testing whether a dash of yeast could keep you from getting drunk, we discovered that it's pretty entertaining — and revealing — to track your blood alcohol while drinking.

Using a device to test blood-alcohol levels, we watched the alcohol in our bodies soar as we drank two ...

You can thank a very large, and very strange, machine called a puffing gun for all those Cheerios you crunched on as a kid.

And if all goes according to plan, you'll be able to see one of those guns, patented in 1939 to force air into grains so they ...

"The ordinary method of cutting out a wedge is very faulty," wrote Sir Francis Galton, a British mathematician, in a 1906 letter to the journal Nature concerning the scientific principles of cake-cutting.

More than a century later, cake lovers might finally be ready to face this truth.

A video ...

We get a little suspicious when we hear the claims that it's possible to get rid of the gunk that accumulates in our cells by doing a cleanse with "clean" foods.

But what if some foods actually do help detox the body?

The results of a recent clinical trial ...

After a Hollywood environmentalist told us the answer to this question was no, we posed it to the followers of the @NPRFood Twitter account. We got a big — and diverse — response.

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's writings reveal the mind of a soldier who struggled with his presence in Afghanistan.

The writings were obtained by The Washington Post, which also reported, citing Bergdahl's friends, that he had previously been discharged by the Coast Guard for psychological reasons.

Bergdahl was freed by ...

When it comes to choosing between sodas and juices in the beverage aisle, the juice industry has long benefited from a health halo.

We know that juice comes from fruit, while soda is artificial. In particular, the sugars in juice seem more "natural" than high fructose corn syrup — the ...

As we've been reporting, the quest to get more fruits, vegetables and whole grains into public schools has once again gotten political.

But in spite of the new, federal standards for school nutrition, "changing a school lunch cafeteria, especially those that participate in the National School Lunch Program, ...

If you're a scientist and you work for a pest control company, you're used to thinking about bugs as the enemy you're trained to kill.

Now try putting one in your mouth.

It took some mental rearranging for Nancy Troyano, an entomologist for Ehrlich Pest Control. But on Wednesday she ...

On American Indian reservations, the traditional diet of wild plants and game for food is increasingly being replaced with a far less healthful diet of predominantly high-carb, high-sugar foods.

Along the way, obesity and type 2 diabetes rates have soared. At nearly 16 percent, American Indians and Alaska Natives have ...

As late-night host Jimmy Kimmel so cleverly captured in a recent segment, some people on the gluten-free bandwagon don't know much about gluten, or why, precisely, they should avoid it. (For the record, gluten is a protein found in some cereal grains, including wheat and rye.)

Uncertainty about the ...

Renee Montagne talks to Dan Barber about his new book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. Barber advocates eating a wider variety of foods that better support the land.

When we did our egg taste test back in April, comparing chicken, quail, duck and goose, I confessed to how partial I've become to duck eggs. Ever since I tasted them at Abounding Harvest Mountain Farm in Los Gatos, Calif., in March, I've been extolling their custardy texture ...

If you're hunting for limes to squeeze into margaritas or to stir into guacamole for your Cinco de Mayo celebration Monday, be prepared for sticker shock, empty shelves, or both.

That lime shortage we mentioned back in March hasn't abated much. While the price has dropped a bit from ...

How do you like them apples, apricots, blueberries, almonds and peaches? They all depend on bees for pollination.

But over the last several years, a massive number of bee colonies have died, putting beekeepers, farmers and scientists in a bit of a panic.

They've come up with a lot of ...

The chicken clearly rules the roost of American egg production. Our hens laid 95.2 billion eggs in 2013, according to government figures. And we'll be awash in them Easter weekend: beating them into yolk-laden desserts, hiding them in backyards for small hunters and gobbling candy made in ...

Why would anyone put her family of four through a radical food experiment that would deprive her children of Halloween candy and chocolate-chip cookies?

A cynic who happens upon Eve Schaub's recently published book, Year Of No Sugar, might say that banning sugar from your home for a year to ...