Most of us don’t reach for that gnarled (多节的) carrots when selecting our produce at the local supermarket. That’s exactly why Americans waste up to 40% of eatable food every year. This unbelievable number has caused the “ugly food” movement, and inspired many companies to sell misshapen fruit and vegetables to consumers, rather than throw them in the trash.

One San Francisco organization is taking a unique approach to this idea. The Salvage Supperclub hosts fancy dinners inside dumper truck (自卸车) where they serve dishes entirely prepared with food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Josh Treuhaft, founder of these ugly food dinners, originally came up with the idea to make people realize America’s food waste problem. “There is undeveloped possibility that their food is going to waste for some reason, not to their own fault,” he told Seeker’s Laura Ling.

Treuhaft isn’t alone in his effort to reduce America’s food waste. A Change.org last year called for Whole Foods to become part of the ugly food movement. They sold misshapen fruit and vegetables in Northern California stores.

Selling imperfect produce is still relatively rare right now, which can be partially due to a supply issue rather than a lack of willing participants. Raley’s, a Sacramento-based grocery chain, started an ugly food pilot program called “Real Good”, but discontinued it after 90 days saying they had “some challenges getting the product”. A grower might have large amounts of ugly produce one year due to terrible weather, but much less the next year if the weather has been more ideal. Harvests constantly vary and retailers are more likely to buy ugly produce in large number rather than just a few pounds at a time.

This is why organizations like Imperfect Produce and Salvage Supperclub are playing an important role in the prevention of food waste. Salvage Supperclub takes it a step further by not only buying the ugly produce, but turning it into a good dining experience as well.

There is no such thing as a "safe" level of drinking, with increased consumption of alcohol associated with poorer brain health, according to a new study.

In an observational study, researchers from the University of Oxford studied the relationship between the self-reported alcohol intake（摄入量）of some 25,000 people in the UK, and their brain scans. The researchers noted that drinking had an effect on the brain's gray matter—regions in the brain that make up "important bits where information is processed," according to lead author Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher at Oxford.

"The more people drank, the less the volume of their gray matter," Topiwala said via email. "Brain volume（容量）reduces with age and more severely with dementia（痴呆）. Smaller brain volume also predicts worse performance on memory testing," she explained. "While alcohol only made a small contribution to this（0.8%）, it was a greater contribution than other 'changeable' risk factors," she said, explaining that changeable risk factors are "ones you can do something about, in contrast to aging."

The team also investigated whether certain drinking patterns, beverage（饮料）types and other health conditions made a difference to the impact of alcohol on brain health. They found that there was no "safe" level of drinking—meaning that consuming any amount of alcohol was worse than not drinking it. They also found no evidence that the type of drink—such as wine, spirits or beer—affected the harm done to the brain.

However, certain characteristics, such as high blood pressure, obesity or binge -drinking（酗酒）, could put people at higher risk, researchers added.

When restaurants first shut down early in the pandemic, Americans raided grocery stores. They started cooking more at home — and, probably, producing more leftovers. Those leftovers can be a convenient future meal — but they’ve got a dark side, too.

“There’s a tendency that if you put an item on a plate that’s a leftover, there’s a higher probability that you’re not going to fully consume that item. And so it’s probably going to waste.”

With his colleagues, Brian Roe, an applied economist at the Ohio State University, recently studied leftovers and food waste by tracking the eating habits of 18 men and women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The participants tracked what they ate using an iPhone app. And during the week-long study, the study subjects totally piled 1,200 different foods on their plates.

After analyzing what got eaten, saved or thrown away, the researchers found that leftovers were more likely to be picked at and not fully eaten — a finding we can all probably identify with.

But they also observed that leftovers — perhaps due to being older and less fresh — directed diners’ attention to the other, more novel items on their plate, which brings up an interesting possible strategy to get people to eat their veggies.

“I guess if you have an item that you don’t eat normally and you’re trying to get people to eat it, perhaps surrounding it with leftovers is a way to make them focus on the newest item on the plate.”

Overall, Roe says one bigger lesson appeared on how to avoid throwing food into the dustbin.

“For us, the real take-home here was: all else equal, choose a smaller meal, and you’re less likely to generate leftovers. And that’s a good thing because leftovers, all else equal, tend to be wasted more often.

“I’m guilty of this myself: we have things left over from last Thanksgiving still sitting in our freezer. And I know people who’ve moved with frozen items before — without ever getting around to eating them.”