Just in time for your Labor Day BBQ or picnic, here is a great recipe:

INGREDIENTS:
3 pounds small red potatoes, skinned
1 cup green onions, sliced thinly
4 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons parsley, chopped
2 tablespoons fresh oregano, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
salt and pepper

DIRECTIONS:
Cook potatoes in a large pot of boiling salt water until
tender. Drain and cool. Preheat grill. Cut potatoes in
half and place in a large bowl. Add 2 tablespoons of
olive oil and toss. Grill potatoes over a medium heat for
5 minutes, turning occasionally. Transfer to bowl. Add
remaining ingredients and toss. Season with salt and pepper.

YIELD: 6 servings

TEQUILA COUNTRY
By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY

ZAPOTLANEJO, Mexico — Here in the heart of Mexico’s tequila country, where every town has a distillery and the air smells like sweet fermenting molasses, a sign proudly marks the entrance to Miguel Ramírez’s farm: “Rancho Ramírez: Producer of Agaves.”
But behind the fence, the blue agave plants, the raw ingredient of Mexico’s famous tequila, are getting harder to spot. They are being replaced by row after row of leafy cornstalks.
That switch to abandon slow-growing agave plants to cash in on corn, beans and other food crops selling for record prices worldwide could limit the supply of tequila and drive up the cost of a shot or a margarita.
The move is part of an international trend from Idaho potato farmers to Bolivian coca growers as they cut back on their trademark crops in hopes of making big money on corn and grain.
“Corn is where the money is now,” Ramírez said, admiring his new crop. “I’m going to get out of agave completely.”

Martín Sánchez, director of agriculture for Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council, said the corn gold rush was probably inevitable. White corn in Mexico is selling at its highest in at least a decade — 18 cents a pound this month — while agave sells for as little as 2 cents.
“We don’t have good numbers, but we know it is happening: People are abandoning their fields of agave and flipping over to other crops,” Sánchez said.
In many fields east of Guadalajara, overripe agave plants are turning brown and dropping their spikes. Prices are so low that the plants are not worth harvesting, said Antonio Aceves, a farmer in the town of Tototlán, who cut his agave fields to 25 acres from 74 this year.
Aceves said the seeds of uncertainty in the agave market were sown in 1997, when a frost killed millions of young agave plants. By 2002, agave prices rose to a stunning 80 cents a pound. Distillers such as José Cuervo, Sauza and Herradura were paying up to $100 for a single “pineapple,” or agave heart.
“You practically had to guard your field with an army,” Aceves said. “A lot of people got rich, and suddenly everybody was planting agave.”
The big tequila makers, determined to avoid another shortage, began growing agave on rented land and contracted with brokers to cover any shortfall, said Rafael Aldana, an officer of the farmers’ co-op in the town of El Arenal.
An agave plant takes five to seven years to mature, so farmers now have a glut of agave and no buyers. “Nobody wants them,” Aldana said. “I’ll probably lose them all.”
In a field near the town of Tequila, farm hand Raudel López Sandoval navigated past the needle-sharp spines of an agave and stabbed a pole into the dirt. He grabbed some beans from a plastic container on his waist and tossed them into the hole.
“Beans grow fast,” he said. “You tend an agave for six years, and then the price drops on you or you get hit with a freeze or something. It’s a lot of investment to lose.”
The price of beans in Mexico has risen 60% since December to 59 cents a pound.
At his feed store in Tototlán, Guadalupe Salorio said sales of corn seed went up 20% this spring as agave farmers switched crops.
The rise in the price of food crops is attributable to several factors: people in developing countries like China and India are eating better, high oil prices are increasing the cost of fertilizer, and the United States and Eur ope are diverting corn and vegetable oils into alternative fuels like ethanol.
As of June, world food costs had risen 62% since early 2006, according to Oxford Economic Forecasting, a British consulting firm. The worldwide price of cereals like corn and wheat was up 120%.
Tequila officials, meanwhile, believe there could be an agave shortage on the horizon, Sánchez said.
“When the price of agave is low, people get demoralized and abandon their crops,” he said.
During the last agave shortage in 2001-02, some premium tequilas cost a few dollars more a bottle. Some distillers added other types of alcohol to their tequila to stretch supplies. Tequila has to contain only 51% pure agave to carry the name.
Distillers are already preparing for leaner days by stockpiling finished tequila, he said. Some growers have stopped weeding and spraying older agave plants, devoting their attention to younger plants, in case the price bounces back when the agaves mature.
Rafael Murillo is one of the optimists. On a hill outside Tequila, he whacked away weeds around some 3-year-old agave plants.
“The mature agaves are a lost cause,” Murillo said. “But I’m not going to become a corn farmer yet. These little ones still have a future.”
Hawley is Latin America correspondent=2 0for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic.

FROM KOSHER TODAY (MON, AUG 25, 2008)

Rabbinate and restauranteurs against blacklist
Jerusalem…by Idele Ross, KosherToday Israeli Bureau Chief…Jerusalem restaurant owners and the Chief Rabbinate have threatened to sue a rabbinic organization for publishing a controversial report on kashrut supervision in the capital’s kosher restaurants. The Jerusalem Post reported that Kosharot, an organization based in Elon Moreh, compiled a blacklist of dozens of kosher restaurants around Jerusalem that allegedly do not uphold the conditions required by the kashrut supervision of the Jerusalem rabbinate. The Kosharot report alleges that restaurants with normal kosher supervision are in fact only visited by a supervisor three to four times a week. Rabbi Eliyahu Schlesinger, responsible for the kashrut supervision in the Chief Rabbinate, told Post reporter Matthew Wagner that there are serious mistakes in the report. He rejects a number of the charges of the Kosharot investigation, which accuse restaurants of violating a number of the kashrut regulations, especially regarding the employment of non-Jews in the kitchen – a requirement for the rabbinate certification. Moreover, Schlesinger said that the Rabbinate discovered that many of the restaurants mentioned in the report were never visited by anyone from Kosharot. Some sources believe that Kosharot wants to see fewer non-Jews employed in kosher restaurants. A number of Jerusalem restaurateurs are considering legal action against Kosharot. Elon Moreh Chief Rabbi Elyakim Lebanon, president of Kosharot, told the JP that the list was for internal private use only. He said he was sorry it was distributed without context, however, he hoped the public interest would improve the level of kashrut supervision in Jerusalem.

From JTA:

PETA slams N.Y. kapporos ritual

Published: 08/25/2008

An animal rights group is calling for a New York state investigation into kapporos in Brooklyn.

For the second year, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has complained about the High Holidays ritual of swinging a chicken over one’s head, a sin transference ceremony.

In a letter sent Monday to the state agriculture department’s Kosher Law Enforcement division, PETA alleges that thousands of dead chickens were thrown away in dumpsters after the ritual last year in one Brooklyn center.

The letter singles out the kapporos center run in Crown Heights by Rabbi Shea Hecht, and asks the state to investigate whether consumer fraud occurred. Jews who bought chickens for the ritual expected the birds “to be processed for meat that would be distributed as tzedakah,” or charity, the letter states.

Last summer’s complaint to the state and city was more wide ranging, alleging a variety of health and safety violations as well as animal cruelty. It spurred a meeting of more than a dozen rabbis in Brooklyn, and they sent out directives to kapporos centers saying they needed full-time rabbinic supervision.

A related letter was submitted to the Kashrus Information Center, an independent association of more than 100 rabbis that monitors kosher affairs in Brooklyn.

Rabbi Moshe Weiner, the Kashrus center’s rabbinic administrator, told JTA that Hecht’s site and others operated by communal organizations are well run.

While there have been problems in the past from “fly-by-night” kapporos centers, Weiner said proactive steps taken by rabbis last year significantly cut down on such problems.

Some Fruit Juices Decrease Drug Benefits
FROM AOL

(Aug. 20) – Drinking certain types of fruit juice may negate the benefits of some drugs prescribed for serious medical conditions, according to study results announced this week.
Medications for heart disease, cancer and organ transplant rejection and infection could lose their impact if taken with grapefruit, apple or orange juices, the study found.
Grapefruit are loaded into a container before being trucked to a juice factory
David Silverman, Getty Images

If you like the juice made from grapefruit, you should be careful not to drink it when taking certain medications. A new study finds that grapefruit and certain other kinds of fruit juice can block absorption of drugs, rendering them less effective.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said David G. Bailey, a professor of clinical pharmacology with the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, who led the study presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. “I’m sure we’ll find more and more drugs that are affected this way.”
The culprit appears to be naringin, which gives grapefruit its sour taste and is also found in orange and apple juice, Bailey said. Naringin appears to block the process in which drugs move from the small intestine into the blood stream. That reduces a drug’s absorption — and its benefits.
Bailey conducted a study with healthy volunteers who took an antihistamine, fexofenadine, used to fight allergies. The participants took the medication with water, with water laced with naringin and with grapefruit juice. Those who drank juice absorbed half as much medication into their systems as those who took the drug with water.
Bailey said the three juices lowered the absorption of the following:
- Etoposide, an anticancer agent
- Certain beta blockers (atenolol, celiprolol, talinolol) used to treat high blood pressure and prevent heart attacks
- Cyclosporine, a drug taken to prevent rejection of transplanted organs
- Certain antibiotics (ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin, itraconazole).
A study Bailey conducted with colleagues two decades ago found that grapefruit juice had the opposite effect on a certain drug — felodipine, a high-blood-pressure medication. Drinking the juice with the medication increased the absorption rate, threatening to create toxic levels of ingestion.
Since then, scientists have identified almost 50 drugs that can be dangerously enhanced by grapefruit juice. Some prescriptions now sport labels that warn against mixing the medicine and grapefruits or grapefruit juice.
To be safe, Bailey recommends taking most medications with water. He said patients should consult with their doctor or pharmacist before taking drugs with juice.
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