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This farmer, pouring maple sap into his pail near Wilmington, Vt., in 1954, may have turned the dregs of the season's sap into beer.

Robert F. Sisson/National Geographic/Getty Images

This farmer, pouring maple sap into his pail near Wilmington, Vt., in 1954, may have turned the dregs of the season's sap into beer.

In Vermont, the last sap in the spring maple sugaring season isn't considered good for much. It's too dark and strong to use for commercial maple syrup — people tend to like the light and clear stuff.

But long ago, that late season sap was used in a potent dark beer that offered some cool relief to farmers when the hay was cut in the heat of summer.

Now some local microbreweries are bringing the historic drink back from extinction.

It doesn't take a transcontinental flight to end up out of sync with your body clock. It might just be that you stay up too late.

According to German researcher Till Roenneberg, the disconnect between our social calendars and our biological clocks is creating a kind of jet lag — he's dubbed it "social jet lag."

And the consequence? Expanding waistlines. "The larger the discrepancy between social time and what your biological clock tells you to do, the more likely it is you are [overweight or obese]," Roenneberg tells The Salt.

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Enrique Vallejo serves soup at the Amaikak Bat txoko in San Sebastian.

Deena Prichep for NPR

Enrique Vallejo serves soup at the Amaikak Bat txoko in San Sebastian.

Spring crops like asparagus and sorrel are poking up all over the hemisphere. And in the autonomous region of Northern Spain known as Basque Country, people are taking that spring harvest to a txoko.

Txokos are usually translated as "gastronomic societies;" they're distinctly Basque members-only kitchens and dining halls, where people cook with their friends (often well into the night), keeping Basque recipes, language and culture alive. There are roughly two million people in the Basque Country and over 1,000 txokos, pronounced "cho-kos."

From the outside, the txoko I visited on a recent trip to San Sebastian, called Amaikak Bat, looked like an ordinary, stone-walled European restaurant. But inside, it was a bustling food-centered social club, somewhere between a dinner party and a fraternal lodge.

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Protesters demonstrate against the production of genetically modified food in front of a Monsanto facility in Davis, Calif.

Randall Benton/MCT /Landov

Protesters demonstrate against the production of genetically modified food in front of a Monsanto facility in Davis, Calif.

When Californians go to the polls in November, they will very likely have the chance to make California the first state in the nation to require labeling of genetically engineered food. That's according to California Right to Know, which filed a petition to force a statewide vote.

And the group is pretty confident it will succeed. "Polls show that nine out of ten California voters agree that they want labeling," Stacy Melkam, spokeswoman for the group, tells The Salt.

But a new analysis of the labeling initiative suggests that if it passes, it would create a complex mandate for food companies that may make it harder — not easier — for consumers to figure out what's really in their food. That's because the initiative muddies the definition of a "natural" food.

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A fishmonger prepares her wares at the Sydney Fish Market.

Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

A fishmonger prepares her wares at the Sydney Fish Market.

Travel often brings the unexpected. But I was unprepared to find some of the best food I've ever eaten in Australia.

On a recent trip, we stopped at a café for lunch. An Australian woman we had seen earlier at a sheep dairy ran over and recommended the marron salad. "What is marron?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "you know what yabbies are."

Toto, we're not in Kansas any more. We are in Oz — which is what the locals call Australia. And bad British food is no longer the norm.

Is black pepper the new secret weapon against fat? A recent paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry claims that the piperine, an ingredient in black pepper, has the power to stop the body from making new fat cells, and could be used to treat obesity.

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Can you fight fat with a spoonful of these?

iStockphoto.com

Can you fight fat with a spoonful of these?

Now before you run out and buy yourself a pepper grinder and a pint of ice cream, it's worth noting that the studies were done on cells grown in a petri dish. And not even human cells — mouse cells — loaded with concentrations of piperine 100 times higher than what one might ever achieve in the bloodstream.

"That's not to say that pepper might not have some really interesting effects," Michael Jensen, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic, tells The Salt.

When you listen to All Things Considered host Melissa Block's story about Thomas Jefferson's garden, you'll hear how he cared about putting peas on the table and sharing seeds with his friends. He also set loftier goals for his vegetable garden: Monticello's south-facing expanse was a living laboratory for a lifelong tinkerer and almost obsessive record keeper. Jefferson was, in many ways, a crop scientist.

After Jefferson retired from public life to his beloved Virginia hilltop plantation, the garden "served as a sort of this experimental testing lab where he'd try new vegetables he sought out from around the globe," says Peter Hatch, the estate's head gardener. Hatch recently wrote a book about Jefferson's garden and its history called A Rich Spot of Earth.