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The Canadian Food Inspection Agency wants to know what people think about the size of canned, cubed, white potatoes -- but if you want to know exactly who asked for the change or why this is a priority exercise, you're out of luck. CFIA launched a month-long consultation on Jan. 21 after saying it had received a request from "industry" to change the maximum allowed size of diced, canned potatoes from 10 millimetres to 20 millimetres. "Yes, we care about all potatoes -- big and small," The tweet was met with great delight by some Twitter users who jumped at...

CONSUMER REPORTS — Sales of air fryers are hot. People love the idea of crispy, fried food that’s supposed to be a bit healthier because very little oil is used. But what if you don’t have an air fryer? Consumer Reports say chances are you can still air-fry home without spending money or cluttering up your countertop with a new appliance. So what’s the deal with air fryers? These popular countertop cookers turn out chicken wings, french fries, shrimp, and other traditionally fried foods without using a lot of oil. You can spend $50 to $300 for one. The good...

A forgotten Famine burial site inside the grounds of a former workhouse in Kilkenny has yielded the remains of nearly 1,000 people, and a wealth of knowledge about how they lived and how they died. AN GORTA MÓR, the Great Hunger, was a time of terrible human drama as Ireland’s poor struggled to survive the ravages of famine and disease. The chance discovery of a Famine-period burial ground in Kilkenny city now helps to tell their story,... Some one million people died and were buried as conditions and finance allowed, with the poorest ending up in burial grounds used by...

LIMA (Reuters) - As wheat and rice prices surge, the humble potato -- long derided as a boring tuber prone to making you fat -- is being rediscovered as a nutritious crop that could cheaply feed an increasingly hungry world. Potatoes, which are native to Peru, can be grown at almost any elevation or climate: from the barren, frigid slopes of the Andes Mountains to the tropical flatlands of Asia. They require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days, and can yield between two and four times more food per hectare than wheat or rice. "The shocks...

THE feast of Ireland’s patron saint has always been an occasion for saluting the beautiful land “where the praties grow,” but it’s also a time to look again at the disaster that established around the world the Irish communities that today celebrate St. Patrick’s Day: the Great Potato Famine of 1845-6. In its wake, the Irish left the old country, with more than half a million settling in United States. The famine and the migrations changed Irish and American history, of course, but they drastically changed Britain too. Americans may think of the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops, late...

Five potato workers arrested BANGOR - Five Spanish-speaking men who apparently were harvesting potatoes in Aroostook County appeared Monday in federal court on charges of possessing false identification documents. Each man had fake Social Security cards and fake resident alien cards, according to court documents. Julio Cesar Erazo, 45, Roberto Erazo-Santos, 44, and Carlos Ernesto Vasquez-Espana, 48, all of El Salvador, and Jose Alfonso Vasquez-Rodiguez, 25, and Fernando Garcia, 38, both of Honduras, appeared Monday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Margaret Kravchuk. If convicted, they each face up to one year in prison, a $250,000 fine and eventual deportation. They were...