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Why you might need to find a new favorite ice cream flavor

Why you might need to find a new favorite ice cream flavor

Vanilla ice cream is the Old Faithful of the frozen treat world. Not only is it America’s favorite flavor, but it’s an essential part of floats, splits, Blizzards, and apple pie a la mode. So why then, is this beloved summer scoop starting to disappear from shop menus? Reuters reported, a March 2018 cyclone in Madagascar, the country that harvests 80 percent of the world’s vanilla, has damaged plantations. About 30 percent of the crop was estimated to be lost, but the true extent of the damage won’t be known until harvest time in July. A shortage of the popular spice led to a crippling prices last year, and with the new crop damage, those prices are estimated to continue this summer. Costs of vanilla pods have risen by up to 500 percent. The valuable commodity sold for around $20 a kg (about 2 pounds) in 2010, but now goes for around $500 a kg…

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Chocolate on track to be extinct in 40 years, experts say

Chocolate on track to be extinct in 40 years, experts say U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

For chocolate lovers, there’s simply no substitute. Unfortunately, the future of the one and only source of that delicious brown concoction, the cocoa bean, is in danger. Thankfully, scientists are working to avoid a world, in our own lifetime, in which chocolate goes extinct. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cacao plants are expected to go extinct by 2050 due to globally rising temperatures and drier weather patterns in the region the plants are grown. Cacao plants already grow in a precarious part of the planet. They only succeed in a narrow strip of rainforested land, found about 20 degrees north and south of the equator. Temperatures here stay relatively constant, no matter the season. More than half of the world’s chocolate now comes from just two countries — Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. But the temperatures in these countries are projected to rise nearly 4º Fahrenheit by 2050…

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Use plastic bags in Kenya and get time in prison

Use plastic bags in Kenya and get time in prisonAP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim

If you lived in Kenya, you’d think twice before heading to the store without your stack of reusable shopping bags. The East African nation has made a big push for its citizens to reduce or eliminate plastic bag usage by making the production, sale or use of any single-use plastic bags punishable by four years in jail or up to a $38,000 fine. More than 40 other countries already have similar laws prohibiting or taxing plastic bag users including China, Rwanda and the United Kingdom. One major problem with the plastic bags is they take lots of energy and oil to produce, but are only used once before ending up in a landfill. Since plastics can’t biodegrade, they will last centuries underground. Some estimates say they can take between 500 and 1,000 years to break down. A third of all plastic bags are also ending up in our oceans. The bags are broken down into micro plastics…

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