Brix is a measure of the soluble solids in the juice of a fruit, vegetable, or any liquid. In a fruit the soluble solids are mostly sugars but there are other things like salts and minerals. In fruits and vegetables higher brix usually mean they will taste sweeter. In vegetables some people equate higher brix with a more nutrient dense food. I guess you could say the same for fruits. But I'm more interested in taste and figure I eat enough that nutrient density is just a side benefit if anything.

There were early pears developed by monks but nearly all the varieties still around today were bred in the ~1800s by more scientifically-minded people who figured out a huge number of crosses was needed to get good new varieties. van Mons is probably the most famous, he bred Bosc and d'Anjou for example. See the Wikipedia article on him. There were dozens of big-time pear breeders in Belgium and France in this period. Scott

I know a lot of people get excited over Lemon Curd, etc. So here are all these delicious recipes... which, of course, I've saved. But..... just what does one do with all these "curds" besides putting them on scones?

Our schools are the same as Terri's - soda's aren't allowed at our local public school, and by law, if a school is accepting government $ for school lunches, they can't have competing foods sold on-side. At a high school level that all goes away, although I'm not sure the law does, I think some schools just chose to ignore it. Our school system has so few kids on subsidized lunch that they've chosen to give up the few dollars and not fill out all the paperwork. Even in my kids' school, which isn't the local public school, I'd be shocked to see a soda in a child's lunch box. My kids drink water for lunch and water or V8 fusion at home, or diluted gatorade at sports. But my kids, and my local school system is the exception, not the norm. I avoid anything with HFCS and most things with added sugar or fake sweeteners. HFCS is a condensed sweetness, meant to extend shelf life and add more sweetness for less cost. This heightened sweet taste elevates our threshold making us crave sweeter and sweeter foods. It's the opposite of when I weaned myself off of artificial sweeteners in my coffee. I started with 3/4 of a packet of Equal and worked myself down to no sweetener at all. This heightened taste for sweet leads to more extra sugar in the diet. Additionally, your cells have a hard time recognizing and processing the altered chemical structure of HFCS, so, like all extra nutrients that the body can't immediately use, it get stored in adipose tissue, as fat.