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iStockphoto.com

May is the month we see strawberries explode in the market. There are strawberry festivals in every corner of the nation celebrating the juicy ruby beauties, and Strawberry Queens crowned galore. Those traditional harvest time festivals make us think our strawberries are mostly grown on the farm just down the road.

But in fact, one state — California — supplies 80 percent of America's strawberries, and the percentage is growing.

The reason? California's fields are stunningly productive. They yield ten times more strawberries, per acre, than strawberry farms in Michigan; twenty times more than farms in the state of New York. And there's a complex web of reasons why.

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Dried beans and legumes are healthy and cheap.

iStockphoto.com

Dried beans and legumes are healthy and cheap.

If you're already a kale and lentils kind of person (we know there are a lot of frugal foodies out there) — you won't be surprised by this finding: According to a new study from some economists at the USDA, eating a healthy diet isn't necessarily more expensive than a diet loaded with sugar and fat. In fact, fruits and vegetables are often cheaper when you calculate the cost in a smarter way.

Cost is often cited as a barrier to eating well. But USDA's Andrea Carlson and her colleagues analyzed the cost of more than 4,000 foods using three different measures: Price per calorie (or food energy), price by weight, and price per average amount consumed.

By using this last measure — which is a good proxy of what actually makes it onto our plate — the news is good.

"We find that fruits and vegetables — especially vegetables — come out much less expensive than the less-healthy food such as potato chips, ready-to-eat cereals [which are] often high in sugar, [and] anything with a lot of fat like cookies and pies." That's because you get more bang — like vitamins and minerals — for the buck.

So how do you do it?

Well, for starters, when you're trying to get the most nutritional and economical benefit in the protein category, think legumes. Lentils and beans are very affordable, and a good alternative to meat.

Also, check sugar labels. For the purposes of this study, lots of foods people may think are healthful actually ended up in the "less-healthful" category because of added sugars. Think yogurts sweetened with jam, sugary cereals and granola bars.

And for veggies: Shop the frozen food aisle. You don't have to consume an entire package in a single use (frozen peas will last weeks). And frozen veggies are just about as nutritious as fresh — with a lot less work on your part.

For the full USDA report, click here.

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Ethan Brown, founder of Beyond Meat, holds a chicken raised on his family's farm. He says childhood experience with farm animals was the inspiration for starting his company.

Yuki Noguchi/NPR

Ethan Brown, founder of Beyond Meat, holds a chicken raised on his family's farm. He says childhood experience with farm animals was the inspiration for starting his company.

Beyond Meat, a new company based in Maryland, has come up with an alternative to chicken meat that it claims is a dead ringer for the real thing. And unlike other meat alternatives on the market, this one aims to be cheap as well as tasty.

The inspiration for Beyond Meat (formerly known as Savage River Farms) started, oddly enough, in "chicken country." Founder Ethan Brown grew up spending weekends on his family's farm in Grantsville, Md., near the Pennsylvania border.

Growing up around farm animals, Brown says, he became increasingly concerned about their welfare. He eventually became a vegan but was frustrated by the "fake meat" options available, so he started his own company.

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Bring on the caffeine — maybe.

antwerpenR/Flickr.com

Bring on the caffeine — maybe.

It seems like every day there's some new research about whether our favorite drinks are good for us. One day, science says a glass of red wine a day will help us live longer. The next day, maybe not. It seems journalists are pretty interested in wine research, as Deborah Blum over at the Knight Science Foundation recently pointed out, and the same might be said for coffee.

In fact, the latest installment in the long saga of coffee just came out, and of course, we're on it. It's a big new study that found that people who drink java appear to be less likely to die prematurely than those who don't.

Now, there's been a lot of research into whether coffee's good for our health. "The results have really been mixed," acknowledges Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute, who led the study published in The New England Journal of Medicine today. "There's been some evidence that coffee might increase the risk of certain diseases and there's also been maybe more recent evidence that coffee may protect against other diseases as well."

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The author pauses to photograph the St. Honore cake before she digs in.

Deena Prichep

The author pauses to photograph the St. Honore cake before she digs in.

We here at The Salt usually ignore food festivals and those "Celebrate Whatever We're Eating Now" Days. They're a bit precious, no? But this one was too good to pass up: Today is the day the French celebrate the Feast of St. Honoré, the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs.

And since the French hold their corner bakery right up there with the Catholic Church, the celebration is not complete without a big bite of the complicated confection named for the saint in question. More on the cake a little later.

First, the history: Honoré, also known as Honoratus, became bishop of Amiens in Northern France in the sixth century. Sources disagree over whether he was a baker, but when he was named bishop, a baker's peel — the flat wooden paddle used to move loaves to and from a hot oven — was said to have put down roots and transformed into a fruiting tree, much to the surprise of the incredulous woman holding it.

In the Star Wars movies, moisture farmers on dry planets like Tattoine use droids to help with the repetitive, back-breaking labor, but that's in a galaxy far, far away. There's no doubt that robots are cool, but are robots on farms far off in our future?

Actually, the future is already here, with highly advanced milking machines on some dairy farms and a fully automated robot planting tractor set to hit the market this fall.

To be sure, today's farmers already rely on advanced technology, like GPS systems to help with planting and automatic milkers. That makes the jump to robotics pretty easy, says Jeremy Brown, president of Jaybridge Robotics. His Massachusetts-based company makes software that helps turn regular machinery into robotic machinery for commercial use.

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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.