Fresh Produce Discussion Blog

Created by The Packer's National Editor Tom Karst

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Wal-Mart Opening 35 to 40 Canada Supercenters in 2010

Wal-Mart Opening 35 to 40 Canada Supercenters in 2010

By Tian Huang

Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, said it plans to open 35 to 40 supercenters in Canada in 2010.

The projects, which entail creating new stores and relocating existing ones, will cost just under C$500 million ($473.2 million) and generate about 6,500 store and construction jobs, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company said today in a statement. Specific store locations were not disclosed.

The expansion will bring Wal-Mart’s presence in Canada to as many as 325 stores by the year’s end from the current 317 stores. Wal-Mart closed six Canadian Sam’s Club warehouse stores in March to focus on the supercenter format, Andrew Pelletier, a spokesman, said today by telephone.

Wal-Mart is also investing C$115 million in a sustainable, refrigerated distribution center in Balzac, Alberta. The retailer said today it expects the center, which will create 1,400 jobs, to open in the fall.

Wal-Mart fell 21 cents to $53.62 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares dropped 4.7 percent last year.

Supermarket pubs: Bar hopping meets grocery shopping - Philly.com



Supermarket pubs: Bar hopping meets grocery shopping
- Philly.com

By Diane Mastrull

Inquirer Staff Writer

No karaoke nights are offered, and no happy hours. Pour-your-heart-out talks with the barkeep? None of those either.

"We don't ever really get any personal stuff, other than 'I'm going to change my grocery list,' " said Heather Reilly.

And though her job involves mixing cocktails and serving up brews, don't call her a bartender. Reilly's a "service team member."

At The Pub inside the Wegmans supermarket in Collegeville, a social experiment of sorts is in progress, at the point where one of life's most mundane chores intersects with something that could go a long way toward blunting its misery: alcohol.

There's even a chance at romance. So far, the store reports one engagement - which the happy couple toasted with champagne.

The Pub, the only one in the Wegmans chain of 75 stores in five states, opened when the market it sits in debuted Oct. 11 just off U.S. Route 422, in the massive but still largely unoccupied Providence Town Center.

A second Wegmans Pub is planned at a store scheduled to open in June in O'Neill Properties Group's Uptown Worthington, a planned mixed-use complex of homes, offices, and stores along Route 202 in Malvern.

If three stores make a trend, this region is well on its way. Front and center in the Whole Foods Market in Plymouth Meeting that opened Jan. 12 is the Cold Point Pub, a mini-model of the Wegmans watering hole.

At Cold Point, you serve yourself wine from preset taps after paying for an access card. Employees run the beer taps. If the munchies on the menu - such as a charcuterie plate, an olive sampler, and soft pretzels - don't satisfy your appetite, you're free to buy something in the store and bring it into the 30-seat pub.

With its soft lighting and easy chairs, the Whole Foods establishment looks more like a coffee lounge than Wegmans' 63-seat pub, where the bar top is Cambria natural quartz stone, surrounded by solid cherry and cherry veneers. Two flat-screen TVs offer patrons something to watch when they're not gazing into each other's eyes.

The food-service component has enabled Wegmans and Whole Foods to buy restaurant liquor licenses that allow them not only to dispense beer, wine, and - in Wegmans' case - spirits for consumption on the premises, but also to sell six-packs of beer for carryout.

Two per customer is the rule, said Nick Hays, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Otherwise, state law generally limits six-pack sales to bars.

Cases (the equivalent of four six-packs) are the minimum at distributors. Sen. John C. Rafferty Jr. (R., Montgomery) is pushing for an overhaul of the state's beer laws to allow distributors, supermarkets, convenience stores, and bars and taverns to sell anything from a six-pack up to a case of beer.

There are no plans for pubs at the Wegmans stores in Cherry Hill and Mount Laurel - the law in New Jersey does not permit supermarkets to own restaurant liquor licenses.

The Mount Laurel store does have an agreement to sublease space to an independent operator that will sell wine, beer, and liquor, said spokeswoman Jeanne Colleluori.

For now, the company is learning from its Collegeville pub - and making adjustments as customers dictate or events warrant, said Kathy Haines, Wegmans' regional restaurant manager for Pennsylvania.

She said The Pub was intended to fill a gap in the store's Market Cafe complex, where shoppers can buy prepared foods either to take out or to eat at nearby tables. The Pub is a full-service restaurant "where you can enjoy a great meal and enjoy a drink with that meal," Haines said - though, she insisted, "our focus is really on the food."

That seems to go for the customers as well. Monthly Pub sales show just 20 percent of patrons ordering a beer, a glass of wine, or a cocktail with their food order, Haines said. This despite moderate prices: Domestic 12-ounce beers go for $3.75; 15-ounce drafts range from $3 to $4. Wine is $5 a glass. Cocktails - $5.25 to $10. And no tipping allowed! (You don't tip the guy at the deli counter for the pound of bologna he slices you, Haines said.)

Overall, the Collegeville Wegmans store registers 30,000 transactions a week, Haines said. That the bar tab isn't more significant might have a lot to do with the abundance of mothers pushing carts bearing young children, particularly in the daytime, customers suggested.

"I wouldn't want to get drunk in front of families and stuff," said John Riggs, 33, of Pottstown. He opted for a tame ginger ale with his crab cake sandwich on a recent lunch outing to The Pub with three colleagues from Canon in nearby Oaks.

Half-joking, Riggs suggested there is much marketing genius in serving alcohol where groceries are sold: "You come in and have a couple of cocktails, and then you buy all sorts of things you didn't come in for."

That lack of self-control is what Norma Hahn, 76, was trying to avoid.

"I have to cook dinner and help with homework tonight," said the Pittsburgh grandmother, in town with husband Adam, 75, to babysit four grandchildren. While the kids were at school, grandma and grandpa headed to Wegmans to do some grocery shopping - and then some.

She was having an iced green tea with her fried oyster sandwich. He was having a Heineken with his, rejoicing in the idea of a pub in a grocery store, and hoping the idea would soon reach his Giant Eagle store back home.

"My God," Adam Hahn said after taking another swig of beer. "Pennsylvania is finally coming into the new century."

Where does all this store-hours-only imbibing, just a short shopping-cart glide away from the produce and dairy cases, leave traditional pubs?

Confident of not losing customers, said Vincent Giancaterino, co-owner of DaVinci's Pub in Collegeville, just two miles from Wegmans.

Though the Wegmans pub is "nicely done," Giancaterino said, "it's more like a resting place. We have live music five days a week."

US 'problem' banks soar, lending drops

US 'problem' banks soar, lending drops

WASHINGTON - U.S. "problem" banks climbed to the highest level in 17 years, signaling failures may accelerate in 2010, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said.


Meanwhile, bank lending had the biggest retreat in more than six decades even as the industry eked out a small profit, the regulator said Tuesday in a quarterly report.

The FDIC included 702 banks with $402.8 billion in assets on the confidential list of problem banks as of Dec. 31. "Problem" or "troubled" banks now account for 8.7 percent of all U.S. lenders, the highest number since the height of the savings-and-loan crisis in the early 1990s.

Big banks have been gradually recovering, many of them with help from federal bailout money. But distress for small and mid-sized institutions has continued and likely will persist in coming years.

Regional banks are especially vulnerable to losses on loans for commercial real estate, like stores and office complexes. These loans make up a disproportionate share of their business. Losses are growing as buildings sit vacant and builders default on their loans.

Such defaults could escalate the wave of failures that totaled 140 last year. So far this year, 20 banks have failed. By comparison, a total of 28 banks failed in 2007 and 2008 combined.

"The growth in the number and assets of institutions on the problem list points to a likely rise in the number of failures," FDIC chairman Sheila Bair said at a news conference. "Both the problem list and bank failures tend to lag behind economic recovery."

Regulators are closing banks at the fastest pace since 1992, amid loan losses stemming from the collapse of the home and commercial mortgage market. "The pace is going to pick up this year and is going to exceed where we were last year," Bair told reporters.

Banks showed "incremental" improvement in the fourth quarter, Bair said. Overall profit was $914 million, compared with a $38 billion loss in the year-earlier period. Net charge-offs on bad loans slowed for a third consecutive quarter, the agency said.

Meanwhile, idustry lending fell as banks seek to climb out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Loans fell 7.5 percent in 2009, the largest annual decline since 1942.

Bank failures pushed the FDIC's deposit insurance fund into the red last year. It was $20.9 billion in deficit as of Dec. 31, the agency reported. It expects further bank failures to cost the fund around $100 billion through 2013.

The agency required that member banks prepay about $45 billion in premiums last year, for 2010 through 2012, to help replenish the insurance fund.

Woman pleads guilty to poisoning salsa at restaurant - Kansas City.com


Woman pleads guilty to poisoning salsa at restaurant - Kansas City.com


Yini De La Torre, 19, of Shawnee has pleaded guilty to charges that she poisoned the salsa at Mi Ranchito in Lenexa, where she worked as a waitress, the U.S. Attorney for Kansas reports. De La Torre's husband is still set to stand trial for the alleged plot, which was intended as revenge against the restaurant owner, prosecutors allege. From the release:

In her plea, De La Torre said her husband and co-defendant Arnoldo Bazan worked for a Mi Ranchito restaurant in Olathe until June 27, 2009. Bazan believed the owner of the Mi Ranchito chain was responsible for Bazan being suspended from employment and the theft of Bazan’s vehicle. Bazan hatched a plot with De La Torre to get even with the owner of the restaurant by poisoning the patrons of Mi Ranchito.

During July 2009, the owner of the Mi Ranchito restaurant reported to the Overland Park Police Department that Bazan was stalking him. On Aug. 7, 2009, a message was sent to the restaurant’s Web site threatening harm! if Bazan’s vehicle were not returned. On Aug. 28, 2009, before the second poisoning incident, Bazan sent word to the owner of the restaurant through a family member that “the worst is yet to come."

Fairtrade sales rise by 12% - Wales Online

Fairtrade sales rise by 12% - Wales Online


ETHICAL consumers are becoming increasingly loyal to Fairtrade products, according to new figures released today which show a 12% rise in sales and an estimated retail value of £800m.

Although households struggling through the recession have tended to seek out value brands in cheaper stores such as Aldi and Lidl in recent months, the Fairtrade Foundation said it had bucked the trend and consumers had remained “staunchly loyal” to its popular products throughout 2009.

Meanwhile, organic food sales fell by up to 31% last year as consumers switched to value brands.

Demand for organic bread dropped by 31% compared with 2008, while sales of organic fruit sank by 16.5%, according to figures from market research firm TNS Worldpanel.

The Fairtrade Foundation said the global economic downturn had meant a “desperate” year for producers in the developing countries producing its most popular products, including chocolate, cocoa, coffee, tea, bananas, dried fruit and nuts, honey, beer, wine and spirits.

Chief executive Harriet Lamb said: “2009 was a tough year for everyone but a desperate year for many poor communities and small farmers in developing countries.

“For millions of growers and their families and communities, Fairtrade was able to make the difference that has helped them survive a difficult year and plan for the future.

“It is to the credit of the public that they do care and, despite the recession, they are still voting with their wallets for fairness, and want to change the indignities of an unjust trading system.

“These challenging times have been a wake-up call and forward-thinking companies have also been re-evaluating their priorities, seeing sustainability as the way forward for business, building relations with producers and introducing many Fairtrade products in the past year.”

Rhys Evans, deputy senior director of Consumer Focus Wales, said Welsh consumers understood and looked out for the Fairtrade logo as a conscious buying decision and appreciated its competitive pricing.

Companies now on board with the principle include Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and Nestlé’s Kit Kat. Nerys Howell of Howel Food Consultancy of Cardiff said the recession had prompted consumers to become more cautious in their spending habits across the board.

“In terms of purchasing food, this has meant consumers are looking for added value but not necessarily the cheapest,” she said. “Recent research shows that consumers are looking at issues such as trust, reliability, reassurance and guarantees.

“It is therefore not surprising that sales of Fairtrade products have increased over the last year, whereas the organic market has changed over the past 18 months and faces challenges other than food quality, such as raising the awareness of the benefits of organic production and how they fit with interests in animal welfare and local food.

“The organic sector has a core market of consumers which, although remaining loyal, are spending less on their weekly shop.

“However, the main issue remains that consumers do not fully understand the key messages surrounding organic production and its effect on the environment, whereas the Fairtrade message is simpler to understand with consumers supporting a fair and just trading system.”

The Fairtrade Foundation is asking consumers to switch everyday shopping basket items for Fairtrade items during Fairtrade Fortnight, which began yesterday.

A YouGov poll of UK consumers found 71% were willing to swap one or more products to mark the event.

Sue Fowler, director of Organic Centre Wales, said: “It shows that when people are given a clear message about ethical trading and they see that there is something they can do to help, they will make that commitment for a fairer world.

“We’re working hard to see that organic food is recognised in a similar way for its benefits to the environment and animal welfare in particular, though unfortunately it is a more complicated message to convey. And, of course, if you can buy produce that is organic and fairtrade at the same time, there is an even greater benefit.”

More than 4,500 products are now licensed to carry the Fairtrade mark.

Consumers feeling less upbeat on recovery - Miami Herald

Consumers feeling less upbeat on recovery - Miami Herald
A key economic measurement -- consumer confidence -- fell sharply in February because of concerns over jobs.

NEW YORK -- (AP) -- Americans' outlook on the economy went into relapse in February. Rising job worries sent a key barometer of confidence to its lowest point in 10 months, raising concerns about the U.S. economic recovery.

The Conference Board said Tuesday its Consumer Confidence Index fell almost 11 points to 46 in February, down from a revised 56.5 in January. Analysts were expecting only a slight decrease to 55. It was the lowest level since the index recorded a 40.8 reading in April 2009.

Using a different scale, a University of Florida survey found that Florida's consumer confidence fell in February by two points to 72, reflecting concerns about unemployment, which is higher statewide than across the nation.

``While national unemployment edged downward in January to 9.7 percent, Florida's unemployment increased to 11.8 percent,'' said Chris McCarty, survey director of UF's Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

``This month Floridians may be coming to terms with the possibility that Florida's economy will not recover at the same pace as other states.''

The two-point decline in the overall index comes on the heels of a five-point increase in January to 74. ``January's index seemed more optimistic than it should have been given the economic climate in Florida,'' McCarty said. ``It's worth noting that January's higher index value was based on data collected prior to the release of unemployment figures for Florida.''

The national Consumer Confidence numbers are a reflection that the nation as a whole may be feeling increasingly pessimistic. They erased three months of improvement and are a big blow to hopes that consumer spending will power an economic recovery. Consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity.

The February reading is a long way from what's considered healthy: A reading above 90 means the economy is on solid footing. Above 100 signals strong growth.

While economists said that heavy snowstorms in many areas of the country that shut down businesses dampened confidence, many believe that the report confirms that consumers aren't feeling the nascent economic recovery.

``More than six months after the recovery started, consumer confidence is still close to a record low,'' said Paul Ashworth, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics.

The news sent stocks lower, overshadowing retailers' reports that showed stronger holiday profits and a housing report, also released Tuesday, that showed that home prices rose for a seventh straight month in December, a sign of price stability as the U.S. housing market continues its bumpy recovery.

However, the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index also showed that five of the 20 index cities, including Miami, New York and Chicago, showed price declines from November to December.

Nationwide, the index rose 0.3 percent from November to December, to a seasonally adjusted reading of 145.87. The index was off 3.1 percent from December last year, nearly matching analysts' estimates that it would fall by 3.2 percent.

Illinois stuck in a ‘historic, epic’ budget crisis - Chicago Tribune

Illinois stuck in a ‘historic, epic’ budget crisis - Chicago Tribune
Talk of major tax increases coupled with draconian spending cuts is building in Springfield



Illinois government is staring down the barrel of an explosive financial mess, and perhaps nothing frames the danger better than two big numbers.

The first is $26 billion, the grand total that lawmakers have allotted this year for the meat of what the state does: funding education, health care, child welfare, public safety and the machinery of government itself.

The second number is $13 billion, the total of red ink in the state's main checking account that, by law, has to be erased — at least on paper — before a penny can be set aside for day-to-day operations in the fiscal year, which begins July 1.

In short, the deficit is half as big as the core of the state budget.

To experts, that is an astoundingly scary ratio that ranks Illinois as one of the nation's worst fiscal basket cases — if not the worst. The budget deficit in Illinois is almost as big as the one facing California, a financially beleaguered state that has triple Illinois' population, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington-based think tank.

"This is historic, it is epic," said Laurence Msall, president of the watchdog Civic Federation. "It is impossible to overstate the level of peril."

Signs of distress are bleeding out to schools, transit agencies and social service providers, all of which complain that it is getting hard to make ends meet because the state is chronically late with promised cash. Meanwhile, the state's credit ratings are tanking, making it ever more expensive to borrow to make ends meet.

Any resolution will almost surely require sacrifice from taxpayers and state workers as well as political courage from elected officials, a commodity always in short supply but especially so in an election year.

Talk of major tax increases coupled with draconian spending cuts is building in Springfield. Despite the seeming urgency, it is not clear whether it will come to anything more than just talk.

This time last year, the budget outlook was already plenty bleak, yet Gov. Pat Quinn and lawmakers ultimately avoided tough fixes. Delay only added billions of dollars more to the projected deficit.

Illinois is hardly the only state reeling from the recession. But a long and bipartisan history of wishing financial problems away has rendered state government here particularly vulnerable.

Budget pressures began to mount in Illinois long before the economic downturn. But the fashionable response from political leaders was to avoid talk of tax increases or significant spending cuts and instead vow elimination of "waste, fraud and abuse," as if those items appeared in a line in the budget that could simply be cut out.

Now, the state's fiscal woes have grown so deep that solid solutions defy such glib answers.

Consider this: The head count of state workers is 20 percent smaller than it was a decade ago. If the state payroll was magically purged of every single employee, the annual salary savings would amount to $4 billion, less than one-third of what is needed right now to dig out of the deficit hole.

"Any elected official or candidate who says you can solve this without a tax increase is either incredibly math-impaired or intentionally deceiving voters," said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, another Illinois budget watchdog.

Last year, federal stimulus spending and a heavy dose of borrowing helped state officials skate around tough budget choices. But now the stimulus money is about to dry up, and the loans must be repaid.

Adding to the challenge is a steep decline in sales and income tax revenue, off nearly $1 billion from what was projected last summer.

The total budget for the current year stands near $55 billion, but about half of that is dedicated for items like road and building programs or earmarked federal funds that lawmakers have little leeway to divert or chop.

The only significant wiggle room resides in the other half of the budget, known as the general funds, which are tapped to pay for most common government operations. And whatever flex there is in the general funds, there's certainly not close to $13 billion worth — an amount equal to what is being spent this year on the State Board of Education as well as the departments of Human Services, Children and Family Services and Public Health combined.

More than $7 billion of the $26 billion in general funds appropriations this year is earmarked for elementary and secondary schools. Any cuts would only increase pressure on local property taxes, which already bear the brunt of public school funding and, as taxes go, are probably more unpopular than the income or sales tax.

Another $8 billion was earmarked for public health care programs including Medicaid, the safety net for the poor that is often a target of criticism from the right. Federal stimulus aid that Illinois is now getting to help stave off financial disaster comes with strings that forbid any rollback in benefits to Medicaid recipients.

Without a tax hike, the Civic Federation estimates, just four key spending items — schools, Medicaid, deficit reduction and debt service on loans the state must repay — will eat through 80 percent of the cash available to pay for all general state programs.

Experts have long warned that the financial reckoning in Illinois was coming, pointing to what they call an inherent "structural deficit" in the state budget. That's a fancy way of saying that revenues collected by the state through taxes, fees and other sources were clearly insufficient in the long run to pay for all the programs and benefits that state officials had put into place.

Rather than confront the imbalance head-on, standard practice in Springfield has been to resort to a combination of fiscal tricks. Revenue projections are unrealistically rosy, money is borrowed with full repayment pushed off years into the future, and multibillion-dollar backlogs of unpaid bills are allowed to fester.

The system was already primed for calamity when the steep recession that began in 2008 knocked it over the edge.

Perhaps the most chronic headache involves pensions. For decades, elected officials have shorted promised contributions to the state's public employee retirement funds. As a result, Illinois by far has the worst-funded pension systems in the nation.

It would be a tall order for the state to totally dig its way out of the hole in one year's budget. But playing catch-up is extremely expensive, and it grows more expensive the longer it takes. Because the state was so short of cash, it borrowed $3.5 billion to meet this year's pension obligations. Next year, debt service on that loan will cost $800 million. And that's in addition to more than $4 billion in pension obligations that the state will be on the hook for in fiscal 2011.

As Msall sees it, Illinois is in such poor financial shape that it risks getting to the point where it can no longer make loan payments or meet state aid commitments to schools.

If that happens, he says, "Illinois' ability to borrow will be eliminated and the state will come to a screeching halt."

bsecter@tribune.com

Why an All-'Superfoods' Diet Is a Mistake - US News

Why an All-'Superfoods' Diet Is a Mistake - US News

We've all seen those lists of "superfoods"—certain fruits, nuts, and other foods that, advocates say, have health-boosting effects. But some people take those lists so seriously that they limit their food choices to what's on them. "They'll say, 'Every day I have Kashi with blueberries and almonds for breakfast, salmon on leafy greens with broccoli for lunch, and grilled chicken with sweet potato for dinner,'" says Mary Beth Augustine, a registered dietitian and senior integrative nutritionist for Beth Israel Continuum Center for Health and Healing in New York. The more educated they are and the more reading about health they've done, the more likely they are to strictly adhere to what they think is a perfect lineup of foods, she says.
Click here to find out more!

[Slide show: Check out some alternatives to 8 superfoods.]

While that one-day menu is certainly healthful, getting into a rigid dietary routine isn't ideal, dieticians and nutrition scientists say. Many fruits and vegetables are chock full of nutrients. There are vitamins, minerals, and fiber, of course, but plants also have a host of special compounds they evolved to defend themselves from, for example, the sun's radiation, says Navindra Seeram, an assistant professor at the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory at the University of Rhode Island who studies the properties of berries. Those phytochemicals aren't essential for our own life and energy, but "research has shown that they may impart biological effects," says Seeram. (They're mostly studied for their beneficial effects, but some can have detrimental ones that we need to be aware of, such as grapefruit's interaction with some drugs.)

Certainly some foods have unique properties, says Seeram. Cranberry juice, for example, can protect against urinary tract infections. But researchers have identified only some of the thousands of active ingredients in fruits and vegetables (as well as other foods) and haven't begun to piece together all the ways they work together. There are some hints, however, that they do interrelate to have an impact on health. A study published in 2006 in the Journal of Nutrition compared two diets. Both provided eight to 10 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. But one diet included foods from 18 different botanical families; the other covered only five families. The researchers concluded that only the diverse diet "induced a significant reduction in DNA oxidation." (DNA oxidation, or oxidative damage, occurs when molecules called free radicals wreak havoc in the body. Antioxidants like some of the vitamins and phytochemicals found in plants are believed to reduce this damage.) In other words, as the researchers wrote, "smaller amounts of many phytochemicals may have greater beneficial effects than larger amounts of fewer phytochemicals."

Dawn Jackson Blatner, a Chicago-based dietitian and author of The Flexitarian Diet, agrees. "No one food is the superhighway to optimal health," she says. "The real magic happens when foods synergize and you get this great variety." Not only does variety give you wider exposure to the good stuff, it gives you less exposure to any detrimental phytochemicals or substances, such as the toxins in some mushrooms, says Augustine. To maximize the variety of fruits and veggies you get, dieticians advise people to "eat the rainbow," aiming to consume a variety of foods within each color group: red (including watermelon and tomatoes), red-purple (berries such as blueberries and blackberries, eggplant), orange (carrots and pumpkin), orange-yellow (citrus fruits, papaya), yellow-green (avocado and spinach), green (broccoli and cabbage), and white-green (garlic, onion, pears). (These categories are from UCLA scientist David Heber's What Color is Your Diet?)

"It's the same thing I teach kindergartners and preschoolers," Augustine says. The principle holds with nonplant foods, too. Eating a lot of the same kind of fish may expose you to possible contaminants, like mercury or PCBs, and deny you the benefits of many different species. At some point, says Seeram, science may be able to pinpoint ideal food pairings based on how their nutrients interact, but for now, the key is to simply aim for at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, across the color spectrum. Variety (within the confines of healthful foods, at least; being sure to take in Twinkies, Ho Hos, and Ding Dongs during a given week doesn't count) as a guiding force for eating? It doesn't boil down to an easy list, but yes, it can be that easy.