Aeries are cropping up on America’s skylines, filled with the promise of juicy tomatoes, tiny Alpine strawberries and the heady perfume of basil and lavender. High above the noise and grime of urban streets, gardeners are raising fruits and vegetables. Some are simply finding the joys of backyard gardens several stories up, others are doing it for the environment and some because they know local food sells well. City dwellers have long cultivated pots of tomatoes on top of their buildings. But farming in the sky is a fairly recent development in the green roof movement, in which owners have been encouraged to replace blacktop with plants, often just carpets of succulents, to cut down on storm runoff, insulate buildings and moderate urban heat.

The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal. Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples.

There was a time when red meat was a luxury for ordinary Americans, or was at least something special: cooking a roast for Sunday dinner, ordering a steak at a restaurant. Not anymore. Meat consumption has more than doubled in the United States in the last 50 years.

Looking for another reason why growing some of your own food makes sense? Here's one you might not have considered: nutritional content. While the washed and waxed produce at your local grocery store might look chock full of vitamins and minerals, a recent report in the Journal of HortScience finds otherwise. These findings follow on the heels of others that suggest that supplementing your store-bought veggies with store-bought vitamins and minerals might not be the solution either. When in doubt, grow your own and, if you can't do that, buy from farmers who are taking good care of their soil.

The perfect Martini is elusive. You're unlikely to find one in a bar-- most of today's bartenders are part on the Pina Colada generation and don't have the patience or expertise to do the job correctly. If you want one, you're probably going to make it yourself. So here we go.

Each time you sip hot tea, you get a huge infusion of powerful compounds believed to fight off heart attacks and cancer. How huge? Amazingly, a cup of hot tea actually contains more of these compounds, called antioxidants, than a serving of any fruit or vegetable! But suppose it's iced tea you drink. Something quick and easy: bottled tea, overnight fridge tea, or tea made from powders, new liquid concentrates, or cold-brew tea bags. There's a hitch: Experts say convenience iced teas lose those antioxidants. So we were curious. How much antioxidants power do you sacrifice by choosing no-work iced tea? To find out, we sent convenience iced teas to a lab to be analyzed for total antioxidants power (called oxygen radical absorption capacity, or ORAC, units) per 1-cup serving. For comparison, we sent "gold standard" iced tea we made by brewing tea bags in hot water, then chilling. We checked out decaf teas and green versus black tea too.