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The Chesapeake Bay once supplied most of the nation's oysters, but overharvesting and disease nearly wiped them out. Now, major public-private efforts to re-establish the oyster as a quality local food product appear to be working. And chefs say the results are sweeter than oysters from other waters.

The funny live tweets coming from frozen supermarket pizza giant @DiGiornoPizza were a tasty highlight of the Sound of Music Live broadcast on NBC. Bad puns, silly lyric changes, and just plain clever comments earned the company more than 2,000 new followers in a single night.

Food as a symbol of politics, diet, gender roles, technology, isolation, gluttony and blatant commercialism has been with us for ages and in many forms. A massive exhibit explores how American artists, from Pilgrim times to Andy Warhol, used paintings of food to shape and reflect our national identity.

Food safety researchers in California are trying to find out how long E. coli in raw manure spread on a field might survive on a spinach farm. They're tweeting about it, too.

Two decades ago, the heir to the throne of England foresaw the potential and value in organic agriculture. The first product Duchy Originals launched was the Oaten Biscuit, and it's still a top seller today.

Costumes made of real food have long provoked reactions of both delight and horror. Many have sparked discussions about race, hunger, vegetarianism, commercialism, sexuality, morality and the ever-popular female body image. Here are a few of the more memorable examples.

Urban agriculture abounds in Los Angeles county but few people could see the big picture of what was actually happening around them. So university students set out to create a baseline of data in the country's most populous county to help urban planners, regulators and agricultural pioneers make sense of it all.

If you've always wanted to take a course at Harvard or with America's most talented chefs, but you didn't have the money, discipline or grades, now's your chance. The best part of this free online class: You can eat your lab experiments.

It's not the hard work that will make astronauts lose it on long planetary missions � it's boredom. And something that can become very boring very fast is a rote menu. A simulated Mars mission reveals why cooking for others will be vital on long space journeys, and why wraps rule.

"Conic sections" are the four kinds of curves that result when a plane slices through a cone. But if you forgot that bit of high school algebra, here's one way to make sure you digest the lesson � this time, in a most delicious form: scones.