To open this week is a story about home gardens and free seeds on CNN. One thing I do sometimes want in the apartment is a garden, but then I walk around the green market(s) and everything is right again.

This is a pretty nifty guide for anyone wanting to cut down on their use of plastics - how to store fruits and vegetables without plastic containers. Interesting that I've been using a lot of these tips already, but I'm happy to apply more of them.

Another interesting fight is happening in the GMO discussion. This time it encompasses transgenic salmon.

I was surprised when Wal-Mart vowed to source a portion of the produce in each store locally, I'm not so surprised that they may change local farming patterns.

Manipulating the physical properties of food has been around since the 90s with Ferran Adria and el Bulli. Bartenders started getting more involved with some of those concepts, and there's a nice rundown of bars using an aspect of Ferran's avant garde techniques over at Alcademics. Specifically the use of "dehydrated liquids." I'm not a fan of the term, but it gets the point across to customers. What was once a liquid is now powder or crystals in/on/around your glass.

And on the subject of el Bulli, the restaurant closed its doors over the weekend. For the culinary and gastronomic world it was the end of an incredible era. Ferran, his brother Albert, and a host of cooks and chefs to come out of, and in contact with, el Bulli changed how many chefs thought of food. He took the questions of "Why?" and "How?" into kitchens and excited and enraged his peers and the public. But more importantly, for me, is that he took the "next step" in food science. His work was the next step in the blurring of lines between laboratory and kitchen, science and art. Work started by Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Belle Lowe with Experimental Cookery: From The Chemical And Physical Standpoint. Work that has inspired many scientists to dabble in the kitchen and gladly tackle gastrophysics.

Grant Achatz and his Alinea family offered up this, their farewell to el Bulli on the final week of service.