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Roasted fish on a stick is OK, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to cook up some fish soup?

That's what might have crossed the minds of hunter-gatherers who made the world's first cooking pots. A new analysis of pottery made 15,000 years ago in what's now Japan reveals that it was used to cook seafood, probably salmon.

Not so long ago, scientists thought hunter-gathers were too busy roaming and foraging to invent cookware. But more recent archeological discoveries in China and Japan suggest that people were making ceramic containers as early as 20,000 years ago, long before the advent of farming.

What were they cooking? Speculation first centered on nuts and plants. But this new study, published online in the journal Nature, says it was fish soup.

To find out, a multinational team analyzed the residue on pot shards found in 13 places in what's now Japan. They were made 15,000 to 11,000 years ago.

About three-quarters of the 101 shards had traces of carbon and nitrogen, suggesting that they were used to cook food from fresh or salt water. Many had traces of marine fatty acids, while only one had fatty acids typical of a grazing land animal.

Evidently, these earliest cooks weren't too keen on dishwashing. But their neglect is science's gain.

Cooking food makes nutrients more readily available and is thought to have given early humans an evolutionary boost.

And cooking food in a pot conserves more nutrients than grilling, according to Peter Jordan. He's director of the Arctic Center in Groningen, Netherlands, and a co-author of the study.

With grilling, he says, "lots of nutrients run away into the fire and are lost. Whereas if you cook in a container, all the nutrients, the oils and the fats, are retained."

Clay pot cooking is also more efficient, because people could park the pots on the coals and let them simmer away, freeing up time for other tasks. Crockery cooking, he says, is "enormously beneficial."

Apples and especially pears are vulnerable to a nasty bacterial infection called fire blight that, left unchecked, can spread quickly, killing fruit trees and sometimes devastating whole orchards.

"It's basically like a gangrene of your limbs. It's hard to stop" once it takes a hold, says Ken Johnson, a plant pathologist at Oregon State University.

It's such a big threat that for decades, growers have seen two antibiotics, streptomycin and oxytetracycline, as vital weapons in the fight to control the disease – even on organic apples and pears.

But their use has raised questions about transparency in organic labeling, amid concerns about the overuse of antibiotics in food production.

"This isn't what consumers expect out of organics," says Urvashi Rangan, the director of consumer safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports. "Organic is supposed to be consistent in meaning," she tells The Salt.

Here's the back story.

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture's national organic labeling standards went into effect in 2002, the two antibiotics were listed as synthetic materials approved for use in organic apple and pear production. Items on that list are revisited on a periodic basis. The notion behind the exemption for these two fruit crops was that, in-between reviews, growers would devise effective non-antibiotic-based methods for controlling fire blight.

But the antibiotic exemption is set to expire in October 2014. This week, the National Organic Standards Board is meeting in Portland, Ore., to decide on a petition from organic growers to extend that exemption one more time. Consumers Union, the policy arm of Consumer Reports, is among the groups who say the answer should be a resounding no.

Antibiotics have been used in American plant and livestock agriculture since the mid-20th century. About 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. go to livestock – not just to treat disease and prevent infections, but also, primarily, to help animals put on more weight.

That heavy usage has been widely blamed for promoting the spread of antibiotic-resistant bugs. And resistance can jump from bacteria that infect livestock to microbes that sicken people. The problem of drug resistance has led to widespread calls for reining in the use of antibiotics on farms, in order to preserve the medicines' effectiveness in treating human disease.

But antibiotic use in plant agriculture is far more limited – just a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of total agricultural use, according to Virginia Stockwell, a plant pathologist at Oregon State University who studies fire blight management. Put another way, about 30 million pounds of antibiotics were used in livestock in 2011. By comparison, 36,000 pounds of antibiotics were sprayed on fruit trees – mostly on pears and apples, according to data from the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

In the U.S., up to 16 percent of all apple acreage and up to 40 percent of all pear acreage gets sprayed with antibiotics each year, she says, citing data from NASS. That's including all organic and conventionally grown fruit. Not every orchard gets sprayed every year.

"There have never been any cases where we've been able to link an antibiotic-resistant pathogen in humans to orchards," says Stockwell, who recently conducted a review of the literature on the subject for the National Organic Safety Board.

Research suggests both of the antibiotics used on fruit crops are rendered inactive in soils, she says, minimizing concerns that residues that drift to the ground after spraying would be a problem. Any residue on fruit, she says, is miniscule.

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Get recipes for Preserved Lemons, Chicken With Preserved Lemon And Green Olives, Root Vegetable Couscous With Preserved Lemon and Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette.

It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?

Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Think about college costs in chunks.

"It's something I picked up from Kevin McKinley, who runs a financial planning practice in Wisconsin. His basic insight is that you should divide it in chunks. He was thinking about the $60,000/all-in four-year cost. He basically looked at it like this: Think about saving $20,000 before the kid starts, which is a reasonably easy thing to do if you do it over 18 years. Then spend $20,000 out of your current earnings during the time that your child is in college. It might mean some sacrifices — some very careful budgeting, a lot of rice and beans on the table — but it's doable. And then borrow $20,000. When you start to divide it into chunks, it starts to seem at least within the realm of the possible."

Your kid has been admitted to an expensive private school? Time to get real.

Need planning help?

Learn more about average college costs.

More on student loans.

Not touring colleges quite yet? Figure out how much school will cost when it's your child's time.