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Andree Heuschling — she was called DeeDee — was in search of fame and fortune. But she'd never heard of Renoir.

"She didn't know nothing about the painting, the painter, who was famous or not at this moment," Bourdos says.

In the film, DeeDee is sent to visit Renoir by his wife, Aline. The artist's son Jean says it was his mother's last gift to her husband. But Bourdos says there's another story about how DeeDee got there.

"She shows up one time to see Matisse, and he said, 'You are not a Matisse; you are a Renoir.' "

Sure enough, she became Renoir's last model. Pearly rose and serene on his canvases, DeeDee registers in the film as a wild girl — determined, forceful.

"She was a kind of tornado," Bourdos says. "Full of energy and a little bit lunatic. A lunatic? Yeah, yeah."

Renoir liked that: a person who knew who she was. The painter had his own demons. He could be cold. Aloof.

"To paint or create, to write, to make music — you need huge concentration," Bourdos says. "It's not an easy work. People think because you are painting flowers, children, nudes, it's an easy job. It's not at all."

Once DeeDee arrived, Bourdos says, the distracted, sad, crippled artist began coming out of himself.

"She came, and he found again a new energy to create," the director says. "That's the whole point of the story. He didn't just start to paint again. He started to paint nudes again."

"What interests me is skin," Renoir says — "the velvety texture of a young girl's skin." (Much of the film's dialogue comes from his son Jean's memoir of his father.)

"That's pretty sexy," Bourdos says. "Not just a painter saying that. It's a man. It's true for a filmmaker too."

A Bridge Between One Art And Another

And it was true for son Jean Renoir, who fell in love with DeeDee. He'd been struggling with a lack of motivation; she pushed him to make something of himself. They married. Jean Renoir became a major filmmaker and put DeeDee in some of his movies. The beautiful, wild redhead was a lover to the son and a muse to the father.

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The White House unveiled its proposal Wednesday for drastic changes in government programs that donate food to fight hunger abroad — and surprised no one.

As we reported last week, rumors of such an overhaul had been circulating for weeks, arousing both hope and anger among organizations involved in global anti-hunger programs.

The rumors, it turns out, were largely on target — and the groups that previously had expressed enthusiasm or skepticism repeated those views Wednesday.

The Obama administration wants to increase sharply the share of food aid that the U.S. provides in the form of cash, rather than through food commodities that are bought in the United States and shipped abroad. Humanitarian groups could use that cash to buy food wherever it can be found most cheaply and quickly.

In addition, the U.S. would end the awkward and much-criticized practice known as "monetization." This essentially uses food as a way to transfer cash. The government buys commodities in the U.S. and ships them abroad, only to sell them on local markets in order to fund local nutrition and agricultural development projects. Critics of monetization call it a highly inefficient way to fund such projects.

The change that may matter most for the proposal's chances of success, though, is purely bureaucratic. The Obama administration wants foreign food aid to be funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development instead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This change is more than symbolic. For one thing, the agriculture committees of the U.S. Congress would lose authority over these programs — a prospect that is unlikely to please those committees and will certainly complicate the prospects for this reform on Capitol Hill.

In addition, what people think of this bureaucratic switcheroo seems to depend a great deal on their opinion of these two agencies.

Supporters of the Obama administration's proposal have no love for the USDA. They see it as a knee-jerk defender of domestic farmers, hopelessly out-of-touch when it comes to fighting hunger abroad.

Defenders of the current system, meanwhile, see USAID as a lightweight agency that continually revises its programs to fit the latest political fashion in Washington. They point out, for instance, that USAID's new flagship program in agricultural development, called Feed the Future, is active in a relatively small number of countries, most of which are friendly to the U.S. Anti-hunger programs funded through traditional monetized food aid are active in twice as many countries.

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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