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It turns out that the desire to speak with Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with $610,000, will buy you a cup of coffee. That's the winning bid offered in a charity auction for up to an hour of Cook's time.

As we reported last month, the chance to grab coffee with Cook at Apple's headquarters zoomed past the suggested value of $50,000 set at the Charitybuzz auction site, rising to more than $600,000 in just three days.

The winner hasn't been identified; an earlier glance at the list of bidders suggested that many of them have companies or entrepreneurial projects they might like to discuss with Cook. The winner has one year in which to coordinate a date to grab coffee with the executive.

The proceeds of the auction, in which Cook and other celebrities are taking part, benefits the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Perhaps to keep any would-be bidders from using the auction as a way to get free publicity, the Charitybuzz site added a note to the Cook auction requiring any bids of more than $500,000 to be authenticated with financial records.

The winning bid places a much greater value on Cook's time than his annual salary reflects. When the bid surpassed the $600,000 mark, our calculations found that if all of Cook's time were to be valued at the same rate, he would earn more than $1.25 billion in a year.

Plenty of celebrities leverage their star power to raise awareness of complicated food issues. Some of the biggest names include Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver, Prince Charles and Paul McCartney.

Down in New Orleans, actor Wendell Pierce, who stars in David Simon's Treme and, previously, The Wire, has been taking on food insecurity in low-income communities with brand new convenience stores. Pierce has received plenty of attention for his efforts and appeared this week on NPR's Tell Me More to talk about the opening of the first grocery store in his New Orleans-based Sterling Farms chain earlier this spring.

Even though New Orleans' restaurant sector is booming — there are over 1,200 in the city, even more than before Hurricane Katrina — many communities outside the center have been waiting in vain for supermarkets to return. That's because of investors' "economic apathy," Pierce says.

A food desert is defined as an area where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away. And New Orleans has plenty of them, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new Food Access Research Atlas shows. "For me, growing up in New Orleans, where so much of the culture is based around food, it's unacceptable [to have them]," Pierce told Tell Me More.

But even with Pierce's leadership (he was recently named one of FastCompany's 100 most creative people in business) and investment dollars behind the effort, a host of stumbling blocks still make it hard to get fresh, healthful foods to people living in these areas. And as food activists are discovering all over the country, grocery stores alone won't make the food desert bloom.

On a sunny spring day in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia province, Afghan officials and U.S. troops and civilians gather inside the ancient mud fort in the center of Forward Operating Base Gardez. They're attending a ceremony marking the formal end of the work of the provincial reconstruction team, or PRT.

“ You stay too long and inadvertently you smother the capacity that you're trying to build up.

When Duan Biggs was growing up in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, he used to watch elephants and rhinos walking past his bedroom window. He left home to pursue degrees in biology and economics, and when he returned in 2011 the park looked and sounded "like a pseudo war zone," he says.

"There'd be helicopters flying overhead all the time," he says. "I remember one afternoon coming back to my home from a game drive and the bush was crawling with people with assault rifles, from the army, from the police, and from National Parks. They were looking for poachers."

The military-grade equipment — drones, tracking chips, thermal scopes — deployed to protect wildlife against poachers hasn't prevented transcontinental cartels from slaughtering rhinos across Africa to supply a black market concentrated in East Asia, especially Vietnam, where rhino horn is consumed as a traditional medicine for modern ailments.

Parallels

Vietnam's Appetite For Rhino Horn Drives Poaching In Africa