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Most urban consumers are happy to leave farming to the farmers, but for those with a green thumb, it is getting easier to garden in the city. That's thanks, in part, to DIYers sharing ideas for reusing old materials to garden in and a new range of tools designed to get many more people involved with growing some of their own food.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has lately been talking about micro-gardens as critical way to help the urban poor get more food on the table. The FAO defines micro-gardens intensively cultivated small spaces — such as balconies, small yards, patios and rooftops. Many rely on containers such as plastic-lined wooden boxes, trash cans and even old car tires.

While it's probably tough to sustain a family on a micro-garden, FAO research shows that a well-tended micro-garden of 11 square feet can produce as much as 200 tomatoes a year, 36 heads of lettuce every 60 days, 10 cabbages every 90 days, and 100 onions every 120 days.

Sure, micro-gardens can easily be created out of plenty of scrap materials: potatoes grown in a bucket or trash can, for example, or wooden pallets turned into an herb garden. Anne Gibson, an Australian who runs The Micro Gardener website, has aggregated many of the most creative ideas. And for folks who don't want to DIY it, several companies are also making it easy to start a micro-garden with an array of new products.

Earth Starter is one such start-up. This month, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign to manufacture more of its all-in-one roll out garden tool, called a Nourishmat. The Nourishmat, which is inspired by Square Foot Gardening, makes it easy to grow a lot of food in a 4-foot by 6-foot space by turning a plastic mat into a garden planting guide.

The mat comes with seedballs (seeds mixed with clay and worm castings to enrich the soil, and chili powder to keep pests away). To plant, you simply lay out the mat on top of a bed of soil, then stick the seedballs for the 18 different vegetables and herbs in their respective holes. (Urban residents who may have soil contaminated with lead and other heavy metals will have to build a raised bed and fill it with clean soil.) The mat also doubles as a weed barrier.

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Americans will get the same ham slabs and bacon slices they have enjoyed for generations, even after Smithfield Foods becomes a Chinese subsidiary, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope told Congress on Wednesday.

"It will be the same old Smithfield, only better," Pope said in prepared testimony at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing.

But several senators weren't buying the bacon-will-be-unbroken story once Hong Kong-based Shuanghui International Holdings owns Smithfield.

Worried about the impact on the U.S. consumer, farmer and even the taxpayer, they expressed qualms about Chinese intentions.

"Is Shuanghui focused on acquiring Smithfield's technology, which was developed with considerable assistance by U.S. taxpayers?" asked Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate committee.

"Can we expect that after the company has adopted Smithfield's technology and practices, they will increase exports to Japan, our largest export market, in competition with U.S. products?" she asked in her prepared statement.

Stabenow also raised questions about:

- Fairness. "Can we really expect increased access for our pork products in China?"

- Consumers. "Will we see volatility in prices?"

- Precedent. "One pork company alone might not be enough to affect our national security, but it's our job to be thinking about the big picture."

The deal is being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, which monitors and reviews foreign investments.

The Salt

Will Chinese Firm Bring Home The Bacon With Smithfield Deal?

We have to confess: When we heard that Twinkies will have nearly double the shelf life, 45 days, when they return to stores next week, our first reaction was – days? Not years?

Urban legend has long deemed Twinkies the cockroaches of the snack food world, a treat that can survive for decades, what humanity would have left to eat come the apocalypse. The true shelf life — which used to be 26 days — seems somewhat less impressive by comparison.

While the Twinkie is indeed a highly processed food — its three dozen or so ingredients include polysorbate 60, sodium stearoyl lactylate and others that could only come from a lab — it isn't any more so than thousands of other food products out there.

"It is absolutely typical of all processed foods," says Steve Ettlinger, who spent five years tracing the origins of ingredients in many processed foods for his book Twinkie, Deconstructed.

"Perhaps disappointing to foodies, it's mostly flour and sugar," he tells The Salt.

So why does the Twinkie persist in the popular imagination as a paragon of delicious, unnatural food creations? Perhaps it is the way the snacks seem to override our senses. Unwrapped from their plastic packaging, these sponge cakes appear impossibly soft, their filling so creamy — not rancid, as logic tells us that any milk product left out for days must surely be.

Indeed, most of the items on Twinkies' long list of ingredients go into pulling off that hat trick. Normally, you need butter, milk and eggs to give cakes their moisture and tenderness.

Americans will get the same ham slabs and bacon slices they have enjoyed for generations, even after Smithfield Foods becomes a Chinese subsidiary, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope told Congress on Wednesday.

"It will be the same old Smithfield, only better," Pope said in prepared testimony at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing.

But several senators weren't buying the bacon-will-be-unbroken story once Hong Kong-based Shuanghui International Holdings owns Smithfield.

Worried about the impact on the U.S. consumer, farmer and even the taxpayer, they expressed qualms about Chinese intentions.

"Is Shuanghui focused on acquiring Smithfield's technology, which was developed with considerable assistance by U.S. taxpayers?" asked Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate committee.

"Can we expect that after the company has adopted Smithfield's technology and practices, they will increase exports to Japan, our largest export market, in competition with U.S. products?" she asked in her prepared statement.

Stabenow also raised questions about:

- Fairness. "Can we really expect increased access for our pork products in China?"

- Consumers. "Will we see volatility in prices?"

- Precedent. "One pork company alone might not be enough to affect our national security, but it's our job to be thinking about the big picture."

The deal is being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, which monitors and reviews foreign investments.

The Salt

Will Chinese Firm Bring Home The Bacon With Smithfield Deal?