Are consumers to blame for the rise in obesity across America? Or has Big Food confused our food choices and made the basic principles of healthy eating harder to follow? Award-winning author and New York University professor emerita Marion Nestle visited the UHM campus on November 7 to offer her research findings on the parallels between processed-food profits, big-budget marketing, and consumer behavior over the last 50 years.

The Symphony of the Hawaiian Birds will be performed on Kaua‘i for the first time in February 2020, and help is needed to recruit teachers on the island to bring their students. All classes in grades 4–12, as well as home-schooled students, are welcome. It's a place-based interdisciplinary program that brings together science, music, art, dance, and education to tell the story of our endangered Hawaiian forest birds.

All are invited to the CTAHR Fall 2019 Graduation Convocation, an intimate ceremony for the college’s Fall 2019 graduates, family, friends, and faculty! It's on Date: Thursday, December 12 (last day of classes) in the Campus Center Ballroom. Check-in begins at 5:00 p.m., the program runs 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., and the reception goes from 6:30 to 7:00 p.m.

Aurora Saulo (Dept. of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences) and co-authors recently published a peer-reviewed article, “Linking Food Endorsement Labels & Messaging to Perceived Price and Emotions: A Mind Genomics^® Exploration,” in the journal Advanced Nutrition and Food Science.

There’s a new agricultural pest in town, and Dan Rubinoff (Dept. of Plants and Environmental Protection Sciences) is ready to start investigating it. He was interviewed by KITV about the Australian longhorn beetle, which is threatening citrus, sago palm, cacao, breadfruit, and kukui trees. A local chocolate company said their cacao yield has dropped 20 percent since the beetle has infested their trees. It also affects native trees such as ‘ōhi‘a and lama.