The applause comes "for trying to whack some sense into America's eating habits," which, regular InfoFarm readers know, is only a fraction of what I write about, but who's complaining?

The article also notes, to my great pleasure, that "even people who consider themselves well informed and conscientious about their food sources could learn something here."

But really, everything I write about food, nutrition and food safety I owe to my colleagues across NAL and the Department, which makes me glad that the accolades include an "honorable mention to numerous other pages in the USDA family."

But my non-foodie colleagues, take heart. The full text of the acknowledgement includes a nod to you as well:

The National Agricultural Library . . . provides a wealth of information on topics like invasive species, trade and commerce, rural life, water quality, organic foods and many other health, business and natural resource issues.

So, to all of you, thanks. I couldn't have done it without you.

Today's theme: It All Adds Up

If you've done all or most of your shopping for Thursday's big dinner, you might find you've got a little more jingle in your pocket than you were expecting.

Maybe as much as 4% more jingle.

That's how much less the American Farm Bureau reports the typical Turkey Day dinner costs this year over last.

Based on the results of their 24th annual survey, the Farm Bureau estimates that the average cost of a feast for 10 is $42.91, $1.70 less than last year’s average of $44.61.

Ingredients included in their typical holiday meal are turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas, cranberries, rolls with butter, a one-pound tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie (with whipped cream, of course!), coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve 10 people.

Unfortunately for the struggling dairy farmers, milk alone makes up $.92 (54%) of the $1.70 savings this year, but the $.44 (26%) drop in the price of a 16-pound turkey significantly contributes as well.

For a visually tasty run-down of the numbers in comparison to last year's, see the CNBC slideshow "The Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner 2009."

Today's theme: Do the Math

Need to know how much turkey to buy for your feast? Or how long to defrost a frozen turkey? If so, you've come to the right place.

The quantity question is easy. When buying a whole bird, figure one pound per person, whether the turkey is fresh or frozen.

Those quantities go down if you're opting for a turkey breast instead of a whole bird: 3/4 pound per person with the bone in, 1/2 pound boneless.

These estimates should allow for as much as two servings per person and leftovers, so don't be tempted to round up too much, even if your big cousin Hank is coming this year.

As for thawing a frozen turkey, it all depends upon the bird's size and the thawing method chosen.

The best way to defrost a turky is in the safe, cool confines of your refrigerator. The slow thaw yields a thoroughly and evenly defrosted bird, but it does require more time, so planning ahead is essential. (Which, of course, is why we're covering this topic today.)

The basic rule of thumb: allow approximately 24 hours for every four to five pounds of bird weight.

Despite today's math theme, here's an easy chart with weights and thaw times. I know your math skills will get enough of a workout next week when you have to quadruple your favorite sweet potato recipe, so I'm taking it easy on you today.

See that last line? If you've got a big bird, you might very well need to start the thawing process today. No time to waste.

For the fridge method, keep the frozen turkey in the original wrapper and place it in a tray or pan to catch the runoff. Thaw the turkey with the breast side down so the juices will flow into the breast.

Once thawed, the turkey may remain in the refrigerator for 1 to 2 days, so even if you have a mid-sized bird, it might be okay to start thawing it today.

For those looking for faster thawing options, USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service spells out the cold water and microwave methods.

Be mindful though. The cold water method will cut the time required to thaw your turkey (8 hours vs. 4 days for a 16 pounder), but it could also cut into your sleep.

This process requires that you change the water every 30 minutes, so unless you're planning on a late dinner on Thanksgiving, you'll be up very early filling and re-filling the sink (which really doesn't sound like fun, does it?).

Remember, too, that you still have to allow enough time to roast the turkey before guests arrive, so don't cut the thawing time too close.

After all, we all want leftovers, sure, but the whole bird might be a bit much if it's not done in time to be served.

So, any turkey thawing horror stories to share? Let your debacle be a cautionary tale (and a chuckle) for the rest of us.

After yesterday's off day (or catch up day, if you'd prefer), we're rolling again.

Things get underway today with a live Facebook chat at 3 p.m. ET.

USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service is making one of its experts available to answer questions about how to have a food safe holiday, from defrosting the bird through storing the leftovers.

Submit questions now or interact live. (Goofy turkey hat optional.)

Aside from the chat, today's theme is Shop Early!

Sure, there are lots of things you shouldn't buy yet, but now's the time for taking that list of non-perishables you made on Monday and start checking things off.

Among the things you should consider getting now are:

• The turkey, if you're buying frozen
• Hardy vegetables like onions, winter squash, carrots, potatoes, parsnips and turnips
• Dried herbs and spices
• Packaged stuffing
• Rice or other dried grains
• Baking necessities like flour, sugars, corn syrup, canned pumpkin and fresh or frozen cranberries
• Crackers, chips or nuts
• Beverages that don't need to be refrigerated before the big day
• Oil, wood chips or charcoal if you've got plans to fry, smoke or grill the turkey
• Any necessary cooking equipment such as a roasting pan, food thermometer, pie pans, etc.
• Food storage containers for the inevitable leftovers

Getting all these now helps you avoid a good bit of the crowds at the grocery store and ensures that you're not scrambling for necessities the day before. It also means you get to be the hero when your neigbor arrives on your doorstep Thanksgiving morning asking to borrow a cup of sugar.

And who doesn't want to be the hero?

What other tips do you have for holiday prep a week out? Chime in below.

We're all about getting you ready for Thanksgiving here at InfoFarm. Since I know you're already working your way through yesterday's to-do list, I'm giving you just three simple tasks tied to today's theme of Keeping Food Safe

First, mark your calendars for USDA's live Facebook chat this Thursday, November 19 at 3 p.m. ET.

A holiday food safety expert from the Food Safety and Inspection Service will be tackling your questions about how to prepare your holiday meal safely.

Then, think of questions you have regarding holiday food preparation or storage and submit them via USDA Live prior to Thursday's chat:

What's the best way to defrost a turkey?
Do stuffing ingredients need to be pre-cooked?
If my big cousin Hank doesn't eat all the pumpkin pie, how long will the leftovers keep in the fridge?

Finally, make a note of these other food safety resources and post them in your kitchen. They might come in handy.

• USDA's Meat and Poultry Hotline at 1-888-674-6854. [Hours: daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET / Thanksgiving Day 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET]
• Ask Karen, an automated response system that provides answers to common food safety questions 24/7.
• Consumer Food Safety information from NAL's Food Safety Information Center.

And by the way, should any of these seem like overkill, spend a few minutes reading about food poisoning and foodborne illnesses. You'll quickly see that a little bit of care can spare you a whole lot of unpleasantness.

Yes, time is flying, and Thanksgiving will be here before you know it. With a little forethought, however, the meal planning and cooking need not make you crazy. (Of course, those of you who prefer their holidays with a mix of insanity might want to stop reading. I don't want to ruin anything for you.)

This week and into next, InfoFarm is going to give you day-by-day tips that will make your holiday preparations a breeze.

Today: Laying the Groundwork

• Plan your menu and gather recipes.
• Check your pantry to see what you have. Verify that dried herbs and spices are not expired.
  
• Make a shopping list of needed ingredients. If you actually make two lists, non-perishable and perishable items, it will help plan your trips to the store this week and next.
• Make sure you have all needed equipment, including a large enough roasting pan, a turkey baster, and a fat separator for making gravy.
• Buy a food thermometer if you don't already have one. If you do have one, make sure it is working properly.
• Start using foods that are taking up space in your refrigerator and freezer to make room for your turkey and other dishes.
• Finally, add @USDAFoodSafety to your Twitter feed or search for the #turkeytweets hashtag to keep the tips for Turkey Day flowing.

He grew up on a ranch in Texas, branding cattle and tracking market prices. He then went on to graduate from Princeton with a degree in operations research and financial engineering.

It's an impressive ag and academic pedigree, but it isn't what gets Ross Ohlendorf noticed.

What does is that he's a young, hard-throwing major league pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, one who intentionally sought out Ag Secretary (and Pittsburgh native) Tom Vilsack when Vilsack threw out the ceremonial first pitch at PNC Park in early July.

And now, a few months later, Ohlendorf is spending two months of his precious off-season interning with USDA's Marketing and Regulatory Programs.

He's also blogging about it (which means I'm not the only USDA blogger with baseball on the brain).

In his one blog post so far, Ohlendorf shared that his two favorite DC sites have been the Library of Congress and the National Archives. That makes sense, of course. He's a smart guy, finishing Princeton with a 3.75 GPA, and his father once managed IT systems for the University of Texas libraries. Given that, he probably feels at home in those hallowed halls of history and learning.

But what about NAL?

This brick tower might not deliver the architectural grandeur of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, or the thrill of their amazing historic baseball collection, but when it comes to agriculture, NAL is the cream of the crop.

This library speaks to Ohlendorf's roots, to his love of the land, his passion for ranching and his insatiable desire to learn. It also has crack reference and information center staff that can help with whatever research he's doing for his internship or whatever marketing issues they're tackling back at his family's ranch.

Ohlendorf's a smart guy, so I'm sure he's not going to want to miss what NAL has to offer. When he hustles out to Beltsville for an NAL tour, what do you think he should see?

On the job with USDA since only June 2nd, Dr. Shah has nonetheless made a significant impact in the area of agricultural research. Said Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, "In the short time Raj has been here, he has initiated and overseen a critical transformation in our approach to science."

That change is intended to raise the profile of science within the Department and to cement USDA as a recognized leader in agricultural research worldwide.

What you might not realize, however, is that goal includes this Library, since NAL, as a part of REE, supports the practical, relevant and results-oriented research our parent agency, ARS, is famous for.

That Dr. Shah's impending job change is announced less than a week after his first visit to NAL is purely coincidental, I assure you. He made clear that he values libraries, and we, in turn, value his leadership.

We'll just have to provide our support from a bit of a longer distance now. After all, USAID does play a crucial role in international agricultural development.

Just don't forget, Raj, that we can help with that, too. Just give us a call.

I can tell you where many young people were, but first, I'll give you a hint:

Sunny day,
Sweepin' the clouds away.
On my way to where the air is sweet.

Yup, you got it . . . Sesame Street!

The educational powerhouse for preschoolers made its broadcast debut November 10, 1969.

Now, 40 years later, it's marking its anniversary with an appearance by First Lady Michelle Obama, who is taking her message about gardening and healthy eating to the Street.

The appearance brings together two healthy living agendas: Sesame Workshop's Healthy Habits for Life Initiative and Mrs. Obama's own work as First Lady to encourage good nutrition and regular exercise.

From establishing the White House kitchen garden to planting (not eating!) seeds with Elmo and friends, Mrs. Obama is becoming an expert on gardening and good eating. She's also recognizing how much children learn from helping to grow their own fruits and veggies.

If that's a movement you'd like to get on board with, learn more about gardening with children from the Healthy Meals Resource System, part of USDA's Team Nutrition.

After all, it might not be garden planting time, but it is definitely garden planning time. And if you want to have a school or family project ready to go next Spring, it's never too early to get the ball rolling.

Wait. Check that.

It doesn't feed our curiosity as much as spark it, as an appetizer warms us up for eating.

But before I get into that, read today's poem. Just pay special attention to the first line.

American Life in Poetry: Column 154

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Though some teacher may have made you think that all poetry is deadly serious, chock full of coded meanings and obscure symbols, poems, like other works of art, can be delightfully playful. Here Bruce Guernsey, who divides his time between Illinois and Maine, plays with a common yam.

Yam

The potato that ate all its carrots,
can see in the dark like a mole,

its eyes the scars
from centuries of shovels, tines.

May spelled backwards
because it hates the light,

pawing its way, paddling along,
there in the catacombs.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Bruce Guernsey. Reprinted from New England Primer by Bruce Guernsey, Cherry Grove Collections, 2008, by permission of Bruce Guernsey and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Okay, so we know potatoes don't eat carrots, unless we're talking compost, so we'll chalk that up to creative license and a nod toward the "yam's" orange flesh. But what about this potato business in a poem titled "Yam"? Anybody catch the problem here?

Turns out, yams are not sweet potatoes, and yet, kinda, they are.

Here's the deal. Technically, botanically, yams and sweet potatoes are unrelated. Yams are monocots; sweet potatoes, dicots. Yams are from the Dioscoreaceae or Yam family; sweet potatoes arise from the Convolvulacea or morning glory family. And the list goes on.

But here in the U.S. yams are sweet potatoes thanks to a blend of tradition and a marketing ploy the Louisiana growers trotted out some decades back. Seeking to set their product apart from the other varieties of sweet potatoes available, the folks in Louisiana took to calling their sweeties "yams" after the soft African yams they resembled.

And thus a market niche -- and consumer confusion -- were born.

But don't go thinking that's the only point of confusion here. Here's one more for the road.

Yams, as we've noted, aren't sweet potatoes, but then, just to round things out, sweet potatoes aren't even potatoes. They're distant cousins at best, with each a part of a different genus:

Potato: Solanum tuberosum
Sweet Potato: Ipomoea batatas

Pretty neat, eh? Curiosity satisfied yet?

The event's goal is to "raise awareness and trigger a global discussion" by inviting bloggers everywhere to address that one issue from our unique and varied perspectives and to apply to it our respective expertise.

Taking that to heart, I decided that the most appropriate thing a librarian like myself can do is to point you to a handful of quality resources on climate change. That way, true to the librarian code, I can empower you to study the issue for yourself and make your own decisions.

Here's what I got:

• The Environmental Protection Agency delivers a primer on climate change, offering background information on the science behind the headlines, along with a look at policy issues, regulatory initiatives, economic impacts and related topics.
• The U.S. Global Change Research Program coordinates and integrates federal research on the topic, encouraging cross-disciplinary approaches from the 13 agencies that participate. And yes, they do make available their research and reports.
• NASA's Global Change Master Directory gets real with climate change by pointing you to actual data sets and services relevant to global change and Earth science research. It also serves up a particularly rich collection of links to sites that address policy around global warming and climate change.
• You can also snag more climate change data from the Energy Information Administration, the statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, and study historical changes in environmental indicators to your heart's content.
• The U.S. Geological Survey Office of Global Change gives you a glimpse into what that agency is doing to study and address climate change. And bless their Web 2.0 souls -- they even offer podcasts.

I could go on. Other goverment agencies like NOAA and USDA tackle climate change. So do research institutions like the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the Woods Hole Research Center. Even newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have set up focused topics pages on the subject that pull together in one place their news stories and multimedia offerings through the years. And let's not forget my own colleagues here at NAL, who have collected hundreds of articles and books that wrestle with the complex issues associated with global warming and climate change.

Of course, the Web is a huge place, and there are countless other sites that pick up one thread or another in the climate change debate. These are just a few. Feel free to suggest others below. Lively discussions and different opinions are encouraged, after all.

The slick Interactive DRI for Healthcare Professionals calculates an individual’s daily nutrient recommendations based on the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs).

You enter the basics -- a person's sex, age, height, weight and activity level -- and the tool will compute his body mass index, daily calorie needs, and the recommended amounts of various macronutrients, vitamins and minerals.

It's simple to use but not necessarily simple to interpet. Of course, that's where the healthcare professionals come in. The tool, after all, was designed for them, for the registered dietitians, doctors, nurses and others involved in dietary planning who can help John and Jane Q. Public interpret and use the information to lay out healthy ways to eat.

Also fresh on the scene is the new Education and Training Materials Database, which points you to all types of educational materials related to food safety and nutrition.

Looking for a game that'll teach 10-year-olds about eating a balanced diet?

How about a video on the importance of hand washing for restaurant staff?

Or food safety posters in Spanish specific to child care centers?

This comprehensive tool delivers them all and more.

You can even type in a keyword, such as "fiber," and then, with a click, easily refine your results by format -- activity, book, brochure, presentation, etc. -- to find exactly what you need for your next class.

One note here, though. You won't usually be getting the content itself. The actual activity, book or brochure won't necessarily be waiting for you one click away. But what you will find is information about how to get it, whom to contact, what it will cost, etc. The rest is up to you, but you gotta appreciate the time it saves hunting.

One place, one search, and you're quickly on the phone or on the Web ordering the absolutely perfect training curriculum.

You can't beat that.

Today from 3:45 to 4:15 Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan will host a Facebook chat focusing on USDA's Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative. [recorded video of chat above]

You can submit a question in advance of the chat or watch the conversation on USDA's Web site.

And while you're riding the wave of excitement from the chat, become a Facebook fan of USDA at www.facebook.com/USDA.

What else are we happy for over this past year?

☆ A sweet, albeit brief, mention in Slate that links out to my April Fools' Day post:

The best government blogs actually sound like blogs, too. InfoFarm, the Department of Agriculture's blog, may be the first-ever instance of government-sponsored snark.

☆ A blogger's high-five from a little blog called The Tulsa Initiative:

The USDA National Agriculture Library blog: Infofarm is awesome. Seriously.

☆ And a discovery I made today about one more notable event that shares October 1st as its anniversary.

Those of you who have been around InfoFarm for a while know that I have a little thing about baseball and like to fold it into my posts here and there when I can. So I was particularly thrilled to learn that on this day 48 years ago Roger Maris hit his 61st home run, breaking Babe Ruth's Major League record for the number of home runs in a season.

Yea, it's not easy for me to acknowledge a Yankee player for anything, but Maris actually broke into the majors with my beloved Cleveland Indians, so I'm willing to make some allowances here. And since he hit the record-setting home run during his 2nd at-bat, I'm also finding some eerie coincidence between that and InfoFarm's 2nd anniversary. (Of course, that coincidence will be gone next year, but by then, I'll find something else to remark upon, don't worry.)

But the connections don't end there, since technically, October 1st is also a record-setting day at InfoFarm. No NAL blog has ever existed this long; no NAL blogger has ever written this many posts.

What can I say?

Maris and I -- we're record-setters.

And I can't resist pointing out that we've both done it without steroids.

Maybe, then, this is all old news to you, but I'm guessing there are still a few of you out there who don't know the scoop on KYF2.

The overarching initiative shines a light on local agriculture. It looks to develop local and regional food systems, spark economic growth and strengthen rural areas. It also works to support healthy eating and protecting the environment. And it seeks to do all this through existing USDA programs that are innovatively applied.

KYF2 also seeks to open up the doors on this Department to let in more ideas and more perspectives. The new Web site's Ideas and Stories page, though not yet fleshed out, will be the hub for that. And the invitation there is quite compelling:

This is the start of a national dialogue between the USDA and you - farmers, ranchers, businesses, community organizations, governments, schools, consumers. Government doesn't have all the answers - the issues that we're addressing require local solutions and local resolve. That's why we need your help. Send us your ideas and stories about food, agriculture, and local and regional food systems and we'll share them. Call, email, write, videotape, photograph, you name it, and thank you for taking the time.

You can also become a Facebook fan of USDA at www.facebook.com/USDA.