Los Angeles Food & News

08/09/2026

SURPRISE! 🍅🍅🍅 In many ways, fast-food restaurants feel like the opposite of a backyard vegetable garden. But one gardener has tied a McDonald’s hamburger directly to a garden harvest in a way that even surprised him.

James Prigioni makes popular gardening videos on YouTube. In one, he wanted to see if he could grow a whole tomato plant by planting the seeds from a tomato on a McDonald’s burger. He picked up a Deluxe Quarter Pounder with cheese, pulled out a tomato slice, and removed two seeds. After rubbing the seeds on a paper towel to remove the protective coating, which can inhibit sprouting, they were ready to plant.

But like any good scientist, Prigioni wanted to try a different method for testing McDonald’s tomato seeds. So he pulled a slice of tomato from a second Quarter Pounder and, instead of extracting the seeds, planted the entire slice.

With the help of a heat mat and a grow lamp, both sets of seedlings germinated and sprouted in soil-filled red Solo cups in about a week. After they were fully established, Prigioni separated the plants so they could thrive individually before being planted outside.

He planted one of the plants in the ground outside and another in a 5-gallon bucket. He then showed how he culled the lower leaves as they developed blight and used a tomato cage to support the plants as they produced fruit and grew heavier. He also added extra fertilized soil and mulch to the bucket plant.

After three months, the plants were producing abundant fruit. The bucket plant didn’t perform as well as the in-ground plant, which Prigioni said was due to insufficient watering during very hot days. The bucket plant also ripened faster, likely due to the stress it had been under. Still, it was an impressive harvest, especially for a plant that started on a McDonald’s burger.

The in-ground McDonald’s plant was even more incredible, with dozens of tomatoes dripping from it.

“I expected this tomato to grow,” Prigioni said, “but I did not expect this.”

The fruit from both plants tasted good and sweet, he said. By the fourth month, the in-ground plant was starting to struggle with its health, but not with its fruit production.

“The plant had so many tomatoes on it that it seemed like it was having a little difficulty ripening that much fruit at one time,” Prigioni said. “I mean, I have had some plants with a lot of tomatoes on them, but never in my life have I seen a single tomato plant with this much fruit on it. I was completely blown away.”

Prigioni said one of his favorite parts of the experiment was seeing what kind of tomatoes would grow from the seeds. He thought it might be a beefsteak variety, but it turned out to be a Roma type. However, he surmised that the McDonald’s tomato was likely a hybrid, based on its ripening characteristics.

Prigioni also shared how the McDonald’s tomato plants compared with his other tomato plants.

“In another area of the garden, I grew Roma tomatoes that I got from Lowe’s, and I planted them at the same time as the McDonald’s tomatoes,” he said in the video, which you can watch below. “The harvest from them wasn’t quite as large, but the fruit ripened way more evenly, and I was able to harvest a lot more fresh fruit right off the vine that was ripe.”

“Overall, I was shocked with the level of production,” he continued. “And this is probably my favorite experiment that I’ve ever done. I mean, to be able to take a cheeseburger, grab a tomato from it, then grow a tomato plant, and then harvest pounds and pounds of tomatoes from it is just such a unique and refreshing experience.”

Perhaps an unexpected result, but a great way to challenge our assumptions and demonstrate the power of nature, even in the context of fast food.

08/09/2026

08/08/2026

The Tory leader has created an upside-down party where former neo-Nazis can run as councillors, but anyone hoping to stop the world from catching fire is banned, writes Alan Rusbridger

08/08/2026

For those with the knack of finding hidden gems among the thrift-store duds.

08/08/2026

“People need to actively avert these factors in midlife as a strategy for preserving brain health.”

08/08/2026

Being an actor typically comes with a pretty crazy paycheck. After all, it's Hollywood—have you seen how much movies have been making, especially lately?

Let's look at The Odyssey for a moment—according to The Numbers, it grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide. And actors get a pretty decent piece of the pie, especially icons like Morgan Freeman.

But some actors tend to be a little stingy when it comes to just what they choose to star in. Not for Freeman, though—as reported by People, the Hollywood icon got candid about his lack of care in his job choices.

Well, "lack of care" isn't entirely true. He cares... about the money, not necessarily the contents of the script. I, for one, don't blame him!

"If somebody offers you a job, it's very nice if they're offering you also an exciting script, but in reality, two or three things come into play," he explained.

"What are they going to pay you? If they're going to pay you enough, then you overlook some of the glitches in the script that happen to be there," he mused.

He added that bad scripts aren't a one-and-done thing. "Sometimes you can mention things that are in the script that don't quite work out for you, and by and large, that gets worked out," he explained.

In case you aren't aware, Morgan Freeman has been a Hollywood icon for years now. And, by his own admission, he's getting on in his age—but he still wants to act.

And he says that he wants to keep going. "I'm like Clint Eastwood on that," he explained. "Don't let the old man in—keep working. If you can get out of bed and don't fall down when you do it, then you just count your blessings and keep moving."

"So, I'll work as long as I can—as long as somebody says, 'Do you want to do this part?'"

The Hollywood icon also made a humorous remark when he was asked if he had any dream roles. "I'm pushing 90 now," he laughed. "So the roles I wished I had been able to play, Denzel Washington will play."

08/08/2026

The Cruz family spent years building a life in New York. Then the risks of staying became too great, Caitlin Dickerson reports. (From March) https://theatln.tc/3BPWhecA

After the 2024 election, Rachel, some of whose ancestors had come to the U.S. on the Mayflower, made a plan to sell the house that she and her husband, Irvi, had poured themselves into and to move with their daughters, Sara and Ana, to his hometown of San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, Mexico. Irvi would go first, so he’d be out of the country before Donald Trump took office. Rachel and the girls would join him seven months later, in August 2025, after finishing the school year and summer camp. Sara and Ana knew little Spanish.

By Inauguration Day, Irvi was in Mexico. There were no blaring car horns or subway trains. He spent hours hunched over outside each day, digging in his family’s land, pruning and picking, and breaking a sweat as soon as the sun came up. Along with relatives, he planted tomatoes, peppers, and onions, and sold them at outdoor markets. He barely broke even, Dickerson reports.

Rachel found a private school in Oaxaca for the girls and secured a job for herself, at an annual salary of $10,700—not nearly enough to live on, even in rural Mexico, and a pittance compared with her $120,000 salary in New York.

Dickerson visited the family in Mexico in November, a few months after their reunion. Of Irvi, she writes, “The United States was where he had become a man, a husband, a father, a homeowner, a model citizen in every respect except the one that mattered to the U.S. government. Now he had done … what President Trump wanted—and he was beginning to live with that choice.”

Rachel and the girls went to New York to visit Rachel’s parents this past Christmas; she had to pry her daughters away from playdates with their New York friends. Rachel’s father still couldn’t believe it had come to this. “I’m heartbroken because I believe in this country in an almost religious way,” her father, Doug, tells Dickerson. But as a country, he says, “we fu**ed up.”

📸: Natalie Keyssar