Visit the land of seafood and spice as Michel Nischan learns to make a traditional Goan meal fit for a only the very best guest.

The Norwegian government finally announced plans this week to build a Global Seed Vault, a seed bank that's been in the works for more than a year. The seed vault will be built on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, which lies 600 miles from the North Pole, and will be designed to protect the world's crop seeds in case of some sort of global catastrophe that destroys all agriculture. Seed banks already exist in several locations around the world, but this one aims to be a back-up in case all those others are also destroyed by this nameless global catastrophe.

So you’ve heard of carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores. But what about localvores? A new word that has barely entered our lexicon, localvores are those who strive to eat food produced or harvested 100-150 mile radius from their homes. For those of you who think eating organic is good enough, think again: with your food traveling an average of 1500 miles before it ends up on your dinner plate, the fuel and energy costs are substantial.

Burying cow’s horns in the ground. Scattering the ashes of field mice across a field. Studying the phases of the moon and the planets.

While this may sound like a lesson plan from Harry Potter’s alchemy class at Hogwarts, it might surprise you to know that the glass of wine you drank last night at dinner could have been created with these methods, which are part of the rapidly growing biodynamic movement.

Antibacterial soaps have been growing in popularity, and I can't remember the last time I went into a home with children where there wasn't a bottle of the stuff on every sink. I'm always reluctant to use it, fueled by a strange gut feeling that I'm better off learning to cope with the bacteria that surround me. Now there's some scientific back-up for my anti-antibacterial sentiments: new research found that as much as 75 percent of the chemicals used to make these products are emerging unharmed from sewage treatment plants, ending up in water supplies and subsequently used to irrigate farmland.

The chorus of clean-energy advocates is growing louder – and more politically powerful – now that farmers are singing along. And they have good reason: Energy crops. Raw materials such as corn, soy, wheat, trees and even animal manure can be processed into cleaner-burning next-gen fuels. According to a new article in Grist.org, leaders of 70 agriculture groups recently joined the ambitious 25 x '25 alliance. It advocates that 25 percent of U.S. energy supplies come from America’s working lands – either from their crops or windmills and solar panels installed on those lands - by 2025.

Alien invasions are a bad thing, as a general rule. Our notoriously porous borders cause all kinds of problems for the U.S., from aspiring terrorists who slip in to form sleeper cells to illegal immigrants whose cheap labor costs us plenty in the long run.

Plus, our lax borders make CNN’s apoplectic populist Lou Dobbs play like a broken record with his “Broken Borders” segments, which take precious air time away from my favorite Dobbs refrains: “Exporting America,” “Assault on the Middle Class,” and “Red Star Rising.”