This will surprise and shock you: It is sometimes hard to stay positive and be an environmentalist. Between Big Oil prematurely ejaculating over suburban lawns, the goddamn weather taking aim at my precious Russian River Pinots, and the very ocean dusting the Great Barrier Reef before I can afford to go there, can you blame me? Kermit -- chemically sensitive amphibian, browbeaten husband, and dolorous crooner that he is -- perhaps gives us the patron cliché we deserve.

All of which means I approach our theme this month -- Happiness! -- with some trepidation. It's not that we Gristers aren't adept at handling looming catastrophe; we just often swallow it with sarcasm and a black humor more cold and remote than the love of God. When it comes to dancing to the tune of the apocalypse, we've got moves like a teenage Blue Ivy Carter, and an f-bomb or 75 never hurts. When things get really bad, we can just report as-is and do this:

But this month is not about that!

Tanya Fields is a Bronx food-justice advocate who has come into possession of a used school bus that she wants to use to bring produce to underserved communities. It already runs on vegetable oil, but it needs a new transmission. And shelves to store fresh veggies. And solar panels to provide energy for cooling and heating. And blenders to make smoothies for vegetable-wary kids. So she’s working to raise $15,000 online to make this a reality. If you donate $50 you can get a banana cream cake!

The grand plan is to create a moving feast of good veggies for a neighborhood that lacks them. DNAinfo reports:

She and her partners want to transport fresh produce from a sustainable upstate farm to the South Bronx, where they’ll sell it on street corners, all the while educating residents about the food system and providing solid jobs.

And, just to make sure no one confuses this for any old farm stand, the "Veggie Mobile Market" will operate out of a playfully painted former school bus that runs on vegetable oil.

What’s great about this project is that Fields is from the Bronx, living in the same areas she wants to serve. So she knows exactly what challenges she’ll face -- which are not really problems of supply, but quality.

OK, we know that it's hard to think about eating this:

But what about this?

Four graduate students in London are betting that you'll eat those nugget-y morsels -- even though they're made of bugs. After all, you already eat lots of weird things. Like raw fish. FastCoExist reports:

"Sushi was a very inspiring story for us," says cofounder Julene Aguirre-Bielschowski, who met her cofounders at the Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc double masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

Ronnie Jacobs last week became the fifth Butterball employee to plead guilty to cruelty-to-animals charges after workers at a North Carolina factory farm were filmed kicking and beating turkeys in 2011. The animal rights activists who filmed the abuse provided evidence that triggered a law enforcement raid and led to six people being charged.

From a 2012 ABC story:

Mercy for Animals, the animal rights group that shot the undercover video, said there had been no insider information about abuse at the facility before the tape was made. "Unfortunately, every time we send an investigator they emerge with shocking evidence of animal abuse," said MFA executive director Nathan Runkle.

Are these activists being showered with accolades and gratitude for doing the work that law-enforcement agencies apparently don't care to do? Hell no! The North Carolina legislature is trying to criminalize their activities.

Swallow Magazine calls itself "the anti-foodie food magazine" and says that "each issue is akin to the perfect dinner party where the food is central to the event, but the conversation veers wildly around the table from topic to topic." In the past, the magazine has covered Scandinavian food and "points along the Trans-Siberian express." It took more than a year for the latest issue -- which covers Mexico City -- to come out. And that is in part because it smells.

The New York Times explains:

This issue of Swallow includes 20 scratch-and-sniff stickers throughout that are imbued with the aromas of one of the city’s many colonias, or neighborhoods.

Wine grapes are about as sensitive as your head the morning after you've tied one on with a bottle of Bordeaux: They need just the right climate to thrive. And that climate, of course, is changing.

A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts the rapid decline of wine-growing regions from California to Australia -- quite the headache for the $290-billion-a-year global wine industry.

The Guardian reports:

Researchers predict a two-thirds fall in production in the world's premier wine regions because of climate change. ...

The scientists used 17 different climate models to gauge the effects on nine major wine-producing areas. They used two different climate futures for 2050, one assuming a worst-case scenario with a 4.7C (8.5F) warming, the other a 2.5C increase.

Both forecast a radical re-ordering of the wine world. The most drastic decline was expected in Europe, where the scientists found a 85% decrease in production in Bordeaux, Rhone and Tuscany.

The future was also bleak for wine growing areas of Australia, with a 74% drop, and California, with a 70% fall

Thieves in the German town of Bad Hersfeld (which sounds like the nickname of the most rebellious kid in bar mitzvah study) swiped 5.5 tons of Nutella spread out of a trailer. They're going to have a hard time eating it all, but I am willing to help.

Like humans in modern societies, organs specialize. Lungs breathe. Hearts pump blood. Eyes see. Noses smell. The work gets divided up. But new research indicates that organs that we usually don't think of as having anything to do with smelling have the same olfactory receptors as cells in found in noses.

In other words, it's possible that your heart, your blood, and your lungs can smell.

I love eggs. I make them the way Julia Child did, stirring the curds slowly up from the pan. I buy good fresh eggs, which I guess cost about 40 cents apiece. But that is a fraction of the price of the egg that's selling for £8 -- $12.24 -- at a restaurant in London called Dabbous.

Ride a train through swaths of the Midwest in the summer and it's hard to imagine how the country could ever produce more corn. Well, imagine it: Farmers will cover 97.3 million acres of land with the monoculture crop this year.

That's more than in any other year since 1936, when, like now, the drought-plagued nation's corn reserves had run low. But unlike the 1930s, corn prices are high now in part because of demand for exports, biofuels, corn-syrup-flavored candy, and feed for factory farming.