Everyone in Wheaton can rest easy now, Wheaton North High School Principal Jill Bullo told parents in a letter sent home last week. The spooge-spiked ranch dressing poses no health risk to students, so eat up kids! more ›

Take a deep breath today folks, it'll be one of your last whiffs of Blommer's chocolate. The EPA was serious about ridding downtown Chicago of the scourge of chocolate pollution. The Blommer Chocolate factory is heeding a complaint by the agency about the pollution caused by grinding cocoa beans and will soon be installing equipment to stifle the emissions. more ›

Anyone who has spent time downtown knows about the delicious cocoa smell wafting over from the Blommer chocolate factory just west of the river. Chicagoist used to hike 2.5 miles each way to our job downtown, and the smell followed us door-to-door. You might think we'd have gotten sick of it, but that warm chocolate hug just made us want to stay home and gorge ourselves on cake and brownies all day. Combine that with the smell of the Bay's English muffin factory near our home and we felt like the fat kid from Willy Wonka. more ›

The EPA has announced that desipite what Mayor Daley and members of congress have said, "Cheesehead sewage" was not the cause of Lake Michigan beach closings. The likely cause was from the feces of seagulls who are drawn to beaches by human food handouts and waste. Water samples collected on the days the beaches were closed found that most of the E. coli bacteria came from seagull droppings and that beaches with the most gulls had the highest bacteria counts. more ›