Tag Archives: food safety

1/27/11 Nourishing News Roundup

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Food Manufacturers Unveil Label Program

Hot on the heels of Wal-Mart’s healthy initiatives announcement last week, the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) revealed their new front-of-package Nutrition Keys labeling program. The GMA claims the labels will make it clearer for consumers to know what’s in packaged food–calories, fat, sodium, sugars–and potentially highlight healthful aspects like fiber and potassium. In her Food Politics blog, however, Marion Nestle says the program is little more than the industry’s effort to preempt the front-of-package labeling standards being developed by the Food and Drug Administration. Moreover, she says, it has plenty of potential to confuse consumers even more.

USDA Fires Top Dog for Organics

The USDA has certainly paid lip service to organics, but as we’ve noted, agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack wants to have it both ways: support organics and conventional agriculture. Now the USDA has fired Mark D. Keating, an agricultural marketing specialist with the National Organic Program (NOP). Keating had been with the department for 20 years and was instrumental in developing the USDA’s organic standards. Jeff Desay reports on the implications of this move on AlterNet.

Where’s the Beef?

Skip the fast-food fix and try our homemade burritos instead.

The Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that a California woman has filed a class-action suit against Taco Bell, claiming the ground beef used by the fast-food chain contains too little actual beef. She may not win, because Taco Bell itself calls the stuff “taco meat filling.” If you need a Taco Bell fix, try Cheryl’s Homemade Beef and Bean Burritos instead. They come together in no time, you’ll actually know what’s in them, and they taste a whole lot better!

Organic Milk Overcomes Climate Change

Climate change, well, changes the nature of your food. Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that milk produced during wet, cool summers tends to be much higher in saturated fat and lower in healthy fatty acids than milk produced during normal weather conditions. But Newcastle University scientists have found that’s not the case with organic milk, which has higher levels of beneficial fatty acids than conventionally produce milk regardless of the weather. The researchers also discovered that the nutritional quality of organic milk is far more consistent than conventional.

Eliminate Food Waste to Fight World Hunger

We talked about minimizing food waste as a smart 2011 resolution for the health of the planet (and your wallet!). But there’s another benefit, too: increasing food security. Worldwatch Institute’s new report, State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet, highlights the importance of preventing food waste in battle against world hunger. The report offers real-world examples of innovative programs from around the world, like women in The Gambia who formed a cooperative to ensure the sustainability of local oyster fisheries or Kenyan women who designed “vertical” gardens to grow food for residents of a Nairobi slum.

Failure to Fund the Food Safety Modernization Will Fail the World

We’ve noted that food safety is one of the big issues we’ll be following this year, and already the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act is threatened by lawmakers reluctant to appropriate funds to implement the law’s measures. We love this editorial in the journal Nature, which teases out the byzantine quality of food safety regulations in the United States. But failure to fund the act will have implications far beyond our borders. The British government think tank The Foresight Programme’s new report, The Future of Food and Farming, illustrates the need for a global food supply system to ensure safe, sustainable food for a world population that’s projected to reach 8-10 billion by 2050.

1/6/11 Nourishing News Roundup

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As the first week of the new year draws to a close, food news has already made some headlines. Here are some of our faves:

Safe Food at Last?

The landmark Food Safety Modernization Act is signed into law. But will the new Congress cough up the cash needed to make it work? NOURISH Evolution

Vote for SuperFood Drive

We recently profiled Nourishing Hero and SuperFood Drive founder Ruthi Solari, who is dedicated to stocking America’s food banks with nourishing whole foods. Ruthi is one of five finalists in the Sambazon Acai Warriors of Change Contest, which will award a $10,000 grant to an individual who is making positive social, environmental and economic change. Cast your vote by Jan. 21 to help Ruthi win: Sambazon site

Something’s Fishy at Costco

Shop at Costco? You may have noticed the company’s recent efforts to “green” its image and banish red-list fish from its stores. As the Greenpeace Oh No Costco campaign reveals, these amount to greenwashing rather than genuine efforts (for example, many of the threatened fish Costco has turned away were never sold in its stores in the first place). Now you can let Costco CEO James Sinegal know you expect better: Oh No Costco

True Sustainable Living

Does living a truly sustainable life mean living like a peasant? Or is there a middle ground? San Diego-based journalist Jill Richardson explores those questions while spending time in Chiapas, Mexico. AlterNet

Ban the Bottle

If you haven’t broken the bottled water habit yet, the Environmental Working Group’s 2011 Bottled Water Report may provide the motivation. By and large, the industry gets low marks for transparency on the source of water, how it’s purified and testing for contaminants. Even when companies are required to share information they don’t. Less than one-quarter comply with a California law that requires bottled-water labels to list the source of water and two ways for consumers to reach the company to obtain a water quality report. Which water is best? Filtered tap water, says the EWG. Environmental Working Group

Focus on What You Eat

A pair of new studies provide more evidence for the benefits of mindful eating. Carnegie Mellon University research finds that if you vividly imagine eating a food you crave you’ll eat less of it in the long run. Another study, from the University of Bristol in England, reveals playing a computer game while eating lunch makes you more likely to snack later in the afternoon. Why? Distracted eaters were less likely to remember how much they’d eaten and felt less satisfied than study participants who paid attention to what they ate.

What’s Food Safety Really About?

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Back in 2011, President Obama signed the long-awaited–and much-needed–Food Safety Modernization Act into law. The act updated America’s food safety system for the first time since the Great Depression and “represents a sea change for food safety in America, bringing a new focus on prevention,” noted Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., commissioner of food and drugs at the Food and Drug Administration.

food-safety

Now the FDA has the authority to enforce food safety measures domestically and internationally, including mandating food recalls (before, recalls were voluntary) and blocking food imported from countries or producers who refuse FDA inspections. As Hamburg notes, half of our fresh fruit, 20% of of our vegetables and 80% of our seafood is imported. However, lack of funding has made implementing measures in the act slow at best.

An avalanche of high-profile food recalls in 2010 may have encouraged lawmakers to pass the act. From the nationwide recall that reclaimed more than a half-billion eggs through a recall of potentially tainted baked goods sold at Whole Foods, 2010 may go down as the year of the food recall. As Kurt noted in his commentary about the egg recall, large-scale industrially cultivated food that’s distributed nationwide can create nationwide food-safety problems.

The real fight is just beginning, says Marion Nestle, author of Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (University of California Press), because Republican lawmakers have repeatedly balked at appropriating the estimated $1.4 billion needed to implement the law’s measures. Without the money, the law won’t have teeth. That’s bad news for the 1 in 6 Americans who are sickened by food-borne illnesses every year (not to mention the 3,000 killed by tainted food), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the meantime, Bill Marler, an attorney who has devoted his career to litigating foodborne illness cases (starting with the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in 1993), predicts that despite the new law “2011 may well look like many of the years before to me – more outbreaks, more suffering and more lawsuits.”

Alphabet Soup: The Lastest News on BPA

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I recently found myself in the grocery store dithering over one of my favorite pantry staples: Canned tomatoes. I knew the canned versions come with a sidecar of bisphenol A (BPA), a substance with some serious health risks. Lia touched on those concerns when she wrote about the challenges of finding BPA-free containers for Noemi’s school lunch. And in recent months, there has been some news on the BPA front.

bpa-bisphenol-a-canWidespread use, widespread risk

BPA is an organic compound used to harden plastics for water bottles, baby bottles, the lining of canned goods and all manner of plastic goods. It leaches into water and food, and it has been used in food cans for more than 50 years. BPA is detectable in the urine of 93% of the population, according to some estimates.

The problem? BPA mimics estrogen in the body and is thought to disrupt hormone function. The President’s Cancer Panel’s recent Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk report notes that a broad range of studies have linked BPA to breast and prostate cancer, diabetes, heart disease and early puberty (which is why parents are particularly concerned about exposing their kids to the stuff). A 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that adults with higher urinary levels of BPA also have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and liver problems. Some studies even suggest it interferes with cancer treatment. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has named BPA among the “dirty dozen” endocrine disruptors to avoid.

The latest news

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration re-evaluated BPA (after declaring it safe in 2008). The agency agreed there’s “reason for some concern” about BPA, but declared the research (most of which has been done on animals) too limited to call for an outright ban on BPA. The FDA and National Institutes of Health are funding $30 million in new research into BPA’s safety–or lack of it.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to add BPA to its Concern List of hazardous chemicals. While the EPA doesn’t have jurisdiction over BPA in food packaging, an EPA ruling would cover, for example, BPA in thermal cash register receipts that you get at the store. [UPDATE: The EPA has since declined to initiate regulatory action regarding BPA, though the agency will continue to monitor research on the effects of BPA on human health.]

While government agencies investigate BPA’s hazards, can manufacturers continue to stand by it. In April, the Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI) issued this statement: “CMI continues strongly to support the use of BPA epoxy coatings and believes our coatings are essential to food safety … Human exposure to BPA from can coatings is minute and poses no health risk that has been recognized by any governmental authority.”

Well, perhaps no American government agency has said outright that BPA is unsafe. But last month, Environment Canada, the Canadian version of the EPA, declared BPA toxic and is considering regulatory action that could be announced by the end of this year.

Consumer demand trumps regulation

In the meantime concerned American shoppers and consumer advocacy groups like the Environmental Working Group have prompted food manufacturers and retailers to get BPA out of our food supply. Last month, As You Sow, a nonprofit organization that promotes corporate social responsibility, and Green Century Capital Management, an investment advisory firm that advocates environmentally responsible investing, released their Seeking Safer Packaging 2010 report, which grades companies on their efforts to remove BPA from food packaging.

Hain Celestial, ConAgra and Heinz receive top marks for developing and testing BPA alternatives and starting to remove BPA from can liners;  they also have time lines for eliminating BPA use entirely. General Mills gets a B+ for transitioning BPA out of its Muir Glen canned tomato products, starting with this fall’s tomato pack.

Among retailers’ private-label canned goods evaluated in the report, Whole Foods got the top grade: D+, because although Whole Foods is transparent on its stance regarding BPA–it opposes the stuff, obviously–it’s not actively developing alternatives, according to the report. (The natural foods giant, though, does “strongly encourage” suppliers to transition to BPA-free packaging where possible.)

But using BPA-free cans isn’t new, says Sonya Ludner, senior analyst with the Environmental Working Group. She notes that Eden Organic has used BPA-free cans in the late 1990s for all its canned bean products. Eden simply asked its supplier–Ball Corp.–to use the enamel liners made from vegetable resins that it was using before the introduction of BPA. It’s a solution that works for nonacidic ingredients, but not for acidic items like tomatoes. Manufacturers also are using alternative forms of BPA-free packaging. For instance, you can buy POMI’s tomato products in aseptic boxes or Lucini’s tomatoes packed in glass jars.

As the report’ s authors note, eliminating BPA is a good business move in response to growing consumer concern. “Companies are actually moving faster than regulators in phasing out BPA,” says Emily Stone of Green Century Capital Management.

Amy Galland, As You Sow’s research director, notes that this year 32% of companies have time lines to phase out BPA from packaging, up from just 7% last year.

Ludner says consumer demand, spurred by advocacy efforts by groups like the EWG, is driving this change. “I see a ton of momentum behind this, and I’m thrilled to see some action.”

Why It’s a Good Idea to Smoke Your Own Fish

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Uh, oh, the FDA is recalling Haifa Smoked Fish, due to potential Listeria monocytogenes contamination. Consumers most likely to be affected are those who bought the company’s smoked fish in greater New York, New Jersey and Illinios. Oy!

If you love smoked fish (and who doesn’t), fire up the grill and smoke it yourself. It’s easy, and we tell you how in our recipes for Hot-Smoked Sablefish and Hot-Smoked Arctic Char with Mixed Greens and Golden Beets. Even better, the fish will be sustainably sourced.

Where there’s smoke, there’s flavor!

Is Your Kitchen Health-Department Clean?

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Would your kitchen pass a health inspection? Probably not, but a refrigerator thermometer ensures your food is chilled properly.

When the swanky Getty Center opened in Los Angeles in 1997, I remember the ‘ “C” health grade on the center’s several restaurants was as remarkable as the stunning Richard Meier architecture and Robert Irwin gardens.

Californians have always expected restaurants to prominently display heath department letter ratings. And we expect them to be “A” grades, whether it’s a celebrity chef’s namesake eatery or a humble taqueria.

Now the New York City health department has adopted letter grades for restaurants, and humorist Henry Alford wanted to see if his home kitchen would pass muster. So he invited a health department inspector in and documented the results in “Would Your Kitchen Pass Inspection?” for The New York Times.

In a word, no, his kitchen didn’t pass inspection, despite scrubbing the place top to bottom. And yours probably wouldn’t either.

That’s because restaurant health codes are designed to safeguard the public’s health from mishandled food. Restaurants are required to do things like have a separate sink for washing your hands (Alford was docked points for using his kitchen sink for this),  not allowing animals to roam in the kitchen (his cat decided to make an appearance during the inspector’s visit) and not keeping his dish towel in a bucket of sanitizer.

But even the forthcoming Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 are likely to address food safety to some extent in an effort to ensure people don’t poison themselves once they bring food home from the store. At least 50 pages of the Dietary Guidelines’ Advisory Committee’s recommendations were devoted to food safety issues, including educating consumers about how to store, handle and cook food.

Most of it’s common sense. Among the basics:

  • Clean hands and surfaces frequently. The health inspector advised Alford to wash his hands in the bathroom sink–a step, frankly, few busy home cooks are likely to follow.
  • Separate to avoid cross-contamination. That means not using the same knife and cutting board that you just used to cut up a raw chicken to chop veggies.
  • Cook foods to the proper temperature. Alford’s inspector docked him a few points for not having a working meat thermometer.
  • Chill by refrigerating or freezing foods promptly. Alford lost the lion’s share of his points for keeping his fridge and freezer too warm. To make sure your fridge and freezer are at the right temperatures (40 F or colder for the refrigerator/0 F or lower for the freezer), invest in a thermometer. You can find a fridge thermometer at most supermarkets.

For details on these and other food-safety tips, check out the Partnership for Food Safety Education’s Fight Bac! website.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines: What’s ahead from the government?

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You may not turn to the government as your best source for nutrition advice, but the upcoming Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 will influence what you eat in one way or another. These are the “official” recommendations, and they’re updated every five years. They shape everything from food labeling to public food programs, including school lunches.

The USDA and Department of Health and Human Services, which issue the guidelines jointly, appointed an advisory committee of top researchers in fields of nutrition, medicine, and food safety and technology to evaluate the latest scientific evidence and submit their recommendations in June. Now the USDA and HHS are considering the committee’s proposals, along with public comments (from public-health advocates to food-commodity special interests), and will release the final guidelines later this year.

As with past Dietary Guidelines, this report’s recommendations are aimed at turning our nation’s tide of obesity. Too many Americans are overweight or obese yet “undernourished in several key nutrients,” the committee notes.

What struck me, as I culled through the 700-page report, was how familiar their suggestions are, in that many of their recommendations reflect NOURISH Evolution’s four pillars.

Sound Nutrition: A plant-based diet

Since they were first published in 1980, every version of the dietary guidelines has advised Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables. But the latest recommendations take it a step further, advocating a “total-diet approach” emphasizing plant foods: “Shift food intake patterns to a more plant-based diet that emphasizes vegetables, cooked dry beans and peas, fruits, whole grains, nuts and seeds.”

They also call for us to eat more seafood and fat-free and low-fat milk and milk products, while consuming lean meats, poultry and eggs in moderation.

It’ll be interesting to see how that recommendation is interpreted in the final 2010 guidelines released later this year. Lobbies, like the National Cattleman’s Beef Association and the National Chicken Council, exert tremendous influence on the USDA and may take a dim view of a government guideline for a plant-based diet.

Eco-Bites: Choose environmentally sustainable food

The committee also calls for increased “environmentally sustainable production of vegetables, fruits, and fiber-rich whole grains.”

However, it stops short of recommending organic agriculture as that sustainable solution, saying that the evidence is too limited to declare organically cultivated produce and grains nutritionally superior to conventional. They also conclude that conventional fare is safe, since it meets the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards. (On an encouraging note, however, the USDA appears to be boosting its support of organic and local farming.)

The report also recommends increasing sustainable aquaculture in order to meet the recommendation to eat two (4-ounce) servings of seafood per week. But it doesn’t delve into what constitutes responsible aquaculture, either from a health or environmental perspective. The genetically engineered salmon which is under consideration for approval by the FDA next week will prove an interesting in-the-trenches benchmark on how they’re really defining “sustainable” aquaculture.

While we’d like to see the recommended guidelines call for organic agriculture and responsible aquaculture in more specific terms, the fact that they even touch on these topics is remarkable.

Mindful Meals: Eat attentively

The committee acknowledges that there’s a huge disconnect between what experts, including the government, advise people to eat and what they really eat. “Americans must become mindful, or ‘conscious,’ eaters, that is, attentively choosing what and how much they eat,” the report notes.

We couldn’t agree more–if you don’t pay attention to what you eat, all the great nutrition advice in the world means nothing. But we’re curious how this will play out in the final guidelines, since mindful eating is an intangible, though crucial, part of the equation and the Dietary Guidelines tend to favor concrete advice.

Kitchen Tips: Learn to cook

It’s no surprise that the report scolds Americans for eating too much food away from home, noting that portion sizes have ballooned over the years as we eat out more often. Meals away from home are a big reason why an astonishing 35% of the American diet is now made up of solid (saturated) fats and added sugars–aka “SoFAS” in the report.

To remedy that, the proposed recommendations urge Americans to return to the kitchen to “improve nutrition literacy and cooking skills, including safe food handling skills, and empower and motivate the population, especially families with children, to prepare and consume healthy foods at home.”

They also call for nutrition, cooking and food safety to be incorporated into school curricula from preschool on.

We’re intrigued to see how this recommendation is interpreted in the final guidelines. Will they recommend a certain number of meals per week prepared from scratch at home? How do mindful eating and home cooking fit onto a pyramid? Or will they dispense with the Food Guide Pyramid–which was first introduced in 1995 and evolved into the confusing color-coded, personalized MyPyramid in 2005–in favor of a simpler, whole-food diet?

If they do latter, it will indeed look familiar … it would look a lot like the NOURISH Evolution approach.

Eggs Got You Scared? Here’s the Scoop

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What annoys me about the coverage of the current egg recall is that it almost always says, “traced to an Iowa farm.” But, proud as I am of my home state, it’s not misguided regionalism that makes me take offense at this statement. It’s the use of the word “farm.” Eggs from chickens raised on true farms are not the issue.

eggs got you scared?Wright County Egg and the rest of serial offender Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s operations linked to this recall are not farms, but factories. They’re the textbook example of everything that’s unhealthy and unsustainable about the industrial model that has hijacked American agriculture.

The conditions in which these chickens “live” are, to put it mildly, inhumane and unsanitary. The variety of salmonella involved in this recall, s. enteritidis, is present in these chickens and infects the eggs even before they form shells. It results from what they are fed and how they live.  Just as disease breaks out when thousands of humans are crammed into a very confined space, so it is for these birds.  Feed them contaminated food, which likely occurred here, and you only exacerbate the problem.

Add to this poor sanitation and handling of the eggs in transit all over the country, and you have the recipe for the thousands who were affected by this outbreak. It takes a large concentration of the bacteria to sicken all but the most seriously compromised immune systems. But if you allow raw fresh eggs to sit for extended periods of time at temperatures above 45 degrees F, a colony of bacteria can double its population roughly every 20 minutes. A single cell can become millions in just 24 hours.

So the Food and Drug Administration is once again scrambling to shut enormous barn doors after the proverbial horses have run off to a couple dozen other states prompting (again) the outcry for stricter government regulations over our food. But industry regulations don’t help much after the fact–just look to the Gulf, where “drill, baby, drill!” turned into “spill, baby, spill!”

The solution, however, is not simply stricter federal oversight, though clearly that’s needed. It’s also a stronger reliance on a smaller, more localized food system – one that doesn’t produce food the same way it produces microchips. This also has the bonus of being easier to regulate as the need arises. Shorter supply chains inside confined geographical regions are easier to oversee and investigate than national or international ones regulated (if at all) by bureaucrats thousands of miles away. They’re also harder for large agro-industrial conglomerates to dominate.

That’s not to say food-borne illnesses can’t occur with eggs from the small, sustainably minded family farmer down the road. They sometimes do, though when an outbreak does occur, it’s isolated and sickens dozens countywide, not thousands nationwide. But outbreaks are far less common because the birds are healthier and the farmers simply care more. They know that it’s not just their own livelihood that depends on the food they produce, but also the health and well-being of their family, friends and neighbors.

Until we achieve that idyllic world, there are a few things you can do to reduce your risk from eggs:

  • Know the source. You should know where your eggs come from and how they were produced. Use our guide to egg labeling and health claims.
  • Keep eggs cool. Refrigerate all eggs immediately upon getting them home (at 45 degrees F or below, but not freezing), and keep them that way until moments before cooking them.
  • Cook eggs thoroughly. I still eat eggs over easy and make Hollandaise from raw yolks, but that’s because I know and trust the farmer who raises my eggs. If you don’t, make sure they’re cooked until the white and yolk are firm–or buy pasteurized eggs.
  • Keep it clean. It’s not just the particular tainted egg that can sicken you, but anything that touches that egg.  If you whisk a few eggs to scramble for breakfast, set the whisk on the cutting board and cut a melon on that cutting board, you can get sick even though your scrambled eggs were cooked until dry. It’s called cross-contamination and it’s is a common cause of food-borne illness.

Meanwhile look for a local source of eggs from a farmer you’ve met and can trust, rather than a factory foreman like Jack DeCoster.

Kurt Michael Friese is the founding leader of Slow Food Iowa, serves on the Slow Food USA National Board of Directors, and is editor and publisher of the local food magazine Edible Iowa River Valley. He’s also Chef and co-owner of the Iowa City restaurant Devotay, a freelance food writer and photographer, and author of A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland.


A Farm by Any Other Name . . .

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Here’s a question. If you bought a pickled cucumber from Marge’s Farm at the farmers’ market and it made you sick, would you need to sift through a mound of paperwork to find out where that pickle came from? Not so much. But if the pickle that made you sick came from a jar on a supermarket shelf, you (or more accurately, others) would be grateful that the paper trail existed, so that source of bum pickles could be singled out before it caused harm to others. Two completely different scenarios, right? Not, right now anyway, according to the Food Safety Enhancement Act just passed by the House.

barn-post

This bill embodies both great opportunity (to improve food safety in a largely industrialized food system) and great threat (to quash the burgeoning small and organic farm movement in America), and I could write at length about any number of issues on either side of the coin. Right now, though, I’d like to focus in one aspect that I feel must be addressed not just in this bill, but in the way we view agriculture in America: specifically, that there is a fundamental difference in the way small—particularly organic—farms function and the way large, industrial outfits do.

One takes a long-term view with the goal of creating a healthy ecosystem. The farmer is continually observing, experimenting and adapting to foster the health of his land. It’s an inherently intimate relationship. The other depends largely upon efficiencies: soil amendments to boost short-term production; pesticides and herbicides to kill weeds and pests with minimal labor and cost; seeds that are engineered to increase yield. It, by contrast, is an inherently impersonal relationship.

Now I’m not arguing that all agriculture should be one way or the other; in the world we live in, there’s a need for some form of both. I’m simply saying that the first step to creating legislation that truly protects our food supply—all aspects of it—needs to acknowledge that there are some major differences between small and large.

The good news is, lawmakers are willing to address concerns about the bill before it goes before the Senate this fall. So stay tuned on NOURISH Evolution to learn more about the issues and how to make your voice heard.