Policy
FDA Hits Back Against Stupid Food Labeling
Published October 23, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
UPDATE: Smart choices labeling scheme gets the axe!
Thank goodness, the FDA has sat up and noticed that someone is trying to pass Froot Loops off as health food. The agency's target is the Smart Choices front-of-package (FOP) labeling scheme, an effort by industry players to claim that experts say their foods, including some high-sugar and high-fat items, are better-for-you selections.
The program has drawn widespread ridicule, consternation and resistance, including a petition organized by Change.org in which 4,000+ signatories prevailed on The American Dietetic Association, the American Diabetes Association and Tufts University to request that the Smart Choices board remove their names from the initiative's Website. In September, Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agricultural Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies, called for the FDA to launch an investigation into the program.
You know things are bad when the box with the blatant misspelling is the one labeled “smart” and members of congress are up in arms.
School Lunch Momentum of Sorts
Published August 21, 2009 @ 09:47AM PT
The New York Times ran a piece this week on the policy momentum behind giving children healthier school lunch options, which has champions in the White House and the Senate pushing to add $0.70 per lunch to the federal lunch budget. They highlight the work of Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY), who's gone beyond asking only for more to be spent to asking that it be spent better:
... “If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.
As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools. ...
In recent years however, federal reimbursement hasn't kept up with rising costs associated with providing school lunches, meaning that schools are often taking a loss on lousy food.
School lunches also have to vie for student's attention with 'competitive' foods of minimal nutritional value, such as candy bars. If the cafeteria staff get creative, they must face a student body that's been acclimated to lousy fast food, rarely get home cooked meals, and consequently don't recognize even a freshly made blackberry cobbler as food. Student rejection of prepared lunch options puts lunch budgets deeper in the red, pressuring menus to look more like the fast food restaurant menus that form the template of expectation when children think of 'food.'
In short, the foods marketed to children in general, and offered as competitive options in schools in particular, range from the nutritionally destructive to the merely low quality. But they've been engineered to taste good and hit all the right food addiction buttons, so there's that.
Further, as Tom Laskawy writes at Beyond Green, there's a structural impediment in the USDA to offering healthy lunches, and that impediment is a commodity purchase program whose main dumping ground is the nation's captive audience of school children.
These discussions always remind me of a classmate and fairly recent high school graduate, let's call him Joe, from four years back when I returned to college. My mom was a homemaker who cooked from a fairly traditional template that she picked up from her grandmother and most of my acquaintances now are either of the slightly older demographic who were more likely to have similar food choices at home and foodies (both urban and rural) who can be revolted by the mere mention of a McDonald's. Which is to say that turning down blackberry cobbler without a good reason is just strange to me and so I turn to Joe as a reminder that not everyone grew up that way.
Joe had been raised on pizza (cheese or pepperoni only, please), tater tots, fries, hamburgers and iirc, macaroni and cheese. He was afraid of other types of food and wouldn't try them. I remember suggesting a taco at one point, a ground beef taco with lettuce and tomatoes, that I'd wrongly thought was close enough to having a hamburger as to make no particular difference. Well, Joe would have none of it. Tacos were just too strange sounding.
As a kid, I was also rather fond of the hamburgers and cheese pizza served at school. They beat the heck out of mushy, canned green beans, anyway. But having tried other kinds of food, they weren't all I would agree to eat, nor what I'd have always preferred to eat. I'd had options Joe never dreamed of. Options that made our tastes in food mutually incomprehensible, indeed, almost incommensurable, to each other.
Are the values of finding markets for US farm products and feeding children good food equally hard to translate into a common goal? Are good intentions at the federal level going to be consumed by mere price inflation? Are school kids going to be doomed to choosing between canned fruit and a 'fresh' fruit option that consists of the battery acid oranges and mealy apples that even I remember turning my nose up at? (The fresh fruit at school was never as good as what my mom brought home from the grocery store. I never realized how lucky that made me.)
I don't know. But I do know that it's going to take years, if ever, to fix school food. Kids can't vote and their parents often have a hard enough time trying to make sure they're well served educationally and have roofs over their heads to consistently take on the lousy food they're given. Particularly concerned parents often just opt out and do what they can to send their kids to school with a decent lunchbag.
All of which makes this a paramount political problem that transcends any 'consumer choice' response to a gross market failure. And I do mean gross in the literal sense.
(Photo credit: erin.kkr on Flickr.)
Agriculture's Nitrogen Fix
Published August 19, 2009 @ 01:43PM PT
Everybody involved in mainstream agriculture wants a piece of the glory for increased yields over the last half century, but the share of credit that's left over after irrigation and heterozygous, conventional hybrids goes mainly to a plant nutrient: nitrogen.
In 1918, Dr. Fritz Haber figured out a way to use natural gas and heat do something only bacteria had ever been able to manage, which was to turn inert atmospheric nitrogen into solid nitrogen compounds that are available to the terrestrial food chain. This process, whether performed in a lab or by a bacterium, is referred to as nitrogen fixation.
Atmospheric nitrogen, which exists mainly in the form of N2, is an extremely stable compound, non-reactive in almost all cases. N2 makes up around 70 percent of the atmosphere and acts as an effective fire retardant. If there were much more oxygen gas and much less nitrogen gas in the atmosphere, the entire atmosphere could ignite.
Terrestrial nitrogen, existing in many forms, is one of the most important nutrients available to living beings. It's the backbone of all RNA, DNA and protein. It's referred to in some cases as a limiting nutrient, one that puts a fixed limit to the growth potential of an ecosystem's biomass. It can also be referred to, in agriculture and horticulture as a macronutrient, something necessary in large amounts relative to other trace or micronutrients.
Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and the greatest of these is nitrogen. As they might say.
Though one can have too much of any good thing. For example, the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is likely the culprit in high levels of carcinogenic nitrates in conventionally grown food, as noted by Tom Philpott at Grist. As Philpott also points out, nitrates have also been linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type II diabetes.
Senate Cuts Animal ID Funding By Half
Published August 05, 2009 @ 02:05PM PT
Woohoo! I get to say nice things about the Senate!
I'm pleased to report that my usual causticity can be suspended for the duration of this post to applaud the Senate's unanimous consent vote to cut funding for the National Animal ID System. Go, Senate!
Jill Richardson at LaVidaLocavore has reposted the press release by R-CALF USA, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, and I think that the most salient point in the entire debate is encapsulated in this paragraph of their statement, here:
3) No food safety benefits. NAIS will not prevent food borne illnesses from e. coli or salmonella, because the contamination occurs at the slaughterhouse, while NAIS tracking ends at the time of slaughter. Thus, NAIS will neither prevent the contamination nor increase the government's ability to track contaminated meat back to its source. In addition, NAIS will hurt efforts to develop safer, decentralized local food systems. ...
If the program fails in its main, stated goal, if it is in fact structured such that failure is inevitable, what are we spending all this money for? As a liberal, progressive, believer in the possibility of government to do good, I have a deep and abiding interest in money given to the government not being wasted. When it's wasted, it creates an instant opportunity cost against something good and useful being done with that money.
Of the money that remains in the program, the Senate directives limit its use to rule-making activities, and on that front, I have a suggestion: lay the groundwork to institute premise ID, instead of animal ID.
I was talking a couple months ago with Margaret Krome, my former internship supervisor and policy program director at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, about how NAIS implementation has gone in Wisconsin. She said that at this point, they've just done premise registration, which sidesteps many of the concerns raised directly by Amish communities and does actually provide a public health benefit.
Krome explained that when there were animal disease outbreaks, the premise registry let public health officials target their notification efforts to the right people. This registration simply lets officials know that there are livestock on the property and what type. That's actually useful to know should there be an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, scabies, or what have you. It also isn't burdensome to farmers, needing to be neither expensive nor time-consuming. See? Useful.
Anyway, cheers again to the Senate for showing such good sense. It seems in short supply these days.(Photo credit: kimberlyfaye on Flickr.)
The House Food Safety Bill in Brief
Published August 01, 2009 @ 02:19PM PT
First, the food safety bill wasn't going to pass. Then it did.
The Agriculture Committee, including the ranking minority member, has had a great deal of input apparently, and they are well satisfied.
Eddie Gehman Kohan of Obamafoodorama, writing at Civil Eats, notes again the importance of putting the force of law behind food recalls. Now, even recalls involving deadly bacterial contamination, such as recent E. coli scares, are entirely voluntary and do not require retailers to stop selling products that may be affected.
The Consumers Union is pleased and Rep. Henry Waxman has given his assurances that the bill isn't intended to interfere with standard organic practices or the maintenance of on-farm biodiversity.
Nonetheless, as LaVidaLocavore's Jill Richardson points out, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has ongoing concerns about the flat facility fees that won't fund the program but will mostly end up collecting fees from the greater number of small processing facilities that exist. Further, that organic farmers won't be exempted from following new standards that contradict with established organic practices, potential barriers to farm-to-institution provisioning, traceability exemptions for products that are identified by origin all the way to the consumer and the likelihood that product-specific exemptions have been handed out unfairly.
The Washington Post has an overview of the main provisions, which include an increase in the frequency of FDA inspections at high risk processing facilities.
Hopefully, they'll rub the burrs off in the Senate, but there's some important things in this bill.(Photo credit: kimberlyfaye on Flickr.)
Food Safety Liveblog
Published July 30, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT
Happening now at LaVidaLocavore.
You can watch at C-SPAN.
Update 3:20 ET: Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) was just complaining that the bill doesn't indemnify food producers from their economic losses in cases of facility quarantine. Was there ever a complaint that made more explicit the corporatists' slavish devotion to the sanctity of profits over public health?
A Big Food Safety Problem
Published July 30, 2009 @ 11:29AM PT
Sick cows are one of our biggest food safety problems:
... Acidosis is often associated with a shift from a foragebased diet to a high concentrate-based diet or excessive consumption of fermentable carbohydrates. Acidosis may occur in cattle on high-grain diets common with youth livestock projects, bull development programs, and cattle finishing programs. It can also occur in stocker calves when self-feeders and highstarch feeds such as corn are used.
Acidosis is the result of low rumen pH. The typical pH of the rumen on a forage-based diet is 6 to 7. As the amount of forage or roughage in the diet decreases and the amount of concentrate increases, the pH of the rumen falls between 5 and 6, depending on the forage to concentrate ratio of the diet. Low pH supports growth of lactic acid-producing bacteria. Lactic acid is very strong and reduces rumen pH even more. Acute (severe) acidosis occurs when ruminal pH drops below 5.2, while subacute (less severe) acidosis occurs at a ruminal pH of less than 5.6. Laminitis, liver abscesses, and polioencephalomalacia often accompany acidosis. ...
Cows with acidosis, who've been fed grain instead of forage, produce deadly E. coli that can survive our stomachs. Healthy cows with a nearly neutral rumen pH still have E. coli in their guts, but these varieties of the bacterium are easily handled by our bodies.
The food safety bill that may be resurrected this week, H.R. 2749, does not address this topic, even though it laudably expands federal food recall powers beyond the toothless "voluntary recall." It does impose regressive fees on the sort of small producers not generally responsible for large-scale food contamination.
Congressional leadership may also put it up for a vote under a closed rule, which means no amendments can be offered. Again, I point you to the Center for Rural Affairs analysis of the vote situation. I'd hope that the pressure Congress feels to do something doesn't lead, as it so often does, to doing something stupid.
