Category Archives: Community News

School Lunches and Fomenters

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I get a fair amount of prophomer foodaganda in my inbox.  One recent email trumpeted Congress: Don’t Gut School Lunch Standards and Damage our Children’s Health!   I learned there was a party-line vote to move forward in the House with a bill to provide more “flexibility” in applying the school lunch standards set by the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFK).

The death of a public good by a thousand, GOP-led cuts?  How much more zeitgeist’y can you get?  I was on it.

And then, well, I had to dig for the meat and potatoes of the situation.  And those meat and potatoes illustrate remarkably well a different contribution to the zeitgeist: folks barking in caps and exclamation points to rally the hoi polloi to post a rant, click send on a petition.

So the caps-&-!! email informed me that four years into the country’s current experiment in mandating healthy school lunches, Republicans seek to let schools opt out of applying those new health standards if their budgets are suffering as a result of implementing them. The School Nutrition Association, a professional group of school nutritionists, supports the idea; however, it also happens to be funded in part by food manufacturers like Domino’s.  But the National School Boards Association, a national federation of 95,000 school boards, supports it as well.  Hmmm.

It turns out the opt-out folks have some good points.  Continue reading →

The Summer’s Dirty Dozen: Healthy Food You Don’t Want to Serve Your Kids

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Every spring, just in time for summer, the Environmental Working Group, a D.C. non-prof that conducts research on public food safety, publishes lee marvinits Dirty Dozen list of produce most tainted with pesticides and other poisons.  They’ve trademarked “Dirty Dozen,” which I think is funny and makes me think of Lee Marvin, who strikes me as the kind of man who never ate a single vegetable.

I can see Lee eating an apple though, just ripping into it as a prop while reading somebody the bitterest of riot acts, and that only adds to my disappointment that apples are 2014’s most pesticide-laden fruit.  Pesticide poisoned, actually, since the primary pesticide found on 99% of the sampled apples was diphenylamine, a poison banned by the EU and for which the WHO has determined 0.02 parts per million to be the upper limit for safe ingestion by humans.

Our own EPA has designated 0.10 ppm to be the acceptable limit. Continue reading →

Food News: Obama, Chicken, Crap Part II: The Shadowy East

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Two weeks ago, I noted changes to the USDA rules regarding poultry that include as a solution to hygiene issues the spraying of chemical baths in lieu of washing all the shit off your dinner.

An article on the site Nation of Change reminded me of something my man Reece, of Cluckin’ Awesome Coops, made me aware of last September: American chickens are going to China!

On one hand, I find this exciting.  All Americans should travel to the far abroad to expand

Yum yum. I found this photo with a related article at The Gaia Health Blog.

Yum yum. I found this photo with a related article at The Gaia Health Blog.

their horizons and see how their fellow creatures live.  But in this case, the chickens will already be dead, so they will have no functioning eyes to take in fellow creatures or horizons.

The gist:

  1. New rules at Obama’s USDA will allow chickens raised and slaughtered in the U.S. to be shipped to China for processing before being shipped back to your neighborhood grocery.
  2. These birds will not be labeled.  You will not be able to tell which bird was prepared according to Washington’s hygienic standards and which according to Beijing’s.
  3. The USDA will inspect birds as they come in—perhaps according to the same rules soon to govern States-side poultry plants—but will not be present in the Chinese facilities.

The specifics: Continue reading →

Food News: Obama, Chicken, Crap

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Do you like your chicken?  Bad news, dude.  And it’s news involving chlorine, Obama, and poop.

The gist: In September, the Obama White House will

  1. reduce the number of USDA food inspectors working each poultry plant to one,
  2. allow poultry producers to monitor and ensure the safety of their products themselves,
  3. increase the allowable processing speed of the kill line by 25%,
  4. and spray every chicken on that line with a chlorine soup in lieu of washing off feces.

    This is the less gross, poop-free version of chicken-nuggets chicken. I found it on a site named The Stir.

    This is the less gross, poop-free version of chicken-nuggets chicken. I found it on a site named The Stir.

This has been branded an effort to increase food safety.  Good times.

The specifics: At the moment, four USDA inspectors monitor individual kill lines that process 140 chickens a minute.  Let’s close our eyes and visualize that for a minute…

These monitors are in charge of singling out birds visibly tainted by feces, bruises, blood, etc.  The new rules will increase the fpm (fowl per minute) to 175 and put company employees in charge of weeding out defective birds.  The single USDA inspector will be tasked with randomly selecting for testing 20 to 80 birds per shift. All bird carcasses, “whether they are contaminated or not,” will be showered with chlorine and other antimicrobials. Continue reading →

So How’s Congress Going to Nip that Salmonella in the Bud? Neil Young Will Tell You.

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Last Thursday was Food Day.  What is Food Day?  Is it like Administrative Assistants’ Day or National Doughnut Day (These are both true “holidays,” the latter dating from 1938)?   I guess so, at least in the sense that nobody seems to know about it.

Skinny men...

But Farm Aid, (which has a pretty great picture of Neil Young just not giving a damn on its web site) dropped an email noting Food Day’s existence.  It did so in the context of the Food Safety Modernization Act, pending legislation that aims to address situations like the recent cases of melamine in baby formula, e. coli-spiked spinach, etc.  There are a variety of things to learn about current food safety (including the fact that 15 federal agencies now share responsibility for it) as well as about the Act, and it’s worth reading about them here, but here are a few key things to keep in mind.

  1. Proposed legislation currently mandates on-farm safety standards that dramatically favor industrial-sized farms and threaten the ability of small and mid-sized farms, the very farms that more effectively get fresh produce to all of us and the very farms more likely to be run be people we know and can thus trust, to compete.
  2. The overwhelming source of the pathogens finding their way into our food come from factory farms, where animals and produce are exposed to massive lakes of animal shit, and the antibiotics that are pumped into those animals (70% of the country’s entire use of antiobiotics) so they can remain “healthy” while standing around in that shit, in turn making those pathogens resistant to antibiotics.
  3. The Act currently makes zero mention of those two primary sources of food contamination.
  4. There were an average of 100 food illness outbreaks a year during the 1990s.  George W. largely left safety regulation up to the industry and the average yearly outbreaks during his tenure numbered 350.

So guess who has their hands in the current legislation?

Less-skinny men

Not that that’s a surprise.  But there are proposals to at least keep the local and regional guys from getting buried, including the Growing Safe Food Act introduced by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow.  Read more about it and help Farm Aid support that and other small-farm protections here.  You can fill out seven boxes with your name and zip and such and hit “send.”  Easy.

Wilco, Newports, and Hoboken’s Finest

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I have this on a shirt from a show I attended in 1998. That's right, baby, the "Being There" tour. Jay Bennet played fiddle while hanging by his knees from the HVAC.

Broadening PitchKnives’ scope from comestibles to ingestibles, allow me to recount last Friday night at the Americanarama Music Festival in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The overwhelming takeaway from the evening was a trio of rock n roll reiterations and a surprise:

1)    My Morning Jacket is the weirdest, mightiest, stadium-sized ROCK! band alive.
2)    Wilco is an unstoppable, deeply organic live act that covers a sweeping stylistic range in realizing some of the very best songs of the last 20 years.
3)     Bob Dylan can deliver a much better performance than you might expect.

That these are the takeaways is a testament to what the bands accomplished.

Because approximately 90 seconds into My Morning Jacket’s set, the crowd two feet in front of us scattered apart to reveal two men, each roughly twenty-five pounds over weight and with a bronze badge swinging from a chain around his neck, slamming a college-aged kid in loafers into the grass.  My first thought was of festival security and the fact that they weren’t interested in what I took out of my backpack and jammed into my pockets, only that I leave the empty backpack in the trash.  The Boston Marathon was on my mind.

But it immediately became clear that Hoboken’s Finest had, at the instant the kid broke out a dime bag to roll a joint, tackled his ass, twisted his limbs around, pressed his face into the ground, and cuffed him.  Why bother, after all, with something like, “Sorry, buddy, you’re busted; you’re under arrest; let’s go” when you can save your breath and rough up the threat to society?  The kid had no chance to run.  He didn’t even know what hit him.  Continue reading →

Community News: Monsanto Wheat Returns from the Dead and the Rest of the Globe Kicks the U.S. Economy

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In 2004, Monsanto ended its field trials of Roundup-Ready Wheat, the proprietary, genetically-altered version of the grain that would allow it to be sprayed with the company’s Roundup weed killer and survive.  The public was too uncomfortable with the prospect of eating techno-genetic food.  Last week, The New York Times reported that Roundup-Ready Wheat returned from the dead to kick U.S. exports in the shin.

The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, but last week Japan and South Korea banned the importation of the grain – and the E.U. recommended that all 27 of its nations increase testing – because the Roundup-Ready strain was found growing in an Oregon Field.  According to Monsanto’s web site, tests of the grain were never conducted in that field.  This brings up a few points worth emphasizing:

  1. The very fear American farmers have about Monsanto’s techno-genetic seeds – that natural crops cannot be protected from contamination by them – is true even in the case of a controlled field test conducted by one of the biggest and most advanced companies in the world.
  2. When contamination of those natural crops occur, ownership of those crops automatically transfers to Monsanto, meaning that farmers must then pay Monsanto or have their businesses destroyed.  This is enshrined in law by the Plant Variety Protection Act and a recent decision by the John Roberts Supreme Court.
  3. Wheat can, according to Monsanto, linger in the ground for up to two years before germinating.
  4. The company’s GM wheat apparently lingered in the ground for nine years before germinating.
  5. Wheat exports contribute, according to U.S. Wheat Associates, an industry marketing firm, account for between $961 million and $1.8 billion of our GDP.  South Korea imports 2.5 million tons.  The E.U. imports over 1 million.
  6. Countries with large numbers of educated individuals do not want to import GM food.
  7. The inability to control the Roundup-Ready wheat – an inherent component of its design – threatens the U.S. economy and our trustworthiness as world merchants.

And on a final note, Monsanto’s new strategy to introduce its proprietary, fundamental foodstuff into the global food chain is to start selling it to India.

A Fair Fight?: Not-So-Fun Facts from “A Food Designed to Addict”

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scooby-snackI’m not sure anyone who loves to eat as much as I do can properly call herself a health nut. I did, after all, write a wistful tribute to Dairy Queen Blizzards on this blog just a couple of weeks ago. And I do have a deep belief in free will and the necessity of people taking responsibility for their own actions. (When I got called for jury duty on a personal injury lawsuit, the corporate defense attorney found me delightfully amusing before the plaintiff’s lawyer dismissed me.) Those two facts combined mean that I often have mixed feelings in the junk food debate. Yes, I like Cheez-Its, but I don’t eat them every day, and that kind of restraint doesn’t feel all that difficult. So should we really be able to hold food companies responsible for the obesity epidemic?

Well…actually, maybe we should, at least partly. A recent article in the New York Times magazine by Michael Moss makes a compelling case that the public doesn’t stand much of a chance against the unhealthy foods that the junk food kings are pushing. Really, you should just go read the actual article right now. But for the record, here are the tidbits that I found most interesting…and disturbing:

The Bliss Point
Any Malcolm Gladwell fans out there will already know about Howard Moskowitz, the guy who revolutionized the food market by testing in excruciating detail every possible permutation of a product (61 versions of Vanilla Cherry Dr. Pepper, say, to find the perfect balance of vanilla and cherry and, um, pepper-ness). He calls that balance the “bliss point,” and he finds it through surveying thousands of taste testers and crunching the numbers across dozens of factors. Which is all rather fascinating, but here’s the nagging thought I couldn’t get out of my head as I read about his process: can you think of anything that sounds less like cooking? Continue reading →

Community New Update: The House and Arsenic Rice

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This photo came up when I googled "super rice."

On October 8th, I wrote about the Consumer Reports investigation that revealed dangerous levels of arsenic in pretty much all the rice we eat.  In that post, I also mentioned that there are currently no federal laws governing how much arsenic is permissible in food.  The FDA regulates arsenic in bottled water, but that’s it.

Turns out three House Democrats (Conn. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, N.J. Rep. Frank Pallone, and N.Y. Rep. Nita Lowey) have introduced a bill—The R.I.C.E. Act—that would require the FDA set a legal limit for arsenic levels in rice.  Continue reading →

Community News: Prop 37 and Our Lens on Life

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Prop 37, the California referendum that would have required the labeling of all food that includes genetically modified organisms, failed on Tuesday in a 47% to 53% split.  The initiative was riddled with holes indicative of the way the laws that regulate our daily lives today are bought and sold: exemptions for dairy products (feed the cows GM corn), exemptions for meat (feed them more!), exemptions for organic labels (wait, what?!)*

In spite of that disappointing reality, approval of the ballot would have brought to the fore a public discussion in a country dying of its own obesity and caloric emptiness.  We are what we eat, and we should consider our own physical well being a value beyond calculation in dollars.  Prop 37 lost because its opponents (spending $44 million, compared to $8 million) had the support of the rural counties where so much of our food is grown.  They convinced those communities that Prop 37 would cut into their profits, and for most folks those profits are already slim.  So those concerns are real for people, even if not for Monsanto, who donated $8 million themselves and would certainly not be harmed by a dip in profits.

And maybe 37 really would have cut into those profits.  Interviews with Industrial Agriculture companies indicate that those companies would switch to non-GM, and thus likely more expensive, ingredients rather than risk the market share loss anticipated from labeling. Continue reading →