The Center or Science in the Public Interest put out a list this week of the Top 10 riskiest foods based on the number of outbreaks and the number of people who got sick. And those lucky duckies are:
Just one last day in the week, and it was looking so good for eaters across America. But not quite. The USDA warns that ground beef produced between May 23 and June13 and are labeled “Est. 6250″ may be contaminated with salmonella. Yes, that does mean that the USDA did inspect this meat, it was sold to the public and it is in fact contaminated.
The meat was sold in the mountain west and central plains through King Soopers and City Market stores.
The SF Chronicle has a sprawling article on the extreme and unscientific safety measures being taken by some produce providers. Fun things like pumping out poison gas to kill mice and squirrels, banning children under the age of 5 from farm visits, and bulldozing ponds used for irrigation recycling.
The strangest part of all this craziness is that the produce buyers refuse to divulge what these new directives are that they are handing down to their farmers. Considering all of these mandates are in response to food recalls and the lawsuits that followed, one would think that they would want to shout their new and supposed improved guidelines from the rooftops. Yet, instead, they are hiding behind a curtain.
I’m not sure how dry mlk gets contaminated with salmonella, but it turns out that there isn’t a food product in existence that can’t be tainted. The product description was kept rather vague.
The recalled prepackaged meals were not available for sale to consumers, but were sent to nutrition service providers and distributors across the U.S.
What do you think? Was the contaminated meals destined for poor people, the sick, or the elderly?
—The FDA will help the food industry establish better tracing systems to track the origins of a bacterial outbreak.
—A new network will be established to help the many agencies that regulate food safety to communicate better.
—Egg and poultry producers will have to follow new standards designed to reduce salmonella contamination.
—The Food Safety Inspection Service, the Agriculture Department agency that inspects meat, will increase sampling of ground beef ingredients in an effort to better find E. coli contamination.
—The FDA will recommend ways that producers of leafy greens, melons and tomatoes can reduce disease strains, and require stricter standards in those industries within two years.
—The FDA and the Agriculture Department also will create new positions to better oversee food safety.
Noroviruses are a group of related viruses that cause acute gastroenteritis, generally characterized by diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Salmonella are bacteria that can cause diarrhea (which may be bloody), vomiting, nausea, fever, and abdominal cramps.
Last night I had the great fortune of seeing a prescreen of Food, Inc. here in DC. I can definitively say that it is the documentary we have all been waiting for. Not only is it a seriously quality film with great story line, editing, and looming sound accompianment, but it also puts together so many of the different facets of food issues into a cohesive whole. I’m not going to go into the content here, as I want to see it again a few more times before writing it up.
After the screening, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kowalcyk (the force behind Kevin’s bill) and Eric Olson, of PEW research, did a great Q & A. Most of the questions were geared towards audience members just wanting to know more about what can be done to make our food healthier and safer. But there were two questions towards the end that really stuck out.
The first was by a young man of maybe 25 who fit the “corn-fed midwesterner” profile. He asked, “I’m from Kansas, and I was wondering how the farmers market/eat locally prescription applies to us. Most people I know don’t need/are looking for that types of food so how does it work for us?” (paraphasing) Which is a fair question. Mr. Pollan was very gracious, and replied that he agreed, this isn’t a recipe for everyone, nor should it be. One of the biggest problem with our food system is that it tries to be one size fits all for everyone and that in reality every area has its own needs. However, in Iowa, of which he is more familar with, there are still plenty of people interested in keeping money in their local economies, and there is still the issue of monoculture farms that don’t produce a diverse menu.
Then a few questions later, a young guy who couldn’t be more than 22 got called on. He asked, “I would like to know why this film makes farmers look so bad - they are are all obese and stuff” (paraphrasing) The vast majority of the audience was quietly stunned. This movie definitely does not make farmers look bad or criticize them. If anything it lionizes those who till the land. And it is incredibly sympathetic to the hard decisions and difficult economic situations that farmers are put into. Food, Inc. does not criticize farmers - it takes on the huge agri-businesses that have cornered American farmers into mountains of debt and impossible choices.
While most of the audience was taken aback by this young man’s assertions, there were 3-4 twenty-something females in my row and the Kansas lad ahead of us who started clapping in response to the question. It was abundantly clear that these folks were here on assignment. Lobbyists, industry representative, who knows. They didn’t see the same movie the rest of us did, they had an agenda.
Afterwards I corners the young “why do you hate farmers” guy. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get him to divulge his employer. He was extremely evasive, just stammering that he was a “producer”.
So now we know. Two lines of attack on this film will be:
Your solution is for city folks and ignores the heartland.
Why are you hating on farmers?
Not the most original strategy, however easy enough to rebut. Of course there is also Monsanto’s gripe - “They wouldn’t give us a fair shake, so we wouldn’t talk to them. Hence the film is unfair and unbalanced.” Sometimes, when the truth is that ugly, its hard to look in the mirror.
See the film. If agri-business hates it this much, it must be good.
Looking back on the hearing from today’s earlier post, there was one kinda *gasp* moment. As The Chair of the Subcommittee was launching into his questioning of Mr. Acheson of the FDA, he made a very simple statement:
“i was a victim of pistachio based salmonella”
I checked the way-way-back machine and could find a single place this was reported. Now I know thare are about 76 million cases of food poisoning a year, but the fact that the Chair of the Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture was a victim of the salmonella outbreak earlier this year makes the fight a tad more personal. For the good guys.
3,913 is the number of different products that have to be recalled due to the salmonella tainted peanuts. 76 million is the number of people are sickened by food-borne illnesses each year in the US. Lots of fun with numbers in this NYT acticle on food safety. Also a cautionary tale:
Concerned about health, Ms. Tardiff, the California nurse, bought organic and less processed foods whenever possible. She decided to try raw milk, believing the unpasteurized product would supply helpful organisms.
Instead, she got a dose of an unhelpful germ: campylobacter, easily killed by pasteurization. The ensuing intestinal illness caused a debilitating nerve disease. Ms. Tardiff communicated by blinking for months, and still cannot stand or use her hands.
“This has been life-altering,” she said. “All I want to say is, ‘Be careful.’ ”
This makes me sad. Veggie Booty is one of those “good for you” snack foods that looks like a non-radioactive version of cheetos. Apparently it was also a source of salmonella in 2007. Bummer. As far as process food goes it seemed to be one of the better options. Argggggh!
A Bend mother, Chrissy Christoferson, will join the Hurleys to talk about her son, Beck, who became sick in 2007 when he was 10 months old after eating Veggie Booty, a puffed corn-and-rice snack that was contaminated with salmonella.
Christoferson said her son has recovered but she worries he will have lingering long-term digestive problems.
“The average parent that goes grocery shopping wants to know that the food they’re buying for their kids will make them healthier, not send them to the hospital,” she said. “We rely on the government agencies … to make sure that the foods we’re giving our children are safe.”
She said she was stunned to learn that the FDA cannot order a recall — it can only ask companies to do so.
Anywho, people who got food poisoning from Veggie Booty and other products are on their way to Congress to talk about the need for food safety.
Proposed legislation would change that. The groups gathering in Washington, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, Consumer’s Union, Consumer Federation of America and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, support House Resolution 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act.
The bill would effectively split the FDA, creating one agency to handle drugs and another that would be solely focused on food. That agency would have stepped-up enforcement powers, including the authority to order recalls, and it would emphasize sanitation to prevent food-borne illnesses.
Sadly, the visages of sick kids rarely seem to move Congress, but we shall see.
Since 1996, when the system began, the burden of illness from campylobacter, listeria, shigella, E. coli O157 and Yersinia has decreased, although all of that decrease occurred before 2004. There has been no statistically significant change in the incidence of salmonella and cryptosporidium since 1996, and there has been a marked increase in cases of vibrio, a relatively rare disease mostly associated with raw oysters.
