food safety

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:)

Kat: Well, here we go again. I was astonished, as were you, by the news that China’s biggest manufacturer of infant formula has just recalled 700 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder. As David Barboza reports in Saturday’s New York Times, “the formula is implicated in the death of one infant, and at least 432 others have been afflicted with kidney problems.” Supposedly, this stuff wasn’t imported to the US, but, as you note, the FDA has issued a warning that it may have found its way onto the “grey” market.

Melamine and the cutthroat, corner-cutting manufacturers who used it in the production of pet foods are, of course, the primary culprits in your latest book, Pet Food Politics, which thoroughly documents China’s food safety problems as well as our own.

In the book, you note that in the aftermath of the tainted pet food debacle, the Chinese government launched a new food safety campaign and declared, in January of this year:

Gao Qiang, China’s vice minister of health claimed at a press conference on Saturday, “This is a severe food safety accident.”

You must be our foremost authority on melamine-adulterated foods, now, so I have to ask you, in the vulgar vernacular of the blogosphere, WTF? Or, if you prefer, what the hell?

Dr. Nestle: Astonished doesn’t begin to describe it. The point of The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, the subtitle of Pet Food Politics, is that the 2007 pet food recalls were an early warning of disasters to follow. By the time the book went to press in May this year, we were already dealing with the heparin crisis. This was a completely analogous situation in which Chinese producers substituted chondroitin sulfate for heparin because the heparin assay only looks for sulfur, apparently. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen.  Protein assays test for nitrogen and don’t care whether it comes from protein or melamine. Chondroitin sulfate and melamine are a lot cheaper than the drugs or food ingredients they replace.

In Pet Food Politics, I trace the use of melamine—fraudulent and not—back to the mid-1960s. David Barboza, the intrepid New York Times reporter based in China, actually got animal and pet food producers to confess that they had been fraudulently adding melamine to feed for years. My guess is that these producers had been adding it in lower doses, got greedy, and upped the dose or used sloppier formulations that contained cyanuric acid. You need a lot of melamine to damage kidneys. But when melamine is mixed with cyanuric acid, it crystallizes in kidneys at very low doses. If it could be added to food for cats, dogs, and farm animals, why not add it to other foods? If nobody is checking—which, apparently, nobody is--you have a good chance of getting away with it, especially if the animals are eating other foods as well.

But infant formulas? These are just like pet foods in that the animal or baby is completely dependent on the one product for complete nutrition. So as with pet foods, there is a good chance of doing great harm and getting caught. Officials didn’t get upset about pet foods because they view dogs and cats as “just pets.” Infant formulas get everyone’s attention.  And you can find plenty of Chinese infant formula in Chinese markets in the U.S.  It’s doubtful that getting rid of them would be on anyone’s priority list for enforcement.

As for what’s going on in China, good luck. It’s the Wild West over there, with foods being made by millions of small backyard producers and a food safety system absolutely unprepared to deal with the scope of the problem. We are talking here about rampant early capitalistic development, just like what we had in the United States prior to 1906 when Congress passed the first food and drug laws. Chinese officials know they have a problem and maybe now that the Olympics are over they can get on it.

In the meantime, we can all exercise personal responsibility and buy local. We also should exercise social responsibility and insist that (1) companies test their products for dangerous contaminants, (2) companies inspect the suppliers of their ingredients, (3) Congress gives the FDA the authority to regulate imported foods more effectively, and (4) Congress demands enforcement of the new Country-of-Origin-Labeling laws that are supposed to be in effect by the end of this month.    

Kat: Uh-oh. Your response begs a follow-up question. Speaking of adulteration, have you seen this article from Sunday’s Chicago Tribune about the watered-down COOL standards? As consumer watchdogs Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch tell the Tribune, there are “giant, giant loopholes in the law." Specifically, foods that are considered “processed” are exempt from the COOL standards, and the USDA is defining “processed” so broadly that it’s severely reducing the number of foods that will be required to carry the labels.

Here are a couple of the more head-scratching examples:

In a word, oy. It seems as though the food industry, having fought the COOL standards for the last few years, is now resigned to the fact that they are going to be implemented, so their new strategy is to undermine the standards by limiting their application as much as possible.

This makes your oft-repeated edict to “avoid processed foods” more timely than ever, but it also compels me to ask, what will it take to put the “us” back in the USDA? Will they ever stop kowtowing to Big Food and start looking out for the little guy?

Dr. Nestle: I had not seen the article but certainly was aware of the problem(s). Congress passed COOL years ago, but then postponed implementing it (except for fish—a fishy story in itself) until now. Why? Because the food industry hates the very idea. I can totally understand why and the pet food and infant formula scandals are great examples. If you knew that the foods you were eating had a good chance of being produced someplace where nobody was minding the store, you might buy something else.

The problem for the food industry is that so much of our food comes from elsewhere. On the order of 80% of our shrimp come from Asia, for example. In the course of working on Pet Food Politics, I met an official of a pet food company who agreed to tell me where the ingredients in his products came from (provided I never mentioned his name or the name of his company). He could tell me the name of the ranch that raised the meat in those foods but the other ingredients constituted an international feast. You have to assume that foods and ingredients come from overseas unless the companies tell you otherwise.

Is this good or bad? I think it’s great that we support farmers in developing countries but I want to have the choice. And the choice isn’t mine if the country of origin isn’t labeled. This is a huge consumer protection issue and it would be nice if our congressional representatives took it seriously. As for the USDA, it and the FDA need some serious depoliticizing. Will we get that in the next administration? Only if we organize, lobby, and exercise our democratic rights as citizens. And start working on the next farm bill, of course.
 

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: We've known for ages that the FDA is so grossly underfunded that it can't even begin to assure the safety of our food supply. Now, all of a sudden, in the wake of the tomato salmonella scare, the Bush administration's asked Congress to allocate an additional $275 million to the FDA in next year's budget. What gives? Why now? Are salmonella-tainted tomatoes more of a hot potato than E. coli-contaminated spinach?

Dr. Nestle: No, tomatoes are not a worse political problem than spinach. What's happening is that we are at the end of an administration, not the middle. In the last year, several major reports have exposed the way Congress has weakened the FDA by giving it tons more to do with no money to do it with. As incident after incident has occurred--spinach, green onions, pet food, peanut butter, and now tomatoes--the FDA's situation has become increasingly embarrassing. But $275 million? A pittance.

What's really needed is a major overhaul of the entire food safety system, from the bottom up. We need a food safety system that goes from farm to table, and preferably under a single food safety agency that unites and rationalizes the functions of the FDA and USDA. Until we have that, expect these incidents at regular intervals. Next administration, anyone?

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: An advisory board released a report on the FDA last Friday that depicts an agency so ill-equipped and disorganized that it’s incapable of effectively safeguarding our health and may even be jeopardizing our lives. One of the advisors called the current state of the FDA a crisis, and blamed “a cabal of Congressional majorities and presidential administrations that has serially stripped the agency of assets.”

So the agency entrusted to protect Americans’ health has been systematically gutted by our politicians. Why? Whose interests are being served? Can you shed some light on the behind-the-scene forces that have left the FDA so toothless?

Dr. Nestle: Ah yes. The latest report from the FDA's Science Board. I was a consumer representative to that Board some years ago. If the Board was doing this sort of thing then, I might have stayed on it. The report is scathing, and is particularly tough on the parts that I care about: food regulation and food safety. These come under the purview of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), which has lost 15% of its employees since 1992.

How did this happen? Politics, big time. The FDA used to be the jewel in the crown of American government, an agency relatively free of political influence, devoted to public health. But it went too far. It took on the dietary supplement industry in the 1980s and got creamed for it in the 1990s.

And in the early 1990s, it tried to take on the tobacco industry and get cigarettes regulated as drugs. That did it. Congress passed a series of Acts, one after the other, each further weakening the FDA's regulatory authority. When 9/11 happened, I thought things might change for the better. A safe food supply is, after all, an essential component of homeland security.

But instead of getting a single food safety agency or more resources for FDA, we got the Department of Homeland Security. And in our current "the less regulation the better" atmosphere, the FDA has gotten weaker and weaker. It is ironic that the Food Marketing Institute and other food trade groups are now begging for stronger federal regulations. The public has lost confidence in the food supply and that's not so good for business. So maybe corporations will start pressuring Congress to give the FDA more resources and stronger authority? It's a thought.

There are so many appalling details in today’s New York Times account of the Topps Meat factory flame-out that it’s hard to know where to begin. Flagrant disregard for safety standards, failure to test batches of ground beef for contamination, repeated citations for “persistent cleanliness problems,” woefully inadequate record-keeping--the list is long, and nauseating. Where, one wonders, were the USDA safety inspectors?

Funny you should ask. They were, in fact, in the Topps processing plant “for an hour or two each day,” as the USDA told the New York Times (emphasis mine.)

Yet, despite their daily presence at the Topps factory, the USDA inspectors never cited Topps for any of these egregious violations of what are, in some cases, only self-imposed safety standards, anyway.

When the story broke earlier this month that the massive recall of E. coli-tainted beef patties had forced Topps to fold, my friend Andrew sent me an e-mail that read, “I bet this company lobbied against regulations and testing practices that would have kept it in biz.”

Maybe they did, but it sounds as if they needn’t have bothered, because the only thing more half-assed than Topp’s sloppy chopping of beef scraps cobbled together from the four corners of Tom Friedman’s flat earth was the USDA’s lackadaisical approach to inspecting this ungodly hodge podge.

Topps issued a statement proclaiming that the company “prided itself on providing quality and safety, which is one reason the company was in business for 67 years…the health and safety of consumers was a top priority at Topps.”

The operative word here is “was.” Topps, which began in 1940 as a small, family run business, was bought out in 2003 by a private equity firm called Strategic Investments and Holdings. As the New York Times reports, the new owners immediately ramped up production:

Late last August, after numerous E. coli cases around the country were linked to Topps ground beef, federal investigators decided to take a closer look, and were shocked, shocked to discover that:

All of which leads the New York Times to wonder:

I have a slightly more obvious question: What the hell were the USDA inspectors doing at the Topps plant every day for one or two hours? The New York Times crossword puzzle? Where’s the oversight for an agency that routinely turns a blind eye to the corrosion of our food chain?

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: I’m not one of those Volvo-driving, latte-drinking liberals, but I do eat a lot of sushi. So I was sufficiently alarmed by a New York City Department of Health report last month that one fourth of New Yorkers have elevated levels of mercury thanks, in large part, to our fondness for fish.

We New Yorkers may be more full of it, but excess mercury is a problem all over the country. We know that even a small quantity of mercury can hurt cognitive development in children. And yet, a BP (British Petroleum) refinery in Indiana is still allowed to dump mercury directly into Lake Michigan, which is “a magnet for sport fishing and the source of drinking water for Chicago and scores of other communities,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

So if we can’t count on the EPA to, you know, actually protect the environment, we have got to be proactive and stay on top of what fish is OK to eat and what’s not. You touch on this topic in your “Eating Made Simple” article in the September issue of Scientific American, in which you note that “two small servings per week of the less predatory classes of fish are unlikely to cause harm.”

You’re presumably talking about fish like anchovies and sardines, but they’re not exactly a staple on sushi menus. Tuna, on the other hand, is. As are salmon and mackerel, which are so high in those omega-3 fatty acids that are known to benefit our brains. My own brain hurts when I try to figure this stuff out. So, seriously, how often do you eat sushi?

Dr. Nestle: I love sushi and eat it every chance I get although I try to be careful to eat it in places where I think the chefs know how to prepare it safely. I can well sympathize with your sushi-induced headache. Balancing the risks and benefits of seafood is no joke. It took me five chapters in What to Eat to deal with fish choices and it took an Institute of Medicine committee two years just to grapple with the methylmercury vs. omega-3 problem.

Personally, I’m much more worried about the risk of biological hazards—bacteria, viruses, worms, and the like—in sushi than I am about methylmercury, but I’m past the point of becoming pregnant. Pregnancy is the real concern. Methylmercury is not good for baby brains. It does not seem to have nearly as much effect--except at high levels--on adult brains.

The good news is that only five big predatory fish in the food supply that are commonly eaten accumulate high levels of methylmercury: (1) shark, (2) swordfish, (3) king mackerel, and (4) tilefish. The other common one has half the level of those four: (5) albacore (white) tuna. Everything else has much, much lower levels, as shown in this chart from the 2006 Institute of Medicine report.

The amounts in other fish are so low that the chart has to make the scale bigger so you can see the difference.

The methylmercury story is one place where I think government agencies make truly sensible recommendations. In 2004, the FDA and EPA came out with a joint advisory for people most likely to suffer bad effects from eating too much methylmercury: pregnant women, women likely to become pregnant (because methylmercury accumulates) and small children. These agencies say that if you are in this category, don’t eat those five fish. Period.

If you are not in those categories, eating a serving or so of those fish once in a while seems OK. In any case, there isn’t all that much fish in sushi. The fish portions are tiny so the amounts of methylmercury will be tiny. That leaves plenty of sushi to enjoy. Salmon, for example, is very low in methylmercury and so are shrimp, eel, and lots of other kinds I like. And, being an adult, I will occasionally indulge in a piece of tuna.

With that said, I’m fussy about the possibility of biological contaminants in sushi. Here too, the FDA has sensible things to say. The FDA tells pregnant women, young children, the elderly, people with compromised immune systems, and those with low stomach acidity not to eat raw seafood--ever. If you aren’t in those categories, and want to reduce your risk of picking up some nasty parasite or bug, it helps to make sure the fish was solidly and deeply frozen before you eat it. Even then there’s a risk, but a much smaller one. So I like to be sure I’m eating sushi in a place with a well trained chef who knows food safety rules.

But the whole subject makes me really angry. About 40% of the methlmercury in fish gets into their waters from coal-burning power plants (the rest comes mostly from volcanoes and natural sources). We know perfectly well how to clean up emissions from those plants before they dump toxins in land and water. This is the best example I can think of to illustrate why changing the environment is so much more important to health than individual choices. You don’t like methylmercury in your fish? Write your congressional representatives and tell them to stop delaying controls on emissions. Now.

(For more on sushi safety, the Colorado Health Department has a neat page with many links to other sources of information on mercury, bacterial, and other kinds of problems with fish.)

Here’s a brain teaser for ya: when is a law that President Bush has signed into law still not a law?

Answer: when lobbyists object to the enforcement of the law on the grounds that it will be too costly for their corporate clients to implement.

The Decider’s decided to take a backseat to K street lobbyists and allow our food safety policies to be driven by beefy bullies like The American Meat Institute and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now,” as Maureen Dowd noted Wednesday. But he can’t rope ‘n’ ride, much less catch Osama bin Laden dead or alive.

The awful truth is that the Leader of the Free World’s been lassoed by lobbyists and roped into doing their bidding at every turn. He’s a docile little dogie, but this gittin’ along is gittin’ kinda old.

As CNN anchor Kitty Pilgrim reported last Monday on Lou Dobbs Tonight:

But Lou was just getting warmed up about COOL on Monday. By Wednesday, his head nearly popped off:

Lou Dobbs: A Consumers Union poll in fact shows 92 percent of Americans want to know where their food comes from. Now, there's a law on the books that calls for country-of-origin labeling of meats and other foods. But implementation has been delayed because of pressure from special interest groups, food industry lobbyists, and others…and, as Kitty Pilgrim now reports, the lobbyists, well, they are still trumping the public interest…

Jay Truitt, National Cattlemen's Beef Association: We have asked for delays in this law from the very beginning. And the law that was passed as a part of the 2002 farm bill has some significant flaws with it.

Kitty Pilgrim: Now, with the House Agriculture Committee working on a new farm bill, some in the beef industry lobby are trying to change country-of-origin requirements by changing the definition of livestock eligible for a "Made in the USA" label. This would allow an animal born and raised in another country and brought to the United States to be slaughtered and be labeled as a product of the United States. And the lobbyists are also pushing Congress to rewrite rules for ground beef, which is sometimes mixed with meat from Canada, Mexico, or Australia, with just fat trimmings from U.S. cattle. Then there would no telling if the package contained meat from Mexico or Canada in so-called U.S. beef.

Some are calling attempts to water down country-of-origin regulations an insult to consumers.

Patty Lovera, Food & Water Watch: What we are afraid of is, instead of delaying it, the beef industry will try to weaken it and get themselves off the hook and not be totally covered.

Kitty Pilgrim: The beef industry says they are fighting country-of- origin rules because they cost too much. Now, the House Agriculture Committee is currently working on the new bill. And the worry is, amendments are being proposed that will basically weaken the country-of-origin labeling rules -- Lou.

Lou Dobbs: Will weaken the country-of-origin rules?

Kitty Pilgrim: They have been delayed twice, basically through appropriations, and now they think they will be diluted -- they will be put in place, but they won't be effective.

Lou Dobbs: So, once again, Congress is filled with gutless wonders rolling over for lobbyists on K Street, in this case, the beef industry fighting these country-of-origin labels.
Has anybody in this Congress got the guts to enforce this law?

Kitty Pilgrim: Well, let me tell you, this is in markup right now in the House, and the consumer groups are watching this like a hawk. When those amendments go in, there is going to be a public outcry...

Lou Dobbs: Well, let's get here tomorrow night, let's get those groups that are watching, Food & Water Watch, for example…the Consumers Union, all of them, and give them some credit, and show our audience where they can write, and try to get some -- and the idiot congressmen who would be blocking the enactment of this law. But let's also get the USDA. And who is the fellow from the Cattlemen's Association?

Kitty Pilgrim: Yes, Jay Truitt? He…

Lou Dobbs: Jay Truitt?...Well, Jay Truitt -- Jay Truitt, I want to talk to you, pardner. You're all bull and no beef. And we're going to call you on this. And we're going to go through every one of your objections. And if you don't start thinking just a little about the national interests, you are going to hear from us daily, nightly, hourly. I don't care what it takes, because I have had a bellyful of this. This is outrageous, a gutless administration on this issue, a gutless Congress, and lobbyists rolling over the will of the people.

Kitty Pilgrim: The public will is very clear on this. They want country-of-origin labels.

Lou Dobbs: It's a law, for crying out loud...millions of Americans that have just had it with this nonsense. This is no longer funny. And they are putting the public health at risk…let's see if we can get the existing law enforced and roll back the influence of lobbyists in Washington.

Yeah, let’s see! Food safety advocates and consumers have been huffing and puffing about this issue for years without getting anywhere, but with a prime time populist like Dobbs hyperventilating, maybe we’ll start to feel the winds of change. Tune in to CNN tonight at 6 for more fireworks. And if you think it’s unfashionable to be a Lou Dobbs Democrat, just call yourself a Kitty Pilgrim Progressive.

I know today’s newspaper is destined to be tomorrow’s fishwrap, but there’s a prematurely stinky smell coming from today’s NY Times . Something is rotten in the District of Columbia, and I’m afraid it’s our roly poly congressional fish heads, who’ve caved in to lobbyists and refused to enforce the Country of Origin Labeling Laws on meats and produce.

COOL--as we like to call it ‘cause it sounds cool--was passed as part of the 2002 Farm Bill. But the meat lobby and grocery industry have stopped Congress from implementing it for five whole years now.

The seafood industry, on the other hand, saw a marketing advantage for products like wild-caught Alaskan salmon, which is widely regarded as healthier and more environmentally friendly than imported farm-raised salmon, and can therefore command a higher price.

So Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, a pretty scaly and flaky specimen himself, did the right thing for the wrong reasons, i.e. out of concern for his corporate constituents rather than consumers, and made sure the labeling law for seafood was enforced.

As usual, corporate interests trump consumer protection. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a question for you, and I’m sorry that it’s not a hypothetical: would you like to buy spoiled, rotten meat that’s been irradiated and then repackaged?

You probably wouldn’t; 71% of consumers have indicated that they’d rather not buy irradiated food. But the food industry has some spoiled, rotten food it would love to sell you.

So they’ve been pressuring the FDA to permit the use of euphemisms like “electronic pasteurization” in order to sell consumers spoiled food that’s been zapped and repackaged. And in cases where there’s supposedly no change in the taste of the food, there would be no label required at all.

Dr. Urvashi Rangan, a health policy scientist and policy analyst at Consumers Union, discussed the proposed changes with Living On Earth’s Steve Curwood last week:

But wait, it gets worse. According to Dr. Rangan, the radiation process converts fat into a possibly carcinogenic “radiolytic byproduct”:

Now, if you’re not sufficiently grossed out by the thought of unknowingly consuming recycled rotted meat that may contain cancer-causing chemicals, read on:

The FDA’s accepting public comments on the proposed policy change until tomorrow, July 3rd, so if you’d like to weigh in you can go to the FDA’s website and type in the docket number 2005N-0272. (hat tip to OrangeClouds115 at Daily Kos.)

And if you’re still not convinced that there’s an entire industry dedicated to shoving unproven, potentially dangerous technology down our throats, an article in the Sunday NY Times business section reveals new questions about the safety of biotech products.

The article quotes Henry I. Miller—yes, the same Henry I. Miller who had an op-ed in last Friday’s NY Times trumpeting Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone as a tremendous boon to consumers and a great way to combat climate change—as emphatically declaring the undisputed safety of biotech food products:

Dr. Miller gave this ringing endorsement at a 2004 roundtable sponsored by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology.

Now, researchers who’ve completed a four-year study organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute have released findings that raise all kinds of questions about the thousands of patents that have already been given to plant, animal, and microbial genes.

But then Dr. Miller doesn’t seem terribly prescient about a lot of things. If you want to have a laugh, revisit the unhinged hatchet job he penned for the National Review a few years back accusing Al Gore of being cuckoo on climate change. Do I smell roasting wingnuts? Between that and the rotting fishheads on Capital Hill, we could sure use some fresh air. Too bad the news is so stinky.

Mississippi’s Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner, Lester Spell, has ordered Chinese catfish off store shelves all over Mississippi after samples tested positive for illegal antibiotics. The antibiotics, banned by the FDA, have been known to cause allergic reactions and nerve, muscle and heart problems. Health officials in Arkansas and Louisiana are awaiting the outcome of tests on samples of imported seafood sent to the FDA, which has yet to issue a recall.

A ban on Chinese catfish would surely be a boon to American catfish farmers, who’ve been struggling to stay afloat in a flood of competition from Asian aquaculture. Imports of Chinese catfish reportedly doubled in the U.S. last year, making life harder than ever for U.S. catfish farmers in the already down-at-the-mouth south.

This morning, a group of southern Senators, led by Republicans Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, tacked an amendment onto yesterday’s prescription drug safety bill that authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to inspect seafood for antibiotics and other contaminants already banned by the FDA. Their concern for the health of their constituents, including, presumably, the sizable southern seafood industry, is heartening.

As Louisiana’s Daily Advertiser notes, “Beyond the antibiotic threat, Asian catfish are often raised in "latrine ponds" - the Chinese system of channeling human and other waste into ponds used to raise fish.”

By contrast, American fish farmers, such as the farmers’ cooperative Delta Pride, raise catfish in ponds in the Mississipi Delta that “produce clean, white-fleshed fish with little collateral damage to the surrounding environment, “ as Jay Weinstein notes in The Ethical Gourmet, the book I always turn to when I have questions about aquaculture.

Weinstein adds that domestic catfish logs far fewer food miles than its Asian competitors, and “also supports an ecologically sound food production system in our own country, improving living standards in a traditionally poor region.”

Matt makes a killer cornmeal-crusted catfish po-boy, and you can bet he wouldn’t dream of buying catfish from Asia. American catfish is still pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things. Of course, Chinese catfish is even cheaper, if you don’t count the consequences of relying on illegal antibiotics and toxin-filled aquafarms. Mississippi’s done the math, and it adds up to this: when it comes to catfish, buy American.

First it was cats and dogs, then hogs and chickens. Now we find out they’ve been feeding melamine-tainted wheat gluten to the fish, too. Oh, and by the way? It wasn’t even really wheat gluten. According to the AP, it was actually a blend of wheat meal, melamine, and “related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was.” Next, they’ll be telling us it was really pulverized pencil shavings.

So while federal inspectors poke around the fish farms trying to figure out whether the fish that ate the tainted feed have entered the food supply, the FDA assures us that “the contamination was probably too low to harm anyone who ate the fish.”

Probably. Who knows? Even additives that have been declared safe by food safety experts can turn out to be toxic. The Guardian reports today that a study of synthetic food additives commonly consumed by British children supports “findings first made seven years ago that linked the additives to behavioural problems, such as temper tantrums, poor concentration and hyperactivity, and to allergic reactions.” The additives include food colorings and preservatives that have been deemed safe in the U.K., including some that are banned in Scandinavian countries and the U.S.

The results of the study, conducted at Southhampton University for the Food Standards Agency, will not be published for several months, although independent experts say the evidence is compelling enough that parents should eliminate foods containing these ingredients from their childrens’ diets immediately.

The research confirms a 2000 report called the Isle of Wight study, which concluded that "significant changes in children's behaviour could be produced by the removal of colourings and additives from their diet…”

The FSA's Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food (CoT) discussed the findings in a closed meeting on March 20. Normally, the CoT’s meetings are open. The Guardian notes the ramifications of making the results public:

So, here in the U.S., we’ve got stuff in our food that isn’t supposed to be there, but may or may not be harmful, while in the U.K., the stuff that the experts say is safe may not be after all. We're all out to sea while our FDA fishes for clues and the U.K.'s FSA flounders.

Yum Brands, proud parent of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, has had a spell of bad yuck recently. First came the Taco Bell E. coli episode. Then came the vermin-filled video that quickly went viral, starring the rat pack who turned a West Village Taco Bell into their very own after hours supper club.

Nothing slows fast food sales faster than viruses and varmints, and, sure enough, Yum Brands announced Wednesday that its overall U.S. operating profits fell 11% in the first quarter.

Yum Brand shares promptly soared to a record high on the New York Stock Exchange.

It’s not that Wall Street’s bullish on bacteria, or unperturbed by pests. Strong sales are what floats investors’ boats, and Yum Brand’s got ‘em—in China.

Sales have been terrific in the land where formica’s a food additive, more than offsetting the decline in U.S. earnings.

We learned last week that Chinese food producers routinely add melamine, a coal-derived chemical, to a wide variety of grain-based food products. The practice is widespread and appears to have been going on for more than fifteen years, according to an account in the China Post:

Call it a culinary culture clash. We say “contaminant,” they say “revenue enhancing additive.”

No wonder Yum Brands finds plenty of takers for its take-out in China. Apparently, if you taint it, they’ll say “yum.”

When we welded our wagon to China’s economic engine, did we sign on to an environmental train wreck?

I’m glad the Chinese government’s hired clean tech trailblazer William McDonough’s design firm to create a green blueprint for six new cities and a village--who better to help China bind its ever-widening carbon footprint than McDonough, the internationally influential green architect and designer who turned Ford’s River Rouge factory green and helped Nike create a biodegradable sneaker?

But China may have misinterpreted his “Waste = Food” concept. I’m pretty sure McDonough doesn’t advocate putting pulverized scraps of plastic in pet food, or making soy sauce out of human hair (not to mention lard out of sewage.)

The premise of McDonough’s environmental manifesto, Cradle to Cradle, co-written with Michael Braungart, a former Greenpeace activist turned sustainability scholar, is that every product we make should be non-toxic and biodegradable, or else endlessly recyclable. It’s a utopian vision for a garbage-and-pollution-free future.

Maybe McDonough’s tilting at wind turbines, but his ground breaking, earth saving designs have been hailed by environmental activists and not-so-crunchy corporatists alike. Steven Spielberg reportedly wants to do a documentary about McDonough’s heroic eco-endeavors.

And Chinese officials recognize the need to tackle the problems their overheated economy poses for the planet. In fact, while we fume about all the greenhouse gases China’s spewing, they may actually leave us in the dust when it comes to cutting carbon emissions.

But while the Chinese government may be leaning green, its business sector has been caught red-handed pumping up its profits by dumping chemicals into our food supply. The confirmation that melamine has been routinely added to animal feed to cut costs makes you wonder what else they might be putting in the food they’re shipping to our shores.

The other day we asked our friend Sue, who’s been to China several times, whether she would trust Chinese produce that’s labeled organic. “No way!” was her emphatic response.

And yet, more and more of the organic food we buy in the U.S. is coming from China. Supposedly, our food manufacturers have to rely on imports because American farmers simply can’t grow enough organic produce to meet the ever-growing demand.

I accepted this notion at face value until my friend and fellow NYC Food Systems Network colleague Christina Grace, a farmers’ market maven, pointed out that it really comes down to the fact that Big Food would rather cut corners and buy cheap from China than support America’s small family farms.

After all, it’s a terrific boon to the corporate bottom line to be able to do business with suppliers who can manufacture their products without the added expense of such niceties as worker safety or environmental protection.

Of course, here at home, the agencies entrusted to protect us aren’t doing such a bang-up job of things, either. It doesn’t help that the FDA’s budget keeps shrinking even as food imports rise. Welcome to Small Government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Food.

The USDA’s going to compensate the pork producers for the millions of dollars they’ll lose when they euthanize those 6,000 melamine-tainted hogs. Bereaved pet owners, on the other hand, will get nothing.

So taxpayers get stuck with the bill for Big Ag’s habit of salvaging substandard pet food and feeding it to the pigs. The dead dogs and cats? Just collateral damage. You know, like all those Iraqi civilians.

So said CNN’s Miles O’Brien this morning. The case of the latest E. coli outbreak gets curioser and curioser. Now the FDA’s guessing it was tainted lettuce, not scallions, that sickened dozens of people who ate at Taco Bells all over the Northeast.

Taco Bell’s president, Greg Creed, held a news briefing yesterday to express the company’s confidence that the lettuce it currently serves is safe. But the ban on green onions remains in place, despite the fact that scallions are no longer a suspect.

“At this point, we do not plan to reintroduce green onions into Taco Bells,” Creed said. But lettuce will stay on the menu because the company has fired its former produce supplier and switched to Salinas-based Taylor Farms.

The FDA’s conducting an investigation of Taco Bell’s previous produce supplier, but everyone’s suddenly being coy about naming names, or even stating states. Asked the origins of the suspect lettuce, Creed answered, ”In a very general sense, I would say the West.”

Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer for the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, insisted that the supplier’s name is confidential because an investigation is under way.

Looks like the LA Times didn’t get the mum’s-the-word memo:

Ready Pac’s reputation was already tainted by their E. coli contaminated spinach, so I guess the FDA doesn’t want to compound the company’s woes prematurely. Perhaps when health officials have completed their traceback probe and located the source of the suspect lettuce, they’ll be ready to implicate Ready Pac.

Greens from the Salinas Valley have been contaminated with the virulent 0157.H7 E. coli strain twenty times in the last ten years. Asked to speculate why, Dr. Acheson told the NY Times:

Well, sure they are, especially if you irrigate your crops with feedlot-tainted wastewater, as the Central California growers reportedly do. No wonder their profits are going down the toilet.

What part of this equation does the FDA not understand? At a time when food born illnesses are on the rise, food safety inspections have declined drastically thanks to deep budget cuts at the FDA.

Our food supply is tainted, all right—contaminated by corporate interests who got our government to gut the FDA with abattoir-like alacrity. Eric Schlosser spells it out in a damning op-ed in today’s NY Times:

The FDA’s food safety budget has been shrinking for years, according to the NY Times. William K. Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner, told the Times that money has been shifted to oversight of drug and medical devices, while the portion of the budget devoted to food safety has fallen from 50 percent to 25 percent since the 1970s.

Of course, if the FDA actually set foot inside the barn—or, rather the CAFO, as in Confined Animal Feeding Operation—they’d have to face up to the fact that the feedlots are what’s feeding the outbreaks of this especially virulent strain of E.coli, which was virtually unknown before the advent of agribusiness.

A recent newspaper headline about the scallion-borne E. coli outbreak doesn’t mince words: “Nearly 100 ill after manure found in Taco Bell onions. ” When you put it like that, it’s pretty revolting, and Americans would be up in arms if they connected the dots between the feedlots and the outbreaks. But that report comes from the Independent, a British newspaper, which dares to make a connection the American media won’t touch with a virtual 10 foot pole (hat tip to AmericaBlog):

So the cows are confined to bacteria-breeding feedlots, the foxes are guarding the henhouse, and the Democrats, led by Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, are trying to pass the Safe Food Act, which would consolidate the FDA and the Department of Agriculture and give them the authority to test for pathogens, demand recalls, and punish companies that knowingly sell tainted food. Our current FDA can do none of these things.

Let’s hope their legislation will enjoy bi-partisan support. After all, as Eric Schlosser notes, “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you still have to eat.”

Step away from those scallions! The feds are closing in on the source of the E. coli that’s sickened dozens of people in three states, so far. The culprits they’re eying are green onions, ‘regular’ onions, cilantro, tomatoes and lettuce from the New Jersey distribution center of McLane, a Texas-based company that supplies ingredients for all 1,100 Taco Bells in the Northeast.

“New Jersey’s health commissioner has said the most recent case of E. coli was reported Nov. 29,” the AP reports, “so the danger of infection might have passed.”

Or not. In the meantime, three dozen or so people have been sickened, nine are in the hospital, and most Taco Bells in the region remain open, if empty.

As the AP notes, “most E. coli infections are associated with undercooked meat.” But the state and federal health inspectors aren’t even inspecting the meat. Why not? Well, for one thing, the USDA’s more stringent standards have made our meat supply safer than it once was, so the source is more likely to be some kind of produce.

But mostly, it’s because the FDA’s safeguards for our food system are voluntary, and right now, McLane’s not volunteering any meat samples. The five foods the feds are testing were selected by McLane. Meat samples were neither requested nor offered.

The public wasn’t promptly notified of the outbreak, either; New Jersey health officials refrained from revealing the contamination for several days, The NY Times reported yesterday, “in part over concerns for possible overreaction by the public.”

Which prompted Karin J. Lauria of Marlborough, Mass., to send this letter to the editor: