USDA

(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.
 

Our ever-evolving culture gave me a new verb, a new phrase, and a new acronym last week. The verb is “googlemire,” and if you’ve ever been sucked into the Internet’s virtual vortex, you know exactly what it means. Word maven Patricia T. O’Connor used it on NPR the other day, but, ironically, the word’s so newly minted that you can’t google it, yet.

The first time I got googlemired was December 19th, 2005. At the time, I was getting paid to blog about food for a “healthy living” website. With Christmas around the corner, I set out to write an innocuous post about low fat eggnog.

I googled around in search of the best brands, which led me to Horizon, which led me to the revelation that this supposedly organic dairy producer with the famously happy cows on its cartons was, in fact, becoming infamous for cramming its cows into open-air feedlots that totally violated the intentions of the organic standards. I got sucked into the Agribiz muck and have been stuck there ever since.

Which brings me to the sad new shorthand for battered bovines: “spent dairy cows.” The Humane Society employed this phrase a month ago in reference to the Westland meat recall, noting that “15 percent of the hamburger meat in the United States comes from "spent" dairy cows.”

Last Thursday, the New York Times used the phrase minus the quotation marks, a sign that it’s officially entered our lexicon: 

Before you dismiss “Downergate” as last week’s news, allow me to draw your attention to some details that beg for better coverage:

Downer cows are considered potentially unfit to eat because a cow that can’t stand up may be (a) carrying mad cow disease, and (b) may have wallowed in E. coli-tainted manure which might find its way from the cow’s hide to its carcass, and from there into our hamburgers.

But there are three standard factory farm practices that also cause dairy cows to stumble:

1. The high calorie, low fiber corn and soy-based feed they’re fattened up on—instead of the grass their bodies are designed to digest--disrupts the balance of bacteria in their digestive tracts, causing a condition called acidosis. Severe acidosis leads to ulcerations, which in turn causes an excruciatingly painful inflammation of the hooves called laminitis.

2. Injecting cows with rBST (aka bovine growth hormone) in order to increase their milk production creates a much higher risk of an udder infection called mastitis, which also leads to laminitis (along with pus-filled milk, ick.)

3. Astonishing as it may seem, cows are not biologically equipped to stand around on concrete floors all day; depriving them of the softer sod their hooves are meant to stand on and giving them little or no opportunity to lie down are two more open invitations to laminitis.

A dairy cow raised on pasture and spared growth hormones can produce milk for a decade or more and remain healthy, whereas illness is the norm for the average CAFO cow subjected to regular rBST injections; antibiotics are routine and these crippled creatures are used up, or “spent,” within a few years, at which point they’re sent off to slaughter and turned into hamburger, some of which ends up in our kids’ school lunches.

Which brings me to a Madison Avenue-manufactured acronym coined by “youth market analysts,” as the New York Times reported last week: KGOY, or Kids Growing Older Younger. The article was about 7 year-old girls getting pedicures and playing with make-up, but it’s part of a larger and--to me, anyway—insidious trend of girls reaching puberty at an ever earlier age.

Our hyper-sexualized, uber-consumer culture may be partly to blame (makeovers for 6 year-olds? How warped is that?) but scientists are also eyeing a whole host of environmental factors including the hormones that contaminate our food chain. No definitive link’s been proven, but--much to the consternation of the corporations who peddle these products--wary parents are avoiding antibiotic and hormone-tainted dairy products, meats and other foods for their kids’ sake and their own health, too, as more and more folks begin to wonder what all these adulterated foods may be doing to us.

Sadly, your desire to know whether the milk you buy came from an rBST-injected cow or how the meat you eat was raised conflicts with Agribiz and Big Food’s desire to turn a profit. So they’re pulling out all the stops to prevent you from having access to that information, with the help of “our” government.

On the rBST front, Monsanto’s launching a multi-state, Astroturf-assisted assault on the labels that currently enable consumers to select rBST-free dairy products. Read the gory details in a hilarious (if horrifying) “open letter to Monsanto” posted on the Ethicurean by Ali of The Cleaner Plate Club fame.

The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, meanwhile, is proposing a new label for meats that’s lamer than a dairy cow pumped full of rBST. The USDA’s new standard would permit a "Naturally Raised" label on livestock raised “without growth promotants, antibiotics, or mammalian or avian byproducts in their feed,” as another Ethicurean, Elanor, noted the other day.

Sounds great, right? However, as Jillian points out over on Daily Kos:

The USDA’s proposed standard is, as Jillian astutely observes, “so weak it would apply to a cloned animal raised in the confines of a factory farm.” And that’s the idea, of course; it would dupe would-be ethical eaters into buying meat from feedlots, so Agribiz could profit from the demand for antibiotic and hormone-free meats. But what’s natural about shoving animals into indoor stalls so small they can’t budge and feeding them a diet that destroys their digestive tracts?

If you think that the label “Naturally Raised” should apply only to animals who have, you know, been naturally raised—i.e., allowed to graze in the great outdoors, treated humanely, etc.—you have until the end of TODAY, March 3rd, to submit your comments to the USDA. The Organic Consumers Association has an action form to make it easy for you to object to this Orwellian proposal (animal farm, indeed.) What are you waiting for? Make a moove!!!

Wow, this is just so unexpected that I hardly know what to think. As Marion Nestle wrote on her blog today, “Every now and then something incredible happens and here it is. Brian Wansink, Cornell Professor and author of Mindless Eating, has been appointed executive director of the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.”

After years of watching the cavalcade of cronies this administration has appointed to every conceivable position, I find myself experiencing the utterly foreign impulse to enthusiastically applaud a federal appointment.

Wansink’s the guy who did the “stale popcorn study,” which demonstrated that people will eat pretty much whatever you put in front of them, and as much of it as you give them, regardless of how it tastes. He’s an internationally acclaimed professor with decades of experience studying food psychology, marketing and consumer behavior. His most recent book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, was dubbed “The Freakonomics of Food.”

If anyone can help us get a handle on our love handles, it’s Wansink. His duties will include overseeing the 2010 Dietary Guidelines and the food pyramid, that unintelligible hieroglyph that’s supposed to help us make better choices.

Will Wansink be able to overhaul our dietary guidelines over the inevitable kvetching from the food industry lobbyists? Pull up a chair and pass the popcorn; this could get interesting.

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?

The USDA’s “certified organic” label is taking hits from every quarter these days, from purists who say it’s too watered down to corporations who’d love to dilute it further to farmers who can’t be bothered with all that bureaucracy. Consumers are confused, too, wondering whether organic food is really any better for you or just an excuse for food manufacturers to charge a premium.

One thing is indisputable, though--sales of organic foods have skyrocketed in recent years. So I was appalled to learn from Sunday’s New York Times that the USDA’s National Organic Program, which is responsible for enforcing the organics standards, has only nine staff members and an annual budget of just $1.5 million, despite the fact that consumers currently spend “more than $14 billion a year on organic foods, up from $3.6 billion in 1997,” as the Times notes. By way of contrast, the article adds that in 2005, the USDA gave $37 million in subsidies to farmers who grow dried peas, a crop worth about $83 million annually.

It’s utterly nutty to allocate peanuts for the National Organic Program. But the USDA has long been industrial agriculture’s handmaiden, coddling corporations and treating organics like an unloved stepchild. Now, of course, Cinderella’s pesticide-free heirloom pumpkin’s turned into a first class coach, and Big Ag wants to tag along for the ride.

How the ugly duckling in a freegan frock became the belle of the ball is more scary tale than fairy tale, well-documented in Samuel Fromartz’s Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew and Julie Guthman’s Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California.

Both books chart organic food’s evolution from small scale, sustainable farms to big time industrial operations that violate the very notion of “organic.” But even as Big Ag co-opts the organic label, the USDA still won’t acknowledge that there are any benefits to buying organic. From the USDA’s own website, under “Organic Food Standards and Labels: the Facts:”

It’s a fact that foods grown without pesticides and chemicals are, at the very least, safer for the environment. You can bet that they’re better for our bodies, too, unless you care to argue that the presence of pesticide residues in your food is a plus.

And there have been numerous studies from credible sources showing that organic foods are nutritionally superior, such as this one from Great Britain’s Soil Association, or the latest study from UC Davis showing that organic tomatoes have nearly twice the antioxidants of conventional ones. Researchers attribute this, in part, to the higher soil fertility of organic farms.

My favorite “agrivist,” Sandor Katz, notes that chemically dependent, so-called “conventional” industrial agriculture only became the cultural norm after two World Wars left us with a surplus of chemicals, including the organophosphates once used in the Nazi gas chambers, which subsequently became popular pesticides.

“Chemical agriculture is an unmitigated disaster, and a relatively new phenomenon: prior to World War II, virtually all food was produced without chemicals, by what we now call “organic” methods,” Katz writes in The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.

Katz is quick to add, however, that he has his doubts about the organic label, as do I. “People wishing to resist corporate control and eat fresh, healthy food have to move beyond organics and into the foodshed, thinking about where our food actually comes from.”

Of course, agribiz doesn’t want you to know where your food comes from, which is why its lobbyists have kept Congress from enforcing the Country of Origin Labeling Laws that were signed into law in the last farm bill.

And even when our foods are labeled, we can’t be sure standards are really being upheld; the Des Moines Register reported on Sunday that that USDA auditors are only just now “scheduled to make their first -- and long-awaited -- trip to China this month to check on organic food operations there.”

Will these supposedly “surprise” visits yield any actual surprises? Will the USDA be shocked, shocked to find traces of toxins in the tofu?

Here’s what I want to know: if conventional agriculture represents such a technological breakthrough, why do so many of us gladly pay more for food that’s been grown the way our grandparents grew it, without “benefit” of chemicals? The USDA may not be willing to confirm our suspicions that pesticide-free produce is better for us, but Big Ag is happy to capitalize on our concerns and promote its brand of organic. I guess that’s just natural. But is it truly organic?

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.

Hunger activists challenged New Yorkers yesterday to try spending only $3.50 on food, just for one day, to get a taste of what life is like for folks who actually have to rely on food stamps.

It’s the latest installment of Let’s Make a Meal, the “paltry pantry” game that started last month when the governors of Oregon and Utah took a “food stamp challenge” and tried to eat on a meager $3 a day, which the average food stamp recipient does by necessity, as opposed to novelty.

The concept caught on with other public servants, who took the challenge and found it hard to eat healthy on a dollar-a-meal diet. Or even eat at all; Eric Gioia, a New York City councilman, ran out of money before the week was up and had to turn to a food pantry. As he told NY1 news, “This is why by the third and fourth weeks of the month the soup kitchens and food pantries are literally bursting at the seams.”

The number of American households experiencing hunger—or, as the USDA’s rebranded it, “food insecurity”—has been climbing steadily each year while wages erode, health care costs explode, and more people fall into the poverty pit. For these unfortunate folks, food stamps could be a lifeline, but of the 40 million or so Americans eligible for food stamps, only 60 to 70% apply. A bitter blend of bureaucracy, stigma and ignorance keeps others from availing themselves of this modest aid.

Not that $3 a day goes very far, anyway; you’ve got to get the maximum calories for the minimum price, which means filling up on cheap fats and carbs like peanut butter and ramen noodles. Fresh fruits and vegetables? Might as well be caviar. We subsidize commodity crops like corn and soybeans, keeping the price of nutritionally bankrupt processed foods artificially low, while doing nothing for the “specialty crops,” which is what the USDA calls the fruits and vegetables it tells us we’re supposed to eat five to nine servings of each day. Isn’t that special?

For most of us non-rural types, the words “Farm Bill” go in one ear and out the other, leaving sepia snapshots of wizened guys in overalls in our heads. But food activists are trying to sweep those bits of straw from our brains and train us to think of this massive and momentous piece of legislation as the Food and Farm Bill, because more than half the nearly 90 billion dollars allocated every year for the Farm Bill pays for things like school lunches, food stamps, and WIC, the nutrition program for women, infants and children.

The value of the food stamp program erodes each year because it’s not indexed to inflation. Senator Chuck Schumer, D-NY, has introduced an alternative to the Farm Bill that would peg the food stamp allocations to inflation, but it won’t compensate for the declines of the past decade. And the Bush administration is looking to reduce the number of Americans who qualify for food stamps at a time when more people than ever are suffering from “very low food security.”

Could I live on peanut butter and ramen noodles? Mmm, that reminds me of a great recipe for sesame-peanut noodles in The Food You Want to Eat, the cookbook from Queer Eye’s culinary guy, Ted Allen.

You just need a quarter cup of peanut butter and a pound of ramen noodles. Oh, and some sesame seeds, toasted sesame oil, peanuts, soy sauce, red wine vinegar, mirin or sherry, a few cloves of garlic, red pepper flakes, an English cucumber, fresh cilantro, and scallions.

Yum! I can do this $3 a day thing! I’ll just have to skip the seasonings, the seeds, the nuts, the cucumber, the scallions and the cilantro, not to mention the mirin or sherry. Hhmmm. Might be too minimal even for Mark Bittman.

I’m glad politicians are volunteering to venture beyond the Land of Milk and Honey to get a firsthand look at the food deserts so many Americans never see, even if it’s only for a day or a week. Our awful agricultural policies have created a food chain that makes it possible, for the first time in history, for poor people to be both malnourished and obese. That’s quite an achievement, and one for which we’re all poorer, if you don’t count companies like Cargill and ADM.

Well, at least Agribiz plows some of its profits into PBS and NPR. That’s about the only by-product of industrial agriculture that contains any redeeming nutritional value.

Looking for a sandwich with no bonus bacteria? An open-faced sandwich is your best bet. It’s got nothing to hide, because the Food Safety and Inspection Service, a branch of the USDA, inspects manufacturers of packaged, open-faced meat and poultry sandwiches on a daily basis.

Add another slice of bread, though, and you’re off the FSIS reservation. Sandwiches encased in two slices of bread, aka “closed-faced” meat and poultry sandwiches, fall, squarely or not, into FDA territory. What might be lurking under that second slice of bread: salmonella? Listeria? E. coli? Who knows? The FDA only inspects manufacturers of closed-faced sandwiches once every five or ten years.

And while the FSIS and the FDA are busy slicing up their food fiefdoms in this random, arbitrary way, neither food agency actually has the power to recall contaminated chicken or toxic tacos. All they can do is ask nicely.

Sometimes, the FDA doesn’t even bother; if a food product is merely tainted with a non-lethal strain of bacteria, the FDA has been known to look the other way and let the tainted food sit on supermarket shelves, rather than needlessly alarm consumers—or harm agribiz profits. It’s a sorry state of affairs, as CNN noted this morning:

The Safe Food Act was authored by a couple of Democrats, needless to say: Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. It’s been on the table since April of 2005. They’re also urging the Administration to support the creation of a single food safety agency:

And while the FDA and the USDA fumble, some 76 million people suffer from food poisoning each year, according to CDC estimates. Does the FDA own stock in Imodium AD or what? Between approving diarrhea-inducing diet drugs, allowing the use of treated sewage effluent to irrigate salad crops, and ignoring bacteria that spell gastrointestinal disaster, their credibility is truly in the toilet.

The UglyRipe™ tomato is, as its trademarked name suggests, not just any old tomato. It’s the only tomato you’ll find on the supermarket shelves that comes close to matching the flavor of a homegrown heirloom tomato.

If you can find it, that is. The Florida Tomato Committee and Governor Jeb Bush would rather you couldn’t, and they’ve been preventing the Procacci Brothers, owners of the company that sells the UglyRipe, from shipping these tasty but misshapen marvels outside the state of Florida.

Why? Because The UglyRipe’s superior flavor threatens to take a bite out of the conventional tomato growers’ $500 million industry, and they don’t welcome the competition.

So how has the Florida Tomato Committee kept the UglyRipe out of the hands of its many fans? By requiring the tomatoes it ships outside the state to be of a uniform shape and size. Flavor is not a factor; “too subjective,” the committee claims.

Oh, the tyranny of the tasteless supermarket tomato; easy on the eyes and utterly insipid. It’s the same way some network news producers choose their anchors. Appearance is everything.

The UglyRipe, by contrast, is the odd-looking offspring of a French heirloom named Marmande, crossed with more disease resistant hybrids. No doubt its Gallic parentage galls anti-UglyRipe Republicans, who seem to hate anything and everything French, including the Statue of Liberty, not to mention the freedoms it represents.

The Florida Tomato Committee did grant the UglyRipe a three-year exemption to see whether there was a market for it, and it was during this period that I discovered the UglyRipe’s fabulous flavor at an upstate Stop & Shop. Evidently, a lot of other people discovered it, too. According to Joseph Procacci, the company’s chairman, “the UglyRipe gets fan mail.”

But the conventional tomato growers were not among the UglyRipe’s fans, and the exemption was withdrawn in 2003.

Last year, the Procacci Brothers petitioned the federal government to amend the Tomato commission’s standards to allow for the UglyRipe’s unique qualties.

Jeb Bush got bent all out of shape about the matter. He submitted a letter whining that “Every grower has some percentage of its crops that is flat, elongated, ridged, etc., yet they are still required to adhere to the minimum grade requirements.”

Oh, those Bushes. Such sticklers for high standards. Despite Jeb’s brother’s best efforts, though, we still live in a democracy, more or less, and of the 88 comments the government received, only nine were negative, including one from Reginald L. Brown, manager of the Florida Tomato Committee. Brown complained that “UglyRipe was a direct competitor with traditional Florida tomatoes that meet the standards.”

He’s totally wrong, of course; there’s no competition. If it’s a taste test, the UglyRipe wins hands down, and that’s why the Powers That Be have tried so hard to squash it. Happily, in this case, taste has triumphed. Starting today, the USDA will allow the UglyRipes to be shipped, and with any luck they’ll be turning up at my local Whole Foods soon.

But aren’t we "locavores" supposed to be keeping track of our food miles? How can I justify buying tomatoes from Florida?

Turns out I don’t have to, because Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, does it for me in The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, in which he explains that a tomato grown in Florida and trucked across country actually generates fewer greenhouse gases than a tomato grown in an artificially heated Northeastern greenhouse.

So if you see an UglyRipe, buy it, and taste the fruit the Florida Tomato Committee tried to forbid. And yes, it is a fruit. Or was, until the Supreme Court declared it a vegetable in the 1880’s. Why? Because fruits weren’t taxed, and vegetables were, and tomatoes were selling well. Looks like the seeds of our corporatocracy were sown early on.

Consider the shrimp cocktail, one of America’s most popular appetizers. It doesn’t seem so appetizing once you know that it’s probably contaminated with pesticide residues and antibiotics.

Not to mention the fact that the way it was farmed or caught may well have contributed to the destruction of coastal wetlands, or killed an endangered sea turtle.

So you might want to add imported shrimp to your (s)hitlist, right after battery caged eggs, hormone-laced milk, and mercury-tainted tuna. Remember tuna? It used to be the most popular seafood in the U.S.

Now, shrimp is number one, but our fondness for it feeds all kinds of ecological havoc in countries like Thailand and Vietnam, where 80 percent of our shrimp comes from. According to Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer watchdog group that monitors corporate abuse of food and water resources:

And I’d like to think that they would be, if only they knew. We’ve stopped buying imported shrimp in part thanks to Jay Weinstein, author of The Ethical Gourmet, who wrote the following:

And the FDA only inspects 1.2 percent of imported seafood, according to Food and Water Watch. Without additional funding from Congress, the FDA can’t significantly increase physical inspections and testing of imported seafood.

Do you really want to keep eating a product that Europe deems too toxic to consume? Switch to domestic wild-caught or responsibly farm-raised shrimp, if you can find it; thanks to loopholes in the USDA’s country-of-origin food labeling laws, roughly half the seafood sold in our supermarkets is unlabeled.

Consumers can demand that Congress fund more FDA inspections, and get the USDA to close the labeling law loopholes. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch is a great place to begin if you’d like to take action.

And if enough of us do, certified turtle-safe shrimp may someday be as widely available as dolphin-safe tuna. After all, who wants to hurt a turtle?

Americans are nutritionally dense in the worst sense; we pounce on overprocessed “natural” food products with the same mindless enthusiasm my cat shows when I dangle a shoelace. And marketers are only too happy to exploit our naiveté by slapping the “natural” appellation on everything from saline-injected chickens to high fructose corn syrup-laden granola bars.

“I think the term “natural” has been thrown around so much, it’s been watered down,” Chris Cosantino, a San Francisco chef, said on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday.

Or watered up, as the case may be. Poultry producers pump their chickens full of salty water and then market them as “natural,” to the dismay of Lampkin Butts, president of Sanderson Farms, whose “100% natural chicken” has no additives at all. Injecting a chicken with sodium lactate, which is a preservative, can add as much as 15% to its weight, which raises profits for the poultry producers who use it. But it also raises questions about what constitutes “natural.”

So the USDA held a public hearing yesterday to consider the issue. Companies like Sanderson Farms and Hormel, who’s launched a line of “Natural Choice” lunch meats, would like to see a stricter definition for the word “natural;” currently, it means only that a product has been “minimally processed,” whatever that means, and contains no artificial flavor, coloring or chemical preservative.

Hormel’s Natural Choice deli meats are preserved by a high pressure pasteurization process instead of conventional chemicals. Hormel hopes that a narrower definition of “natural” will mean more cachet, and more ka-ching, for products like Natural Choice, since consumers are clearly willing to spend more for foods they perceive as being “pure,” i.e., free of chemicals or preservatives.

But if you really want pure, unadulterated food, why not go straight to the source and skip all that processing and packaging? Buying your meats and poultry directly from the farmer is part of a movement the Japanese call seikatsu, which translates as "food with a face." Better to read faces than labels; a farmer who sees his customers every week at the Greenmarket is not going to look you in the eye and lie when you ask him whether his pork is pasture raised, or if his produce is organic.

“An alternative food system is rising up on the margins,” Joel Salatin, the self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” told Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren’t as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?”

I can tell you where we went; to Bobolink Dairy Farm, where Jonathan and Nina White invited us to see the virtues of pasture raised farming firsthand. Jonathan’s at the Union Square Greenmarket every Friday, spreading the grass-fed gospel. When I buy a block of cheddar from Bobolink, I don’t have to ask if it’s “natural,” because I know the farmer. I’ve even met his cows.

Carnivorous fish pose a real conundrum when it comes to defining “organic.” If “you are what you eat,” how can a farm-raised fish whose diet consists of smaller, non-organic fish really qualify as organic? And what about wild fish who feed on smaller fish in untainted waters?

The USDA’s been puzzling over which fish could be certified organic since 2000, when a task force was formed to study the issue. The task force determined that wild fish could not be labeled organic. As one member of the advisory panel, Rebecca J. Goldburg, a senior scientist at the advocacy group Environmental Defense, told the NY Times, “What it comes down to is organic is about agriculture, and catching wild animals isn’t agriculture.”

Aquaculture, by contrast, is indeed a form of agriculture; some salmon hatcheries are essentially underwater feedlots, with fish crowded into pens that foster disease and parasites that spread to the wild salmon population, threatening to decimate it. Fish farmers are fighting the parasites, called sea lice, by feeding their fish pellets laced with an unregulated pesticide, which then contaminates the water, potentially poisoning all kinds of marine life.

The Marine Stewardship Council certifies Alaska salmon as a “Best Environmental Choice,” but it will never be USDA certified organic.

“If you can’t call a wild Alaska salmon true and organic, what can you call organic?” protests Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican from Alaska. Murkowski’s fish industry constituents fear they’ll miss the boat on the organic boom while their farm-raised competition unfairly profits from dubious aquaculture practices that contradict the very notion of organic.

As chef/journalist Jay Weinstein writes in his excellent cookbook-cum-manifesto The Ethical Gourmet, “Wild Alaskan salmon is a well-managed fishery, with strict catch quotas coming from remarkably pristine waters…While salmon farms require huge ocean harvests to generate the synthesized feed on which their fish subsist, these wild salmon are part of the ecosystem, and source their sustenance directly from the most plentiful natural resources.”

The 2000 task force determined that “farm-raised fish could be labeled organic as long as their diets were almost entirely organic plant feed.” But the USDA shelved those proposals and sat on the issue till 2005, when a second task force, well-stocked with aquaculture advocates, was convened.

This second task force, according to the NY Times, “recommended far less stringent rules, including three options for what organic fish could eat: an entirely organic diet; nonorganic fish during a seven-year transition period while fish farms shift to organic fish meal; or nonorganic fish meal from “sustainable” fisheries. Sustainable fisheries are those that ensure that their fish stocks do not become depleted.”

“…It seems to be a complete deception of what organic means,” Andrea Kavanagh, director of the Pure Salmon Campaign, an advocacy group working to improve conditions for farm-raised fish, told the NY Times. “Organic is supposed to be on 100 percent organic feed.”

Welcome to the Orwellian, Alice-in-Wonderland world of organic standards, warped by agribusiness and guaranteed to confuse consumers. No wonder ABC World News is airing a three-part series exploring the organic industry’s growing pains; when ABC anchor Charlie Gibson’s talking about “grass-fed” and “pasture-raised,” you know that "organic has really gone into the mainstream," as author Samuel Fromartz told Gibson last night. And Fromartz should know, since he literally wrote the book on this subject, Organic, Inc., a thoughtful take on the transition from whole food to Whole Foods.

When it comes to ethical eating and aquaculture, vegetarians come out on top, predictably. “There is broad agreement that the organic label is no problem for fish that are primarily vegetarians, like catfish and tilapia,” the NY Times notes, “because organic feed is available (though expensive).”

American farmed catfish and tilapia are far more environmentally friendly than their carnivorous counterparts, too. They’re raised in inland ponds that don’t affect the ocean’s ecosystem, and fed a mainly grain-based diet that doesn’t deplete the wild fish population, as farm-raised salmon does.

The problems plaguing farm-raised salmon, on the other hand, are systemic and serious, so until there’s a way to verify that the salmon industry has truly cleaned up its act, I’ll stick with wild salmon. It may not be organic, but then, in my book, neither is farm-raised salmon given non-organic feed. But hey, what do I know? I’m just a self-appointed anti-agribusiness activist. Evidently, the folks at the USDA know something--or is it someone?--I don’t.

Cow manure, like religion, can be a force for good or evil. It makes things fruit and flower, but it also spreads toxic contaminants. Terribly confusing to the average American consumer with a limited understanding of agricultural practices, no doubt, but that’s why we love Michael Pollan, who plows through the poop to get to the root of the problem; industrial farming practices have turned a formerly harmless fertilizer into a source of pollution and disease:

The Haccp plan Pollan refers to is the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system, which the government developed to deal with E. coli contamination in beef. Cattle feces were tainting our hamburgers, but rather than trying to keep the manure out of the meat, the industry opted to, well, sterilize the shit out of it.

Pollan predicts that our industrial food chain’s reliance on such technological “solutions” means that we’ll be hearing calls to irradiate the entire food supply any day now. Did he know that in the business section of Sunday’s NY Times, on the same day that his piece ran in the Times’ magazine, Danial Akst wrote a column entitled “Big Farms Will Keep Spinach on the Table?” Akst defends the practice of irradiating food as a life-saving technology that’s been stymied by “public fears of anything sounding too nuclear.”

Akst states that “Someday irradiated food will be commonplace, and thousands of lives will be saved because of it. Someday, too, I expect that tasty meats will be grown in vats rather than taken from the carcasses of dead animals. These developments will be humane, earth-friendly — and brought to you by big agriculture, hopefully with big government keeping a watchful eye.”

Yeah, hopefully. Because, you know, it’s Agribusiness’s job to make a profit, not to protect our health and safety; that’s up to the FDA and the USDA. They’re looking out for us, except when Big Food lobbyists pay them to look the other way. To the highest bidder go the spoils; to the loser, the spoiled meat. Or spinach.

We’ve learned, in the wake of last month’s E. coli outbreak, just how weak a link the FDA is in our nation’s food chain. It’s certainly nice of the Nunes Company, a Salinas-based grower of salad greens, to voluntarily recall its Foxy brand lettuce after traces of E. coli turned up in the irrigation water where the lettuce is grown, but supposing they chose not to?

When it comes to food safety and produce growers, we have to rely on the honor system, because the FDA lacks the resources and the regulatory clout that help the USDA safeguard the country’s meat supply, which is far more closely monitored now than in the past.

Why shouldn’t produce be held to the same high safety standards as meat and poultry? And how can the FDA proclaim that spinach is safe to consume when they freely admit that they still haven’t figured out how the bacteria contaminated the spinach in the first place?

Irrigation methods are under suspicion as the most likely source of last month’s outbreak, in addition to being the reason for the lettuce recall. Frank Pecarich, a retired USDA soil scientist, asks the question “Is There a Cover-up of Poor Decisions on the Type of Water Used for Irrigation of Croplands in the Salinas Valley?”

The California State Senate Governmental Organization Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow entitled "Unraveling the E.coli outbreak: Are state emergency response systems prepared for outbreaks of foodborne illnesses?" As Pecarich points out, “Perhaps the state should be asking other questions as well.”