FDA

(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?

We Americans have a bias against eating bugs—well, most of us do, anyway. Just try serving your family a batch of homemade granola laced with pantry moth larvae—I did, and it totally grossed them out. Once these miniscule maggots gatecrashed my granola, I tried to make the best of it and defended my locally grown larvae as a good source of protein along with the almonds, pecans, and walnuts. My niece didn’t swallow it (too busy gagging, I guess.)

But people all over the world have been eating bugs on a regular basis for centuries without bugging out about it, as Sam Nejame’s “Man Bites Insect” article in the New York Times the other day noted. We may find the concept of insects as livestock disgusting, but could an insect farm possibly be any more revolting than our fetid feedlots? Insects may even be nutritionally superior, according to Nejame:

David Gracer, a connoisseur of bug-based cuisine, told Najame, “Insects can feed the world. Cows and pigs are the S.U.V.’s; bugs are the bicycles.” Way to get us eco-weenies to board the bug-eating bandwagon; who doesn’t love bicycles?

Food-insects.com also touts the “future potential of insects as a global food resource.” Dr. Gene DeFoliart, Food-insects.com’s editor, predicted in 1992 that if insects “become more widely accepted as a respectable food item in the industrialized countries, the implications are obvious. They would form a whole new class of foods made to order for low-input small-business and small-farm production. International trade in edible insects would almost certainly increase.”

Of course, that’s not counting the bugs China’s already slipping into our food as a free trade bonus. As Hopkins noted:

Is it time to start chowing down on some of those crawly critters we instinctively prefer to stomp on? The Feral Forager, a self-published ‘zine excerpted in Sandor Katz’s The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, rebrands pill bugs as “land shrimp”; grasshoppers are “surprisingly tasty and filling” and taste “something like popcorn”; crickets, “incredibly high in calcium and potassium.” Roasted grubs make a fat-filled protein snack that, again, tastes “a lot like popcorn.”

Earthworms make “a very nutritious flour,” and ant eggs are edible, too; raw ant eggs reportedly taste “like couscous”, but the author of the article confesses that “the only time I tried this it tasted like a hundred ants biting my tongue…”

But the Feral Foragers don’t draw the line at eating insects; some of them go so far as to cross the (yellow) line in their pursuit of alternative food sources. As members of a North Carolina collective called Wildroots, they’re what Katz calls “Roadkill Radicals”--enthusiastic advocates of peeling “dishonored victims of the petroleum age” off the pavement and converting them into “food which nourishes.”

As the Feral Forger notes, “picking up roadkill is a good way to get fresh, wild, totally free-range and organic meat for absolutely free.” Finally, a silver lining to our car-crazed culture.

I may have had some vehicularly-slaughtered venison at the home of a foraging friend, once or twice, but I haven’t yet embraced the concept of intentionally eating insects. I do have a recipe for grasshopper quesadillas in Albert Bates’ excellent Post-Petroleum Survival Guide And Cookbook, but haven’t been tempted to try it (the rest of his recipes are so tasty, though, that I may have to reconsider, assuming I could catch 2 cups worth of grasshoppers in the first place--“about 100…the younger, the better” Bates says.)

If the thought of eating bugs and roadkill freaks you out, consider this: competition for the world’s dwindling resources is heating up right along with the planet, and global warming is worsening food shortages all over the world. In this land o’ plenty o’ processed foods, most Americans can’t imagine an era when we’d be forced to subsist on weeds, bugs, and---till we run out of gas---roadkill.

The funny thing is, though, that would constitute a healthier diet than the one most of us eat now. Weeds, after all, are higher in omega-3’s than the cultivated crops our farmers grow. Maybe when we run out of petrochemicals and pesticides we’ll start eating the weeds, instead. Toss in some grubs and a side of grilled groundhog, and you’ve got a well-balanced meal.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

(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.

On the West coast, we have legislators looking to ban new fast food outlets in a neighborhood where junk food is often the only option. On the East coast, a federal judge just struck down a law that required fast food restaurants to include calorie counts on their menus.

But neither of these efforts to discourage junk food consumption would solve the problem of what people are supposed to eat, instead. Are we also going to pass laws requiring that for every KFC, there has to be a Jamba Juice? Are city agencies going to give grants to mom-and-pop health food shops or crunchy granola cafes that would bring healthier choices to underserved communities?

Residents of South L.A. have the highest concentration of fast food joints in the city, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times, and far fewer grocery stores than other L.A. neighborhoods. Councilwoman Jan Perry, who represents South L.A. and proposed the two-year moratorium on new fast food outlets, told the Times, “"The people don't want them, but when they don't have any other options, they may gravitate to what's there."

Not surprisingly, South L.A. has the highest rate of diabetes in the county, and obesity levels are greater, too. Residents have become addicted to the cheapness and convenience of junk food in a community where you need a car to drive to other neighborhoods if you’re looking for more wholesome options.

And that’s a missed opportunity for entrepreneurs as well as folks seeking healthier foods. According to the Times, a 2005 market study found that South L.A. “loses more than $400 million annually in general merchandise, grocery and restaurant sales to outside areas.”

So, evidently, there’s the potential for a win-win situation here, whereby businesses could grow their own bottom lines while helping folks fight their ever-expanding waistlines. If it takes an ordinance against fast food joints to get this better-food-chain-train in motion, then so be it.

Of course, the restaurant industry in L.A. objects to this proposal as strenuously as the New York restaurateurs opposed the requirement to post calories. And let’s not forget the Big Food-financed, oxymoronic Center for Consumer Freedom, which is always happy to fight for Your Right Not to Know. From the Chicago Tribune:

Yes, and they’re even more concerned that when you provide consumers with more facts about the foods they’re about to choose, they start to make healthier choices, as the success of New England supermarket chain Hannaford’s “Guiding Stars” program proves.

The FDA, recognizing the need for better consumer information, held a preliminary hearing on Monday to consider whether it should establish some kind of national ratings system that would simplify choices for consumers. As it stands now, food manufacturers in the U.S. and abroad are devising their own standards, which are inconsistent and may leave shoppers befuddled.

That’s why Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is hoping to push legislation that would require the FDA to establish a single system. Harkin released a statement that read, in part:

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has also filed a petition asking for a national front-label symbol system. Referring to Britain’s “traffic light” system, which ranks foods by their fat, salt, and sugar content and gives them green, yellow or red lights, CSPI’s executive director, Michael Jacobson, said:

The anti-regulation “Nanny state” naysayers insist that it’s unfair to force food manufacturers to provide consumers with so much guidance. After all, isn’t it pretty obvious that some foods are healthier than others?

Well, actually, no, sometimes it’s not. Brian Lehrer, who hosts a call-in show on WNYC, our local NPR station, did a segment on this subject today with Marion Nestle and Diane Brady, who writes for Business Week, and a woman called in to tell the story of how virtuous she felt about her menu choice till she read the fine print:

Another caller said she always reads the labels when she shops:

This is the challenge we face today, in a nutshell; how do we get people to literally stop drinking the KoolAid, even if it’s sweetened with organic high fructose corn syrup?

(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.)

Did Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, literally lose his head on Tuesday? Chinese officials declined to say what method of death was deemed fitting for Xiaoyu’s execution, but in any case, he’s dead now. His crime? Taking some $823,000 in bribes to approve drugs that proved unsafe and killed at least 10 people.

“Corruption in the food and drug authority has brought shame to the nation,” Yan Jiangying, deputy policy director of the State Food and Drug Administration, told the NY Times. “What we will have to learn from the experience is to improve our work and emphasize public safety.”

All these horror stories about China’s lethally lax standards and toxic products (antifreeze-flavored toothpaste is just the latest) have given our Asian rival a big black eye, but in some departments, China’s actually more progressive than we are.

While Lou Dobbs has compulsory conniptions over the impending arrival of cheap Chinese cars to our shores, we can’t sell American cars to the Chinese because the Ailing American Automakers Formerly Known As The Big Three can’t meet China’s fuel efficiency standards.

And Home Depot sells made-in-China sheets of plywood that are so full of formaldehyde they’re too toxic even for the Chinese, who are nonetheless willing to produce this product just for the U.S. market.

Our stores are so dominated by made-in-China goods that trying to live for a whole year without buying anything made in China is the latest literary stunt. But China’s paying a terrible price for its unregulated manufacturing, with air and waterways so degraded that “about 460,000 people die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air and drinking dirty water,” according to a preliminary report from the World Bank. The Financial Times claims that Chinese authorities are asking the World Bank to sit on these shocking figures out of fear their revelation would spark a riot.

But Chinese officials needed to manufacture some good pr, get a “message: we care” kinda vibe going, if you will, and what better way to do that than to demonstrate zero tolerance for government officials who accept money from corporations to look the other way and approve unsafe products?

May I make an immodest proposal and suggest that we try this tactic in the U.S.? After all, we’ve had a spate of deaths linked to drugs the FDA approved as a favor to Big Pharma despite evidence that the drugs in question had serious and even fatal side effects. And lobbyists routinely bribe our politicians to ignore legislation such as the Country of Origin Labeling Laws, which would tell us where our food comes from, because the corporations that manufacture our food are afraid that informed consumers might pass up their products if they’re forced to bear those three little loaded words, “Made in China.”
Since so many Americans supposedly support the death penalty, I hardly think it’s un-American to suggest that we execute government officials who accept money in return for doing the bidding of Big Pharma or Big Food. The only problem with this scenario is that it might turn Capitol Hill into a ghost town.

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.

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.

First, the dogs and cats got kidney failure. Now, some 6,000 hogs in seven states will have to be euthanized after consuming tainted feed. Chickens may have eaten melamine-contaminated food, too.

Oh, and then there’s the three hundred or so hogs that have already been slaughtered and shipped off to market. Suddenly bringing home the bacon sounds slightly sinister.

The FDA expressed confidence a few weeks ago that the tainted wheat gluten hadn’t entered the human food chain, but they acknowledge now that plastic-polluted pork may indeed have entered our food supply.

Still puzzling over how a chemical used to make plastic found its way into the food chain? The evidence suggests not a random or accidental contamination, but rather a systemic and deliberate reliance on melamine, which is high in nitrogen, to artificially elevate the protein content of wheat gluten, rice protein, and other grain-based products used in animal feed as well as human food products.

Melamine is only mildly toxic, but experts have detected a second contaminant in the tainted pet food called cyanuric acid, which, when combined with melamine, appears to prompt the formation of crystals in urine, which in turn can cause kidney failure.

Cyanuric acid has all kinds of useful applications, apparently; it’s good for stabilizing the water in outdoor swimming pools and hot tubs, as well as boosting the protein content in food.

As Kitty Pilgrim reported Thursday on Lou Dobbs Tonight:

Making lard from sewage? Suddenly, the Yes Men’s “reBurger” satire seems more prescience than parody.

Apparently, we Americans are too stupid to tell the difference between real chocolate and the cheap, waxy “chocolatey” concoctions that food manufacturers fabricate out of artificial sweeteners, milk substitutes, and partially hydrogenated oils (i.e. those toxic trans fats). Or so the Chocolate Manufacturers Association is hoping.

Real chocolate is made, of course, from cocoa beans. But thanks to global warming, cocoa bean crop yields are dropping as temperatures rise. The specter of parched cocoa plantations has sent the cost of cocoa beans up about 28% in recent months.

So the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, whose members include Hershey, Nestlé, and Archer Daniels Midland, are lobbying the FDA to change the legal definition of chocolate to let them substitute cheap vegetable oils for cocoa butter.

But vegetable oils and cocoa butter are two entirely different ingredients. As Brad Kinstler, the CEO of See’s Candies (one of Warren Bufffet’s tastier acquisitions), told Bloomberg News, “If the margarine manufacturers could call their product butter instead of being required to call it margarine, wouldn't it strike the consumer as being odd?''

Yes, and it would strike this consumer as another egregious example of Big Food’s utter contempt for the American public. The “citizens’ petition” these multinational corporations have submitted to the FDA presents this proposed redefinition as a boon to consumers. As Hershey’s spokesman, Kirk Saville, told Bloomberg News:

Ah yes, “flexibility”--i.e., the option to use cheap, toxic trans fats instead of antioxidant rich cocoa butter. As today’s NY Times notes, “Eating dark chocolate may be almost as effective at lowering blood pressure as taking the most common antihypertensive drugs.” The fat found in cocoa butter is, like olive oil, one of the “good” fats.

The partially hydrogenated oils the Chocolate Manufacturers Association wants to substitute, on the other hand, constitute a known health hazard. But Hershey, Nestle et al insist that Americans don’t actually care what goes into the food we eat, as Cybele May, founder of candyblog.net, noted in an LA Times op-ed. She cites a passage from the petition:

So switching from costly, heart-healthy cocoa butter to artery clogging trans fats constitutes a “technical improvement” or “manufacturing efficiency.”

May points out that it’s perfectly legal for manufacturers to sell their cheap chocolate flavored confections. They just can’t call them “chocolate.”

But Big Food insists that cocoa butter and vegetable oils are interchangeable. In theory, this means that if you’re trying to butter up your sweetie with a fancy box of chocolate, you could save yourself a few bucks by bucking the Scharffen Berger and springing for the Whitman’s Sampler instead.

In actual practice, of course, this could incite a 21st century Valentine’s Day Massacre, with hordes of furious females hurtling boxes of bargain basement bonbons at their cheapskate dates. Because nothing says “I’m just not that into you” like a box of crappy, waxy candy.

And nothing says “We work for the corporations, not the consumers” more than the FDA’s willingness to consider the merits of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association’s petition. As a nostalgic nod to the democracy we once were, the FDA allows the public to provide feedback on these matters, and tomorrow, April 25th, is the very last day for us to tell the FDA to take its greasy palms off our chocolate.

You can take a catastrophically mismanaged war, tie a ribbon around it and call it a victory for democracy, but it’s still a disaster and a defeat. And a box of partially hydrogenated, artificially flavored candy can never be a box of chocolates. It wouldn’t even fool Forrest Gump.

Still worrying about wheat gluten? That’s so yesterday. Today’s suspected pet food contaminant, courtesy of animal rights group PETA, is vitamin D. Excessive amounts of vitamin D cause the same kind of kidney malfunction in pets that vets are seeing all over the country.

PETA’s suspicions stem from the fact that the symptoms are showing up in dogs and cats fed only dry food, most of which contains no wheat gluten. The FDA’s investigation has focused almost entirely on wet foods. And while the MSM is still reporting 16 or so confirmed deaths, anecdotal evidence suggests that hundreds of pets have died and thousands may have been sickened.

The specter of more dogs and cats dying needlessly has PETA pleading with the FDA to widen its focus. In a letter to Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinarian Medicine, PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich made the case for a broader recall:

Pet owners are scared and confused, and rightfully so; while the FDA is busy banning imported wheat gluten, the New York Department of Agriculture still maintains that the culprit is rat poison, and notes that melamine is “not a known toxin.”

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that Menu Foods was aware of a potential problem for a month, maybe longer, before initiating a recall. And the FDA has repeatedly refused CNN’s requests for an interview, although it was willing to answer questions from news anchors during last year’s E. coli outbreaks. What’s different about this recall?

And why does New York’s Department of Agriculture, armed with the latest high tech equipment thanks in part to Homeland Security funds, have a completely different finding?

Whether the killer ingredient turns out to be rat poison, wheat gluten, vitamin D, or some other contaminant yet to be discovered, the focus on wheat gluten has raised other questions.

Why does our nation, with all its amber waves of grain, import so much wheat gluten in the first place? Slate’s Michelle Tsai provides a concise yet comprehensive explanation, but the short version is, simply, it’s cheaper.

So we’re stocking our pantries with foreign food products, of which the fatally underfunded FDA manages to inspect less than one percent. As CNN’s Christine Romans told Lou Dobbs last night:

Dobbs heaped his trademark scorn on the FDA, excoriating the gutted government agency for in “no way discharging its responsibility to public safety and to public health.”

I share Dobb’s dismay that the FDA doesn’t seem to be looking out for consumers. But in our free market economy, you get what you pay for. The question is, who owns the FDA?

Julie Zawisza, spokeswoman for the FDA, told the Christian Science Monitor, "We are just tying up investigations now … we don't see where the system didn't work … it doesn't appear from what we've seen that anyone can be blamed in this country."

As Pet Connection's Christie Keith pointed out in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, though, "The issue may not be that the system broke down, but that there isn't really a system."