Civil Eats

Thanks to factory farming’s massive economies of scale, a lot of food today is either disgusting or cruel or disgusting and cruel. Just when people stopped talking about cantaloupes with deadly listeria, “pink slime” hit the news. And just when people stopped talking about pink slime, ground beef treated with ammonia to kill germs, mad cow hit the news. Does anyone even remember the arsenic in the fruit juice?

Food scandals are so costly to Big Food, it has repeatedly tried to kill the messenger rather than clean up its act. Read More

Since the homemade food renaissance has taken root in California, there’s been no shortage of home picklers, jammers, and bakers. But under current state laws, it’s a misdemeanor for those home artisans to sell their goodies in the open marketplace. Case in point: Last June, Department of Public Health officials shut down ForageSF’s popular Underground Market, which featured mostly home producers, because its sellers were not compliant with local and state regulations.

But due to a campaign launched by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), the laws might change this year. The Oakland-based SELC recently teamed up with Los Angeles Assemblymember Mike Gatto to introduce the California Homemade Food Act (AB 1616), a “cottage food” bill that would legalize the sale of certain foods produced in home kitchens. Read More

You’ve probably never heard of the Microbiological Data Program (MDP) but if you eat fresh produce, you should, because it’s currently on President Obama’s budgetary chopping block. The MDP is a small ($5 million annually) pathogen monitoring program tucked away in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It tests fruits and vegetables for deadly bugs like E. coli, salmonella, and listeria.

While the testing program may be inexpensive, it’s critical because no other federal mechanism currently exists to conduct regular testing of fresh produce. (The Food and Drug Administration—which technically has jurisdiction over produce safety—conducts only limited inspections.)

To date, the MDP has tested high-risk produce such as alfalfa sprouts, cilantro, green onions, peppers, tomatoes, spinach, and other leafy greens. Every one of these vegetables has caused a food-borne illness outbreak or recall over the years, some of them lethal thanks in part to an industrialized food system that transports bugs nationwide. You might recall, a shocking 34 people (and counting) died from a listeria outbreak last year in cantaloupe in 26 states (yes, melon–also on USDA’s tested produce list). That tragedy alone should cause the Obama Administration to rethink this thoughtless budget cut. Read More

This growing season there’s a new GMO in town: Monsanto’s GE sweet corn. This Roundup Ready product is the first GE corn for direct human consumption, and it has not been tested by the USDA and will not be labeled. If you’re unhappy about this, you’re not alone. The majority of consumers don’t want to eat genetically modified foods, and 95 percent feel strongly that they should be labeled.  Many retailers, including Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and General Mills, have already agreed to not use GE Sweet Corn in any of their products—but Walmart, the country’s largest grocer and self-proclaimed sustainability adherent, has yet to make such a promise. Read More

A recent recall of 36 million pounds of salmonella-contaminated turkey by the company Cargill reminded Americans once again about the failings of our food safety system. While the debt deal struck earlier this month puts funding for the Food Safety Modernization Act, which passed in 2010 and will help the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) improve the safety of our food, at risk, there is information that can empower consumers now. Below is a comprehensive info graphic by the Heath and Fitness Blog Greatist.com that explains what you need to know about shopping for, handling and cooking food more safely, as well as a briefing on the sources of food-borne illness. Read More

Cargill announced Wednesday it is recalling almost 36 million pounds of ground turkey products that may be contaminated with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella Heidelberg, a pathogen linked to at least 76 illnesses across the United States and one death in California.

The recalled meat came from a single processing facility in Springdale, Arkansas, but ended up in dozens of different ground turkey products sold nationwide under a variety of brand names including Honeysuckle White, Shady Brook Farms, Riverside, Aldi’s Fit and Active Fresh, Spartan, Giant Eagle, Kroger and Safeway. Read More

When San Francisco’s Underground Market got started, the city’s health department recognized it as a private event where people exchanged (albeit, with money) homemade foods. Interested participants simply had to sign up on the Web site of the event’s host organization, Forage SF, and they became “members.”

Soon the market became one of San Francisco’s most popular phenomena–a place where hip, mostly young food entrepreneurs could get their brands out there and foodies could gather, socialize, and discover bafflingly delicious items such as “bacon brack.” The whole point, said founder Iso Rabins, was to create opportunities for food entrepreneurs who could otherwise not afford to operate out of certified commercial kitchens.

When the event swelled to accommodate the hundreds and soon thousands of people who would line up to attend, the market became an undeniably public. Then, earlier this summer, the San Francisco Health Department put a halt to the whole delicious operation. At present, the market is in limbo and Rabbins, the Health Department, and many others are chewing on the question: What makes an event or club private? Read More

If Iowa is considered the belly of the beast of industrial agriculture, then the Iowa state capitol is the part of the animal that drains the swamp. After all, Iowa is the place where Iowa legislators have made it possible to produce 11.3 hogs per person annually and created some of the most polluted rivers and streams contributing to the Dead Zone due to continued poor legislation and failed regulatory oversight.

Last year Iowa’s modern agricultural practices were made famous by legendary food safety violator Jack DeCoster, who is still in business after a 500-million egg recall due to salmonella that sickened more than 1,500 people in 23 states. This year Iowa’s state legislators are about to pass a bill that would make it illegal for anyone to take a photo of his “farms” or any other farm or field in Iowa. Even though some of the worst animal welfare abuses in U.S. history have taken place under the roofs of Jack DeCoster’s hundreds of industrial animal confinements, Iowa lawmakers are willing to offer immunity to offenders like him and penalize those who blow the whistle on those who would abuse animal livestock, i.e., our food. Read More

The food safety bill–S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act–which some had given up for dead, was revived late Sunday attached to a shell bill and passed unanimously just before the Senate adjourned for the day.

The bill, with the Tester-Hagan small farm exemption intact, now goes back to the House. But the action will likely put the food safety law on President Obama’s desk before Christmas. Read More

After a long day of debating–and waiting–Thursday, the Senate was at impasse over the details and politics surrounding the food safety bill.

Though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said earlier this week he would, if necessary, keep the Senate in town over the weekend to finish the bill, sources on the Hill said it was more likely the legislation would not move forward until after Thanksgiving recess, which begins Monday. Read More

When the FDA announced it found the genetically engineered AquAdvantage salmon safe just before Labor Day, news headlines and even Alaska Senator Mark Begich called it a “frankenfish.” A closer look at AquAdvantage makes it seem unlikely that Mary Shelley could have ever dreamed up anything as wild as the fast growing GE salmon. Even more worrisome is the science used to justify the salmon’s safety, which Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen calls “sloppy,” “misleading,” and “woefully inadequate.”

If approved, AquAdvantage will be the first genetically engineered animal to directly enter the U.S. food supply — a fact that raises the stakes of the FDA’s approval process, as it sets a precedent for all future GE animals. Read More

This isn’t your typical egg farm. In Elkhart, Iowa, about 70 miles south of Wright County Egg–the mega-farm at the center of a 550 million egg recall tied to almost 1,500 Salmonella illnesses–colorful hens are milling around Foxhollow Farm. Lyric-less rock music is playing in the hen house, and it’s for the hens. The head rooster, a five-year-old Black Cochin Bantam named Shadow who appears to run the place, is friendly and strutting for the camera.

In many ways, Foxhollow Farm represents the antithesis of large-scale egg production in Iowa, which produces more than twice as many eggs as any other state. Read More

If you’re like anything like me, one of the main draws for heading to the farmers market each week is the abundance of fresh, seasonal, local food. And we farmers’ market shoppers assume that we’re doing business with local family farmers practicing sustainable methods.

In most cases that’s probably the case – but not always. Sometimes the mythology of farmers markets is not matched by the reality. Many California farmers markets, for instance, allow vendors to sell eggs produced by hens crammed into the insufferable cage confinement systems just like those involved in the recent egg recall – the largest in U.S. history

Not only is this intensive confinement inhumane and unsustainable, it also poses a real threat to food safety. Cramming birds into cages exacerbates the risk of Salmonella contamination. In fact, every one of the last ten studies comparing cage to cage-free systems found higher Salmonella rates in cage systems, including a 2010 study that found 20 times greater odds of Salmonella infection in caged flocks. Read More

Picture this: three long-haired college kids are unloading crates of food from the bed of a battered pick-up truck. It’s parked curbside at the Androscoggin Food Co-op located in the equally battered mill town of Lewiston, Maine. The year is 1971 and these kids are, unbeknownst to them, the vanguard of the local food movement.

They’ve spent the day rounding up goods directly from local farms and food processors, not because they’re devout locavores (the word wouldn’t be invented for another 35 years) but because sourcing locally was the cheapest way to get food for a co-op whose members were largely lower income. Some crates are full of apples from a nearby orchard; others contain 12-pound wheels of a so-so cheddar from a small cheese plant; and one cardboard box contains 30 dozen eggs from a chicken farm only 10 miles down the road. That box is labeled DeCoster Farms. Read More

The pending Senate food safety bill inched forward yesterday as key lawmakers released a bipartisan, compromise agreement, a step which should make it easier to bring the bill to the floor for a vote after recess. Read More

Safe and sustainable: we need our food to be both, and nowhere has the case been made better than in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Food, Inc. Earlier this month, Consumers Union, long a proponent of safe, sustainable food, hosted an Activist Summit in Washington, D.C. which featured two of the film’s leading voices: Barbara Kowalcyk, who lost her two-year-old son to beef suspected of contamination with E.coli 0157:H7, and whose struggle for tougher food safety laws is documented in the film, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and the film’s co-producer. Read More

When the New York Times reported on the growing phenomenon of underground food markets in New York City earlier this month, the Greenpoint Food Market in Brooklyn was forced to shut its doors.

The Times article “put us on radar with the officials,” wrote Joann Kim, the market’s organizer and founder, in an email to market devotees. “Since then we have gone back and forth with the city trying to find a solution to how the market can keep its mission while adhering to rules and regulations.” Read More

The sustainable agriculture world is abuzz today with news of the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding an earlier lawsuit, brought by alfalfa farmers, that sought to stop any planting of Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa seed. While the press coverage heralds the ruling as a decisive victory for Monsanto, a close reading shows that, in fact, it’s a fairly significant win for opponents of biotech crops. Read More

The Center for Food Safety today celebrated the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Monsanto v. Geerston Farms, the first genetically modified crop case ever brought before the Supreme Court. Although the High Court decision reverses parts of the lower courts’ rulings, the judgment holds that a vacatur bars the planting of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Alfalfa until and unless future deregulation occurs. It is a victory for the Center for Food Safety and the Farmers and Consumers it represents. Read More

My no-nonsense New England mother instilled in me the belief that Mother’s Day was about manufactured rather than genuine sentiment. She also shunned formality when it came to flowers, preferring bouquets plucked from our garden to anything a florist could dish up. But now that she’s gone, the holiday has assumed for me an unbidden emotional significance. I always want to observe it, but I’m never sure how. This last weekend, quite by accident, I found my answer: I happened to spend Friday morning on an organic farm. Read More

Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, and more than 80 farmers, public health, environmental, and organic food organizations today sent a letter to Michael R. Taylor, Deputy Commissioner for Food at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and to Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), expressing serious concerns that a proposed U.S. position on food labeling would create major problems for American producers who want to label their products as free of genetically modified (GM)/genetically engineered (GE) ingredients. A copy of the letter can be found online [PDF]. Read More

USDA has until Wednesday, March 3 to receive public comment on its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on approval of GE alfalfa. In 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued USDA on behalf of farmers and others regarding its approval of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa, saying that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should have prepared an EIS. CFS won and USDA was required to prepare a full EIS analyzing the impact of approving genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa on the environment, farmers, and the public. While USDA prepared the EIS, Monsanto appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case later this year. In the meantime, farmers are in limbo about the legality of planting GE alfalfa this spring.

Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, today released new poll data showing that two-thirds of organic food consumers are concerned about GE ingredients contaminating organic food. Given the popularity of alfalfa sprouts among health-oriented eaters, Consumers Union urges USDA to consider the overwhelming consumer concern before deciding to allow GE alfalfa on the market. The poll results can be found online [PDF]. Read More

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience. Read More

Consumer Reports’ latest tests of packaged leafy greens found bacteria that are common indicators of poor sanitation and fecal contamination, in some cases, at rather high levels. The story appears in the March 2010 issue of Consumer Reports and is also available free online. Consumers Union today also issued a report [PDF] urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to set safety standards for greens. FDA food safety legislation pending in the Senate, and passed last summer by the House of Representatives, would require the FDA to create just such safety standards. Read More

Dr. Elisabeth Hagen has been nominated to take the helm of the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) at the USDA, which oversees the safety of all meat, poultry and eggs, and where there has been a gaping hole waiting to be filled by a warm (and hopefully reform-minded, considering the past year’s track record on recalls) body since October 2008. Dr. Hagan is not new around the USDA, she is currently FSIS Chief Medical Officer, and served during the Bush Administration as a FSIS senior executive. If nominated, food borne illness litigator Bill Marler already has a list of needed reforms for Dr. Hagan and her team. Read More

I can’t believe I missed it: the Meat Industry Hall of Fame’s first-ever induction ceremony occurred in Chicago on October 27. And what a night it was: headlined by the illustrious Bill Kurtis—the former CBS anchor who currently narrates criminal justice shows for the A&E Television Network.

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.” Read More

Beginning in 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) took legal action against the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) illegal approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready alfalfa. The federal courts agreed and banned GE alfalfa until the USDA fully analyzed the impacts of the plant on the environment, farmers, and the public in an environmental impacts statement (EIS).

USDA released its draft EIS on December 14, 2009. A 60-day comment period is now open until February 16, 2010. CFS has begun analyzing the EIS and it is clear that the USDA has not taken the concerns of non-GE alfalfa farmers, or organic dairy farmers seriously, for example, having dismissed the fact that contamination will threaten export markets and domestic organic markets. You can review the EIS here and supplemental documents here.

This is the first time the USDA has prepared an EIS for any GE crop and therefore will have broad implications for all transgenic crops, and its failure to address the environmental and related economic impacts of GE alfalfa will have far-reaching consequences. CFS is spearheading a campaign to make sure all affected parties know and are involved in the public process and have the opportunity to comment. Read More

The food safety landscape after the first year of the Obama administration remains very similar to the last year of the Bush administration….

During a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, President Obama gave himself a letter grade of B+ for his first year in office. But all the same, an ad hoc consortium of food safety professionals, food safety advocates, and food safety writers say he deserves some coal in his Christmas stocking. Food Safety News, the best online publication for all aspects of the safety of the global food supply, is running a list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice this year in food safety. The list was created after polling those mentioned above, including your intrepid blogger. There was an overwhelming consensus that large chunks of coal should be deposited in the Christmas stockings of both President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack for the failure to name someone to lead USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, which monitors meat, poultry and eggs. Read More

How is it that a country can put a man on the moon, but can’t seem to feed it’s children school lunches that are safer than those eaten at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box?

In the past 10 years more than 23,000 school children have become sick as a result of hundreds of food poisoning outbreaks in our nation’s lunchrooms. A recent investigation by USA Today found that the meat served in U.S. school cafeterias faces less testing and lower safety standards than the mystery meat in Big Macs and Whopper Juniors.

USA Today reporters discovered that meat served at McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco is tested as much as 10 times more often as the ground beef served in America’s school cafeterias. While fast-food chains take samples on their production lines every 15 minutes, the USDA only tests 8 times a day.

In addition to testing more frequently, fast-food chains also set more stringent limits on so-called indicator bacteria. In the case of generic E. coli, the USDA allows 10 times more bacteria than Jack in the Box!

This fact should be a national embarrassment to all members of Congress, USDA officials and meat industry executives who have allowed our nation’s school lunch programs to become the dumping grounds for cheap commodity products that feed the bottom line of corporate agribusiness. Read More