food safety
Testing Athletes for Chinese Food
Amid the many Chinese food-safety stories of the last year, there’s been an undercurrent of concern about what athletes will be fed during the upcoming Beijing Olympics. China has responded by designating 36 companies as the exclusive food suppliers for athletes, according to the BBC. The food, grown on low-chemical farms, will be tracked “from farm to fork” with a GPS system.
The BBC visited a farm north of Beijing and saw how worried the Chinese are: They’re cracking down on hair. The reporter watched a worker who, as she packed vegetables, “suddenly realised she was not wearing the hat that keeps her hair away from the vegetables. She quickly put it on before farm manager Lin Yuan could see her.” I’m telling you, the USDA’s just got to start testing for hair in imported food. “Some of the foreign media are biased against Chinese vegetables,” the farm manager says.
Foreign teams are worried. An official with the Australian Olympic Committee calls food safety “the number one issue facing our [Olympic] teams.” In a story earlier this month on how the United States Olympic Committee is addressing food safety—for starters, having Tyson ship “25,000 pounds of lean protein to China about two months before the opening ceremony”—the New York Times quotes a caterer working for the USOC who visited China last year. He picked up a half breast of chicken measuring 14 inches: “We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested positive.” It almost sounds like an urban myth.
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| Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 3:36pm
| 0 comments
Tagged with: china, food safety, bbc, beijing olympics, athletes, farms, steroids, chicken breasts
Mu Shu Kosher?
How’s this for an unexpected first sentence? “Chinese exporters, facing a U.S. backlash over tainted food products, are turning to an unlikely group of inspectors to help clean up their act: Jewish rabbis.” Fire the FDA; hire the rabbis. Bloomberg reports that kosher certifications in China have doubled in the last couple of years and the Orthodox Union, an inspecting organization, is anticipating thousands more in the near future.
It’s a trend that started before last year’s downpour of food-safety scares, but kosher inspections are now up precisely because of the scares. In an extraordinary statistic, Bloomberg says that “[f]ully half the Chinese exports to the U.S. of $2.5 billion a year in food ingredients, such as coloring agents and preservatives, are kosher.” There have been a few cultural misunderstandings, of course. For starters, a furniture company apparently requested certification.
The increase in kosher labeling is part of a worldwide story: As U.S. News & World Report wrote earlier this month, kosher has become “the most popular claim on new food products, trouncing ‘organic’ and ‘no additives or preservatives.’” Sales of kosher foods have jumped 15 percent every year for the last decade. It’s unclear if this is good for Jews. Maybe the goyim are buying kosher for the stricter supervision, not because they’ve picked up the Torah.
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| Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 3:52pm
| 0 comments
Tagged with: kosher, rabbis, china, food safety, bloomberg, labeling, us news and world report
Now with Less Melamine
For those of you following the long and tense year in U.S.-China food imports, there was a significant—OK, maybe somewhat significant, sort of—new food-safety agreement signed between the countries this week. It’s unclear how much it’ll matter.
Chinese companies exporting food and medicine to the United States will have to register with the Chinese government and be inspected annually. The Chinese government is in turn implementing new inspection systems that will conform to American standards. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “The foods covered are canned vegetables and other preserved fare, pet food and treats, raw materials such as wheat and rice protein used in a wide variety of products, and farm-raised fish and shellfish.”
But as Illinois senator Richard Durbin says, the agreement covers “a tiny fraction of the food we import from China.” Even an unnamed senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services lowballed the agreement, calling it “a first step.” It’s true that it isn’t wholly logical. Here’s the Times again: “Chinese authorities agreed to notify their U.S. counterparts within 24 hours of any medications sent to the United States that could pose a hazard. However, the window for notification in cases of risky food is 48 hours. And food may be consumed more quickly than medications are.”
As the Chicago Tribune explains, earlier this year the FDA had restricted some fish from China, including shrimp, after banned antibiotics were detected. Those items will now be allowed in, but the new agreement, as the Tribune notes, leaves enforcing the new standards “largely up to the Chinese.” In fact, the most interesting aspect to the discussions might be that the secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt, said that he eventually expects FDA officials to be “embedded” in China to ramp up the food-inspection programs.
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| Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 3:48pm
| 0 comments
Tagged with: food safety, china, imports, los angeles times, chicago tribune, department of health and human services, fda
Put a Lid on It
September is National Food Safety Education Month. My goodness, we almost missed it! Thankfully there’s Lifehacker, a website that compiles tips on everything from how to get motivated to how to use charcoal to “de-stinkify” your fridge. Lifehacker recently linked to an article about safely storing food on Gomestic. The piece offers up some pretty basic advice (fruits and vegetables stored together ripen faster, so separate them if you want them to last longer; vacuum-seal or zip-lock items in the freezer to protect them from freezer burn), but it cited an amazing statistic: Americans throw away an average of 14 percent of their food because it spoils.
I’m sure I waste at least this much due to poor storage. According to my eighth-grade-level mental calculator, that’s a lot of money donated to the cylindrical file. So I went looking for some more detailed food-storage tips, and found two good sites. The National Center for Home Food Preservation provides links to some useful documents, and this amazing wiki lists expiration dates for just about every type of food you can imagine. Among the interesting tips I found:
• Partially thawed food may be refrozen as long as it still has ice crystals (although this may affect the quality of the food).
• Uncooked egg whites separated from egg yolks can be frozen as they are. To freeze uncooked whites or whole eggs, add 1/8 teaspoon salt or 1 1/2 teaspoons corn syrup per 1/4 cup of whites. Thaw in refrigerator.
• Do not wash fruit before storing—moisture encourages spoilage.
• Ice crystals on the inside of an ice cream container are formed by sublimation. As the ice cream is consumed, the air space within the container increases. This allows more water to evaporate from the ice cream, and subsequently refreeze. Therefore, as the remaining ice cream decreases, so does the shelf life. A large container with a small amount of the ice cream remaining may last only two to three days.
And, of course, Chowhounds have lots of great storage tips, including advice on containers.
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| Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 1:49pm
| 0 comments
Tagged with: food storage, food safety, how to store food, lifehacker, spoilage, ice cream, egg whites, eggs, refrigeration, freeze, freezing
Canned Heat
OK, that tears it. I’m not eating anything that comes in a bag, box, can, or package for the rest of the summer.
The food supply seems to be very, very broken. The latest food recall, of canned meats like corned beef hash and chili, along with dog food (which leads one to muse, “Hmm, they seem to be making dog food alongside my chili”), was for botulism. Now, E. coli’s pretty bad, I’ll grant you that, but botulism, well, that is something you don’t want to mess with. A paralytic disorder, botulism can take a year to get over, if it doesn’t kill you first.
Coming on the heels of all the other food scares in the past year, this recall is provoking consternation. Bloggers are sounding off and feeling angry.
Meanwhile, the FDA has appointed a “food safety czar”—and proposed cutting the number of its labs in half at the same time, according to yet another angry writer, this one an editorialist for the Baltimore Sun.
On top of all that, a Montana man opened a bag of barbecue potato chips, only to find a deep-fried mouse.
‘Good thing I seen it. I got it all the way up to my mouth,’ he said. ‘I felt the fur, I brought it back down and just looked at it and threw it behind my back.’
His claim is unsubstantiated, of course.
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| Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 7:47pm
| 2 comments
Tagged with: botulism, potato chips, mouse, chili, dog food, fda, food safety
Wet Cardboard with a Dollop of Pork Fat
The safety issues with China’s food exports may be peanuts compared to the problems with the street and restaurant fare in the country, a recent AP report suggests. Just check out this whopper of a first paragraph:
Chopped cardboard, softened with an industrial chemical and flavored with fatty pork and powdered seasoning, is a main ingredient in batches of steamed buns sold in one Beijing neighborhood, state television said.
In an investigative segment on China Central Television, a man whose face is never shown takes a reporter behind the scenes of his shady bun-making operation, into a tumble-down building “with water puddles and piles of old furniture and cardboard on the ground,” according to the AP. And he reveals his cost-cutting culinary secret:
‘What’s in the recipe?’ the reporter asks. ‘Six to four,’ the man says.
‘You mean 60 percent cardboard? What is the other 40 percent?’ asks the reporter. ‘Fatty meat,’ the man replies.
The whole exchange would be a bit funny if it wasn’t so sad—and ostensibly so true.
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| Friday, July 13, 2007 at 6:14pm
| 1 comment
Tagged with: china, food safety, contamination, cardboard, ap
Getting the Boot
OK, we’ve just got to get our shit together in regards to the safety of our food supply. Although people have always faced dangers from their food, these continuing recalls are chilling.
The latest one is heartbreaking. Veggie Booty, the kale- and spinach-covered snack puff, may have caused more than 50 cases of a rare form of salmonella. Anecdotally, the biggest consumers of Booty products aren’t grownups, but toddlers.
Booty has a troubled history. Once a cult-favorite snack, it was beloved by parents who were overjoyed to see their toddlers ingest anything even remotely associated with kale, even after it was discovered that Robert’s American Gourmet, the company that makes Booty, allegedly played fast and loose with the nutrition stats.
To paraphrase Woody Allen, everything our parents said was good is bad: sun, milk, red meat, and Veggie Booty.
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| Friday, June 29, 2007 at 1:15pm
| 4 comments
Tagged with: booty, veggie booty, salmonella, robert's american gourmet, food safety, food recalls
When Big Factories Are Better
The scare over tainted food products from China keeps getting, um, scarier. As the nation’s government admitted Wednesday, inspectors encountered 23,000 instances of food contamination involving 180 plants around China in the six months from December through May. Why the officials waited this long to come forward is just one of many troubling questions raised by this whole affair, which started with tainted wheat gluten in pet food several months back.
This time around, the focus is on a wide array of products including flour, candy, biscuits, seafood, and bean curd, Forbes reports; those and other foods were found to contain dangerous chemical additives like petroleum by-products, formaldehyde, and a carcinogenic green fabric dye. “It was unclear whether any of the cases involved food made for export,” according to Forbes.
But if we Westerners think we’re getting squeamish, imagine what folks in China are dealing with. “Chinese people are becoming suspicious about the food they eat,” Shanghai-based writer Fuchsia Dunlop explains on Gourmet’s blog. “Some of my friends seek out vegetables with insect-bites in them, on the grounds that they won’t be drenched in pesticides.”
Both Dunlop and Forbes reporter Vivian Wai-yin Kwok cite the particularly small scale of Chinese food factories as likely causes of the safety issues. As Kwok puts it,
Most of the cases involved small, unlicensed food-processing plants with less than 10 people. Government figures show that about 75% of the 1 million food-processing plants … are small and privately owned, according to China Daily.
Here in the United States, there’s a tendency among chowish types to think of small-scale anything as good, at least when it comes to food. And “unlicensed” doesn’t seem all that terrible anymore in American foodie circles, now that there are movements dedicated to freeing treats like raw milk and mangosteens from the tyranny of FDA regulations.
But perhaps it’s as the old saying goes: You have to know the rules in order to break them (or maybe in order to break them safely). Since there’s never been any serious crackdown on illegal food-processing practices in China, the small manufacturers have apparently turned into deranged, penny-pinching molecular gastronomists, replacing food-grade ingredients with cheap industrial chemicals. Hopefully the Chinese government’s efforts to shore up the nation’s food safety won’t just fizzle after next summer’s Olympics.
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| Friday, June 29, 2007 at 8:50am
| 2 comments
Tagged with: china, food safety, contamination, wheat gluten, forbes, gourmet, food processing plants
Your Morning Granola, Now With Extra Carcinogens!
When jars of peanut butter dating back to 2005 were found to be contaminated with salmonella, the manufacturer simply fixed its leaky factory roof and said it was sorry. Not the most comforting response, but at least PB-philes can minimize their health risks by buying brands they trust (though that’s no guarantee) and grinding their own delightful nut butters. Not almond butters, though, or at least not after September 1: In response to two salmonella outbreaks (in 2001 and 2004), the Almond Board of California and the USDA have quietly developed new safety standards for the tree nuts that will require most raw almonds sold on this continent to be doused in carcinogenic motorcycle fuel.
The regulations mandate that (with few exceptions) all raw North American almonds, even those grown organically or sold at farmers’ markets, be sterilized either by quick-steaming or with (far cheaper) chemical treatments. And as the director of LocalHarvest explains in a great newsletter piece, the proposed chemical—propylene oxide, or PPO—was in fact banned by both the National Hot Rod and the American Motorcycle Racing associations, which used the stuff as fuel before declaring it too toxic. The EPA has classified it as a “probable human carcinogen.”
So it’s too nasty for hot-rod racers to breathe but just fine to eat? Awesome. And as these things often go, it’s the small and organic producers who will bear the burden of this high-cost new procedure—even though they’re far less likely to be the culprits of any food-borne illness outbreaks. As the rule stands now, the only way to ensure that your almonds are steamed instead of PPOed is to buy organic (otherwise growers don’t have to tell you how they pasteurize), and those babies are already going for about $15 a pound before the inevitable increases in price this fall. Buying roasted instead of raw almonds won’t make a difference, since the nuts will likely have been pasteurized before roasting (link opens to a PDF file). I don’t want to tempt fate here, but I’d rather have a slim chance of getting a bad tummy ache from a handful of delicious almonds than the risk of forestomach tumors, which sound way more painful.
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| Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 8:08am
| 18 comments
Tagged with: almonds, usda, almond board, regulations, food safety, family farmers, pasteurization, localharvest
Is That Poison in My Pasture-Raised Pork?
The pet-food scare has been depressing, but it’s also illuminated some interesting things about the animal-feed industry in this country, and it seemed to suggest a solution: Avoid the mass-produced puppy chow, and buy organic, local, or small-batch brands (or do it DIY-style). Not an easy or a cheap solution, true, but at least it was something.
Now, with the recent news that people may have consumed melamine-laced food, I don’t know what to think. Yes, melamine. As in plates.
As Reuters reported this week, FDA officials are inspecting suspect imports of six grain derivatives—wheat and corn glutens, corn meal, soy protein, rice bran, and rice protein—for traces of the pet-killing pesticide. While the World Health Organization doesn’t consider melamine a human carcinogen, there have been few actual studies on the chemical’s effects on people. Worse, those grain products, Reuters says, are “used in foods ranging from bread to baby formula”—meaning that infants no bigger than cats may have ingested the tainted material.
In related news, the California Agriculture Department said that it knows of at least 50 people who bought pork that may be contaminated with the stuff (it’s attempting to contact them now). And disturbingly,
‘Some of the hog operations [where feed tainted with melamine may have been sent] were fairly sizable,’ said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. But USDA spokesman Steve Cohen said the feed was sold to smaller and independent hog farms.
Egads, smaller and independent hog farms! Perhaps eating local isn’t safe anymore either. And according to the Houston Chronicle, “salvaged pet food [!!] contaminated with an industrial chemical was sent to hog farms in as many as six states,” including New York, North and South Carolina, Utah, and Ohio. Hogs at some of the farms have been quarantined, though no one is saying which ones yet.
The FDA is not much help in shedding light on anything; in fact, it has shielded five companies that it knew to have received contaminated Chinese rice protein concentrate, Consumer Affairs reports. Three of those firms have recalled their products voluntarily, but as of now the other two are unknown to the public: By law, the FDA can’t name them until the companies come forth voluntarily. “Currently, recalls are dependant [sic] upon the media to disseminate information and for consumers to be conscientious and well-read buyers,” the article explains.
And let’s not even get into the latest E. coli business. WTF, America?
Posted by
| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 9:23pm
| 9 comments
Tagged with: pet food, melamine, pork, animals, fda, contamination, food scare, food safety, food recalls, pet food recalls
Impure Imports
The reasons to eat local keep piling up, as it increasingly seems like the only way to not get poisoned. Sure, you may be limited in the vegetable department to nothing but asparagus for a few months this spring if you stick to a truly local, 100-mile-style diet; but the alternative is often imported produce, which is frighteningly unregulated in this country. As the AP reports:
Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected — yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption.
Frozen catfish from China, beans from Belgium, jalapenos from Peru, blackberries from Guatemala, baked goods from Canada, India and the Philippines — the list of tainted food detained at the border by the Food and Drug Administration stretches on.
The average American diet contains about 260 pounds of imported foods each year (including single ingredients and more processed stuff)—that’s about 13 percent of our grub.
I love my foreign-born fruits and snacks as much as the next hound, and I’m always wary of food-based xenophobia. But one passage in the article has me mentally narrowing the list of imported items I’ll try:
Consider this list of Chinese products detained by the FDA just in the last month: frozen catfish tainted with illegal veterinary drugs, fresh ginger polluted with pesticides, melon seeds contaminated with a cancer-causing toxin and filthy dried dates.
That word filthy is especially off-putting—and also vague enough to inspire a little paranoia.
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| Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 1:48pm
| 3 comments
Tagged with: imported food, fda, regulations, food safety
Lethal Leaves
An E. coli outbreak traced to prewashed, bagged spinach has caused federal health officials to recommend that consumers stay away from the bagged greens.
The New York Times reports that while the exact source of the outbreak cannot be identified, the deadly bacteria has killed 1 person and infected 49 others in eight states.
Although authorities recommend avoiding bagged spinach, they don’t recommend engaging in any leafy profiling. When asked if consumers should avoid bagged salads entirely, Dr. David Acheson of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA said: “At this point, there is nothing to implicate bagged salad.”
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| Friday, September 15, 2006 at 9:17am
| 3 comments
Tagged with: e coli, spinach, food safety, fda
