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Kat’s question for me is “Shouldn’t the FDA keep melamine out of our domestic food chain?”  Well yes.  It should.  And thanks to Sokie Lee for forwarding the Mao poster from her “say no to made in China” campaign.  Still, I don’t think we should be too xenophobic about China.  After all, its food safety system is about where ours was before we got food and drug laws in 1906.  It’s just a lot bigger and more complicated so it has even more work to do to keep its – and our – food safe.  And here’s Sokie’s poster in miniature:

A new study reports that children of women who ate peanuts during pregnancy had lower rates of peanut allergies than women who were told not to eat peanuts.  This could be good news.  But I’m baffled by food allergies.  Why are rates rising?  Why don’t we know more about them?  Why isn’t there more research?  I’m getting lots of questions about them lately.  Good places to start: The National Library of Medicine explains the research.  Organizations like the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network and the Food Allergy Initiative provide basic information.  And for personal experience, Allergic Girl has plenty to say on her blog.

This time, it’s about salt and how difficult it is to go on a low-salt diet when 80% or so of the salt in American diets is already in food before it even gets to you.

Thanks to Colman Andrews, food writer par excellence and now writing for Gourmet.com, for his impassioned defense of food writing as a means of analyzing and making sense of important issues in society.  I’m constantly having to defend my academic interest in food against charges that it is too quotidian to matter. Food matters.  That’s why my column in the San Francisco Chronicle is called Food Matters.

The Mercatus Institute has produced a report arguing that food miles – the environmental cost of the distance food travels – is a meaningless concept based on erroneous assumptions, and that the “buy local” movement is focused on the wrong issues.  I don’t know anything about the Mercatus Institute other than what is on its website, and I don’t recognize the names of its members.  Anybody know anything about it?  Here’s what the Wall Street Journal said about this group in 2004.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a big project on marketing foods and beverages to children.  Its most recent report singles out television advertising as the most pervasive medium; even babies watch TV and see loads of commercials for junk foods.  The authors, Nicole Larson and Mary Story of the University of Minnesota, provide an excellent one-stop review of methods, expenditures, and other such data, along with useful suggestions for what to do about this problem.

I’m told that FDA laboratories are still finding melamine in milk-containing food products imported from China.  In response, the FDA has issued a countrywide  import alert, meaning that FDA officials can detain the products without having to examine and test them.  The list of detainable products is long and includes not only milk but also yogurt, desserts, cakes and cookies, candies, chocolate, beverages, and- shades of 2007 – dog and cat food.

If you want to understand what’s going on with Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL), try USDA’s exceedingly useful COOL website.  If you are really serious about tracking COOL, you can subscribe to a listserv for updates.