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Last summer, food safety lawyer Bill Marler wrote a blog post:

28 years of Leafy Green E. coli Outbreaks – We can and should do better!  E. coli outbreaks associated with lettuce, specifically the “pre-washed” and “ready-to-eat” varieties, are by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, the frequency with which this country’s fresh produce consuming public has been hit by outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria is astonishing. Here are just a sample of E. coli outbreaks based on information gathered by the Center for… Continue Reading

It includes a long list of illness outbreaks (more than one case attributed to a particular source) from 1995 through 2022 caused by contaminated salad greens.

I did not add them up but the FDA reports a total of 78 foodborne disease outbreaks linked to leafy greens (mainly lettuce) from 2014–2021 reported to the CDC.  During this period, the CDC issued outbreak notices for several of the outbreaks.

Their cause: leakage of animal waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) onto vegetable fields.  This happens often enough to be worth advising against eating bagged salads from California or Arizona.

Bill Marler doesn’t eat bagged salads at all (see the 6 foods he won’t eat):

Prewashed or precut fruits and vegetables. “I avoid these like the plague,” Marler says. Why? The more a food is handled and processed, the more likely it is to become tainted. “We’ve gotten so used to the convenience of mass-produced food—bagged salad and boxed salads and precut this and precut that,” Marler says. “Convenience is great but sometimes I think it isn’t worth the risk.” He buys unwashed, uncut produce in small amounts and eats it within three to four days to reduce the risk for listeria, a deadly bug that grows at refrigerator temps.

Buy greens from farmers’ markets or grow your own.  If that seems impossible, buy them whole and grown in places unlikely to be neear CAFOs.  And wash them well in running water.

The USDA has just announced Investments to Strengthen U.S. Specialty Crops Sector.

The launch of the Assisting Specialty Crop Exports (ASCE) initiative will provide $65 million for projects that will help the specialty crop sector increase global exports and expand to new markets. Additionally, today USDA is announcing $72.9 million in grant funding available to support the specialty crops industry through the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program. The Specialty Crop Block Grant Program (SCBGP) will fund innovative projects designed to bolster the competitiveness of the expanding specialty crop sector. Specialty crop exports totaled $24.6 billion in FY2023, representing 13.8 percent of total U.S. agricultural exports.

“Specialty crops” is USDA-speak for fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains—the food plants everyone, including the USDA, recommends for health.

The USDA co-sponsored Dietary Guidelines say:

A healthy dietary pattern consists of nutrient-dense forms of foods and beverages across all food groups, in recommended amounts, and within calorie limits. The core elements that make up a healthy dietary pattern include:

• Vegetables of all types—dark green; red and orange; beans, peas, and lentils; starchy; and other vegetables

• Fruits, especially whole fruit

• Grains, at least half of which are whole grain

The USDA, however, defines “Specialty” crops as

Fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops (including floriculture).

It lumps edible foods, herbs, and spices together with inedible annual and perennial bedding plants, potted house plants,  cut flowers, and Christmas trees, among others.  So the new money supports export of all of them, not just food.

The money—$65 million—is hardly a rounding error compared to the billions spent on support of commodity crops like corn and soybeans.

Commodity crops go for food for animals and fuel for automobiles; only a tiny fraction goes for food for people.

Despite the Dietary Guidelines, the USDA support of food for people is minimal.  Hence, “Specialty.”

We need the USDA to refocus its priorities on food for people and environmental sustainability.

Hey—I can dream.

I have long argued that industry funded studies are about marketing, not science.

Here is a prime example (it caught my eye in Food News from the Institute of Food Technologists).

PR Newswire Cornell University partners with Danone and Symbrosia for new study: The study will aim to prove oil-based seaweed product has the potential to be more effective than existing solutions.  Read More

I went right to the source: a press release from Danone, North America: Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Study, in partnership with Symbrosia and Danone North America, Aims to Prove Effectiveness of Seaweed Oil Extract for Livestock Methane Reduction.

Symbrosia, a Hawaii-based cleantech startup that uses seaweed to drastically reduce livestock methane emissions, is excited to announce a study with Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (Cornell CALS), supported by Danone North America, a leading food and beverage company. Designed by Associate Professor Joe McFadden, the study aims to prove the effectiveness of an Asparagopsis-based seaweed oil extract for reducing livestock methane emissions compared to Symbrosia’s existing freeze-dried seaweed products…

As the press release explains, “The team’s plan [is] to ensure the study’s impact on the environment and sustainable agriculture is maximized.”

Thus, the purpose of this study—and the teams’ design plan—is explicit: to prove the superiority of this product.  That’s marketing, not science.

If it were about science, the investigators would design their study to find out which product does a better job of reducing methane emissions, if any.  This may sound like a subtle difference, but it is anything but.

Research on the effects of industry funding—“the funding effect”—shows how easy it is to design studies to give desired answers.  These researchers should be doing everything possible to make sure their study design is as objective as possible.

For a review of this and other research on food industry funding, see my Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A Goldthwaite, eds.  Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically.  New York University Press, 2024.

I did a blurb for the back cover:

In Ethical Eating, authors from all walks of life relate their daily struggles—moral as well as economic—to eat diets that promote human and environmental health and meet deeply held principles of food equity and social justice.  Their accounts of these struggles are sometimes funny, always moving, and entirely recognizable by anyone trying to eat ethically.

This book contains several dozen short-to-medium length essays describing authors’ struggles—I use the word advisedly—to figure out how to eat in today’s impossibly complicated food system.

The book is designed to be used in food literature courses, and I can see why.

Each essay raises subject-to-debate issues about the costs and consequences of making principled dietary choices on a day-to-day basis while living with the usual complexities of life.

The writers are almost all unknown to me, so the book is an introduction to the concerns of people who care about the same issues I do, although often in very different ways.

Amazon has examples from the text and the Table of Contents .  Here’s a sample of the TOC—there’s much more in the book:

Cell-Based or Cultured Meat continues to generate predictions, positive (new products, new approvals, growth) and negative (doom, bans).

Current status: The FDA and USDA have approved sales of cell-cultured chicken but the only place selling it is Bar Crenn in San Francisco (where I have not been).

While waiting for it to get scaled up (if this ever will be possible), here are a few items I’ve collected recently.

THE POSITIVES

• A new window opens for the emerging lab-meat industry:  Joint regulation of cell-cultured meat by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has not brought transparency to  the novel food. To help fill that transparency gap, the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW) has announced the launch of LabMeat.com, a new website to educate the public… Continue Reading.
• ‘People want to eat meat,’ SCiFi Foods CEO on first production run, potential of cell-cultivated meat:  Food-tech company SCiFi Foods inches closer to releasing its hybrid meat product that consists of a blend of cell-cultivated beef and plant proteins, upon completing its first commercial-scale production run, company co-founder and CEO Joshua March told FoodNavigator-USA…. Read more
• Israeli Company Gets Green Light to Make World’s First Cultivated Beef Steaks. An Israeli company has received a preliminary green light from health officials to sell the world’s first steaks made from cultivated beef cells, not the entire animal, officials said. The move follows approval of lab-grown chicken in the U.S. last year.
• ‘Essentially real meat, just grown differently’: Ivy Farm’s CSO on cultivated meat production and commercialisation. UK-based Ivy Farm, which produces cultivated meat, began as a spin-off from Oxford University. Now, says its new CSO, Dr. Harsh Amin, commercialisation is in sight…. Read more
• USDA: ‘We will need cellular agriculture’ to reach climate, food innovation goals:  Sustained government support and transparent scientific research, such as USDA’s landmark grant to Tufts University’s National Institute for Cellular Agriculture program, can energize cellular agriculture R&D and renew attention from the private sector, experts argue…. Read more

THE NEGATIVES

• Lab-grown foods ‘creep people out’, says Natural Grocers:  Cell-cultured or precision fermentation-derived products including meat and dairy alternatives will be rejected by consumers in 2024, US grocery chain Natural Grocers predicts…. Read more
• Cultivated meat labeling puzzle could bring legal headaches:  Though regulators came to a consensus on what to call the namesake product in 2022, continuing debates over package labeling rules could still create headwinds for players in the space.
• Crunch time for cultivated meat: ‘Probably 70-90% of players will fail in the next year’:  on paper, cultivated meat might seem like a no-brainer. Unlike plant-based options, which still don’t quite hit the spot for many consumers, it promises the allure of ‘real’ meat without the ethical and environmental baggage that comes with plundering our oceans and raising billions of sentient land animals for food.
• Italy bans cultured meat: The Italian parliament voted to ban the production, importation, or sale of cell-cultured meat in a step the far-right government called a defense of Italian culture.

THE QUESTIONS

• What’s the Italian Government’s beef with cultivated meat?  The Italian Government recently announced that it would ban cultivated meat production, at the same time restricting meat-related labels on plant-based meat alternatives. The decision has drawn significant criticism from some quarters, but from Italy’s perspective, the ruling is motivated by a desire to protect culinary traditions as well as key stakeholders such as farmers…. Read more.
• What is the environmental impact of cultivated meat?  While the verdict is still out on the sustainability of cultivated meat production, a panel of experts during the Tufts University Cellular Agriculture Day on Jan. 11 in Boston, Mass., are optimistic, citing the need for expansive data sets on more diverse cell culture mediums, bioreactors and energy sources…. Read more
• Is cultivated meat a threat to farming? EU countries clash over cellular agriculture’s future: According to delegates from Italy, France and Austria, cellular agriculture practices represent a threat to primary farm-based approaches and ‘genuine’ food production methods. … Read more

If you still have fruitcake left over from Christmas, you are undoubtedly wondering why it is still around and whether it is still edible.

Fortunately, we have Scientific American to thank for shedding light on this pressing issue.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these seemingly indestructible pastries typically stay fresh for six months in the pantry and up to a year when refrigerated. But anecdotally we know that they can last for decades; some of the oldest have been preserved for more than a century. In 2017 a then 106-year-old fruitcake left behind by members of a 1910 Antarctic expedition was unearthed from one of the continent’s first buildings. And in 2019 the Detroit News reported that a Michigan family treasured a then 141-year-old fruitcake as an heirloom. And you could theoretically still eat these century-old cakes without harm—if you can get past the nauseating, rancid smell.

The reasons for fruitcake’s indestructability are because it is made with:

• Alcohol,
• Dried fruit
• Sugar
• Not much liquid

Bacteria are killed by alcohol and do not reproduce well under conditions of high sugar, low water, and low oxygen (high cake density)—dryness, in a word.

So if yours is still around, you can eat it as long as it smells OK.  If it starts smelling  bad, it’s because the fats are getting rnncid.

Aren’t you glad I asked?

LEAD

I’ve posted previously about the recent finding of high levels of lead—and now chromium—in applesauce pouches.

I’ve also posted about the inadequacy of inspections of such products.

The lead problems are continuing.

The FDA says it has received 89 complaints as of January 16, with the average age of the affected children less than one year (you have to scroll way down to see the latest updates).

The CDC says it has received reports from state and local health departments:

Total Cases: 385

Confirmed Cases: 97

Probable Cases: 253

Suspect Cases: 35

Both agencies say: Do not feed recalled products to your children!

• WanaBana apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches – including three packs
• Schnucks-brand cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches and variety pack
• Weis-brand cinnamon applesauce pouches

What caused this?  The best guess is (deliberate?) adulteration of the cinnamon.  Not nice to think about.

PESTICIDES

I read in The Guardian: Nearly 40% of conventional baby food contains toxic pesticides, US study finds.

The research, conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) non-profit, looked at 73 products and found at least one pesticide in 22 of them. Many products showed more than one pesticide, and the substances present a dangerous health threat to babies, researchers said.

The EWG research: New EWG study (2023): Pesticides still found in baby food but most-toxic threats eliminated through advocacy, regulation.

• New EWG research finds fewer pesticides in baby food than in the  groundbreaking 1995 study, Pesticides in Baby Food.
• Though EWG detected some pesticides, the most toxic have been removed.
• EWG’s advocacy helped drive market change – but the fight for safer food continues.
• Federal oversight of pesticides in children’s food is inadequate, as explored in depth in a 1993 landmark National Academies of Science study.
• No pesticides were detected in any of the 15 organic products.

Well, this message is clear: if you must buy commercial baby food, buy organic.

Overall, you are better off feeding babies the healthy foods you eat, pureed or cut up so they don’t cause choking, and as unsalted and unsugared as possible.

I like sweet foods as much as anyone (maybe more), but I do try to keep sugar intake within reasonable limits.

For one thing, sugars have no nutritional value beyond calories (which hardly anyone needs more of).  For another, it encourages overeating whatever foods in comes with, many of them ultra-processed.

Thus, I cannot understand why my nutrition colleagues would do anything to imply that eating more sugar is OK.

But, thanks to Ricardo Salvador at the Union of Concerned Scientists who forwarded the study to me, we here have: Risk assessment of nutrients: There must be a threshold for their effects.

Its authors argue that because no firm threshold has been established for harm from excessive sugar intake, guidance to keep sugars “as low as possible in the context of a nutritionally adequate diet” is inappropriate.

The most appropriate interpretation from the vast amount of data is that currently no definitive conclusion can be drawn on the tolerable upper intake level for dietary sugars. Therefore, EFSA’s [European Food Safety Authority’s] own guidance would lead to the conclusion that the available data do not allow the setting of an upper limit for added sugars and hence, that more robust data are required to identify the threshold value for intake of sugars.

Sigh.  Who paid for this?

Funding: “Cosun Nutrition Center (Hilversum, The Netherlands) provided financial support for some of the cost for the preparation of this paper. This support was unrestricted, and Cosun Nutrition Center had no influence on or input to the content of this paper” [yeah, right].

And what, pray tell, is the Cosun Nutrition Center?

The Cosun Nutrition Center conducts research and acquires scientific information on plant-based foods in relation to health and sustainability…The Cosun Nutrition Center is funded by Royal Cosun.

Sounds legit.  But what is Royal Cosum?

Founded 125 years ago, Royal Cosun has developed into a leading international agricultural cooperative with more than 8,100 sugar beet growers.

Sugar beet growers?  Oh.

I won’t bother to list the authors’ conflicts of interest, except to assure you that some include affiliations with sugar companies.

Conflicted?  Absolutely.

Caveat lector.