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In case you missed it, the New York Times has an editorial on the Pew Commission report (I am a member of the Commission, as I explained on a previous post) and on a similar report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. As the editorial explains, farm policies have turned “animal husbandry…into animal abuse,” and policies about animal confinement need rethinking and revision. My question: how about enforcing existing laws while we are at it?

This week’s question for me from Eating Liberally’s kat has to do with food waste and the world food crisis.  I do go on and on about this one.  It’s a worry.

As I explain in What to Eat, USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) can’t figure out what to do about certifying fish as organic.  Organics are about production methods.  Wild fish eat whatever, wherever, and their production is uncontrolled.  Farm fish are fed whatever.  According to Food Chemical News (June 2), the NOSB held hearings on the use of fish meal and fish oil in organic aquaculture last month and postponed a decision until fall.  The issue:  is it OK for farmed salmon to “eat meal and oil derived from carcasses, viscera and trimmings from processed wild caught fish certified as ‘organic’ by foreign suppliers,”  when there are no U.S. standards for such certification.   I’d say no.  How about you?

I’ve just gotten a press release from the USDA announcing its “road to healthville” challenge. On June 10, the USDA will hold a multi-media event featuring “dozens of some of the Nation’s leading corporations stepping forward to help stem the tide of overweight and obesity among America’s young people with specific new, out-of-the-box initiatives. The program will be hosted by CNPP Executive Director Dr. Brian Wansink.”  I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what food corporations will come up with.  Why am I thinking that out-of-the-box will not include stop marketing junk foods to kids, let alone making them.

Thanks to Michele Simon for sending this link to an AOL deadpan description of how companies are making healthier junk food. Those of us who think “healthier junk food” is an oxymoron wonder how the addition of vitamin E to Kool-Aid is going to do much good for anyone but Kraft must think it will entice you to buy it. Water, anyone?

In what the New York Times today calls a “hint of hope,” the CDC reports that rates of childhood obesity among American children haven’t budged since 1999 (well, maybe except for Hispanic boys and non-Hispanic black girls). As the accompanying JAMA editorial makes clear, the favorable trends still leave plenty of work to do; the rise in childhood obesity that started in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, has not declined and pediatricians are still seeing more young people with chronic disease risk factors than they used to. And then there are those troubling racial and ethnic disparities….

Here’s a useful post from Science Progress (in which I am quoted) on the push to fix the U.S. food safety system by creating a single food safety agency. It comes with an instructive diagram of the various agencies now involved–this alone is a good reason why the system needs a fix.  Science Progress is a project of the Center for American Progress, of which I had not heard until now.

New Zealand food packages are covered with nutrition and health claims just like ours, but the food agency only began allowing them a few years ago. The agency thought it might be interesting to find out whether the packages really contained the levels of vitamins and minerals claimed on the labels. Oops. Turns out that 58% did not. They either had too little (15%) or too much (42%). The excuses: built-in safety margins, hard-to-mix ingredients, unstable vitamins, uncertain analytic methods. The FDA hasn’t done one of these investigations in a long time, as far as I know. I wonder what it would find if it did?