USDA
cmonforton | December 18, 2012McClatchy Newspapers' Lindsay Wise reports in two stories today (here and here) on the USDA's proposal to "modernize" the poultry inspection process. The proposal, part of the Obama Administration's offerings in the name of eliminating burdensome regulations, will eliminate hundreds of Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors, allow line speeds to increase to 175 birds per minute, and cede to the poultry companies the task of spotting diseased and defective birds. USDA estimates the financial benefits to the poultry industry will exceed $250 million annually. Without those pesky…
cmonforton | November 21, 2012It's become a Thanksgiving tradition: The President of the United States appearing in the White House Rose Garden to pardon a live turkey so the bird is spared from being part of the feast. This year, the Obama White House really got into the tradition. They created a Facebook page to allow all of us to decide whether a 40 pound turkey named Cobbler or one named Gobbler would forever avoid the butcher's knife.
But, this silly PR stunt isn't fooling food safety advocates. Cobbler and Gobbler were donated by the corporate giant Cargill from a grower in Rockingham County, Virginia. These two…
cmonforton | September 24, 2012[Update below, 9/26/2012]
When Secretary of Agricultural Tom Vilsack announced in January the USDA's proposal to modernize the poultry slaughter inspection system, he promised several things. He said the new system would save taxpayers and poultry producers money while improving food safety. (In "The Age of Greed," law professor Rena Steinzor explains on whose backs those savings are borne.) Secretary Vilsack also insisted that USDA inspectors
"will continue to conduct on-line carcass-by-carcass inspection as mandated by law."
That requirement is a long-standing provision of the Poultry…
cmonforton | May 18, 2012Members of and organizations affiliated with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) received an Action Alert today urging them to tell USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack to withdraw his agency's proposed rule on poultry slaughter inspection (77 Fed Reg 4408.) As written here previously and by the Center for Progressive Reform's Rena Steinzor in "The Age of Greed," the USDA proposal was developed in response to President Obama's edict about regulations, and his call to agencies to eliminate "outmoded" and "excessively burdensome" rules. The change proposed by USDA involves shifting the responsibility…
cmonforton | April 26, 2012Gabriel Thompson writes today in The Nation about a summer job he had a few years back, working on the assembly line at a Pilgrim's Pride poultry plant in Alabama. The chickens flew by on hooks at 90 birds-per-minute as he sliced and cut the meat non-stop. It didn't take long for him to meet co-workers who suffered from painful and debilitating musculoskeletal disorders caused by the high-speed, repetitive work. Thompson writes:
"One was unable to hold a glass of water; another had three surgeries on her wrists; a third had discovered, after a visit to the doctor, that her thumb joint had…
gregladen | April 23, 2012It is not clear that Pink Slime has ever made anyone sick, but Tuna Scrapings certainly have. The difference? Chemical treatment of the former but not the latter, apparently.
The way that food is produced and processed in our industrialized society virtually grantees that much of it would be poisonous to some degree because of spoiling before it gets to our kitchens. However, the food industry has all sorts of ways of avoiding that, ranging from freezing to heating to radiation to various chemical and physical treatments. The ammonia treatment associated with the Pink Slime Maneno of…
cmonforton | January 17, 2012Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich likes to pump himself up by picking on other people. Several weeks back his target was "children in the poorest neighborhoods." Now it's people who receive food assistance.
Others have checked his claims about President Obama being the "food stamp President," but Gingrich also suggested that if you are on food stamps, you aren't earning a paycheck. According to data assembled by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, however, a hefty portion of households receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are…
lborkowski | October 5, 2011The Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News has put together an excellent - and alarming - story on salmonella in chicken. Jeffrey Benzing, Esther French and Judah Ari Gross outline the problem this way:
Salmonella is found in a range of food products, including meat, produce and eggs. Chicken is the single biggest source of infection among cases where a food has been identified, causing about 220,000 illnesses, 4,000 hospital stays and at least 80 deaths annually in the U.S., according to an analysis of CDC data by the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida.
But gaps in…
sastyk | September 14, 2011The USDA indicates that in 2010 there were above 17 million households in the US (out of about 115 million households total) that were food insecure, and had trouble getting enough food on a regular basis. Only 59% of those households, however, received Food Stamps, WIC or School lunches, the three largest US food subsidy programs that make up the bulk of US nutritional supplementation programs. Which means that nearly half of all households were either receiving no support despite food insecurity, or relying on food pantries, soup kitchens and other resources.
One of the most significant…
lborkowski | December 27, 2010Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site.
By Liz Borkowski, originally posted 11/3/09
New York-based Fairbank Farms is recalling more than 500,000 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Gardiner Harris reports in the New York Times that two people - one from New Hampshire and one from New York - have died after eating the ground beef suspected of contamination, and more than two dozen people have fallen ill. [Note: This is a re-post from 2009, so don't go running to look for this beef in your fridge. Up-to-date…
lborkowski | October 8, 2010The Washington Post's Jane Black gives us a heads-up about the forthcoming update to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Every five years, USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion issues new dietary guidelines based on analysis by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a group of scientific experts appointed by the Secretaries of HHS and USDA. Here's how the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005 publication explains the guidelines' role:
The intent of the Dietary Guidelines is to summarize and synthesize knowledge regarding individual nutrients and food components into…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
zooillogix | June 23, 2008No one quite knows when the Light Brown Apple Moth arrived on the shores of California, but after DNA identification in 2007, it wasted no time pitting the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the populace of San Francisco against one another. Today the CDFA announced a new strategy for the eradication campaign: releasing bioengineered sterile moths to lure-in amorous males.
Ever tried to neuter a moth? Not easy...
Indigenous to Australia, the non-descript moth breeds prolifically with an average of three broods generations per year. However, much like Paul Hogan before it, the…