View from the Loft

HVP recall: if you buy processed food, you need to know this!

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is in a vast number of processed foods, including snack foods, gravy and dip mixes, frozen foods, soup mixes, sauces and sauce mixes ... the list goes on. Well, Basic Food Flavors, a maker of HVP, is guilty of selling salmonella-contaminated HVP to its customers--food processors who use the stuff as a flavor enhancer, among other things. Worse, records show that salmonella was found in Basic Food Flavors' HVP back in January! Yet nothing was done about it: the company continued to ship its products despite its own records showing contamination.

Not that we're surprised by this any more.

Via Marion Nestle's blog, here's an excerpt from the FDA's letter to Basic Food Flavors:

After receiving the first private laboratory analytical results (Certificate of Analysis dated 1/21/2010) indicating the presence of Salmonella in your facility, you continued to distribute paste and powder products until 2/15/2010. Furthermore, from 1/21/2010 to 2/20/2010, you continued to manufacture HVP paste and powder products under the same processing conditions that did not minimize microbial contamination.

The FDA further explains [my emphasis]:

The FDA then began discussions with Basic Food Flavors regarding the firm’s intentions to conduct a voluntary recall of the HVP the company had made, in both powder and paste form, manufactured on or after Sept. 17. On Feb. 26, 2010, Basic Food Flavors began notifying its customers that it was recalling all of the HVP product in powder and paste form made since Sept. 17.

Nestle's emphasis highlights the fact that the FDA does not have the power to recall tainted foods; instead, the company is supposed to recall its products voluntarily. Thus, for about a month, tainted products were knowingly distributed by Basic Food Flavors, and the recall itself wasn't announced until March 4.

At that time, 30-plus products were on the list. As of March 11, there are 153 products on the list. Go here for a list of recalled products, but keep in mind that more may surface (that's what usually happens with these things; remember the pet-food scandal?).

Nestle points out that other companies have now issued their own recalls:

The fallout from the recall is just beginning.  Windsor Farms of Lampasas, Texas and Oakland, Mississippi is recalling 1.7 million pounds of ready-to-eat beef taquito and chicken quesadilla products+ containing HVP.   Procter & Gamble is recalling Pringles Restaurant Cravers Cheeseburger potato crisps and Family Faves Taco Night potato crisps.

There's nothing in my pantry that might be contaminated, thanks to my somewhat paranoid label-reading, but most people have processed foods in their cupboards, freezer, and fridge and should check the recall list. Better yet, read the labels and toss out anything with HVP in it.

Another reason why I don't buy processed foods ...

Grab bag

Stuff I've been meaning to mention:

Xenophobia is alive and well in Congress. Rep. J. Gresham Barrett (R-SC) first introduced his Stop Terrorists Entry Program Act (STEP) in 2003. Apparently the earlier version would bar persons from countries "determined to be state sponsors of terrorism" from entering the US. His new, improved version would

"bar citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Yemen and Syria from entry into the United States. It would further require citizens of those nations who are legally visiting or residing in the United States to be deported within 60 days."

The National Iranian American Council is particularly outraged by this bill.There are something like a million or so Iranians living here in the US, quite peaceably.

I'm sure you recall that the last two incidents of terrorism involved an American at Fort Hood who killed 12 fellow soldiers and a Nigerian who attempted to blow up a plane.

Will 2010 be the year when the world sees widespread famine? Some people think so, pointing out that harvests--despite the USDA's insistence that US harvests were at record highs last year--could not have been, given the number of counties, especially in the Midwest, that were declared disaster areas. When harvests suffer a 30% loss of the value of at least one crop, that county can be designated a disaster area.

With food reserves worldwide at a low, some experts are fearful of food shortages and hellacious inflation in food prices. A little thought shows that if severe food shortages come about, the effect on the worldwide economic system could be devastating. Go and read the whole thing. I hope there are other explanations for the apparent gap between the USDA's predictions of record harvests and the fact that so many agricultural areas in the US were declared disaster areas. And I haven't even gotten into the situation globally, where drought and other natural phenomena have taken a serious toll.

Study claims that three of Monsanto's GMOs can cause organ damage in rats. The study was published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences; it found that the major organs affected were the liver and kidneys. Of course Monsanto immediately responded with an angry statement defending its products and accusing the researchers of faulty methods. Would we have expected anything else? Also not surprising: the Wall Street Journal named Monsanto its Corporation of the Year.

How often do the doctors and nurses in your local hospitals wash their hands? A study of 163 doctors in a large university hospital in Switzerland found only 57% compliance with rules for handwashing, which usually require handwashing on entering and exiting a patient's room. While the study is an old one conducted in 2004, the problem is ongoing--so much so that in the state of Maryland, hospital teams made up of staff members will now be monitoring the handwashing practices of health care workers.

With the problem of hospital-acquired infections, this seems quite reasonable to me. Iatrogenic infections take a large toll on hospital patients. I myself had a friend whose 22-year-old brother went in for some kind of elective surgery and ultimately died of an infection he contracted in the hospital. Is it too much to ask that in a setting full of sick people that doctors, nurses, and other health care workers abide by the common-sense rule "wash your hands"?

Interview of Michael Moore by Naomi Klein

This is a must-see/must read: Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore following the opening of his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story. In the interview, available as a video and transcript, Moore answers questions such as

How is President Obama handling the economic crisis? Who is taking on Wall Street? And who is letting Wall Street take advantage of us?

and many, many others.

One of the puzzling questions is why people like the teabaggers are so eager to defend capitalism, the very system that's cheating them--and all of us ordinary people--out of our hard-earned money.

It's a terrific, mind-opening interview. Do give it your time and attention; you'll be glad you did.

What Billmon said.

Here.

FDA's lack of power and guts endangers us all

This is ridiculous:

Even though federal health officials have begun a criminal investigation into whether the Peanut Corporation of America deliberately sold contaminated products, the government still needed the company’s permission last week before announcing a huge recall of its products.

The wording of the recall statement had to be approved by the company before the Food and Drug Administration could publish it under current rules. The agency relies on cooperation from food makers to ensure the safety of the food supply even when those makers are suspected of crimes.

President Obama has promised a full review of the FDA's operations. One hopes that such a review will include investigating whether the need for the peanut company's approval delayed getting warnings out to consumers. And there was definitely a serious delay in spreading the word:

 

Public health officials pinpointed the Blakely plant as the source of the salmonella outbreak on Jan. 9. The peanut company announced a limited recall on Jan. 13 and expanded it on Jan. 16. The company waited until Jan. 28 before recalling all products made at the plant in 2007 and 2008, even though it had known since 2007 that tests of products showed contamination with salmonella.

Some food company executives and public health officials knew of the tainted food before an official announcement was made. At Costco, for example, Keebler and Austin peanut butter crackers were pulled off the shelves a week before the peanut company and Kellogg announced the nationwide recall of these products.

 

While it's laudable that some food buyers take action in such a timely way, that doesn't let the FDA off the hook. The FDA does have some power to get toxic food off the shelves, but they rarely, if ever, use it:

 

The F.D.A. can seize a product that it suspects is contaminated, and it can ask a federal judge for authority to recall products if a maker refuses to do so. The agency can also announce that it suspects problems with a product before the company agrees to a recall. But it rarely does any of these.

The FDA needs broader emergency powers here. It's simply not acceptable that valuable time is spent negotiating press releases with the offending company while people are getting sick and even dying from contaminated food. And it's galling that even the steps the FDA could take, it doesn't, preferring not to ruffle the feathers of the food industry.

 

For a list of foods on the recall list, go here. But you'd better keep checking--it seems like every day, more products are announced.

 

How many people are going to have to sicken and die before the US government takes the necessary steps to ensure the safety of our food supply?

 

I hope the Peanut Corporation of America is bankrupted at the very least, and that some of its top executives see the inside of a jail cell to boot, for their cavalier attitude of profit above all. The least we can do is make an example of them.

 

 

Burger King does the right thing

A while back I posted on Burger King's refusal to join McDonald's and Yum! Brands (owner of KFC, Taco Bell, and other chains) in agreeing to pay Florida tomato pickers an extra penny per pound. The Coalition for Immokalee Workers has put pressure on fast-food corporations to increase pay and working conditions for these farm workers, who suffer under some of the worst working conditions in the U.S.

Burger King has now bowed to pressure and joined the other fast-food giants in agreeing to the extra penny. Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel writes:

This victory is testament to the tenacity and discipline of the Coalition,a community-based worker organization, which has exposed a half-dozen slavery cases that helped trigger the freeing of more than 1000 workers. It has also advocated for better wages, living conditions, respect from the industry, and an end to indentured servitude. In this last year, CIW scored victories in negotiating a penny-per-pound surcharge--so workers would receive about 77 cents per 32-pound bucket--with McDonald's and Yum! Brands (owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC). (The corporations also agreed to work with the Coalition to eliminate slavery from the fields.) And the corporations --not the tomato growers--agreed to pay the 40 percent salary increase. Astonishingly, Burger King, until today, refused to go along with a deal that will cost them less than $300,000 annually; last year, the corporation raked in $2.23 billion in revenues.

But, as van den Heuvel notes, this is no time for complacency: not only are conditions in the field appalling, but the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is opposed to the penny-a-pound increase, even though that increase comes directly from the fast-food companies, not the growers themselves [link]:

As some growers began to implement the Yum/McDonald's agreement – an extra paycheck cut to the farmworkers by the buyers, not the growers, mind you – the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), representing 90 percent of the state's growers, said any members who adopted this policy would be fined $100,000 per worker benefiting from the agreement.

At the hearing, Reginald Brown, Executive VP for the FTGE, tried to justify opposition to the agreement on the grounds of "legal concerns." Unfortunately for him, Senator Bernie Sanders

entered into the record a letter from 26 legal professors specializing in labor law, including antitrust dimensions of labor standards, writing that "the ostensible legal concerns of the Growers Exchange are utterly without merit." (In fact, the experts concluded, the only real antitrust issue might be several growers agreeing amongst themselves to reject the deal.) He noted that McDonald's and Yum! Brands also entered letters into the record stating that there are no legal problems with the extra penny deal and that they want it implemented.

"I gather that McDonald's and Yum have some money to hire some pretty good attorneys," Sen. Sanders told Brown. "You might want to reconsider the attorneys you are using and rethink this issue."

The FTGE looks the other way when slavery occurs in the field, professing shock, yet somehow never uncovering such cases--while the CIW has uncovered several. It's thought that for every case of slavery that comes to light, there are others still concealed.

So while the Burger King victory is cause for celebration, it's only the beginning. The CIW's next step may well be to begin pressuring supermarket chains, including Wal-Mart and Whole Foods. If so, we can do our part by letting supermarkets know we support the CIW and by boycotting where appropriate. Those who buy tomatoes from Florida growers are in a position to insist on better pay and working conditions for tomato pickers, lest they take their business elsewhere.

Boycott Burger King

Constant readers will know that I don't give any fast-food "restaurants" my business. But I'm hoping to persuade any Burger King customers out there to give up their Whoppers, even if that means buying a Big Mac (shudder).

Let me give you some background, courtesy of Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation):

The Student/Farmworker Alliance and an affiliated nonprofit, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, have for years been urging the fast-food industry to accept some responsibility for the plight of Florida migrants who harvest the tomatoes for its hamburgers and tacos. . . . The wages of these farm workers, adjusted for inflation, have declined by as much as 70 percent since the late 1970s. And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants have been enslaved by labor contractors and forced to work without pay. The McDonald’s Corporation and Yum Brands (which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC) have agreed to subsidize a modest pay raise for their tomato pickers and work closely with the coalition to eliminate slavery from the fields.

The "modest pay raise" is a penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Schlosser's use of the word "enslaved" is not metaphorical: we are talking about actual slavery, people forced to work without pay. Last month a Senate committee hearing was held on the issue of working conditions for tomato workers. An investigator for the Collier County Sheriff's Office, asked by Sen. Bernie Sanders whether there was human trafficking occurring in Florida agriculture, replied,

"It's probably occurring right now while we sit here," Frost said. "Almost assuredly it's going on right now."

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the Student/Farmworker Alliance have fought some tough battles on behalf of the farm workers. For their efforts, they are now being spied upon by the Burger King corporation.

At first the company denied using such tactics. Now, however, a Burger King executive has admitted to using a private security firm, Diplomatic Tactical Services, to spy on the Alliance--ostensibly to prevent acts of violence.

“It is both the corporation’s right and duty,” a company spokesman later wrote in an e-mail message to [Schlosser], “to protect its employees and assets from potential harm.”

Neither the CIW nor the Student/Farmworker Alliance has ever been guilty of any form of violence. Burger King spied on this group in order to learn of its plans in hopes of undermining those plans.

Additionally, a Burger King official

used his young daughter’s e-mail address to spread misinformation about the farm worker group. [See more on this here.]

Burger King's actions are unjustifiable and unconscionable. Publicly, officials say they want to work with the coalition to improve working conditions for tomato pickers, while privately they engage in actions seeking to discredit the coalition. Disinformation campaigns and spying are despicable acts, particularly when directed against efforts to improve workers' lives. A penny a pound would certainly not greatly erode Burger King's profits; McDonald's and Yum Brands have found it possible to reach an agreement with the CIW. In fact, Eric Schlosser has said that the penny-a-pound increase would cost Burger King only about $300,000 a year. Burger King reported $2.2 billion in revenues last year, and its CEO made $4.1 million. It's extremely hard to understand why they are balking at that extra penny.

The CIW presented, or tried to present, Burger King officials with a petition signed by 80,000 people promising to boycott the company if it doesn't do the right thing. You can sign the petition, and you can promise to stop patronizing Burger King.

While the fast-food companies haven't been the only beneficiaries of shockingly low wages and outright slavery--the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is a particularly loathsome organization that has so far blocked that extra penny provided by McDonald's and Yum from reaching the workers--pressuring these companies, as the buyers, is a place to start. The buyers have the power to insist on decent treatment of workers and to look elsewhere for tomatoes (like Mexico) if growers refuse to be accountable.

Tomato workers have not had a raise in over twenty years. They average 45 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes picked, about $50 per day. I hope that any Burger King customers reading this (and do follow the links for the whole story) will boycott the chain and urge others to do the same. Use your buying power to send a message.

Chewing gum, candy bars, heat-treated garbage: it's what's for dinner!

You may already know that grain is not a natural food for cows. Back when I became the vegetarian that I was for several years, I knew that grain-feeding beef was bad practice in terms of what it meant for humans, in that feeding grain to cows and then to people is a very inefficient way to deliver protein. The fifteen pounds of grain that it takes to manufacture a pound of beef protein could, instead, go directly to feed many more people than can be fed with a pound of beef.

I didn't realize that the cows suffer from a grain diet. According to Jo Robinson in Mother Earth News,

Replace the grass with grain and the rumen [the specialized organ that allows fibrous grasses to be digested] becomes too acidic. After several months, the condition can progress to “acute acidosis.” Cattle with acute acidosis develop growths and abscesses on their livers, stop eating, sicken and even die.

[snip]

To keep the calves alive and gaining weight, they must be given a steady diet of antibiotics.

Even with these countermeasures, many calves develop “subacute acidosis,” a more aggressive form of acid indigestion. A calf with subacute acidosis will hang its head, drool, kick at its belly and eat dirt. Alarmingly, this is regarded as “natural” in the feedlot. According to an article in the trade magazine, Feedlot: “Every animal in the feedlot will experience subacute acidosis at least once during the feeding period. … This is an important natural function in adapting to high-grain finishing rations.” When calves are finished on high-grain diets, a certain amount of suffering is simply taken for granted.

From Science News we learn that

Grains can accumulate in an animal's intestines because they lack starch-digesting enzymes. Thus, a high-grain diet can promote an overgrowth of Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium associated with sudden death in feedlot cattle, Russell's article suggests.

Humans, too, are now paying the price of this harmful cattle diet:

Finally, grain-based diets can promote Escherichia coli (E. coli) within the digestive tract of cattle, and these E. coli are more likely to survive acid shocks that mimic the human gastric stomach. This discovery, first reported by Russell and colleagues in 1998 (Science, 11 September), has now been confirmed. Other USDA scientists have likewise shown that cattle switched from grain-based diets to hay were less likely to shed harmful E. coli 0157:H7 in feces.

Some scientists believe that this particularly vicious form of e. coli actually evolved in the digestive tract of grain-fed cattle as bacteria adapted to the more highly acidic environment. Where once the e. coli would not have survived the acidity of the human stomach, having resided in a low-acid environment, bacteria that have adapted to the high acidity of the grain-fed stomach are no longer killed by human stomach acid.

Most of us know that the rules about feeding CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) animals have been changed in recent years because of mad cow disease, or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). It's a relief to know that chicken manure can no longer be fed to cows, and that cows are no longer unwittingly being turned into cannibals by eating rendered and ground-up cattle. But you might be surprised to discover what is being fed to feedlot cattle.

Feed is 60% of the costs of running a CAFO, so operators are always looking for cheaper ways to feed the animals. One way to do that is to feed them "byproduct feedstuffs." That can be just about anything.

In New York state, chewing gum has been used as a cheap feed supplement. The novel practice was recommended in a 1996 study in the Journal of Animal Science. The study concluded that stale chewing gum — still in its aluminum wrappers! — can “safely replace at least 30 percent of [cattle] growing or finishing diets without impairing feedlot performance or carcass quality.” In other parts of the country, cattle are being finished on stale pizza dough and candy bars, even heat-treated garbage. Feedlot operators drive to the manufacturing plants or municipal landfills and load up their trucks with this yummy fare, or they buy the used goods from middlemen called “jobbers” who offer a more varied buffet.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, one "farmer" feeds his cattle 100% junk food, "including french fries, tater tots, and potato peels." Another uses 17% stale candy bars and 3% stale "party mix." Why this increased use of junk? One reason is the production of ethanol, which has resulted in higher corn prices.

No studies have as yet been done on the nutritional quality of beef fed diets like this, but the outcome can't be good. Ruminants are meant to eat grasses; it's as simple as that. We do know that grass-fed beef is superior nutritionally to grain-fed beef, as shown by many studies. It's high in conjugated linoleic acid, (a cancer fighter, among other things) and high in omega-3 fatty acids. It also has high levels of vitamins B6 and B12, which helps reduce homocysteine levels. You can access a collection of good information on the health benefits of grass-fed beef here.

The USDA, needless to say, doesn't require any labeling to indicate what the animal has been fed. I myself would now be very suspicious of any supermarket beef, even if it says "grain-fed" (which most people continue to think is a good thing, a practice that ensures marbled and tender beef). Who knows what that cow ate in life?

I haven't even talked about the antibiotics and growth hormones in supermarket beef, and I won't get into it here. Suffice it to say that these are in virtually all supermarket meat, and that European countries are enduring WTO-imposed sanctions for their refusal to accept hormone-containing meat for their markets. I urge you to read the entire Mother Earth News article "What's in Your Beef?" and find out for yourself why your best bet is to avoid supermarket beef. The article includes some suggestions for finding beef that is raised truly naturally on grass and hay.

If you can afford it, you might want to join forces with another family (or more) and buy freezer beef from a farmer who pastures his cattle rather than grain-feeding.

The USDA is not protecting our food supply. This, after all, is the government agency that went to court to prevent voluntary BSE testing on the part of a beef producer, and which banned the marketing of BSE test kits! As with most government agencies today, the USDA is all about protecting the profits of big business. So let the buyer beware: do your homework and find out where you can buy meat that is safe, natural, and good for you.

[cross-posted to You Are What You Eat]

Toxic trade

The Campaign for America's Future has a new report out called "Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer" (the link will take you to a page from which you have to download a pdf file, and which will also show you how to take action). Every one of us should read it, and then we should contact our elected officials and demand that they seriously address the problem of unsafe imports. The problems arise from two trends:

On the one hand, global outsourcing of production and importing of goods is rapidly increasing. World imports have increased by 338 percent since 1974, with imports from China alone increasing nearly 3,900 percent just since 1985.

6 Yet the budget of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the government agency responsible for monitoring consumer goods in the United States, is less than half the level it was when it started in 1974. We have been disarming our ability to protect ourselves, even as the need to do so has been soaring.

A few days ago I wrote about lead levels in lipstick. How about lead levels in Halloween products meant for children, including candy buckets coated with lead-based paint, or a gag set of teeth with 100 times the legal level of lead?

Unbelievably--okay, not unbelievably, given that she's a Bush appointee--the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord,

has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation that would strengthen the agency that polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools.

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistleblowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

Really, follow the link. You'll be enraged and incredulous. Nord's actions have rightfully prompted calls for her resignation. She obviously is head of the CPSC not to protect consumers, but to protect corporations. Again, that's par for the course with the Bush administration, which has sought to deregulate damn near everything in order to ease the "burden" on corporations. It's indefensible.

It's not like the CPSC couldn't use the help, as pointed out in "Toxic Trade":

As a result of budget cuts, the CPSC has closed more than 40 field offices and cut its port inspection staff to 15 people nationwide.

10 It has dropped child drowning from its strategic goals.11 It has not modernized its testing labs since 1975. 12 The agency’s toy-testing department consists of one man who drops toys on the floor in his office to see if they break.13

Please, read up on this issue and take a moment to urge your Congresscritter to co-sponsor the Safety Assurance for Every (SAFE) Consumer Product Act. Go here to have an e-mail sent. It's the least we can do.

What price beauty?

Now that I'm ancient, I don't wear much makeup, and thank goodness. It seems that some types of makeup are, indeed, hazardous to your health:

More than half of 33 brand-name lipsticks tested (61 percent) contained detectable levels of lead, with levels ranging from 0.03 to 0.65 parts per million (ppm). None of these lipsticks listed lead as an ingredient.

One-third of the tested lipsticks exceeded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 0.1 ppm limit for lead in candy – a standard established to protect children from directly ingesting lead. Lipstick products, like candy, are directly ingested into the body. Nevertheless, the FDA has not set a limit for lead in lipstick, which fits with the disturbing absence of FDA regulatory oversight and enforcement capacity for the $50 billion personal care products industry.

Well, heck: surely it's worth a little lead to have voluptuous lips, right?

Sigh.