By MARIAN BURROS, published December 27, 2006 in the New York Times

THE headlines about food this year read like a remarkable replay of Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” in which the things Americans think they should eat more of — lettuce and spinach — were suddenly the ones that could make them sick, or even kill them.

Yet critics of American agribusiness, like Marion Nestle, a professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, and the author of “What to Eat,” see an upside to all the bad news.

“This is the year everyone discovered that food is about politics and people can do something about it,” she said. “In a world in which people feel more and more distant from global forces that control their lives, they can do something by, as the British put it, ‘voting with your trolley,’ their word for shopping cart.”

Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation,” about the horrors of industrialized food for the animals, the workers and the consumer, is equally upbeat. “Those negative events brought attention to the problems,” he said of the past year. “Even the growers think the system is broken and has to be fixed,” he added, referring to the California spinach farmers, who are now demanding that the government step in and set some rules about growing and processing produce.

Food safety isn’t the only place Mr. Schlosser sees progress. “There is growing bipartisan consensus on obesity,” he said. Former President Bill Clinton “brokered a deal with soft drink and snack food companies to remove sodas and junk food from schools,” he added, and “Governors Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California have made nutrition in schools an important priority.”

This was the year when Americans got in touch with their food, and its varied political and social connections came into focus in different media. The Nation devoted an entire issue, developed in collaboration with Alice Waters of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, to food. Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” a book that took a look at industrial agriculture and other topics, became a best seller. “Fast Food Nation” was made into a film by the director Richard Linklater.

Partly as a result of the renewed focus on where food comes from, animal welfare groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, once relegated to fringe status, have captured some attention. Animal rights supporters persuaded officials in Chicago to ban foie gras because they say force-feeding ducks and geese is cruel.

Whole Foods threatened to terminate its contract with a California duck grower because he processed and distributed the products of a foie gras producer. The supermarket chain has stopped selling live lobsters, it says, until it can figure out how to keep them more comfortable on their trip from ocean to fish counter. Lobster “condos” have been suggested.

The organics movement went mainstream this year, too, as Wal-Mart rolled out a wide selection of food bearing the United States Department of Agriculture’s organic certification. The chain also vowed to price these products only slightly higher than conventional foods.

But there were signs that organics may have become too successful for their own good. Once welcomed as the savior of the small farmer and the conscientious eater, organic farming has lost some of its luster, dulled by large operators who follow the letter of the law but ignore the larger principles that once characterized the organic movement.

Today the word no longer stands for small-scale farming and animals raised in a traditional pastoral setting. As Mr. Pollan wrote in The New York Times in 2001, about the dairy farms operated by the organic milk producer Horizon, “thousands of cows that never encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced dry lot, eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three times a day.”

The Department of Agriculture is now considering allowing salmon farmers to call their fish organic even if the fish are fed nonorganic fishmeal. The increasingly loose meaning of the word has led some consumers, who once bought anything labeled organic, to rely on new signifiers, like grass-fed, sustainable or local.

It is not only individual shoppers who are choosing to vote with their food dollars. Tired of waiting for the federal government to act, local governments have stepped in. New York City banned trans fats in restaurants and told restaurants with standardized recipes that they must provide easy access to calorie information. Other municipal and state governments are requiring public institutions to buy more nutritious, locally produced food.

The slow drip-drip-drip of foodborne outbreaks over the last 20 years has not desensitized people to the fact that food can harbor harmful bacteria; it has made them skittish. After the outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in spinach in August, sales of the vegetable plummeted 60 percent. With several outbreaks this year, including one involving E. coli at the Taco Bell chain, the idea that eating local may be safer is taking hold. When the fruits or vegetables from dozens of farms are combined before shipping, the opportunities for contamination are greatly increased.

The discovery of contaminated produce is happening at a time when advice about eating more fruits and vegetables seems to be having an impact. So concerns about safety may be contributing to the success of local farmers’ markets.

“I see this happening everywhere, and it is enormous,” Ms. Nestle said. “It’s the recognition that food ties into extremely important social, economic, environmental and institutional issues. Ordinary people don’t have access to these really important issues except through food.”

Text credit: (c) 2006 The New York Times Company
Photo Credit: Ekai

Posted by at 1:42 PM | Permalink

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, December 21, 2006 in The Washington Post

Tonight at precisely 7:22, while you are washing dishes, doing your holiday shopping or reading this newspaper, the sun will stand still. At that point in Earth's yearly orbit around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere will have tilted away from the sun as far as it's going to go. The sun's zenith (the high point of its arc) today is the lowest of the year. Six months later it will reach the highest. Today, the winter solstice, marks the year's shortest day and longest night.

The sun doesn't literally stop, but, to highly observant Neolithic man, it seemed to, partly because the increments by which the days shorten and then lengthen at this time are so small. The sun, on which all life depends, withholds its power in winter and seems to hesitate before deciding to return and gradually wake up the Earth again. To early man, it was a solemn, frightening moment.

Most modern religious occasions correspond to agricultural festivals that predate them, and our present customs still reflect that connection. In spring, the observance of Easter has roots in fertility celebrations universally practiced at that time of year. Some people have linked its name to Eostre, a Saxon fertility goddess, and images of fecundity still abound. Eggs are discovered in green grass. They are brought by a rabbit -- an animal that can conceive even while bearing a litter.

In the Christmas season, we still deck the halls with evergreen branches just as the ancient Romans did during the late December feast of Saturnalia, which honored Saturn, a god of agriculture. The tradition passed to Europe, where holiday activities still feature conifers, holly and mistletoe, plants that wear their green even in winter's deathlike grip. Cultures around the world light fires and candles at this time to propitiate the forces of darkness and banish the gloom left by the departing sun. Removed as we might sometimes be from both nature and religion in modern times, some essential feelings are the same as they ever were. I wonder if the oft-mentioned "Christmas blues" is a symptom not of the holidays and their attendant frenzy, but a primal reaction to the year's darkest time, which shopping for gifts fails to dispel. I've noticed that holiday cheer with links to a more Earth-centered past does more to lift our mood.

To read the full article at washingtonpost.com, please go here

To read more about winter solstice celebrations at wikipedia.org, please go here

Winter solstic photo credit: Ennor

Posted by at 2:04 PM | Permalink

By JIM DOWNING, Published December 19, 2006 in The Sacramento Bee

Two high-profile E. coli outbreaks this year have some in the food business wondering - once again - whether it's time to go nuclear. For decades, many food safety experts have argued that irradiation - zapping food with high-energy rays to kill microorganisms - could avert hundreds of deaths and perhaps millions of illnesses each year. But for just as long, federal regulators and food retailers have been leery of bringing the technology to market.

Despite exhaustive reviews by federal scientists and endorsements by public health and medical groups around the world, irradiation by its very name conjures up images that are anything but wholesome - nuclear fallout, for one.

That imagery, combined with some lingering uncertainties about irradiation's effects on food, has helped grass-roots activists make a potent case against it.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved irradiation as a disinfectant for a limited range of foods, including spices and ground beef.

But a food industry petition to greatly expand that approval to include many ready-to-eat products - fresh bagged greens, for instance - has been awaiting review by the agency for more than seven years.

Now, with both government officials and the produce industry feeling pressure to respond to the recent outbreaks, irradiation is again up for debate.

Jeff Barach, vice president of the Food Products Association, the trade group that brought the 1999 irradiation petition, said he had for months been unable to get an audience with FDA officials - until September's outbreak of E. coli in spinach from Salinas Valley, Calif.

"We all of a sudden got a meeting" with the head of the department that is evaluating the petition, Barach said.

He said he offered to limit the scope of the request to fewer products in exchange for a quicker decision from the agency.

An FDA spokesman said the agency can't comment on the petition's status.

Members of California's fresh greens industry recently have been discussing irradiation - among other strategies - in their ongoing negotiations on food safety standards, according to Trevor Suslow, a specialist in perishable produce at the University of California, Davis, who has been present at some of the sessions.

One appeal of irradiation to the produce industry has to do with the difficulty of pinpointing the source of contamination following a foodborne illness outbreak. By the time someone gets sick, there is a good chance the offending bacteria have died off.

So, farmers and food processors - and federal investigators - can't tell where safeguards failed.

Irradiation introduces the prospect of a final "kill step," for fresh produce, an additional layer of protection if other precautions fail.

The high-energy rays can penetrate packaging, making it possible to do a final disinfection after, say, spinach leaves have been washed and sealed in a bag. The technology can also kill pathogens nestled where disinfectants like chlorine don't always reach - in a crevice in a leaf of spinach, for instance.

Recent studies have shown that the technology will reduce populations of common foodborne disease pathogens by at least 99.9 percent without hurting the quality of most fresh produce, according to Brendan Niemira, a lead scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety Intervention Technologies lab in Pennsylvania.

Irradiation disinfects food by damaging the DNA of microorganisms, rendering them unable to reproduce. The most common irradiation machines employ the high-energy gamma rays produced by radioactive cobalt.

In Polk County, Mulberry-based Food Technology Service Inc. operates a gamma irradiation facility that will treat some 14 million pounds of meat, produce and poultry this year, up from about 12 million pounds in 2005, according to Jim Jones, the company's vice president of sales and marketing.

Although Food Tech's stock has briefly jumped during E. coli outbreaks, roughly 60 percent of the firm's business comes from irradiating medical supplies, not food, Jones said.

Newer irradiation alternatives use X-ray and electron acceleration techniques that do not require radioactive material like Cobalt 60. Units suitable for mass food processing cost between $4 million and $8 million, according to two U.S. food irradiation firms.

Irradiation was first identified as a food disinfectant in the 1920s. It does not make food radioactive, and its safety is supported by the results of nearly all studies of the technology performed over the past 50 years.

Still, were the irradiation of ready-to-eat produce to be approved, it would likely be the target of fierce campaigning by some public-advocacy groups.

"I would characterize our view on irradiation as calling for a moratorium,"
said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

In 1999, when the USDA was considering whether to allow irradiation and genetic engineering in certified organic foods, Kimbrell's group helped build strong opposition that included 300,000 public comments. The agency decided to keep both technologies out of the production of organic foods.

Kimbrell said that research results don't provide proof of the safety of irradiation. He also argues that its widespread use would lead the food industry to be sloppy in other areas.

Michael Pollan, an influential writer on food and agriculture, raises another objection: If a costly food safety technology like irradiation becomes a standard step in food processing, small producers are likely be hurt more than large ones, who are in a better position to absorb major expenses.

That's particularly galling, Pollan said, because the national-scale outbreaks of foodborne illness that tend to prompt the use of such technologies are usually linked to big operations.

The average grocery shopper doesn't have much of an opinion one way or the other about irradiation, said Christine Bruhn, a cooperative extension specialist at UC Davis.

About 15 percent know about the technology and support it, while 10 percent are opposed, she said.

While the recent E. coli episodes have again prompted discussion of wider use of irradiation, a major change isn't likely unless the produce industry's troubles continue, she said.

Text source: The Sacremento Bee
Photo source: PDXdj

Posted by at 5:01 PM | Permalink

Dear Kitchen Gardener,

You see a long line of parents and grandparents, over 500 people in all, waiting in line for something.  It's the holiday season and you ask yourself: "So which one are they waiting for: the new Sony Playstation 3 or the Nintendo Wii?"  If you are feeling cynical about humankind, you might even wonder: "Why aren't they fighting each other for better position like they usually do?"

Would you believe me if I told you that these peaceful-looking people aren't waiting in line for the latest electronic gift sensation, but for a free heirloom apple tree?

Welcome to Wanganui, New Zealand.  Some of us in the Northern Hemisphere may think of New Zealanders as an upside-down kind of people.  They drive on the left, their seasons are the opposite of ours, and they use funny names and words such as a "chilly-bin" (a cooler), "brekkie" (breakfast), and "kornies" (corn flakes).

While some of what they say and do may seem upside down to us, New Zealanders are some of the most upright and honest folks on the planet.  The global anti-corruption NGO "Transparency International" voted New Zealand tied for first place with Finland  as the least corrupt nation.   In case you're wondering, the UK ranks 11th, Australia 9th, Canada 14th, and the US 17th.  Chad tied with Bangladesh for last place at 158th.

Honest people like honest pleasures and what could be more honest than a  heirloom apple?  The idea for Wanganui's apple tree give away program came from Mark Christensen of the Central Districts Tree Crops Association who sees the project as being as much about public health as it home gardening.

The heritage variety being distributed is called "Monty's Surprise".  "There they go again with their funny names" you might be tempted to say, but there's nothing funny about cancer.  Of all the good eating apples tested by Christensen, Monty's Surprise had the highest level of cancer-fighting "procyanidin and quercetin flavonoid compounds", 4 times as many as other popular apples such as Red Delicious. 

Based on the public's response to the project, you'd think the organizers were handing out free drugs of a less wholesome sort.  In the end, Christensen gave away over 800 trees (including 200 to schools) and ended up having to turn hundreds of people away.   Local health officials were also stunned by the success of the launch.

“What blew us away more than anything was that people were prepared to give the time and energy for something that’s not for immediate benefit,” commented Anne Kauika of Wanganui's Public Health Center.

In an age that values instant gratification over patience, it's encouraging to see that there are still people who are prepared to take the slow and winding road (also known as the "scenic route") in life instead of the superhighway. 

Next year, Christensen is planning on giving away 4000 more trees and has started a similar research project to study which heirloom tomato varieties have the highest levels of the cancer-fighting antioxidant lycopene. 

I can already hear him at a future tree give-away: "Would you like a Brandywine with that Monty's Surprise?" 

Best holiday wishes,

PS: Thanks to all of you who contributed in some way to Kitchen Gardeners this past year.  We're bringing our 2006 funding appeal to an end and would appreciate whatever gesture of support you can offer, be it an online donation, a check, or something else you feel you can contribute.   We now have 2900 people from 60 countries on our mailing list.  Together, we can grow a better food system.

PPS: Mark Christensen has sent us a copy of the brochure (available here as a pdf file) handed out with each apple tree for anyone interested in exploring a tree or seedling give-away program in his or her community.  The free trees were distributed this year at a local nursery which apparently had its best day with many tree-takers staying on to do some shopping.

Posted by at 11:23 AM | Permalink

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, December 14, 2006 in The Washington Post

It's raining seed catalogues, and the forecast is for the downpour to continue well into January. They arrive in the mail bursting with potential, like seeds themselves. I look forward to a peaceful, post-holiday weekend in which sifting though descriptions of peas, beans and cauliflower seems like the most important thing I could possibly do with my day.

It's a little like Christmas all over again. Each year the seed-breeding elves have been hard at work coming up with new varieties that might be tastier or prettier than others I have grown, better able to meet the garden's climatic challenges, more forgiving of lapses in my expertise or work ethic. But I'd love to write a letter to Santa explaining exactly what improvements I'd like to see in this year's offerings.

One thing I'd be sure to put on my list is a mildly hot pepper. I like to cook with a pepper that has some zing to it, but not so much that I can add only a few timid choppings. To get enough pepper flavor I end up using lots of sweet peppers and a smidgen of hot. The closest thing I've found to the ideal is the ancho, but most advertised as mildly or medium hot are either hot, or not. No middle ground.

A red radish that held well in the ground would be welcome. Radishes must be sown often and harvested promptly before they get strong and pithy. You never have these worries with a carrot. Why can't a radish be like that?

I love cylindrical beets -- so right for slicing -- but how about one whose shoulders stay a smooth maroon rather than a rough brown even if pushed up out of the soil? And a golden beet that germinated better. A potato that formed all its tubers well below ground so it didn't need to be covered in more earth to prevent greening.

To read the full article at washingtonpost.co, please go here

Posted by at 4:07 PM | Permalink

Amateur baking will never be the same after the New York Times' article and video earlier this year about Jim Lahey's revolutionary "no knead" bread method. The response has been so great that it has spawned a second article with more details. The technique requires a heavy cast iron pot. You can use your Le Creuset-style Dutch oven if you have one, but you'll need to remove the plastic lid handle which cannot handle the high temperatures.

Ingredients
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
11/4 teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

Procedure
1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1.5-pound loaf.

Recipe adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery and printed in the New York Times

Photo credit: Tschoerda

Posted by at 9:42 AM | Permalink

Ingredients:
2 large eggs
3 cups grated drained all-purpose potatoes
1/4 cup grated onion
1 teaspoon salt, more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 to 4 tablespoons matzo meal, or as needed
Canola oil, for frying
Applesauce and sour cream for serving (optional).

Procedure:
1. In a large mixing bowl, beat eggs lightly. Add potatoes, onion, salt and pepper, and mix well. Stir in 2 tablespoons matzo meal, and let it sit about 30 seconds to absorb moisture in batter. If necessary add more to make a thick, wet batter that is neither watery nor dry.

2. Place a large skillet over medium heat, and add 2 tablespoons oil. When oil is hot drop in heaping 1/8 cups (about 2 tablespoons) of batter, flattening them gently to make thick pancakes. When bottoms have browned, after 2 to 3 minutes, flip and brown on other side. Add oil as needed. Drain on paper towels, and sprinkle with additional salt to taste. If necessary, work in batches, keeping cooked pancakes warm. Serve hot with applesauce and sour cream, if desired.

Yield: 4 servings (about 24 small pancakes).

Recipe source: New York Times
Photo credit: NYCnosh

Posted by at 2:15 PM | Permalink

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, December 7, 2006 in The Washington Post

Do children still make mud pies? Or have the drama and mystery of sci-fi stories and space shuttle launches turned their gaze permanently skyward? Any of them can name the planets in the solar system, but how many know what magnificent and invisible worlds lie beneath the surface of the soil? It's there that the most numerous of the Earth's creatures are to be found, many of them as alien to us as the hypothetical residents of remote galaxies that so engage our imaginations.

Earth's soil is the source of life, not just something we remove from our children's clothes when we do laundry. It's where their education should begin. The holidays present us the perfect opportunity to lure them back to earth with simple tools, equipment and activities that will aid in their terrestrial discoveries.

Prowl through a yard with a small child and you'll soon see how curious he or she is about the natural world. Kids are fascinated with what lives in the dirt. Start by just seeing what you can find on the surface -- worms, bugs, spiders, ants and all. Brush away dead leaves (using gloves if there's any chance of dead poison ivy) and see if any creatures lurk beneath them. Turn over a rock and see if that is a hiding place. It usually is. Then turn over a shovelful or two of earth, preferably in the garden where the soil is loose, fertile and full of life. Some things will wiggle forth right away; others you can find by sifting. This time of year most soil-dwellers have prepared for winter, so it's a great month to investigate how they hibernate -- as hard little pupae, inside fuzzy cocoons or as tiny eggs. Often these signs of sleeping life, which children love, are curled up inside a leaf on the ground. Show a child how even after a leaf has withered and fallen, a new bud has formed at the end of the twig, to become a new leaf in spring.

To read the full article at washingtonpost.co, please go here

For a light-hearted look at kids and gardening, check out John Hershey's "Inch by Inch, Row by Row......when is this Stupid Plant Going to Grow?"

Photo credit: Pfly

Posted by at 1:20 PM | Permalink

So, with the latest e.coli outbreak, it would appear that scallions have replaced bagged spinach as the new "bad guys" of the food world. We thought you'd appreciate this police artist's rendering of the likely suspects. Photo art courtesy of Travis Price

Posted by at 1:05 PM | Permalink

Posted by at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By MARIAN BURROS, published in the New York Times, 7 December 2006

Outbreaks of food-borne illness from produce have increased drastically as the way fruits and vegetables are grown, distributed and consumed has fundamentally changed.

Over the past couple of decades, Americans have doubled their consumption of fruits and vegetables, more and more of this produce is imported, and the number of plants where it is processed has shrunk.

“High centralization of production is great when everything goes right,” said Dr. Robert Tauxe, an epidemiologist with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “When something goes wrong, you have a big problem.”

A little bit of contaminated produce from one farm can infect tons of produce when it is all mixed together.

“Someone makes a small mistake, but someone chops up green onions and puts them in salsa and ships them off to Taco Bell, and you have exponentially magnified the problem,” said Carole Tucker Foreman, an agriculture official in the Carter administration, speaking hypothetically.

While the meat industry is required to follow rules set down by the Department of Agriculture for processing and slaughter, produce is not subject to similar regulations by the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of fruits and vegetables.

The agency has little regulatory authority over the produce industry and has fewer than 2,000 inspectors for more than 12,000 facilities, 250 inspectors fewer than in 2003. The Agriculture Department has 7,600 inspectors for 6,000 facilities. F.D.A. inspectors do not inspect farms unless there is a problem.

Produce-related outbreaks of disease rose to 86 in 2004, the latest year for which there is data, compared with 29 in 1997, when the states started electronic reporting to the Centers for Disease Control.

Before meat products can be imported, the Agriculture Department must certify the country and the plant, and it inspects 20 percent of the imports.

Today, according to the F.D.A., 35 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables sold in this country are imported, and the figure grows every year. There are no regulations governing the countries or the plants from which produce is imported. Only 1 percent of the imported produce is inspected, the agency said, and only a small part of that is actually checked for bacterial contamination.

If the current outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania was caused by green onions at Taco Bell, as is suspected, the onions probably came from Mexico, where much of the green onions sold in the United States at this time of year are produced, said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. An outbreak of hepatitis A in 2003 was traced to green onions from Mexico.

Last month the center petitioned the F.D.A. to regulate produce with inspections and mandatory standards governing manure, water and sanitation on farms.

“If we are going to curb these problems, F.D.A. has to take a much more active role,” Ms. DeWaal said. “That also means mandatory regulations and inspections for imports.”

Dr. Tauxe said the produce industry should look to the beef industry, which has reduced the levels of E. coli 0157:H7 in its products, for ways to tackle its food safety problems. Beef producers have gotten together to share ideas on how to reduce risks, and they have been successful. As the number of outbreaks from produce has increased, those from beef have declined.

Dr. Michael P. Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, says his family buys only whole vegetables, not those that have been processed, chopped and bagged.

“We don’t eat bagged salads because I don’t think they are safe under present conditions,” Dr. Doyle said. Instead, for example, his family buys a head of lettuce. The person preparing the lettuce washes it and removes the outer leaves, where most of the harmful bacteria are likely to be, then washes his hands and washes the inner leaves of the lettuce.

Since the spinach outbreak, Ms. DeWaal said she was purchasing bagged lettuce less frequently, instead choosing heads of romaine, which she washes and chops up herself.

Dr. Tauxe still buys bagged salads, “because they are so convenient.” But he said, “I would be particularly concerned about baby greens because of the way they are harvested.”

Baby greens, he explained, are harvested with a machine that looks like a big lawn mower. “So,” he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if something got in there with the baby spinach.”

Unlike other food safety problems, Dr. Tauxe said: “This one is not going to be solved with consumer education. With a product eaten right out of the bag there is relatively little a consumer can do.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company, republished under the "Fair Use" clause, Title 17, Section 107 of US Copyright Law.

Posted by at 8:42 AM | Permalink

The US Department of Agriculture has released a new study examining the potential implications for US agriculture production if all Americans adopted eating habits consistent with the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Comparing food availability data to Food Guide Pyramid Servings data, the report authors estimate domestic fruit, vegetable, and whole grain crop production would need to increase by 7.4 million acres (nearly 2 percent of cropland) to provide enough food for the increased consumption recommended by the guidelines.

Assuming the needed supply was obtained only from domestic sources, the US would need to more than double fruit acreage to 7.6 million acres and increase vegetable acreage from 6.5 million to 15.3 million acres. Whole grain consumption would need to rise, but total grain production acres would need to fall by nearly 6 million acres.

To meet the new recommendations for milk products consumption, the study predicts production would need to increase by nearly 30 percent ­approximately 108 billion pounds per year­to a total of 274 billion pounds annually. The report’s numbers put an interesting perspective on the continued opposition of the specialty crop alliance to full planting flexibility on program crop acreage.

The complete report is available at www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err31/err31.pdf.

Source: the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

Posted by at 5:10 PM | Permalink

A little of this, a little of that, and - voila - a great vegetable soup in less than 30 minutes!

Posted by at 9:20 AM | Permalink

Czechs face the warmest autumn in 45 years - meteorologists

Warmest November on record- Western Australia in November 2006 

One last swing: US Golfers enjoy second warmest November since 1956 

Scotland: Flood warnings as rain follows warmest autumn on record 

Norway: Summer in November 

Posted by at 6:42 AM | Permalink