An article in the Chicago Tribune takes yet another look at our broken food safety system, declaring that a USDA Food Inspector’s job is now less about inspecting meat and more about inspecting paperwork.
After the Jack in the Box case, the USDA required each meat plant to adopt a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point plan. The plans let companies design their own food safety measures, usually around the need to process beef quickly.
You can add another item to your special “unsafe food” list for October: chicken and turkey pot pies, including the Banquet brand and generic store brands that have “P-9” stamped on the side, which may contain salmonella. Several cases of salmonella poisoning have now been reported in various states, and ConAgra and the USDA are asking consumers not to eat the product while they investigate.
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Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation ground beef (E. coli), More Topps Meat Company ground beef products (E. Coli).
Stemilt Growers can’t call its produce USDA Certified Organic until they grow without chemicals for three years, but that isn’t stopping them from branding their produce “Artisan Naturals” in the interim. The three year chemical-free transition period is marked by insect infestations, infertile soil, and poor crop quality, which conspire to ravage a farm’s profitability. Stemilt, one of the nation’s largest apple growers, is hoping that consumers will pay a price premium for “natural” produce, which will likely be confused for USDA certified organic produce.
The orchard is in its second year of transition to organic, but the fruit will be sold under Stemilt’s Artisan Naturals label, promoting its naturally farmed history.
That certified organic edamame you bought from the local supermarket may have been made and packaged in China. The exporting juggernaut is quickly and quietly muscling in on the thriving global trade in certified organic products. Organic exports from China are certified by private companies and carry the official USDA organic logo. The logo, however, does not guarantee that products are truly organic:
The USDA likes to pay dead farmers to grow corn, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. Some of the dead farmers received in excess of $500,000 in government subsidies. Hmm! How very mysterious!
China says the US should fix its own food supply issues and stop picking on China. The Chinese government issued a statement saying that they are trying to fix food export issues but that the US should fix its own issues first.
Unlike seafood, the meat, produce and nuts you buy don’t have a country of origin label, despite a 5 year old law that says they should, according to the New York Times. Lobbyists and congresspeople have managed to hold off enforcement of the law since it was passed in 2002, but now proponents of country of origin labels (COOL) think they may have enough momentum from the Chinese Poison Train to finally make the label a reality. From the NYT:
“No. 1, there’s a basic consumer right to know,” said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union, an advocacy group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine and supports the labeling law. “People are more and more concerned about the food they eat.”
The USDA has vowed to safeguard your meat by fighting reckless meatpackers that want to test their dead cattle for mad cow disease. The USDA’s current policy of testing less than 1% of cows is clearly succeeding since none of you have caught Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow disease.
The more we continue to live and breathe on this earth the more we realize that the term “organic” is really just code for “awesome marketing idea.”
Poison toothpaste, killer cough-syrup, and tainted pet food are the tip of the disgusting iceberg of yuck heading our way from China. Over the past four months, the FDA has rejected 298 shipments from China that included “filthy” fruits, cancer-causing shrimp, and “poisonous” swordfish.
People in Wisconsin take their organic food seriously, Walmart. Don’t mess with Wisconsin. They wear cheese on their heads, for pete’s sake.
The FDA and USDA today jointly announced that swine and poultry fatted on feed containing wheat gluten laced with melamine pose a “very low risk” if you eat them.
For the first time, the USDA has granted preliminary approval for large-scale planting of an engineered food crop that contains human genes.
A report was released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office that designated Food Safety as a high risk area “because of risks to the economy and to public health and safety.” The report finds that: “The current fragmented federal system has caused inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination, and inefficient use of resources,” and they’ve recommended a fundamental reorganization of the entire system.
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