Spot-On: Something Cool

This past Tuesday (October 1) we finally saw something good for consumers come out of the federal government: Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) for food. Grocery stores have six months to comply and then most meat and produce and some nut producers must specify the origin of their products (exceptions include roasted nuts, mixed vegetables, and a few other items).

Read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | COOL

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Spot-On: Inefficiencies of Scale

I came home from the farmers' market last Tuesday with a couple of pounds of tomatoes. To some folks, that makes me a brave or foolish man.

So far more than 1,000 people have officially been sickened by the latest salmonella outbreak. But, health care professionals say that in such estimates, for every reported case of sickness, more than 30 go unreported. This means something close to 40,000 people have been sickened to some degree.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | food health | food safety

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Spot-On: Attack of theNot-So-Killer Tomatoes

I'm almost as fed up (pun intended) with writing about food recalls as I am learning about them. Some good news on the food front would really be nice, but I'm afraid that with 238 people reportedly sickened with salmonella from contaminated tomatoes there is none this week.

That 238 doesn't sound like very many but using the Center for Disease Control estimates - only one in 30 cases of salmonella poisoning is reported - you can figure over 7,000 people got sick.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | food safety

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Spot-On: More Insanity from the U.S.D.A.

Most bureaucracies are famed for their lack of imagination, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture manages to consistently confound that dismal notion by finding new ways to control what we eat and who we buy it from. How the U.S.D.A. plans to regulate the farmers from whom I buy locally-raised meats is a good example of this ineptitude

Read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | USDA | food safety | food health

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Spot-On: No Prevention, No Cure

The Hallmark beef recall has become big news in the two weeks since the Humane Society video was released, which is great, but as I've read and listened to the coverage I've been angry about one thing: The news agencies keep calling it a "USDA recall," which is flat wrong and is misleading the public.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | food safety

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Spot-On: USDA D is for "Downer"

The food news last week was grim, disturbing, and troubling. It featured a video taken by members of the Humane Society of the United States that shows workers at Hallmark Meat Packing in Chino, California picking up, rolling over and dragging "downer" cows — animals that can't walk — with forklifts, shocking the animals, and shooting water up their noses in an effort to get them into the slaughter house. The video is grim and graphic, no animal should ever be treated that way.

You can read the complete article on Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | spot-on | USDA | food safety

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Spot-On: Safer By the Half-Dozen

Meat inspection - and by extension, food safety - were back in the headlines last week. And, once again, you've got to wonder what it is that government regulators, consumers and farmers are getting out of the nation's inspection system.

Before announcing that it was going out of business Topps Meat recalled 21.7 million pounds of frozen ground beef after 27 people became ill as a result of eating some that was contaminated with our old friend E. coli.

You can read the complete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | kevin d weeks | seriously good | spot-on | food safety | recalls | farm bill

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Caution: Swallowing Hazard

It may be a statistical accident that in the past 12 months we've had three large and unrelated cases of e-Coli contamination. Pure happenstance that a Georgia peanut butter plant was shipping peanut butter contaminated with salmonella... A mere fluke that gluten contaminated with melamine has shown up ... in food fed to pigs and chickens. But I don't think so.

Read the compete article at Spot-On.

Technorati: Food | essay | food column | food commentary| spot-on | food safety

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