Is it in the tomatoes? The peppers? Perhaps the cilantro? Apparently, your guess of a random salsa ingredient may be as good as the FDA’s. Over 1000 cases of the recent salmonella strain have been reported while the hunt for the source continues.

The lack of progress and the inability to contain the spread of this bacterium for over a month now reveals the frightening state of the American food industry’s procedures and the Federal Government's food inspection system. Instead of requesting the additional funds needed to hire more FDA food inspectors, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt would like to turn more of the inspection responsibilities over to the industry so that it can police itself.

This far-reaching problem not only threatens the health of citizens but that of the entire nation. It has resulted in significant losses to the economy. With the sinking of tomato sales, many farmers even resorted to allowing their crops to rot in order to save the money they would have otherwise spent in harvesting them for probably nothing.

''What Hurricane Katrina was to FEMA, this salmonella outbreak is going to be to the FDA,'' said one tomato grower.

Deplorably, this outbreak isn’t surprising. According to the CDC, illnesses caused by tainted food affect close to a quarter of the country’s population each year. Sick to your stomach yet?

This recent scare only further implicates the obvious and urgent need for action in order to improve the systems that are supposed to ensure our food’s safety. Read more about the issue here.

Have you cut tomatoes and peppers from your diet? Personally, I've been buying only local peppers and cherry or grape tomatoes. I look forward to a time where we can once again enjoy salsa without thinking about this nasty little thing called salmonella. Each of us can help bring that day closer: tell the FDA that it's long overdue for a system makeover.

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For those of you who plan to serve up seafood, there are a number of things for you to consider as well. Much of the seafood available in the United States is imported from foreign, industrial aquaculture farms. Bacteria, viruses and parasites thrive in the unsanitary conditions that often characterize these farms, such that some imported fish have been described as “filthy” by inspectors, with Salmonella and other contaminants not uncommon. Where chemicals and antibiotics (many of which have been outlawed in the United States) are applied in an attempt to eliminate the disease-causing agents, harmful residues can accumulate in the flesh. To protect yourself and your guests, ask your grocers where the product is from and how it was produced. Generally, the best bet is to opt for domestic, wild fish. A particularly healthy and sustainable option is U.S. troll-caught Mahi Mahi. If you are set on having salmon, choose U.S. wild Pacific salmon over Atlantic/farmed salmon. Domestic halibut, whiting, and tilapia are also good choices. If shellfish is on your menu, again stick to products from the United States.

Now undoubtedly you will need something to drink. But pass up the bottled water and instead treat your guests to tap water (if you will not be near a tap, fill up a cooler before you leave and take it with you). Bottled water is not safer than tap water; in fact, tap water is better regulated and tested more frequently. True, there may be impurities and the mineral content may not be to your liking, but these issues can be easily fixed with a simple filter. Bottled water creates unnecessary garbage and pollution, plus it is expensive (it costs more per unit volume than gas). So save your money or spend it instead on that fancy cake you’ve been eying.

So remember, when it comes to food, the bottom line is to cook meats and eggs to appropriate temperatures and choose local, sustainably-produced products. Not only will you be supporting local producers, you will also be protecting your safety and the environment. For resources and more information, consult the Eat Well Guide. And check out our water filtration guide to learn how to serve the best water in town, straight from your tap.
Have a good Fourth!

There’s a new hazard to watch out for when purchasing your carne—at least if you like it a little on the raro side.

Some of the steak sold in stores is now mechanically tenderized. This means machines are used to tenderize the meat using needles, which puncture the surface of the meat. Because of this puncturing of the surface, E. coli bacteria present on the outside of the meat can be driven inside. Then, if the internal temperature of the meat doesn’t reach the required safe temp—160 degrees—the bacteria can survive. This means that if your steak has been mechanically tenderized, it is not safe to eat it rare.

Food safety advice, even from official channels, tends to omit this. A question posed to Karen, the USDA’s Food Safety Information Service’s automated response system virtual representative, resulted in cooking advice indicating that rare steak is just fine. A little digging reveals this more appropriate piece of advice:

Cook steaks and roasts that have been tenderized, boned, rolled, etc., to an internal temperature of 160 °F.

There is no labeling that informs consumers of whether their meat has been mechanically tenderized. So before you dream of juicy grilled meat at your relaxing summer barbecue, ask your butcher if the cuts of meat you’re admiring have been tenderized or not.

And then enjoy your barbecue.

-Erica Schuetz & Jen Mueller
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- Darcy White
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This means Wegmans is telling consumers that irradiated beef doesn’t have to be cooked to 160 degrees, which contradicts the U.S. Department of Agriculture guidance that ALL ground beef should be cooked to that temperature. Take a glance at the photo in the recipe…does that burger look cooked to you?

This is not the first time Wegmans grocery stores has used misleading advertising about the safety of undercooked irradiated meat. Despite being reprimanded by the USDA last year for improperly telling consumers they could undercook irradiated meat, Wegmans is still on a mission to convince consumers that irradiation is the silver bullet for foodborne illness.

In a recent store flyer, Wegmans told customers that irradiated beef is "insurance against…E. coli." But irradiating meat does not necessarily kill all of the bacteria, nor does it sterilize the meat. There is also still a chance of cross-contamination from handling the meat in the processing plant or even in your own kitchen. Furthermore, food irradiation, a process whereby food is exposed to gamma rays, x-rays, or electron-beams to kill off bacteria, creates its own problems. Recent studies have shown that irradiating food may promote cancer development, cause genetic damage, and deplete vitamins.

Despite all of the evidence against the safety of irradiation, Wegmans grocery store has been one of its most vocal supporters, and has been pushing the technology any way they can. You can tell Wegmans to stop misinforming the public about the safety of irradiated beef by signing a letter to the store.

And next time you’re at a backyard BBQ, ask where your meat’s from and make sure it’s cooked properly.

Hopefully your meal won’t be moving on your plate.

Why is the USDA so determined to allow this trade? Are we facing a national chicken deficit? On the contrary, the United States has been producing too much chicken. The real reason seems to lie in the interests of the meat industry. It is thought that accepting Chinese poultry is an important prerequisite to China opening its markets to U.S. beef and pork.

While it is important that we stay on good terms with China, this should not happen at the expense of your safety. Sign our petition to tell Congress not to import Chinese Chicken!

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So what are Smithfield facilities doing to prove their dedication to environmental stewardship? According to Smithfield’s website, the corporation has been implementing programs to improve conservation, reduce emissions, and investigate alternative energy sources. That all sounds great, but curiosity drove me to review Food & Water Watch’s 2008 report, The Trouble With Smithfield: A Corporate Profile, for more specifics.

In the report, I learned that the corporation has a multitude of environmental achievements, just not all positive. Perhaps the company’s factory farms are being honored for their practice of storing hog waste in huge lagoons, which only overflow or leak occasionally, smothering nearby rivers and streams and killing millions of fish. Or maybe it is the failure of slaughterhouses to properly treat effluent, allowing the entire watershed to benefit from fecal coliforms and phosphorus, among other contaminants. A practice that I found particularly noteworthy is their efforts to share hogs’ waste and associated fumes with neighboring communities –the waste can even be potent enough to be enjoyed by pilots flying at an elevation of up to 3,000 feet!

Now you may be wondering, as am I, how Smithfield facilities earned this award. I suppose it is possible that they have drastically changed their ways since our report… Or, the standards being used to give the award aren’t exactly the same as my standards for good environmental performance.

- Darcy White
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Today, almost half of the world’s population grows food for their families and communities. They grow staples and a mix of diverse crops. They have developed their own seed varieties, fertilizers, and pest management. They live in communities where the concept of the commons is strong, resulting in shared seeds, water, and labor. Unfortunately, this kind of local self-sufficiency is scorned by multinational corporations and the institutions they influence.

Jayson Cainglet, a Filipino activist working to stop irradiation and save family farming in the Philippines, spoke about this in the new book Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food: “Irradiation, if widely adopted, will facilitate this type of food production. Irradiation is designed to cover up inherent problems in production methods that agribusiness employs, but small-scale farms do not rely on these technologies.”

-Robert Schubert
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The next idea, presented by Dr. Joseph Sebranek, professor in the Department of Animal Science at Iowa State University, Ames, IA, on October 30, 2007 before the House Agriculture Committee, is to combine this technology with irradiation—a process that may be very harmful. When meat is irradiated, it can turn an unappetizing color—purplish or even greenish. But pump some CO in there, and meat is back to cherry-red—eliminating one indicator that allows consumers to steer clear of meat that’s been zapped.

The combination of these two technologies is the ultimate in treating the symptoms instead of the problem—masking bad meat with one techno-fix after another, rather than simply producing cleaner food. And get this—between the two, we can now extend the meat’s shelf life to… drumroll please… 38 days. Who would want to eat a cut of meat that’s well over a month old? And the joke is that even after those 38 days after over, the meat will remain red—so we’ve got to rely on grocery chains to take perfectly good-looking meat off their shelves.

Gross.

-Erica Schuetz
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For three intense days, a Food & Water Watch team of interns, fellows and staff crammed into a conference room for a marathon summer session of organizing training. Some report, were it not for the endless supply of coffee, tea and bagels --supplemented by the occasional Subway, Chipotle or Pasha falafel pick-me-up -- they would have been in way over their strategizing heads.

The first day of training included a broad overview of grassroots organizing and issue briefings from the food, water, and fish teams. While a nine-hour day of organizing training could be much like waiting for an S2 bus and simultaneously watching paint dry (not that we’ve done that or anything), it turns out that when you gather a bunch of highly motivated, impassioned people together the energy flows like delicious, federally-funded, publicly-owned tap water.

If it wasn’t for Sarah Alexander and Annie Weinberg’s hard work and enthusiasm (we're not sure if they ate or slept last week to be honest), we could never have hoped to be as productive as we were or as well-prepared as we are now.

And thanks to Erin Greenfield and Erica Schuetz from the communications team, we learned how to not make cheesy headlines like the one seen above.

The second and third days of training were led by Jackie Kendall from the Midwest Academy. On these days we were not only instructed in such actions as petitioning and calling reporters, but we were actually sent live into the lion’s den (the genetically-altered, factory-farmed, super-vindictive kind) by calling reporters to pitch a media event and post-carding in Dupont Circle to talk to passersby about cloned animals in the American food supply.

In spite of our initial apprehensions, this tactic proved to be a realistic preparation for which we are grateful.

Jackie’s anecdotes and wealth of knowledge were invaluable to the training experience.

Thanks to the training, the interns and field fellows from different projects and states were able to get to know each other much better, creating a real Food & Water Watch summer team. And we all know that you can’t spell “team” without M-E-A-T (the non-irradiated, carbon-monoxide free version)!

The Intern Nook

Food & Water Watch interns Julie Mierwa, Siobhan Thomas-Smith, Eric Hoffman, Sally Goodman are among the organizers recently trained and they are now ready for action.

The 3,000 adult residents of the Felton Water District organized for six years against California American Water, a subsidiary of American Water Works, which itself is part of German energy giant RWE.

Feltonites offered to buy the water system, but got rebuffed big time: RWE leadership stated, flatly, that the system was not for sale at any price and expressed its determination to oppose all public acquisition efforts so that Felton did not start a domino effect of citizens taking control of their water resources.

This was despite the fact that RWE was losing money on its U.S. water investments and wanted out. Even its attempt to unload American Water has been a big flop.

Finally, less than a week to go before a jury was to decide how much Felton needed to pay the company to take the system through eminent domain, Cal-AM and RWE negotiated a sale. San Lorenzo Valley Water District will buy the water system for $10.5 million and manage it for the Felton community.

Jim Mosher, one of the lawyers representing Felton FLOW – Friends of Locally Owned Water – told Food & Water Watch: “We fought off every one of Cal-Am’s tactics to derail the process. But in the end, our position was completely vindicated.”

Much more about this at “The Fight for Public Water in Felton, California.

Send a high-five to the Felton activists.

Robert Schubert
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As you may know from yesterday’s blog, FDA is considering relaxing rules on irradiation, lifting labeling requirements or substituting the word “pasteurized.” The reason why they want to do this, though, is where the gag factor comes in. It’s so you can eat poo.

In the factory-farm meat production model, faster is always better. High production is the whole goal, so little things like sanitation and animal welfare can sometimes fall by the wayside. Remember that disturbing video the Humane Society put out a few months ago, leading to the massive Hallmark-Westland beef recall? When a “downer” cow is pushed and dragged across the manure-covered floor of a facility before going to slaughter, and is possibly cut and injured, the resulting meat is contaminated with fecal matter, vomit, pus… you get the picture. The health result of this, also, is pretty much as gross as you’d imagine.

It would seem clear that the solution should begin right there in the plant, with improving conditions. But there’s another option—one that some industry players favor because it doesn’t threaten the crank-'em-out factory-farm model. Food irradiation kills most bacteria—so you don’t have to make sure the meat is clean. Just sterilize that poo! Then we can just eat it. Yum!

In addition to likely being dirty, irradiated meat contains some chemicals that materialize during the irradiation process. The scariest substances, known as 2-ACBs (short for 2-alkylcyclobutanones, if you were wondering), have been linked to colon cancer, and have never been found anywhere in the world outside of irradiated meat. They’re formed when fat is exposed to radiation, and have been definitively identified in irradiated beef, chicken, pork, lamb, eggs, peanuts, salmon, mangoes, papayas, and more. FDA has never studied the potential health hazards of 2-ACBs, and scientists don’t know how the body metabolizes them. And that’s just one substance. Just, you might say, a taste of irradiation’s goodness…

Every story needs a moral, and this time it’s more like one of those old-school warning-style fairy tales. Basically, irradiating dirty meat doesn’t make it clean, and can even add bonus nasties that you’ve never even heard of. But we hate to leave you simply with, “and then the wolf gobbled her up.” There is, as always, our power as consumers. Since we currently have labeling for irradiated foods, we can make informed choices about the food we choose to purchase. And—for now—we can use our eyesight! More on this next time…

-Erica Schuetz
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This is an understandable—and common—misperception. Most Americans today don’t know what food irradiation actually is. This is due in part to the success of activists, who have prevented the technology from becoming widely commercialized, and in part to industry hype that aims to keep people in the dark about what exactly happens to their food.

So to clarify: Hauter’s book explains that the distinction between irradiation and the types of radiation in microwaves, radio waves, infrared light, and visible light is that irradiation uses ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiation can cause molecules to vibrate and heat up—that’s what makes microwaves good for leftovers. But ionizing radiation has enough energy to blow apart molecules, which then go careening into other molecules, knocking them apart, till they are all flying around like crazy and can combine into new types of matter (more on this later in the week). When people are exposed to ionizing radiation, that same energy can explode DNA molecules, leading to leukemia and other types of cancer.

When food is exposed to ionizing radiation, it doesn’t hold up too well either. Irradiation can wilt and discolor food, and cause it to smell and taste nasty—apparently comparisons have been made to "burned feathers" and "wet dog." Mmmmm. Nutritionally, irradiation is also a disaster, destroying up to 91% of Vitamin E, 90% of Vitamin C, 50% of Vitamin A, and 95% of Vitamin B1. So why would we do it?

The motivation for irradiating is industry-driven. Irradiation allows food producers to store food longer, ship it farther, and avoid cleaning up dirty conditions at food production facilities. This translates for consumers simply as older food, fewer vitamins, and continued risk of foodborne illness. Irradiation is ineffective against mad cow disease and several other threatening pathogens, so irradiating instead of improving sanitation at plants is simply paying lip service to food safety.

But it won’t kill you…right? Actually, we don’t know. There just isn’t enough research. While there isn’t conclusive evidence that eating irradiated foods could have the same effects as being exposed to radiation itself, some studies seem to suggest it. Experiments on lab animals fed irradiated foods have shown ruptured hearts, sterility, blindness, internal bleeding, cancer, tumors, stillbirths, mutations, organ damage, immune system failure, stunted growth, and a host of other problems. Of course, conflicting studies exist that mysteriously show irradiated food as having no health effects whatsoever. So we’re not saying it will kill you…just that it might. But isn’t that bad enough?

Currently, it’s possible to partially avoid irradiated foods. Single-ingredient foods, like fruits or cuts of meat, must be labeled with the flower-like “radura” symbol to show they’ve been irradiated, and are also more costly than their non-irradiated counterparts. But ingredients in prepared food can be irradiated without disclosure, and over 95 million pounds of spices are already irradiated annually in the US. Plus, the FDA is now considering a decision to futher loosen labeling requirements on irradiated food, allowing it to be labeled as “pasteurized” in some cases, and in other cases to be sold without any labeling at all.

So, will we soon be facing supermarket shelves stocked completely with zapped foods? Not if we can help it. It’s due in large part to consumer rejection of irradiated food till now that the technology isn’t more mainstream already. And we, as consumers, can continue to stand up for our right to safe foods—not zapped foods. And check back tomorrow for more on irradiation and its consequences.

-Erica Schuetz
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