A small but important editorial in the New York Times today:
The House has voted to cut $106 million from the president’s request for $1.036 billion for meat inspections by the Department of Agriculture. That money would help pay for the inspectors who oversee the 6,300 plants that process the nation’s meat and poultry supply.
To ensure the safety of these products, inspectors must be on site at all times. If they’re not, the plant must stop work. House Democrats say the budget cuts would require 37 to 40 furlough days for many of the 8,600 inspectors. Even a conservative estimate would put the loss of meat and poultry production at about $11 billion over the next seven months — a very large dent in the $177 billion annual business. It could also make a large dent in Americans’ household budgets, as reduced supplies drive up costs.
After recent problems with tainted peanut butter, spinach, nuts and eggs, Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration new authority and responsibility to monitor food safety. The House’s $129 million cut would seriously impede its ability to do that job, putting the health of American consumers at risk. We are all for savings, but these proposed cuts make no sense at all.
My Uncle Vernon passes along a little something in his e-mails to me each day. A lot of times, it's just a joke or two, but today's offering is worth passing along to you (with a bit of editing to make it more food-oriented and more about healthful eating - but if you really want the Snickers bar and apple dessert recipe, click on the comments section below, leave a message, and I'll post it tomorrow).
Peel a banana from the bottom and you won't have to pick the little "stringy things" off of it. That's how the primates do it.
Take your bananas apart when you get home from the store. If you leave them connected at the stem, they ripen faster.
Store chunk cheese in aluminum foil. It will stay fresh much longer and not mold.
Peppers with 3 bumps on the bottom are sweeter and better for eating. Peppers with 4 bumps on the bottom are firmer and better for cooking.
Add garlic immediately to a recipe if you want a light taste of garlic and at the end of the recipe if your want a stronger taste of garlic.
Heat up leftover pizza in a nonstick skillet on top of the stove, set heat to med-low and heat till warm. This keeps the crust crispy. No soggy micro pizza.
Put cooked egg yolks in a zip-seal bag. Seal, mash till they are all broken up. Add remainder of ingredients, reseal, keep mashing it up mixing thoroughly, cut the tip of the baggy, squeeze mixture into egg. Just throw bag away when done - easy clean up. When you buy a container of cake frosting from the store, whip it with your mixer for a few minutes. You can double it in size. You get to frost more cake/cupcakes with the same amount. You also eat less sugar and calories per serving.
(Note from Lori K: If you buy natural peanut butter and can't seem to stir it well enough to mix the oil and the solids, a whirl around in the food processor for a few seconds will keep it mixed and easy to spread once it's in the fridge.)
Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill with hot water. Dump out the hot water, but don't dry cup. Next, add your ingredient, such as peanut butter, and watch how easily it comes right out.
To get rid of pesky fruit flies, take a small glass, fill it 1/2" with apple cider vinegar and 2 drops of dishwashing liquid; mix well. You will find those flies drawn to the cup and gone forever!
Like a lot of folks who prefer scientific curiosity to spreading alarm or sticking one's head in the sand, I've been reading a lot on salmonella lately. The Internet is indeed a boon and a curse. Some of the most popular hits contain the most appalling ignorance, such as calling salmonella a virus; one top hit is the Yahoo Answers, where someone asked if a pizza oven can kill salmonella and the answer voted "best answer" was "no..."
As far as the sites go, there's a lot of good info on salmonella.org, although the two San Diego State researchers who work on it emphasize that they are not medical doctors and to go see one if you have symptoms.
As Margie Lee, a microbiologist at UGA's College of Veterinary Medicine, was quoted in a University of Georgia Research Magazine article a while back:
Salmonella infections also have been associated with vegetables. "Because of organic gardening, people use manure," she said, "And a lot of it hasn't been composted," which kills most types of salmonellae. Each year, there are 23 million reported cases of illness caused by all food-borne bacteria, and of these, 9,000 are fatal. Of those, salmonella is the least threatening, Lee said. Even though people become sick from salmonella poisoning, it rarely becomes deadly. "[Salmonella] doesn't merit the public's fear. Car accidents kill more people," Lee said. "You have to look at what is really lost, and on the whole, it's seldom life." But since the genetic markers that indicate the deadly strain of the bacteria are not even visible under a microscope, people should play it safe. "Cook your chicken and eggs well," Lee said. "That's the bottom line."
Thank God for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., for keeping the heat on the Peanut Corporation of America. In doing so, he is compelling all of us to think about what blind faith we engage in every time we open a bag or box of processed food.
According to a story in The Washington Post today, Kellogg and other companies that bought products from PCA told lawmakers Friday that unlike Nestlé, they did not perform their own inspections. Instead, they relied on third-party audits common in the U.S. food industry:
David Mackay, Kellogg's chief executive, said his company trusted audits performed by the American Institute of Baking International, the biggest food-inspection firm in the country. The institute conducted scheduled inspections of PCA's facilities and never flagged serious problems. It issued a "certificate of achievement" and a "superior" rating last August, when PCA was getting results from internal laboratory tests that revealed a salmonella problem in its plant in Blakely, Ga., congressional investigators said.
"They gave PCA glowing reviews," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "The company was selected by PCA, paid by PCA, and realized that if they didn't give PCA a glowing review, they were not going to get hired again.
"They gave PCA a certificate of achievement," added Waxman, who held up the certificate in one hand and with the other waved a photograph, taken by federal investigators, of dead rodents inside a PCA facility. "How do you have a company that looks like this getting a certificate of achievement? . . . It really makes you think there must be something wrong."
It's too bad that other large conglomerates, who obviously only had the bottom line in their sights, didn't do what Nestlé did and send their own inspectors out for a check of the facilities.
It sounds like there was plenty of chances to stop the bad peanut butter from spreading, but at every juncture, profit won out over prevention. And a lot of innocent people paid the price.
I hope that more videos of these hearings make it out into the public domain, so us non-CSPAN junkies can see our public officials in action. The video below was taken earlier in the hearings.
I turn my blog over today to the lead editorial in the New York Times today, an excellent commentary on the issue of food safety.
Dangerous Food
The more investigators look into the latest food-safety scandal involving the Peanut Corporation of America, the worse it gets. It now appears that as many as nine people have died and 19,000 have been sickened after eating cookies, crackers or institutional peanut butter tainted with salmonella from a plant in Georgia owned by the company.
At a charged Congressional hearing last week, company executives refused to answer questions on the advice of their attorneys, but the questions told much of the story. “The food poisoning of people — is that just a cost of doing business?” one congressman asked. When another angrily asked the company’s president if he would like to try some of the recalled products, he refused.
The company is facing a criminal inquiry and has now filed for bankruptcy court protection. But it would be a mistake to view this as “an unconscionable act by one manufacturer,” as an official from the American Peanut Council, the industry’s trade association, said.
While most successful food producers are far more diligent — big name-brand peanut butter is considered safe, for example — American consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years. Congress and the Obama administration must finally make food safety a serious priority.
The new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, is talking about creating “a modern, unified food-safety agency capable of reducing the risk of food-borne illness.” Many thoughtful food-safety experts have been calling for such an approach for years. Today’s patchwork system requires frozen pizzas to be inspected by two agencies: one if they’re cheese and another if they’re pepperoni.
A one-stop agency could take time in Washington. Until then, Mr. Vilsack should look at ways to strengthen current federal and state systems for avoiding food hazards. Congress needs to find more money for inspectors, especially at the Food and Drug Administration.
The F.D.A. also should have the authority to recall tainted food quickly, establish strict federal standards on cleanliness and create an advanced system for tracking foods so that any tainted products can be culled from the food supply more quickly. Finally, Congress should require a more efficient way to test food products and give government food inspectors the authority to review those results more easily.
What was particularly galling about the latest recall was how federal inspectors had to threaten to use anti-terrorism laws to finally gain access to the Peanut Corporation of America’s testing reports. Those reports showed how samples were re-tested if they were contaminated and how some products were shipped even before the tests showing salmonella had come in.
President Obama promised during the campaign to create a government that does a better job of protecting the American consumer. The nation’s vulnerable food supply is a healthy place to start.
No jars of peanut butter on the grocery shelves have been affected, but the recall of the salmonella-tainted product made by Peanut Corp. of America continues to plague consumers. Earlier this week, Kellogg pulled some Keebler crackers from store shelves as a precaution. But the Food and Drug Administration warns that their investigation is still in its early stages and new cases of poisoning are being reported. According to Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's food safety center, "This is a very active investigation, but we don't yet have the data to provide consumers with specifics about what brands or products they should avoid."
For people with weakened immune systems, the elderly and children, this is not good news. To be extra safe, it would be wise to pass on any processed food that has peanut butter as an ingredient. Anything you make that uses peanut butter from the jar is probably OK, but if you have any doubts, you can bring an empty jar (weigh it before filling) and grind the peanuts yourself at many health food stores, including Whole Foods.
The peanut butter salmonella outbreak has sickened more than 400 people across the country and is believed to have contributed to the deaths of three people. The company that distributed the tainted peanut butter recalled it earlier this week, saying that the outbreak was conclusively linked to its product.
Salmonella typhimurium, the type implicated in the national outbreak, is only one of the many strains of the deadly bacteria. Epidemiologists estimate there are about 2,500 types of salmonella.
An Ohio peanut butter distributor issued a voluntary recall Saturday for two brands of peanut butter as health officials continue the search for the source of a salmonella outbreak that has been reported in 42 states.
Officials from the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture issued a product warning Friday after preliminary laboratory testing indicated the presence of salmonella in a container of creamy peanut butter from King Nut, according to published reports.
Late Saturday, King Nut Companies of Solon, Ohio, announced it had issued a recall of all peanut butter distributed under its label and manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America, of Lynchburg, Va. The company also recalled its distribution of Parnell's Pride peanut butter, which is also made by Peanut Corporation, according to a prepared statement by King Nut.
