It's Called "Swine" Flu For A Reason

Notice that the government doesn't want you to call it swine flu any more? They're calling it the H1N1 virus. Partly that's because they don't want you to stop buying pork. But also it's to take the heat off our corporate pork producers, and off a U.S. company as the probable origin of the swine flu. A gigantic Smithfield Company factory farm in Mexico is the ground zero of swine flu. Read the Rolling Stone article, below, at your own risk, because you may never eat pork again after you read it.

grist.com: When pigs flu
Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms

Rolling Stone: Boss Hog
America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

White House Garden

Excellent news: The Obamas have announced that they will be planting an organic garden at the White House.

Today, first lady Michelle Obama will host a groundbreaking for a White House kitchen garden on the South Lawn. She will be joined by students from Bancroft Elementary in Northwest Washington, , whose participation in the project will continue past today, as they help with planting in the coming weeks and harvesting later this year.

The 1,100-square-foot garden will include 55 kinds of vegetables, including peppers, spinach and, yes, arugula. (The selection is a wish list put together by White House chefs.) There will also be berries, herbs and two hives for honey that will be tended by a White House carpenter who is also a beekeeper. The chefs will use the produce to feed the first family, as well as for state dinners and other official events.

The White House will use organic seedlings, as well as organic fertilizers and organic insect repellents. The garden will be near the tennis courts and be visible to passersby on the street. The whole Obama family will be involved in tending the garden, White House spokeswoman Katie McCormick Lelyveld said.

WaPo: Shovel-Ready Project: A White House Garden

Look for Country of Origin Labeling at the Grocery Store

The Consumerist: COOL
Country Of Origin Labeling Officially Begins Today

President Obama's Weekly Web Address

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
_______________________________________________________________________________
EMBARGOED UNTIL 6:00 AM ET SATURDAY, March 14, 2009

WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Barack Obama Announces Key FDA Appointments and Tougher Food Safety Measures


WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Barack Obama announced the appointments of Dr. Margaret Hamburg as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein as the Principal Deputy Commissioner, as well as the creation of a new Food Safety Working Group. This Food Safety Working Group will be chaired by the Secretaries of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture and it will coordinate with other agencies and senior officials to advise the President on improving coordination throughout the government, examining and upgrading food safety laws, and enforcing laws that will keep the American people safe.

In addition, the President also announced two other measures to protect the American people. The Department of Agriculture will close a loophole to prevent diseased cows from entering the food supply. And, the government will invest in the FDA to substantially increase the number of food inspectors and modernize food safety labs.


President Obama announced his appointments of the following individuals today:

Margaret "Peggy" Hamburg
Dr. Hamburg is a nationally and internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, and an authority on global health, public health systems, infectious disease, bioterrorism and emergency preparedness. She served as the Nuclear Threat Initiative's founding Vice President for the Biological Program. Before joining NTI, she was the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to this, she served for six years as the Commissioner of Health for the City of New York and as the Assistant Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.

Joshua "Josh" Sharfstein
Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein is Commissioner of Health for the City of Baltimore. He also serves as chair of the board of four affiliated nonprofit agencies. He has been recognized as a national leader for his efforts to protect children from unsafe jewelry and over-the-counter medication, and ensuring Americans with disabilities have access to prescription drugs. He is a member of the Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice of the Institute of Medicine.

The full audio of the address is HERE. The video can be viewed online at www.whitehouse.gov.



Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Washington, DC

I’ve often said that I don’t believe government has the answer to every problem or that it can do all things for all people. We are a nation built on the strength of individual initiative. But there are certain things that we can’t do on our own. There are certain things only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and don’t cause us harm. That is the mission of our Food and Drug Administration and it is a mission shared by our Department of Agriculture, and a variety of other agencies and offices at just about every level of government.

The men and women who inspect our foods and test the safety of our medicines are chemists and physicians, veterinarians and pharmacists. It is because of the work they do each and every day that the United States is one of the safest places in the world to buy groceries at a supermarket or pills at a drugstore. Unlike citizens of so many other countries, Americans can trust that there is a strong system in place to ensure that the medications we give our children will help them get better, not make them sick; and that a family dinner won’t end in a trip to the doctor’s office.

But in recent years, we’ve seen a number of problems with the food making its way to our kitchen tables. In 2006, it was contaminated spinach. In 2008, it was salmonella in peppers and possibly tomatoes. And just this year, bad peanut products led to hundreds of illnesses and cost nine people their lives – a painful reminder of how tragic the consequences can be when food producers act irresponsibly and government is unable to do its job. Worse, these incidents reflect a troubling trend that’s seen the average number of outbreaks from contaminated produce and other foods grow to nearly 350 a year – up from 100 a year in the early 1990s.

Part of the reason is that many of the laws and regulations governing food safety in America have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt. It’s also because our system of inspection and enforcement is spread out so widely among so many people that it’s difficult for different parts of our government to share information, work together, and solve problems. And it’s also because the FDA has been underfunded and understaffed in recent years, leaving the agency with the resources to inspect just 7,000 of our 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses each year. That means roughly 95% of them go uninspected.

That is a hazard to public health. It is unacceptable. And it will change under the leadership of Dr. Margaret Hamburg, whom I am appointing today as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. From her research on infectious disease at the National Institutes of Health to her work on public health at the Department of Health and Human Services to her leadership on biodefense at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Dr. Hamburg brings to this vital position not only a reputation of integrity but a record of achievement in making Americans safer and more secure. Dr. Hamburg was one of the youngest people ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. And her two children have a unique distinction of their own. Their birth certificates feature her name twice – once as their mother, and once as New York City Health Commissioner. In that role, Dr. Hamburg brought a new life to a demoralized agency, leading an internationally-recognized initiative that cut the tuberculosis rate by nearly half, and overseeing food safety in our nation’s largest city.

Joining her as Principal Deputy Commissioner will be Dr. Joshua Sharfstein. As Baltimore’s Health Commissioner, Dr. Sharfstein has been recognized as a national leader for his efforts to protect children from unsafe over-the-counter cough and cold medications. And he’s designed an award-winning program to ensure that Americans with disabilities had access to prescription drugs.

Their critical work – and the critical work of the FDA they lead – will be part of a larger effort taken up by a new Food Safety Working Group I am creating. This Working Group will bring together cabinet secretaries and senior officials to advise me on how we can upgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century; foster coordination throughout government; and ensure that we are not just designing laws that will keep the American people safe, but enforcing them. And I expect this group to report back to me with recommendations as soon as possible.

As part of our commitment to public health, our Agriculture Department is closing a loophole in the system to ensure that diseased cows don’t find their way into the food supply. And we are also strengthening our food safety system and modernizing our labs with a billion dollar investment, a portion of which will go toward significantly increasing the number of food inspectors, helping ensure that the FDA has the staff and support they need to protect the food we eat.

In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your President, but as a parent. When I heard peanut products were being contaminated earlier this year, I immediately thought of my 7-year old daughter, Sasha, who has peanut butter sandwiches for lunch probably three times a week. No parent should have to worry that their child is going to get sick from their lunch. Just as no family should have to worry that the medicines they buy will cause them harm. Protecting the safety of our food and drugs is one of the most fundamental responsibilities government has, and, with the outstanding team I am announcing today, it is a responsibility that I intend to uphold in the months and years to come.

Thank you.

Ode to Trader Joe's

Another Reason to Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup

It's contaminated with mercury.

[M]any foods sweetened with HFCS contain mercury, left as a residue in the production of caustic soda, a key ingredient in HFCS. And worst of all, the FDA and the industry have known about this potential toxin and has continued serving it up since at least 2005.

[]

A second study [] tested products directly from the supermarket. One in three tested positive for mercury residue. These included products like Smucker's Strawberry Jelly, Hunt's Tomato Ketchup, Hershey's Chocolate Syrup, Nutra Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars, Pop-Tarts Frosted Blueberry and Coca-Cola Classic.

How to Buy Sustainable Fish

Look for the label of the Marine Stewardship Council. From their website;

Sustainable fishing

Throughout the world there are fisheries using good management practices to safeguard jobs, secure fish stocks for the future and help to protect the marine environment. At the Marine Stewardship Council, we believe that sustainable fishing is a powerful solution. We want to see well managed fisheries recognised and rewarded, and we want to encourage more fisheries to join them. Through our certification and ecolabelling program we seek to reverse the decline of fish stocks, safeguard livelihoods and deliver improvements in marine conservation worldwide. Our blue ecolabel makes it easy for everyone to make the best environmental choice in seafood.

I saw this at The Green Miles, which also links to the Monterey Bay Aquarium pocket seafood guide.

Sustainable Food Shopping Video

public.resource.org: Eastern Market


HuffPo: DIY -- Sustainable Food Shopping Video

Good basic ideas on how to shop sustainably.

Farmed Salmon Killing Wild Salmon

Young salmon infested with sea lice. Adult salmon can generally live with the lice, but wild juveniles migrating out to sea are particularly vulnerable because they are small and thin-skinned.
Alexandra Morton - Salmon Coast Field Station

Remember this the next time you are tempted by that pasty pink stuff in the grocery case:

WaPo: Salmon Farming May Doom Wild Populations, Study Says

Good Reads

SI Neg. 77-10004. Date: 1977...Mammoth, Ice Age Hall, National Museum of Natural History ..Credit: Chip Clark (Smithsonian Institution)
flickr
I'm on the road today, so here's a sampling of online reads:

Boston Globe: Doctor blogs about his own malpractice trial; opposing lawyer finds out, case settles. Arrogant dummy.

New York Times: Greywater Guerrillas in California reusing household water with Rube Goldberg contraptions. My favorite part of the article is on page two: "Two years later, as the Guerrilla Greywater Girls (at the time, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine was a woman) they published a “Guide to Water,” a crude sheaf of photocopies...." So California.

The guy Rachel Paulose replaced as USAttorney for the District of Minnesota, Tom Heffelfinger? The LATimes reports that he was ousted because he was too vigilant in protecting the right of Native Americans to vote.

Digby on the latest suicide at Guantanamo: It's a terrorist attack! Asymetrical PR!

From McClatchy, Joe Lieberman gets a message from the troops he visited in Iraq: "We don't feel like we're making any progress." Joe Lieberman responded "La la la, I can't hear you." Well, not really, but he may as well: "I think it's important we don't lose our will," he said. "To pull out would be a disaster."

From the Consumerist, a comparison of fast food salads v. fast food burgers. Go ahead, have the burger, it's healthier.

No Chinese, Please

Smithsonian neg#77-1965 Neon Sign Display in A Nation of Nations at Museum of American History. SI photo by Dane A. Penland
Big Food has been importing cheap food and food "ingredients" from China. There's no FDA in China, and our own FDA barely inspects a fraction of the foodstuffs coming in to this country. The FDA has even been sending tainted products back, rather than destroy them; the producers just send 'em in again. And probably succeed most of the time, as so little is actually inspected, just 0.9% in 2006. I'm writing to my Congressman today in favor of a mandatory label on food products listing country or countries of origin.

litbrit at Shakesville: It's Time For America To Legislate Mandatory Country Of Origin Labels

WaPo: Tainted Chinese Imports Common
In Four Months, FDA Refused 298 Shipments

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught -- many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

NYTimes: Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama Is Believed to Be From China

International Herald Tribune (reprinted from the Boston Globe): U.S. proposal to allow chicken imports from China raises health concerns

Chicago Tribune: Big holes frustrate food import safety net
China trade reveals gaps in FDA system

Infections

Today's Washington Post has an article about the antibiotic-resistant infections sweeping the nations' hospitals. This made me think of Steve Gilliard of the News Blog, who has suffered a relapse in his fight to get out of the hospital and get well. He was already weak from serious kidney and heart problems; now he has a system-wide infection and can only be visited by people in what his friend Jen calls "bunnysuits". Steve was the first 'big' blogger ever to link to this site, so we have a special place in our heart for him and pray for his recovery.

It also made me think about a factor not mentioned in the article, Big Food's aggressive use of antibiotics in the production of meat. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70% -- seventy percent! -- of the antibiotics used in this country are used on animals being fattened for slaughter:

It is livestock producers, however, who use the vast majority of antibiotics produced in the United States. An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this country are used for nontherapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on large-scale confinement facilities known as "factory farms." This translates to about 25 million pounds of antibiotics and related drugs fed every year to livestock for nontherapeutic purposes—almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease.

Another reason to become a vegetarian.


1999 Guardian (uk) series: Antibiotics in our food

Time: Playing Chicken With Our Antibiotics
Overtreatment is creating dangerously resistant germs (2002)

Center for Science in the Public Interest: Antibiotic Resistance Project

Food Blogging

I never thought I'd become a food blogger, but so many stories have food in them today.

(1) Save Chocolate! Due to popular demand (meaning the FDA got slammed) the consumer comment period on Big Food's petition to be allowed to substitute vegetable fat for cocoa butter has been extended to June 25, 2007. Don'tMessWithOurChocolate.com has a sample letter you can use in composing your petition to the FDA. I don't want to buy a bar of Crisco, do you?

(2) Pizza. Resigned-in-disgrace AIDS Czar Randall Tobias, patron of the DC escort service, said this in his defense:

[ABC Investigative Reporter Brian] ROSS: Well, David, I talked to him one day before he resigned and told him that we had found his name and personal phone number on a list of clients of the so-called DC Madam’s escort service in Washington. And what he told me was that he in fact had been a customer of the service, but that he had not had sex. He had had what he called gals come over to his condo to give him a massage. He claimed there was no sex but that he was stunned by the fact that we were aware he was a client and that was his conversation. I asked him if he knew any of the young women, their names. He said he didn’t remember them at all. He said it was like ordering pizza.

I don't even know what to say about a comment like that.

(3) Melamine. Apparently our food supply is awash in the stuff, much of it coming from China. It's ground up and added to feed and grains. When a food is tested for nutritional value, melamine looks like protein, so it 'boosts' that number. It's all part of the scientific breakdown of food into scientific categories or nutrients, which has had a disastrous effect on the American and the world diet. Read this article from the Times magazine a few months ago: the best diet is to eat food your grandmother would recognize as food. Mostly plants, and nothing reconstituted in a factory. Most of it tastes like crap, anyway.

NYTimes: Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China

Like Water For.....Crisco?

Big Food has petitioned the FDA to allow them to sell vegetable fats and oils and pass it off as real chocolate, which is made with cocoa butter. Mmmm, a big bar of Crisco. You can submit an e-comment to the FDA in opposition to this travesty (click on submit your comments and look for this docket number: 2007P-0085). Save chocolate!

Here's the comment I submitted to the FDA:

Keep chocolate as it is, made of cocoa and cocoa butter. I do not want another false adulterated product passed off as the real thing. Plus, I do not think any research has been done on the nutritional implications of replacing a natural, satisfying ingredient -- cocoa butter -- with vegetable fats and oils. We've already seen the disastrous results of substituting high-fructose corn syrup for sugar. Don't add to the obesity epidemic, and don't take away my real chocolate. Do not adopt these regulations. Keep chocolate real.

LATimes: Hands off my chocolate, FDA!
The FDA may allow Big Chocolate to pass off a waxy substitute as the real thing.

sisyphus shrugged: save chocolate!

Suburban Guerrilla: Oh no!

Don'tMessWithOurChocolate.com

FDA docket No. 2007P-0085: Adopt Regulations of General Applicability to all Food Standards that would Permit, within Stated Boundaries, Deviations from the Requirements of the Individual Food Standards of Identity

Like Water for Chocolate (novel)

wikipedia: Chocolate

Physiological effects

Pleasure of consuming

Part of the pleasure of eating chocolate is due to the fact that its melting point is slightly below human body temperature: it melts in the mouth. Chocolate intake has been linked with release of serotonin in the brain, which produces feelings of pleasure.[13] A study reported on the BBC indicated that melting chocolate in one's mouth produced an increase in brain activity and heart rate that was more intense than that associated with passionate kissing, and also lasted four times as long after the activity had ended.[14] Research has shown that heroin addicts tend to have an increased liking for chocolate; this may be because it triggers dopamine release in the brain's reinforcement systems[15] — an effect, albeit a legal one, similar to that of opiates.

Potential health benefits and risks

Recent studies have suggested that cocoa or dark chocolate may possess certain beneficial effects on human health. Dark chocolate, with its high cocoa content, is a rich source of the flavonoids epicatechin and gallic acid, which are thought to possess cardioprotective properties. Cocoa possesses a significant antioxidant action, protecting against LDL oxidation, perhaps more than other polyphenol antioxidant-rich foods and beverages. Processing cocoa with alkali destroys most of the flavonoids.[16] Some studies have also observed a modest reduction in blood pressure and flow-mediated dilation after consuming approximately 100g of dark chocolate daily. There has even been a fad diet, named "Chocolate diet", that emphasizes eating chocolate and cocoa powder in capsules. However, consuming milk chocolate or white chocolate, or drinking milk with dark chocolate, appears largely to negate the health benefit.[17] Chocolate is also a calorie-rich food with a high fat content, so daily intake of chocolate also requires reducing caloric intake of other foods.

Two-thirds of the fat in chocolate comes in the forms of a saturated fat called stearic acid and a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid. However, unlike other saturated fats, stearic acid does not raise levels of LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream.[18] Consuming relatively large amounts of dark chocolate and cocoa does not seem to raise serum LDL cholesterol levels; some studies even find that it could lower them[19].

[]

Studies suggest a specially formulated type of cocoa may boost brain function and delay decline as people age.[21]