It’s a good one, with terrific articles by Michael Pollan on farm policy for the next administration, David Rieff on what to do about agriculture in Africa, and Mark Bittman on why food should be taken seriously. Read, think, and enjoy!
P.S. And for fun, check out Safire on the meaning of “locavore” and “functional food.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that China has new guidelines on allowable levels of melamine in foods: 1 ppm (mg/kg) in infant formula and 2.5 ppm in other foods. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency agrees and is requiring importers of foods from China to document that their products meet these standards. According to the October 10 Food Chemical News (which I can’t link to), the number of infants affected by melamine-contaminated infant formula is nearly 94,000, with 30,000 cases in central Henan province and 16,000 in Hebei province, both near where the source of the problem, the Sanlu Dairy group, is located.
Thanks to Andy Bellatti of Small Bites for sending the link to this most instructive “flowing” map of the growth of Wal-Mart across America from 1962 to 2007. Have some Jell-O from the previous post (see comments on it), sit back, and enjoy.
Thanks for Michele Simon of the alcohol industry watchdog, the Marin Institute, for telling me about Kraft’s creative idea for selling more Jell-O: mixed drinks. You have to be 21 or over to look at the site and, I guess, be 21 or over to eat Jell-O? Why do I think this will be a tough sell? Or maybe it won’t?
I’m fascinated by the “Soup Wars” (see previous post). The New York Times has a full-page ad today from Progresso: “Campbell’s has 95 soups made with MSG. Progresso has 26 delicious soups with no MSG (and more to come).” Then it adds in small print, “Except that which occurs naturally in yeast extract and vegetable proteins.” I thought people considered high fructose corn syrup to be the new trans fat (get rid of it!), but maybe it’s MSG?
Pity the poor makers of canned soups. Canning blands out the taste so they add grams of salt to cover the blandness. But less salt is healthier, so the companies add MSG (monosodium glutamate) instead.
Because MSG is the sodium salt of glutamate, a normal amino acid constituent of body proteins, it ought to be safe but health concerns about it go on and on (Wikipedia has a quick review). Lots of people tell me they are sensitive to it and that MSG gives them headaches or makes them dizzy. The research on MSG is so inconsistent that I can’t make head or tail of it. My guess is that we will be hearing a lot more about MSG, especially with Campbell’s and Progresso facing off about which soups use less. Stay tuned.
And here’s an account of what’s going on with this.
The Department of Health and Human Services has just issued new guidelines for physical activity. They come with a guide for adults, a toolkit for community organizers, and research information for professionals. The approach is easy: some activity is better than none; more is better than less. Seems like good advice (but if you are worried about weight, you still have to eat less).
The New York City Health Department announces a new education campaign to teach New Yorkers about calories. The slogan: “read ’em before you eat ’em.” Here’s one of the ads (below). Access the rest here. Will ads like this help? Can’t wait to find out.
The British Food Standards Agency has been checking on levels of melamine in sweets imported from China. Some candies contained as much as 152 milligrams melamine per kilogram (mg/kg) or parts per million (ppm). A kg is 2.2 pounds, which would be a lot of candy to eat. Some of the tainted infant formula contained 2,500 mg/kg, but you only use a scoop (10 grams or so) to make up a bottle of infant formula, and that would contain 25 mg.
I realize that I am asking the wrong question – melamine should not be in food at all – but how much is safe to eat? To follow this, you have to pay close attention to the difference between mg/kg melamine in food versus the amount per kg body weight.
The FDA says 2.5 mg/kg in food is unlikely to be harmful in anything other than infant formula. The FDA’s May 2007 melamine risk assessment said 63 mg/kg body weight was safe for adults but it established a Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) 100 times lower, or 0.63 mg/kg body weight per day. The European TDI is even lower: 0.5 mg/kg body weight per day. Using the European TDI, a person weighing 80 kg (176 pounds) could supposedly safely consume 40 mg melamine from food a day. But a baby weighing 5 kg (12 pounds) drinking infant formula containing 25 mg melamine would be getting 5 mg/kg body weight with every bottle – ten times the European TDI. And babies drink several bottles a day. And if a by-product of melamine, cyanuric acid, is also present, kidney crystals can form at much lower concentrations.
All of this begs the question: how come it is there in the first place and what are the food safety agencies going to do about it? And when? In the meantime, food companies should be testing anything with protein in it for melamine and it’s best to avoid eating foods made in places where they aren’t doing such testing.
