Food Dive reports: FDA study finds some CBD products are mislabeled: Of the 20 edible and beverage products tested that had an amount of CBD marketed on their labels, five had less than 80% of the amount indicated and six had more than 120%.

I’m particularly interested in CBD edibles so I took a look at the FDA CBD labeling report.

What the results mean:

• For gummies, 7 of 17 products were mislabeled by 20% or more, and 5 contained THC (the psychodelic ingredient they are not supposed to have).
• For edibles, 6 of 17 were mislabeled by 20% or more, and 3 had THC.
• For beverages, 3 of 8 were mislabeled by 20% or more, but none had THC.
• For pet foods, 5 of 22 were mislabeled by 20% or more, and 9 had THC.

If you want THC in your edibles, you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting it, and so do your pets.

Enjoy!

With millions of people out of work, food insecurity is becoming a bigger problem than it has been. Some recent items:

From Politico: “Stark racial disparities emerge as families struggle to get enough food”

The last time the government formally measured food insecurity nationally was in 2018. At that time, about 25 percent of Black households with children were food insecure. Today, the rate is about 39 percent, according to the latest analysis by the Northwestern economists, which is set to be published this week. For Hispanic households with kids, the rate was nearly 17 percent in 2018. Today, it is nearly 37 percent.

From Northwestern, a new report: “Food Insecurity During COVID-19 in Households with Children: Results by Racial and Ethnic Groups”

Disparities in food insecurity across racial and ethnic groups are large. Across the eight weeks for which CHHPS microdata are available covering April 23–June 23, 41.1% of Black respondents’ households have experienced food insecurity in the prior week, as have 36.9% of Hispanic respondents’ households and 23.2% of White respondents’ households.

From the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project: “About 14 million children in America are not getting enough to eat”

Accounting for the number of children in these households, I find that 13.9 million children lived in a household characterized by child food insecurity in the third week in June, 5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many than did at the peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million). During the week of June 19-23, 17.9 percent of children in the United States live in a household where an adult reported that the children are not getting enough to eat due to a lack of resources.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “Boosting SNAP: 5 Reasons Why Households Need More”

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act of March included much-needed measures to temporarily increase SNAP benefits for many households and let state SNAP agencies temporarily modify procedures…But these temporary benefits didn’t help everyone who needs them, and they aren’t enough to help families afford food, given the challenges that COVID-19 and the downturn have presented. Here are five reasons why the next relief package needs to include an additional boost in SNAP benefits:

From The Counter: “Covid-19 has increased online SNAP purchases twentyfold—and Amazon, Walmart have a lock on virtually all those sales”

The USDA has been pushing online food sales for SNAP recipients, and COVID-19 is accelerating the trend.  The Counter article explains that

more than 750,000 households had used food stamps benefits online as of late June. That’s up from just 35,000 in March….As of early July, 43 states are approved to accept SNAP benefits online, and 39 have the program up and running.

The Counter also notes:

One thing is certain: At this point, two big retailers stand to benefit from the explosion in online SNAP sales. In 34 of the 39 states, Amazon and Walmart are the only participating grocers. The reasons why are likely logistical.. Few independent grocers have the web infrastructure to display and update their inventory online, making Amazon and Walmart a kind of duopoly by default. Even fewer have enough staff to assemble complex orders and deliver them to people’s homes. By contrast, Amazon and Walmart have been investing heavily in grocery delivery for years.

Comment

No matter how useful they are, online deliveries cost more and SNAP does not pay delivery costs.  Online also requires a computer and broadband access.  Do SNAP participants have these things?

The 750,000 housaeholds using the online system constitute a small fraction of the 19 million households enrolled in SNAP.

We have a long way to go to solve problems of food insecurity in this country.

A reader, Max Hultberg, sends this amazing item, which I thought was a joke but apparently is not:

Hey Marion!

I’d like to pitch this news tip from Burger King Sweden.

Repurpose your Swedish passport as a stamp card at Burger King

Sweden’s been criticized for their relaxed COVID-19 strategy, which has made it difficult for citizens to travel abroad. Even when some countries start open up, Swedes in particular are not welcome.

So Burger King Sweden now offers another use for dust collecting passports – by letting you repurpose them and use them as stamp cards. Instead of a regular passport stamp, you’ll get a BK stamp. Each new stamp equals one free burger from their new ”World Gourmet”-series.

As I keep saying, when it comes to food marketing, you can’t make this stuff up.

You can even watch a film of how this works.

CAST [Council for Agricultural Science and Technology: Economic Impacts of COVID-19 on Food and Agricultural Markets:  This is a collection of 16 articles by various experts on the effects of Covid-19 on food, agriculture, and forestry.  The report is here.

IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy): Milking the Planet: How Big Dairy is Heating Up the Planet and Hollowing Rural Communities: The report is here.

FAIRR (a global network of investors addressing issues in meat production): An Industry Infected: Animal Agriculture in a post-COVID world.  The report is here.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds globally, we are presented with a real-time case study into the vulnerability of animal agriculture systems to external shocks. It has reminded us of the vulnerability of human health to disease risks stemming from both wild and domestic animals, and has served as a warning of the role modern animal production systems can play in increasing zoonotic disease risk.

The British Meat Processors Association is not happy with this one, it seems.

While we are seeking ways to support farmers and feed hungry people, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a good model.  Civil Eats ran an especially interesting article about it.

CSAs are rooted in Black farmers in the South: In the 1960s and 70s, farmer and Tuskegee University professor Booker T. Whatley began advocating for what he called “Clientele Membership Clubs.” In the mid-1980s, two farms in New England started what has now become the model for today’s CSAs: small-scale farmers invested in agricultural stewardship, organic and other sustainable practices to build direct relationships with consumers. The idea is simple: members pay a small fee up front and commit to buy produce throughout a season…the CSA provides a sustainable financial model for farmers…In return, CSA members get regular boxes of fresh, local produce delivered to neighborhood pick-up spots…Today there are close to 13,000 CSAs across the country listed by USDA’s 2012 farm census data.

My partner and I belong to a bread CSA run by Stefan Senders’ Wide Awake Bakery.

Deliveries these days are in the middle of a parking lot for a mall that’s mostly closed.  The rule: masks and 6-food distancing.

Sometimes the lines are very long, but the bread is worth waiting for.

In addition to its world class bread, Wide Awake now provides sour dough starter, flour, and recipes, along with a how-to guide to dealing with this new member of your family.

The bakery uses grains grown locally.  So it is helping farmers.

CSAs aren’t for everyone.  Not everyone can afford to pay for food in advance.  But helping this bakery stay in business seems good for everyone, as do CSAs in general.

I’m still trying to figure out what’s happening with the USDA’s food box program.  Is it helping farmers?  Recipients?  It’s hard to get the big picture.

H. Clare Brown in The Counter writes that the Farmers to Families box program is failing to meet its targets.  It is “10 million boxes and 25 percent short of its forecasted delivery.”

Other aspects of the distributor selection process were even more perplexing. No distributors from Maine were selected, for instance. Some contractors failed to deliver their boxes directly to distribution points, forcing food banks to incur tens of thousands of dollars in last-mile delivery costs. And then there were questions about the cost of the food: Despite requests from lawmakers, the agency has not publicly released detailed information about the prices it has paid for the food boxes. Reporting from The Counter found that, in some cases, the agency was paying well above retail prices for gallons of milk distributed in the boxes….Advocates have argued that the food boxes…represent a regressive attempt to reinvent the wheel, forcing people to wait in long lines reminiscent of Depression-era food handouts, in full view of their neighbors and in potentially dangerous proximity to other people. It remains to be seen whether the food box program is more efficient for purchasing groceries than SNAP.

In the meantime readers have been sending me photos of what they are seeing.

RC Rybnikar sends this photo with the comment that the lettuce was iceberg, not romaine.

Andrew Coe, who wrote the op-ed I linked to last week, sent a photo of a New York City Board of Education food box that is part of the city’s free meals program.  

Well, the apples are fresh.

Larissa Zimberoff sent me a photo of pork patties distributed through a food bank in Marin County.  These do not appear to be part of the COVID-19 program.

Gayle Lautenschlager writes:

In a recent blog post regarding USDA food boxes you asked if there is a way to both more efficiently help people who need food while simultaneously helping farmers. The answer is yes and it is already being done in Washington state.

The program is called Farm to Food Bank. Harvest Against Hunger is the lead agency running this program as well as a sister program called King County Farmers Share.

The basic premise is that giving money directly to food banks allows them to wholesale purchase produce directly from local farmers. The result is that small local farmers are supported and food banks increase their distribution of culturally relevant and in demand produce. Often the local farmers will throw in extra produce or give a “non profit discount” which results in a below wholesale price per pound.

I am happy to know about such programs.

But my big question still remains: What is a sustainable way to address food insecurity in individuals and ensure a reasonable market that adequately compensates small- and medium-size farmers?

Can one policy do that?

Coca-Cola, which bought Odwalla juices in 2001, is discontinuing the brand and getting rid of 300 jobs and 230 trucks.

Why?  People aren’t buying it: too much sugar, and too much competition.

This is the end of a long saga.  Odwalla started out selling unpasteurized juices and was doing fine until it got too big.

Against company policy, it used apples that had fallen on the ground to make apple juice.  Some were contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, which carried a shiga toxin that caused illnesses and deaths.  In 1998:

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler, who represented some of the victims, some of whom have lifelong complications, says  Good riddance to bad rubbish.

During the course of the litigation, we uncovered that Odwalla had attempted to sell its juice in 1996 to the U.S. Army – no, not as a biological weapon – but to be sold in base grocery stores to our men and women service members and their families. The Army rejected the product – because it was not fit for military consumers.

His post includes the Army’s letter of rejection:  “We determined that your plant sanitation program does not adequatel assure product whoolesomeness for military consumers.”

It also includes some emails suggesting that Odwalla did not want to test for pathogens because they might find some:  “IF THE DATA is bad, what do we do about it.  Once you create a body of data, it is subpoenable.”

I wrote about the Odwalla events in my book, Safe Food.

The Odwalla outbreak provided convincing proof that unpasteurized and uncooked “natural” foods could contain the same pathogens as meat and poultry if they had the bad luck to come in contact with contaminated animal manure or meat.  For the industry, the lessons were mixed.  If food companies failed to reduce pathogens, their liability costs could be substantial–in money, time, legal penalties, and reputation—but these problems could be temporary and soon overcome (p. 99).

The end of a saga, indeed.

I was fascinated to see this ad in the June 8 & 15 issue of the New Yorker inside the back cover:

I like pistacchios, but never thought of them as a protein source and in any case so what?  Protein is anything but lacking in American diets.

I went right to the website, AmericanPistachios.org: “Breaking News: Pistachios are a complete protein.”  I read more: A study shows that pistachios have all 9 essential amino acids.

Here’s the study:

I assumed that the study was paid for by the pistachio association, but if so, the funding was well laundered.  The disclosure statement says: “This study was funded by a Specialty Crop Grant from the US Department of Agriculture.”  The USDA supports pistachio marketing.

OK.  Here’s why I think this ad is absurd.

• Americans consume roughly twice the amount of protein needed.
• Most food proteins, even those from plants, contain all 9 essential amino acids.
• Pistachios are already known to contain the essential amino acids (see the USDA food composition data base).
• 100 grams of pistachios contain 21 grams of protein BUT also 572 calories.
• Other nuts have all those amino acids too (see composition data for walnuts, for example).

I suppose it’s good to educate New Yorker readers about how plants have protein—they do!—but the emphasis on protein makes no nutritional sense.

The Pistachio trade association must think whatever this ad costs is worth the expense.*  Let’s hear it for marketing!

*What does it cost?  This depends on the size of the market—the circulation in a particular area—which can vary from one borough of New York to the whole country, and must be highly negotiable.