I haven’t said anything about pet food in a while, in part because I’m waiting to see what the FDA is planning to do about it, if anything.  The FDA currently regulates pet food the same way it regulates feed for farm animals.  Pet food labels look like feed labels.  They do not have Nutrition Facts or Pet Food Facts labels, making their contents difficult to understand.  There is a push to improve that situation and I .wish it were stronger.

FDA regulation of pet food

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates pet food similar to that for other animal foods. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) requires that all animal foods, like human foods, be safe to eat, produced under sanitary conditions, contain no harmful substances, and be truthfully labeled. In addition, canned pet foods must be processed in conformance with the low acid canned food regulations to ensure the pet food is free of viable microorganisms.

I don’t see much sign that is changing.  Members of Congress introduced the PURR [Pet Food Uniform Regulatory Reform] Act to give the FDA authority over the  labeling and ingredient review process for dog and cat foods, currently up to the states.

As explained by Pet Food Industry,

The Pet Food Institute (PFI) noted in a press statement that the proposed bill language solely impacts pet food label reviews and codifies ingredients and marketing claims in the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) Official Publication.

AAFCO sets ingredient definitions, label standards and laboratory standards and everybody uses them.

I wish it would propose Pet Food Facts labeling.

The pet food marketing—news

• U.S. pet owners spend over $2B on Valentine’s gifts for pets: February 14 iwas another chance for American pet parents to express their love to their companion animals…Today’s most popular gifts include heart-covered knitwear, scarves, tiaras, plush toys, cozy ‘human dog beds,’ and, of course, healthy treats.

Pet food ingredients—news

• PR Newswire Ÿnsect granted approval to use mealworm proteins in dog food It is the first time that mealworm-based ingredients for pet foods have been approved in the USA. Read More
• Cat owners more accepting of unseen insect-based ingredients: In a survey, the majority of survey respondents were willing to feed cat foods and treats containing insects to their pets, but the form of the insect-based ingredients mattered.Read more
• ‘World’s first’ cultivated pet food seeks regulatory approval: Meatly has created the ‘world’s first’ cans of pet food that uses cultivated chicken as a protein source, ready for rollout to stores across the UK pending regulatory approval…. Read more
  

My book with Malden Nesheim, Feed Your Pet Right, has a lot to say about these issues.  It’s still useful for understanding what they are about.  It’s really not a manual for feeding pets (although we did include recipes).  It’s an analysis of the pet food industry, something I still think worth knowing about.

Usually, I post something about research conflicts of intereest on Mondays, but am doing that today instead.

Three readers sent news about this study to me, so for that alone it’s worth sharing.

First, the press release:

Associations between mango eaters and moms-to-be: better diets and improved nutrient intakes: New NHANES analysis reveals meals including mangos associated with higher healthy eating index and better nutrition for healthy pregnancies.

Any time you see a headline like this, your first question should be: Who paid for this?

The study: Mango Consumption Was Associated with Higher Nutrient Intake and Diet Quality in Women of Childbearing Age and Older Adults.  Kristin Fulgoni and Victor L. Fulgoni III. Nutrients 2024, 16(2), 303; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16020303.

Conclusion: “This study suggests incorporating mango into the diet could increase select nutrient intake as well as diet quality in specific life stages of adult Americans.”

Funding: “This research was funded by the National Mango Board.”  [Bingo!]

Conflicts of interest: V.L.F.III and K.F. are employees of Nutrition Impact, LLC, a food and nutrition consulting firm which analyses NHANES data for numerous food and beverage companies and related entities. Nutrition Impact has a contract with the National Mango Board.

Comment: The National Mango Board contracted with the authors to produce this analysis. Its results are predictable.  Guess what: eating fruit increases intake of the nutrients contained in that fruit.  Eating fruit increases the quality of the diet.  I could have told them that.

I do love mangos, although they taste much better—like eating perfume—in their countries of origin.  I’m allergic to their skins and pits, however, and have to eat them carefully.  The Mango Board must think research results like this will increase sales.

Here’s how the Mango Board advertises this fruit:

Mangos pack a nutritional punch.

• Each serving of mango is fat free, sodium free and cholesterol free.
• Mangos contain over 20 different vitamins and minerals, helping to make them a superfood.

I learned about this one from Bill Marler’s blog: This is Nuts – California and Washington E. coli Outbreak linked to Gibson Farms Walnuts 

This refers to the CDC announcement: E. coli outbreak linked to organic walnuts

The CDC issued a warning: CDC warns of E. coli outbreak linked to organic walnuts sold in bulk

The FDA has its own investigation: Outbreak Investigation of E. coli O157:H7: Bulk Organic Walnuts (April 2024): Do not eat, sell, or serve recalled organic walnuts sold in bulk bins at natural food and co-op retailers in multiple states. FDA’s investigation is ongoing.

The CDC points out:

• Almost all sick people purchased organic walnuts from bulk bins in food co-ops or natural food stores in California and Washington.
• FDA determined that Gibson Farms, Inc supplied these walnuts and Gibson Farms, Inc has recalled these products.: These walnuts have expiration dates between May 21, 2025, and June 7, 2025.
• FDA has a list of stores that may have received these walnuts.

Comment:  All toxic E. coli outbreaks are troubling because the illnesses are so serious and all are preventable if producers were doing what they were supposed to be doing.  But walnuts?  My first question is how could walnuts, firmly encased in shells, get contaminated with animal fecal wastes, the usual source of this strain of E. coli.  This reminds me of the Odwalla juice E. coli problems; the company had harvested apples that had fallen on the ground. Did Gibson harvest walnuts off the ground?  Whatever it did, the company should have been following a food safety plan mandated by the Food Safety Modernization Act, which requires prevention controls and testing to make sure things like this donn’t happen.

Are non-organic walnuts harvested any differently from organic walnuts.   Here’s what one producer says.

The nuts are removed from the tree using a mechanical shaker, a machine that grasps the trunk and shakes the whole tree. The nuts drop to the ground, are then swept into windrows and picked up with harvest machinery. This operation is completed quickly to reduce the time nuts remain on the ground.

Uh oh indeed.  I hope this incident causes some changes in this procedure.

In the meantime, Marler has more to do.

Every five years or so, we have to deal with another farm bill.  Like the dietary guidelines, also every five years, the farm bill doesn’t really change much.  The arguments about both don’t change either.  So here we go again.

And just so you know where i”m coming from on this, here are my classic thoughts on the matter:  “The farm bill drove me insane.”

A quick summary of why it does: it’s a collection of dozens if not hundreds, of programs, each with its own constituency and lobbyists, and too complicated for outsiders (like me) to understand.  The elephant in the farm bill is SNAP, which takes up 80% or so of the funding and accounts for most of the fights.  What SNAP is doing there is a long story, but don’t even think about removing it; take it out and neither food assistance nor farm supports would have enough votes to pass.

On May 1, Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee introduced her version of  this year’s delayed farm bill: The Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act.

A full summary of the bill is here. (Note: it’s vague on details)

A section-by-section is here. (Note: it’s 94 pages)

Title summaries

• Certainty for All Farmers
• Conservation
• Trade Promotion and International Food Aid
• Nutrition
• Credit
• Rural Development
• Research
• Forestry
• Energy
• Horticulture
• Miscellaneous

The House Committee’s counter-proposal is available here.

It’s too early for me to get into the weeds on this.

On SNAP (the Nutrition title), some advocates will be pushing for making it healthier as well as increasing benefits.

On farm supports (Certainty for All Farmers title, and others), advocates for animal rights, young farmers, and Black farmers will want more than they have received in the past.  Most of what’s in the farm bill goes to support feed for animals and fuel for automobiles.

On “specialty crops,” (translation: food for people)  in the Horticulture title, I was amused to see a $100 million increase per year, which sounds like a lot but is barely a rounding error in a bill costing $100 billion or more a year.

The farm bill ought to be an opportunity to bring agricultural policy in line with health policy and to focus on producing food healthy for people and the planet.

Well, the details are still to come, and reconciliation of the two versions is still a long way off .  Stay tuned.

Tinight at 6:00, I’m moderating a conversation with Michelle King about her new book, at:

Archestratus Books, 164 Huron, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Information here.

Michelle T. King.  Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.  WW Norton, 2024.

I had never heard of Fu Pei-mei when this book was sent to me so I was curious to find out who she was and what she had done to deserve such a close look from a food studies scholar.

My ignorance.

Fu (1931-2004) is most easily understood as the Julia Child of Taiwan, whose televised cooking shows charmed and enlightened cooks for decades after World War II.

Fu left mainland China for Taiwan in 1949 as a war refugee, and soon married.  She did not know how to cook, but housewives were expected to and her husband complained.  She was forced to learn, and hired restaurant cooks to teach her.  Once she did learn, she began teaching others and eventually landed on TV just when it was starting.  This, in turn, led to a remarkable career as a TV personality, cook, cookbook author, and world traveler.

But this book is much more than a biography.  It is also a cultural history.  As King puts it,

The circumstances of her birth and the timing of her culinary career gave Fu a front row seat to every major political and social event affecting modern Taiwan’s history for more than seventy years.  Through the pages of Fu’s cookbooks and the story of her life, we come to understand not only the twists and turns of Taiwan’s modern political history, but also the dynamic shift in women’s roles during the postwar economic boom, when women begn to leave kitchens and cooking behind for jobs in offices and factories.

Fu was mainland Chinese and her work got caught up in the politics of mainland vs. Taiwan; she represented Taiwan although her food represented—and highlighted—regional mainland Chinese cooking with Taiwanese cuisine only added later.

Reading this book raised a personal question for me: how did Fu do it?  Her husband did not want his wife working outside the home and it’s hard to imagine his approving her travel and fame.  Somehow, she managed.  King suggests that perhaps by not challenging her husband’s control of the family or its finances, she was able to be free to conduct her career.  Fu must have been one formidible woman.

Along with the biography and history, King includes “kitchen conversations,”excerpts from interviews with Chinese-Americans who have cooked from Fu’s books.

All of this made me want to find one of Fu’s bilingual cookbooks and see if I can produce some of my favorite Chinese dishes.  By all reports, the English translations of her recipes were clear, and they worked.

And so does Chop Fry Watch Learn.  

Can’t wait to find out more about it.  Join me tonight!

Here’s something I haven’t yet written about but I’m seeing so much on the topic that it’s due.

Microplastics are small (5 millimeters and much, much smaller) particles that come off of plastic containers, wrappings, and waste.  They are now everywhere and in everything, including oceans, water supplies, food, animals, and us.

Not nearly enough is known about their effects, but early signs are not reassuring.

Some examples:

Bottled water can contain thousands of particles of nanoplastics, research suggests:  Microplastics, which research suggests could be harmful to human health, are well-known infiltrators of a wide variety of food and beverages. Now, researchers have found that nanoplastics, the even smaller offspring of microplastics, are present in stratospheric quantities in bottled water, unbeknownst to us until now…. Read more

Plastic chemicals linked to $249 billion in US health care costs in 2018 alone, study finds: By contributing to the development of chronic disease and death, a group of hormone-disruptive plastic chemicals is costing the US health care system billions — over $249 billion in 2018 alone, a new study found.

Should We Care That We’re Drinking Nanoplastics? A new study this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science tells us that every bottle of water we’re drinking has hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics….Nanoplastics and microplastics are not innocuous, but their risks are poorly understood. They come with chemicals that can be endocrine disruptors and contribute to obesity.

How Plastic Can Harm Your Health: Plastic is everywhere—even in the foods we eat and the beverages we drink. CR’s [Consumer Reports’] recent tests of nearly 100 foods found two types of chemicals used in plastic, bisphenols and phthalates, in a wide variety of packaged foods.

Everything you need to know about plastic pollution:This year’s World Environment Day – the fiftieth iteration of the annual celebration of the planet – is focusing on the plastic pollution crisis. The reason? Humanity produces more than 430 million tonnes of plastic annually, two-thirds of which are short-lived products that soon become waste, filling the ocean and, often, working their way into the human food chain.

Plastic food packaging contains harmful endocrine disrupting chemicals, study confirms: Many plastic food contact materials – plastics that are used in the processing and packaging of food – contain toxic chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system and metabolism, according to a new study published in Environmental Science & Technology.

Microplastics: In January 2019, ECHA [European Chemicals Agency] proposed a wide-ranging restriction on microplastics in products placed on the EU/EEA market to avoid or reduce their release to the environment. A consultation on the restriction proposal was organised from March to September 2019….The proposal is expected to prevent the release of 500 000 tonnes of microplastics over 20 years.

Comment: We should be looking hard at similar restrictions and at methods for reducing use of plastics and phasing them out. This won’t be easy, as discussed in: Microplastic regulation should be more precise to incentivize both innovation and environmental safety.  Is this one more food issue we need to be worried about?  I think it is.

As I’ve said before, USDA is at long last taking a first step toward declaring Salmonella an adulterant on poultry products.

Here’s the headline: USDA Finalizes Policy to Protect Consumers from Salmonella in Raw Breaded Stuffed Chicken Products:  an adulterant in raw breaded stuffed chicken products when they exceed a specific threshold (1 colony forming unit (CFU) per gram or higher) for Salmonella.

And here’s the Advance Copy of Final Rule: Salmonella in Not-Ready-To-Eat Breaded Stuffed Chicken Products.  

What this rule means: raw breaded stuffed chicken shown to have more than one colony forming unit of Salmonella (basically none) cannot be sold.  Period.

I have long argued:

• Chicken should be free of pathogenic bacteria when we buy it.
• We should not have to run our kitchens like biohazard laboratories.
• Poultry producers should be responsible for eliminating pathogens in their flocks.

Finally, the USDA is taking some action on this.  It promises to start rulemaking on other chicken products.  This can’t come too soon.

As for the chicken industry, alas: NCC [National Chicken Council] Expresses Grave Concerns with New FSIS Salmonella Regulation

NCC is gravely concerned that the precedent set by this abrupt shift in longstanding policy has the potential to shutter processing plants, cost jobs, and take safe food and convenient products off shelves, without moving the needle on public health….“NCC estimates that on an annual basis, over 200 million servings of this product will be lost, 500-1000 people will lose their jobs, and the annual cost to industry is significantly higher than USDA’s estimates. It is likely that this proposal would drive smaller producers of this product out of business entirely.

If you want to know why it’s taken the USDA so long to get this done, and only in one product, the NCC is your answer.

Additional resources

• Salmonella in Not Ready-To-Eat Breaded Stuffed Chicken Products: Final determination and response to comments
• The AP Story on the ruling

I’m having a had time keeping up with all the things the New York City food policy office is doing to improve the city’s food system, so I asked for, and got, an impressive list.

For starters, it has a plan: Food Forward NYC: A 10-Year Policy Plan

And its done a 2-Year Progress Report

The office published or supports the publishing of other city reports:

• Food Standards Compliance Report on the nutritional quality of the 219 million meals served City agencies
• NYC Food by the Numbers summarizing data on everything it’s doing
• Good Food Purchasing Dashboard with data on what the city buys
• Prioritizing Food Education in Our Public Schools: A Path to Developing a Healthy Next Generation, a guide to building healthy school communities.
• Cultivating Urban Agriculture, a planning document

It announces a new grant to the Department of Corrections to train prison foodservice workers to prepare plant-based meals

These are on top of initiatives to:

• Promote Healthy Food in New York City.
• Improve  Food Standards and Good Food Purchasing
• Promote Healthy Foods in City Publications and in Advertising on City Property
• Hold Plant Powered Fridays in schools
• Improve standards for beverages offered in City vending machines
• Require chain restaurants to post sugars
• Serve healthier food in NYC-run hospitals

The Mayor’s Office of Food Policy has a remarkably low profile.  Trying to find out who’s in it and what they are doing is not easy, which is why I wanted to try to get a handle on it.

I think Kate MacKenzie and her handful of colleagues are doing impresssive work, not least because of their outreach and partnership with multiple city agencies.

Impressive, indeed.