Weekend viewing: Civil Eats’ Infographic on Meat
I love Civil Eats’ Infographic explaining the global meat situation. Here’s how it begins. Click on the link to see the rest of it. Definitely worth a look.
I love Civil Eats’ Infographic explaining the global meat situation. Here’s how it begins. Click on the link to see the rest of it. Definitely worth a look.
I can’t believe that I am writing about sugar policy again. The Trump Administration has just gotten a preliminary agreement with Mexico about the sugar it exports to us.
Mexico says OK, (1) it won’t make us pay as much for it, and (2) it will restrict how much refined (white) sugar it sends.
This is great for U.S. sugar processors who turn raw sugar into white. They want Mexico to send raw sugar so U.S. processing plants stay busy.
But food and beverage companies making products will have to pay more for sugar. They belong to the Coalition for Sugar Reform, which is not happy about the agreement.
Under NAFTA, Mexico could sell unlimited amounts of sugar to us. But our domestic sugar producers complained the Mexicans were “dumping” subsidized sugar and undercutting their prices. In retaliation,
Three years ago, we got Mexico to agree to set minimum prices and limit the amount of sugar it sells to us. The new arrangement confirms that deal, at least for the moment.
As for us public health types, sugar policy is endlessly weird. Domestically, we don’t produce enough sugar to meet demands so we have to import sugar from other countries. We keep domestic prices high through quotas, buy-backs and price-support loans. This ought to discourage consumption, but does not.
How come? Because the higher price, amounting to billions a year overall, works out to only about $10 per year per capita.
This is not high enough to:
Want to read more about this?
Remember “pink slime” the pejorative name for what BPI (Beef Products International) much prefers to call “lean, finely textured beef (LFTB),” so much so that it is suing ABC News under South Dakota’s “disparagement of agriculture” or food libel law.
This is not a joke. BPI is suing for $1.9 billion in damages and this could go to $5.7 billion under South Dakota’s Food Product Disparagement Act.
The New York Times recounts the history of pink slime and reminds us that Michael Moss won a won a Pulitzer Prize for an article in which he mentions it in 2010.
I am riveted by Dan Flynn’s account of the trial in Food Safety News.
May 30: The trial opens, with ironic timing.
But the BPI vs. ABC lawsuit is going forward just as demand is also coming back for LFTB, two years after depiction of the product in the media as “pink slime” put consumer pressure on retailers and restaurants to pull the product.Now, however, many of those same restaurants and retailers fear losing their customers for beef patties because they cost too much. LFTB, produced by both BPI and Cargill, is in demand to keep hamburger prices down.
June 5: The jury trial begins.
At issue is whether the the network and its reporter violated South Dakota’s Agriculture Food Product Disparagement Act. If it did, any award won at trial could be tripled under the Act — to as much as $5.7 billion in this case. The jury will have to decide if the network and its reporter defamed the product known within the meat industry as lean finely textured beef by repeatedly referring to it as “pink slime” in numerous reports beginning in March 7, 2012.
June 8: BPI’s chief witness testifies. She is professor Mindy Brashears, director of the International Center for Food Industry Excellence at Texas Tech.
She told the jury that BPI’s lean finely textured beef (LFTB) is meat, is beef, is nutritious and is entirely safe to eat…In the past four years, Brashears said, she not only examined everything she could find about BPI, but also conducted her own studies. Her time on the project totaled 1,250 hours and BPI paid her a private consulting rate of $250 an hour for a total of about $335,000.
June 9: ABC’s lawyer, Dane Butswinkas, starts his cross-examination
Butswinkas did get the professor to admit BPI was suspended from the National School Lunch Program on multiple occasions in 2007 and 2008. Brashears said those suspensions were essentially voluntary actions by BPI taken after pathogens were discovered in its product by the lab working for the lunch program. She said the action was consistent with BPI’s food safety plan.
I have a long-standing interest in this case, dating back to 2009 when I first started writing about it.
I will continue to follow this trial with great interest. Most lawyers I know think that food libel laws will not hold up in court. Let’s see what this jury says.
This is one of Food Navigator’s collection of articles, videos, and podcasts on single topics, in this case “clean” labels, clearly a hot trend.
Special Edition: Where next for clean label?
How is the ‘clean-label’ trend evolving? Is it still about avoiding certain ‘artificial’ or ‘artificial-sounding’ ingredients, or is it now part of a broader conversation about GMOs, animal welfare, sustainability, and business ethics? What do consumers understand by ‘clean’ food? And how will they view innovations from monk fruit produced from microbes, to ‘meat’ and ‘milk’ made without raising animals?
To the casual observer, ‘cleaning up’ our food sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But where is the clean label trend going, and is ditching every ingredient you can’t pronounce really the key to fixing the ‘broken’ food system (as Panera implies in a recent ad) or improving the health of people and the planet? .. Read
When the Administration’s released its “America First” budget, Senator Debbie Stabenow (Dem-MI) issued two Infographics
The first is on effects on the 2018 farm bill.
The second is how the proposed budget will affect rural America.
Stabenow is the ranking member of the Senate Agricultural Committee.
Her Infographics are easy to read and worth a look. They take vast amounts of complicated material and boil it down to key facts. Their conclusions:
I hope she is right about the second one.
USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue says this about our new “trade breakthrough” with China:
This is tremendous news for the American beef industry, the agriculture community, and the U.S. economy in general. We will once again have access to the enormous Chinese market, with a strong and growing middle class, which had been closed to our ranchers for a long, long time. .. When the Chinese people taste our high-quality U.S. beef, there’s no doubt in my mind that they’ll want more of it.”
Why “breakthrough”? China refused to buy US beef after a case of mad cow disease turned up.
The point of US trade policy is to have open markets for our products. USDA has a quick summary of our current balance of trade. We are doing pretty well with it.
And here’s why:
Hence: Selling beef to China should up those numbers.
I am a great admirer of food-safety lawyer Bill Marler, who represents victims of food poisonings. In a recent blog post, he offered advice to food companies caught up in incidents of consumer mistrust.
I think his advice about how to build or rebuild public trust applies to any food company—those making GMOs, for example.
Do not shoot the messenger. Blaming what is now happening on the media or the moms who are concerned about their kids health never works. Had you not built the foundation of your business in part by deciding the public did not need to know something – even something that you believed was good for them – the explosion of negativism you are now experiencing would have been a passing storm instead of a hurricane.
Do not threaten legal action against anyone. There are too many good lawyers (this one included) who would gladly take up their defense – pro bono.
For goodness sakes, do not play the political card. Sure, you have given hundreds of thousands of dollars (perhaps millions) to politicians (hopefully from both parties – Republicans and Democrats will equally prostitute themselves), but do not make them dance in support of your product as they try to explain that the money you threw at them has no bearing on their willingness to dance. And, please do not make them eat your product or say how safe it is in front of the national media. No one will believe people that you paid to endorse your product. Remember, politicians are considered only slightly more trustworthy than lawyers, however, both are in single digits.
What should you do?
Simple, just tell the truth…If you are proud of your product, explain in honest and clear terms why you are…Bottom line: If you have nothing to hide then hide nothing.
Several food safety advocacy groups are suing the FDA to take responsibility for ensuring the safety of food additives.
Doesn’t the FDA already do this? No, it does not.
As the press release puts it [with my emphasis in bold],
Federal law requires FDA to ensure that substances used in food are safe, taking into account consumers’ entire diet and all exposure to the chemical and similar chemicals. But any substance designated as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) by FDA or by a food or chemical company can bypass the rigorous pre-market review and approval process applied to food additives. The GRAS exemption was initially created to cover ingredients that are widely known to be safe, such as vegetable oil, but has been applied in recent practice to novel chemicals and is now a loophole that has swallowed the law.
Under pressure from industry, in 1997 and again in 2016, FDA adopted a practice that allows food and chemical manufacturers to decide for themselves, without notice to FDA or the public, that food chemicals are safe—even if the chemicals are new, not widely studied, and not widely accepted as safe .
I commented on the FDA’s 2016 ruling at the time. Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler referred to this GRAS policy as a “joke,” noting that it allows the industry to decide whether its own products are safe.
I am particularly interested in this suit because I wrote a commentary on an article about conflicts of interest in GRAS determinations in 2013. As I said about the article’s findings,
At present, manufacturers of all food additives are permitted to decide on their own whether a substance is GRAS for human consumption, unless the additive affects food color. Companies also can choose whether to even notify the agency about a new additive. In practice, many manufacturers do inform the FDA. But…about a thousand additives are believed to be in the food supply without the FDA’s knowledge…the lack of independent review in GRAS determinations raises serious questions about the public health implications of unregulated additives in the food supply, particularly the additives that the FDA does not even know about.
Let’s hope the lawsuit gets this situation fixed.