My distant* but dearly loved cousin, Michael Kravit, sent this from Taiwan.  Seems like a really good idea.

I’m working on a book chapter on snack foods (for an updated edition of What to Eat) and I counted the number of feet of shelf space devoted to snacks—chips, crackers, cookies, toaster pastries, candies, etc—in the Ithaca Walmart: 4,100 linear feet, or 0.8 mile.

OK.  Some of them are nuts or dried fruit.  But the great majority?  Mostly ultra-processed and highly profitable to their makers.

*Definition of a distant cousin: he’s the grandson of my first cousin, which I think makes him twice removed.

I’ve been tracking what’s happening with GMO plantings for a long time, ever since writing Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety. 

The USDA has published charts of GMO plantings for a long time, but this is the first one I’ve seen that incorporates sugar beets and alfalfa.  Take a look.  It’s titled, “More than half of harvested U.S. cropland uses seed varieties with at least one genetically modified trait.”

Why is this of interest?  It’s an indicator of corporate consolidation and control of the food supply.

Organic, anyone?

The study: Kombucha tea as an anti-hyperglycemic agent in humans with diabetes – a randomized controlled pilot investigation.  Mendelson Chagai, Sparkes Sabrina, Merenstein Daniel J., Christensen Chloe, Sharma Varun, Desale Sameer, Auchtung Jennifer M., Kok Car Reen, Hallen-Adams Heather E., Hutkins Robert.  Frontiers in Nutrition.  2023;10.  DOI=10.3389/fnut.2023.1190248.

Purpose: “Kombucha is a popular fermented tea that has attracted considerable attention due, in part, to its suggested health benefits. Previous results from animal models led us to hypothesize kombucha may reduce blood sugar levels in humans with diabetes. The objective of this pilot clinical study was to evaluate kombucha for its anti-hyperglycemic activities in adults with diabetes mellitus type II.”

Method: 12 study subjects were instructed to consume kombucha or a placebo (240 ml each) for 4 weeks, then later switch to the other one.

Results: “Kombucha lowered average fasting blood glucose levels at 4 weeks compared to baseline (164 vs. 116 mg/dL, p = 0.035), whereas the placebo did not (162 vs. 141 mg/dL, p = 0.078).”

Conclusion: “In this pilot study, the effect of kombucha consumption on blood glucose levels in adult T2D subjects revealed positive effects. Nonetheless, this study was not sufficiently powered to provide more definitive conclusions.”

Acknowledgment: “We thank Craft Kombucha, Kombucha Brewery in Washington, DC, and especially founder Tanya Maynigo-Loucks for donating the kombucha and for creating and donating the placebo drink for this study.”

Conflicts of interest: “RH is a co-founder of Synbiotic Health; JA has a financial interest in Synbiotic Health. DM serves as President of the Board of Directors of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics, a non-paid position. All kombucha and placebo drinks were donated by Craft Kombucha. Craft Kombucha did not have any access to data reported in this study. No author has any financial ties with Craft Kombucha. SD was employed by MedStar Health. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Comment: Synbiotic Health develops and sells probiotic ingredients.  Its “mission is to harness the power of the human microbiome, using the best science to develop precise, scientifically validated microbiome ingredients that support optimal health in every age group.”  Craft Kombucha sells its products in classy cans.  Kombucha is a fermented sweet tea; it contains bacteria and yeast (probiotics).   It’s easy to find claims for its health benefits if you search for them, but much harder to find science to back them up.  IIf you can demonstrate benefits, you can sell more products.  Hence, this study.  High marks to the authors for including the disclaimer: “this study was not sufficiently powered to provide more definitive conclusions.”  Indeed.

My bottom line: drink kombucha if you like it, but don’t expect miracles.

Thanks to Laura Schmidt for this one.  Both of us like kombucha drinks, by the way.

Anya Von Bremzen. History, and the Meaning of Home. Penguin, 2023.

I can never get over how many superb books are now published on food themes, on after another.

Consider—and you definitely should—this one, for example.

For starters, there’s the fabulous cover by Roz Chast, no less (I want one for my next book!).

For another, there’s its brilliant structure and what Von Bremzen does with it.  She is a cookbook author, best known to me for her memoir, Masterian the Art of Soviet Cooking, an account of what food was like for a child growing up in Moscow in the former Soviet Union.

National Dish uses what are assumed to be foods representing entire cultures to reflect on the meaning of food for personal identity and larger issues of gastronationalism.  Von Bremzen spent at least a month in each country examining how its particular dish did and did not represent the culture of Japan (Ramen noodles), France (Pot-au-Feu), Spain (tapas), and Mexico (mole), and others, necessarily ending with the most poignant, Ukraine (borsch).

Von Bremzen is great company on these explorations, delving into language, history, anthropology, and whatever else it takes to understsand the role of that particular food in that particular society.  A couple of excerpts:

Neopolitans were not Italy’s original mangiamaccheroni, however; the Sicilians were.  A twelfth-century Arab geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi, was first to report that people near Palermo were making strings of dough called itriyya–-from the Arabic? Greek?  Hebrew?—which they traded “by the shipload” to Calabria and “other Christian lands.”  The Neopolitans?  They were called mangiofoglie (leaf eaters), or, more quaintly, cacafoglie (leaf shitters) for their massive intake of dark leafy greens—a forerunner of the Brooklyn dream diet.  (p. 52)

This, on “washoku—fuzzily defined as “the traditionally dietary cultures of the Japanese” and modeled on the equally fuzzy but successful “gastronomic meal of the French.”

But it was the UNESCO listing that produced a washoku explosion.  A word only faintly known before to the Japanese public was now everywhere, celebrated in cookbooks, media articles, gastronomic guides, and scholarly studies.  And the government—mixing bunka gaikō (cultural diplomacy and Brand Japan building—promoted washoku abroad as the nation’s ancient and healthy tradition.  An upscale pizza effect swung into action.  International recognition boosted washoku’s domestic cachet, swelling the pride that Japanest home cooks now took, according to polls, in their own intangible food heritage.

Intangible indeed. (p.103)

This is one terrific book, erudite but fun to read and a great contribution to the literature of food studies.  Enjoy!

• Here’s the New York Times review.
• And an interview in Saveur

Every now and then the USDA recruits a talented designer and produces terrific charts like this one.

I thought this was perfect for a hot summer day.  Enjoy!

Poisoned, the food safety film featuring the lawyer, Bill Marler,  is now available to watch on Netflix.

I wrote about earlier when I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival.

It’s totally worth watching, and not only because I have a cameo in it.

Bill Marler explains why.  I reproduce his post with permission.

After Netflix Poisoned – What would I do with a Food Safety Magic Wand?

By Bill Marler on August 4, 2023

Over two months ago, while watching the premiere of the documentary, “Poisoned,” at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, I got thinking again about how little in the past 30 years I feel I have moved the needle on food safety – pathogens and certainly, human nutrition.  Now that “Poisoned” is up on the Netflix platform, it has become the most watched documentary in the world – at least for the last few days.

The real issues to me is how do we engage the food industry, policy makers, academics and most importantly consumers, to focus on driving the numbers down on the pathogens that kill us quickly and the products that kill us over time?

I will focus on pathogens as I have for the last 30 plus years. I will leave it to some very smart people who are rightly concerned about the millions of us who become sick and die due to inadequate nutrition – especially the millions of illnesses and deaths due to heart disease, diabetes and obesity caused by ultra-processed foods, salt, sugar, and fat.

There is so much to do, and the list is long. So, what would I do with a Food Safety Magic Wand on day one?

1. Vaccinate. The first thing I would do is mandate that all food service workers be vaccinated against hepatitis A.  Perhaps to some, not the most pressing food safety issue, but it is forefront of my mind.  In the past few months, I finished up litigation around a hepatitis A outbreak involving one ill food service work who infected nearly 50 people, hospitalizing most, killing four and causing two liver transplants.  With regret, I forced a family-owned restaurant chain to file for bankruptcy.  All of this could have been prevented by a safe vaccine that has been around for decades.  It is time for the restaurant industry and the CDC to step up.

• Investigate. Invest in public health surveillance over human pathogens, like, Listeria, E. coli and Salmonella, etc.  A dirty truth is that most culture-confirmed illnesses are never attributable to a food source, so people never know what sickened or killed them. Not because the source was not food, but because we fail to invest adequate resources in the epidemiologists that investigate illnesses and track those illnesses to the cause. Tracking illnesses to the cause gets tainted product off the market and helps us all understand what products and producers to avoid.  We need to continue to invest in the science of whole genome sequencing, so we know with certainty which pathogens are causing which illnesses. Foodborne illness epidemiology helps us understand the root cause of an outbreak and helps prevent the next one from happening at all.

• Relegate. Allow public health officials access, especially during an outbreak investigation, to all areas around farms that grow fruits and vegetables.  It is long past time to allow investigators access to neighboring cattle, dairy, chicken, or hog operations that spill billions of deadly pathogens into the environment, via air or water.  We need to think of our growing regions as an integrated system and that all sectors responsible need to play a role.  Access allows investigators to understand the likely cause of an outbreak, and again, what can be done to prevent the next one.

• Advocate. Make all pathogens that can sicken or kill us adulterants.  In 1994 Mike Taylor making E. coliO157:H7 and adulterant has saved countless lives and has saved the beef industry from my lawsuits. We can do the same for all food producers, especially chicken, turkey, and pork.  Remember, in the 1990’s nearly all the lawsuits I filed were E. coli cases linked to ground beef.  Today that is zero.  Think about it.

• Educate. Give everyone a thermometer and provide better education to middle and high school teachers and students around food safety and human nutrition policy, not in a dry, technical way, but by sharing engaging history, microbiology, patient stories, and case studies. We need to teach how and why our food can be unsafe and what consumers can do about it.

• Consolidate. Finally, make a single federal agency out of USDA/FSIS, FDA, and the food safety parts of CDC, NOAA, and EPA, to oversee food safety and human nutrition. Making food safety and human nutrition its own agency would help increase governmental accountability,  close regulatory loopholes, facilitate the collection and sharing of information and facilitate critical change.  I might have a suggestion for someone to run it.

With the CDC estimating 48,000,000 are sickened each year, 125,000 hospitalized, and 3,000 die from food, preventing pathogenic foodborne illness is no simple matter.  And, if you consider the millions that are impacted by the lack of adequate and safe nutrition, we have a lot to do.  However, it can be done, and the six ideas above are a small start.

“Doing anything is better than doing nothing,” my Marine drill sergeant father used to say.  He used to require my brother and I to make our beds every morning and bounce quarters on them.  For the longest time I thought this was punishment.  But it was not punishment, it was accomplishment, that you could build on for the rest of the day.  Doing “little” things, like the six things above, are accomplishments. Doing them starts a process that will continue to make all our lives just a little bit safer.

AAFCO, the American Association of Feed Control Officials, says its membership has at last agreed to fix pet food labels so they look more like Nutrition Facts labels.  When this happens, you might possibly be able to understand them.

Here’s what the nutrition information on a pet food label looks like now.

Pet food labels follow the regulations for animal feed, not human food.

This might have made sense when dogs and cats were on their own to hunt or be fed household scraps, but it makes no sense at all now that pets are considered members of the family—fur babies.

The agreed-upon changes have to be incorporated into state regulations, and manufacturers need time to adopt them.  Everybody gets 6 years to do this, although some companies will undoubtedly start using the new rules right away.

The changes will be in four areas of the labels:

1. Nutrition Facts Box – Updated to resemble human-food labeling more closely.  This will be a Pet Nutriton Facts panel.
2. Intended Use Statement – Updated to new location on the lower-third of the front display panel to help consumers easily identify the purpose of the pet food.
3. Ingredient Statement – Updated to clarify the use of consistent terminology and allow parentheticals and common or usual names for vitamins.
4. Handling and Storage Instructions (optional) – Updated and standardized with optional icons for greater consistency.

This is a great step forward.  One reason why I think so is that the new Pet Nutrition Facts label is exactly what Mal Nesheim and I recommended in our book, Feed Your Pet Right.

That book came out in 2010; these rules go into effect in 2029.

It pays to be patient—and to persist!