The USDA does terrific research on many useful topics.  Here is a sample of some just in.

STATE FACT SHEETS:  data on population, per-capita income, earnings per job, poverty rates, employment, unemployment, farm characteristics, farm financial characteristics, top agricultural and export commodities.

WIC PROGRAM: research, publications, and data related to WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children). WIC served 9.1 million participants per month at a cost of $6.5 billion in 2009.

FEED GRAINS DATABASE: statistics on domestic corn, grain sorghum, barley, and oats; foreign grains plus rye, millet, and mixed grains. You can also get historical information through custom queries.

LIVESTOCK, DAIRY, AND POULTRY OUTLOOK:  current and forecast production, price, and trade statistics.

AGRICULTURAL OUTLOOK STATISTICAL INDICATORS: commodity and food prices, general economic indicators, government program expenditures, farm income estimates, and trade and export statistics.

ASPARAGUS STATISTICS: acreage, yield, production, price, crop value, and per capita use; also world area, production, and trade.

FOODBORNE ILLNESS COST CALCULATOR:   the cost of illness from specific foodborne pathogens, depending on the  annual number of cases, distribution of cases by severity,  use or costs of medical care, amount or value of time lost from work,  costs of premature death, and disutility costs for nonfatal cases.

ORGANIC FARMERS: explains why use of organic practices in U.S. lags behind other countries, differences and similarities between organic and conventional farmers, reduced consumer demand resulting from the weaker U.S. economy,  and potential competition from the “locally grown” label.

LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS: defines local food,  market size and reach,  characteristics of local consumers and producers, and  economic and health impacts.  Addresses whether localization reduces energy use or greenhouse gas emissions (inconclusive).

BIOFUELS: Reaches 88 million gallons in 2010 as a result of one plant becoming commercially operational in 2010, using fat to produce diesel. Challenges include reducing high costs and overcoming the constraints of ethanol’s current 10-percent blending limit with gasoline.

Thanks to USDA for producing data that policy wonks like me just love to cite.

Dietary supplements are in trouble these days.  For one thing, it’s really hard to demonstrate that they do any good.  For another, these products are poorly regulated.  Some recent examples:

• Gingko biloba supplements don’t improve cognitive function in the elderly.
• St. Johns Wort supplements don’t improve irritable bowel syndrome.
• Most supplements do not improve mortality, except maybe glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate which are associated with a slight unexplained improvement in this particular review.
• Most supplements are contaminated with toxic heavy metals says a GAO report with one of this agency’s typically inimitable titles: Herbal Dietary Supplements: Examples of Deceptive or Questionable Marketing Practices and Potentially Questionable Advice.

The New York Times account of the GAO report quotes Steve Mister, president of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, the supplement industry trade association, unsurprised by this finding.  Heavy metals, he said, are routinely found in soil and plants: “I don’t think this should be of concern to consumers.”

Oh great.  Glad he thinks so.  I’d be happier if we had a bit more regulation of these products.

A coalition of public health and environmental groups, collectively known as the National Workgroup for Safe Markets, has produced a report on the amounts of Bisphenol A (BPA) in canned foods: No Silver Lining: An Investigation into Bisphenol A in Canned Foods.

What did it find?  BPA in 92% of the foods sampled.  Most canned foods are lined with BPA plastic, and it leaches into the foods.

I’ve discussed concerns about the health effects of BPA in previous posts.  Here is an update on attempts to get rid of it.

• Senator Dianne Feinstein proposed an amendment to the endlessly pending food safety bill to ban BPA.
• The Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) and the Chamber of Commerce have threatened to oppose the food safety bill if it bans BPA.  How’s that for a good example of food politics in action.
• The canning industry knows it must replace BPA and is looking for alternatives.
• The French will ban BPA in baby bottles, since infants are most at risk.

To put all this in context, take a look at Jerome Groopman’s New Yorker article, The Plastic Panic: How Worried Should We Be About Everyday Chemicals? He isn’t exactly sure, but points out how difficult it is to test the health effects of any one of many chemicals in our environment–flame retardants and plastics among them–and how far regulation lags in dealing with this problem.  He concludes:

How do we go forward? Flame retardants surely serve a purpose, just as BPA and phthalates have made for better and stronger plastics. Still, while the evidence of these chemicals’ health consequences may be far from conclusive, safer alternatives need to be sought. More important, policymakers must create a better system for making decisions about when to ban these types of substances, and must invest in the research that will inform those decisions. There’s no guarantee that we’ll always be right, but protecting those at the greatest risk shouldn’t be deferred.

Given the evidence brought forth to date on BPA, I’d call this an understatement.

A survey report in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology says that peanut allergies have tripled in the last decade.  Why?  The authors don’t really know although they speculate that children aren’t exposed to as much dirt as they used to be.

Are we really that much cleaner than we were 10 years ago?  I doubt it.  But I would very much like to know why this is happening.

After years of hearing sad tales about the slaughterhouse problem, it looks like many people are trying to get it resolved.  A fix no longer seems impossible.

The slaughterhouse problem is what small, local meat producers have to contend with when their animals are ready to be killed. The USDA licenses so few slaughterhouses, and the rules for establishing them are so onerous, that humanely raised (if that is the correct term) animals have to be trucked hundreds of miles to considerably less humane commercial facilities to be killed (see added note below).  Furthermore, appointments for slaughter must be made many months or years in advance — whether the animals are ready or not.

Perhaps because the USDA has just announced guidelines for mobile slaughter units, lots of people are writing about this problem. Here, for example, is what I ran across just last week:

• Joe Cloud, who works with Joel Salatin, writes about the need for small-scale slaughterhouses in The Atlantic.
• The San Francisco Chronicle reports Joe Cloud’s concerns that USDA regulations will put small slaughterhouses out of business.
• Carolyn Lockwood has a front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the worries of operators of small slaughterhouses about safety requirements for microbial testing.
• Christine Muhlke writes in the New York Times magazine about her experience observing a mobile slaughterhouse developed by Glynwood’s Mobile Harvest System.
• Marissa Guggiana, president of Sonoma Direct Meats in Petaluma, CA, says in Edible Marin & Wine Country that “in Northern California, the lack of local slaughtering options is at a crisis point.”

If enough people complain about this problem, the USDA might get moving on it.  The guidelines are a good first step.

The guidelines, by the way, are up for public comment.  For comments (or attached files with lengthier comments), go to the Federal eRulemaking Portal.   Be sure to include the agency’s name, USDA, and docket number FSIS-2010-0004.  Comments must be filed within 60 days.

Added note: the USDA has a new study of “Slaughter availability to small livestock and poultry producers — maps” that tells the story at a glance.  Many large regions of the country have limited or no access to slaughterhouses small enough to handle animals from small producers.

Michael Pollan has a long essay in the New York Review of Books based on a review of five books: “The Food Movement, Rising.”

Here’s my favorite quotation from it, for obvious reasons:

Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

At the risk of reading too much into this, I think the fact that the New York Review of Books thinks the food revolution is worth writing about is an indication of how far this movement has come.

In an essay in the latest issue of Food, Culture, and Society, “Writing the Food Studies Movement,” I talk about the first class I ever taught about food and nutrition.  This was at Brandeis University in the fall semester, 1975.  In this class, I assigned two articles from the New York Review of Books:

• Barraclough, Geoffrey.  I. The Great World Crisis.  New York Review of Books, January 23, 1975.
• Barraclough, Geoffrey.  II. Wealth and Power: The Politics of Food and Oil. New York Review of Books, August 7, 1975.

These astonishingly prescient essays – still well worth reading – addressed the ways money, energy, and food are inextricably linked to each other and to global power politics.

Then, nothing.  Thirty-five years later, the New York Review finally figured out that food politics is worth space in its pages.  Pollan’s article is a sign of how far the food movement has come.

Bill Marler, the Seattle attorney who represents victims of food poisonings, consistently urges federal food safety agencies to reveal what they know so consumers can protect themselves from unsafe food.

He is especially annoyed that the FDA has not revealed the name of the farm in Yuma, Arizona, linked to the bagged romaine lettuce that has sickened more than 30 people in several states so far with the unusual form of E. coli, 0145.

Marler knows how to get information (although not always accurate results, apparently – see update below).  He first offered $5,000–and later offered $10,000–as a reward to anyone who revealed the name of the farm before the FDA did (the money goes to charity).  He got two takers. Both identified a particular firm in California as the source.

Update, May 22:  I received a message today from Leslie Krasny, partner in the law firm of  Keller and Heckman, LLP, San Francisco, which represents the farm named by those sources.  She advises me that there is no evidence linking her client’s romaine lettuce to the outbreak and that her client is not even under investigation by the FDA.  She asks that I delete reference to her client, which I have done.  Mr. Marler also has done so.

Many of us have been heartened to learn that the number of small farms in the U.S. is increasing for the first time in a century.  The latest Census of Agriculture reports more small farms in 2007 than in 2002.

But the USDA, which tracks such things in reports such as the recent Small Farms in the United States: Persistence Under Pressure, offers a less optimistic message.

According to the authors of that report, defining a small farm is not so easy to do.   As they explain:

USDA defines a small farm as an operation with gross cash farm income under $250,000. Within that group are commercial and noncommercial farms. The number of small commercial farms – with sales of $10,000 to $250,000 – actually fell between 2002 and 2007….

In fact, all of the growth occurred among farms under $1,000 in sales…Most of these operations are better described as rural residences; the households on these farms – and on many other small farms – rely heavily on off-farm income.

Although most (91%) of U.S. farms are small, farms earning $250,000 and above account for 85 percent of the market value of agricultural production.

I’m surprised by these figures and wonder whether the USDA data capture the young farmers I keep hearing about who are producing for farmers’ markets and CSAs.  The ones I meet tell me they are making a living.  If so, I hope that means they are doing better than $1000 per year.  If not, we need the USDA to work with them to make sure they do.  Small farms grow food, not feed.  We need more of them.