Several Danish consumer groups have banded together to oppose the food industry-backed GDA system for ranking the nutritional quality of processed foods.  The GDA (the Guidance Daily Amount) system is already in use on some products and food industry groups want it required for all European Union food labels.  Of course food companies want it.  It doesn’t use the U.K.’s red/yellow/green traffic light system that encourages people to avoid the red-labeled products.

The “Stop GDA” campaign argues that the GDA system encourages purchases of processed foods at the expense of the real foods.  It has produced a clever pamphlet to back up this argument.  Its criticisms apply just as well to all scoring systems for food products, except the traffic lights.

The long awaited and much postponed Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) finally takes effect today, despite massive efforts by the beef industry to make it go away.  It is interesting to see what meat producer groups object to:  too expensive, too difficult, it’s really just another trade barrier, and – my favorite – consumers don’t care where their meat comes from.  As of today, COOL is law.  Will anyone pay attention?  Or will the law be as widely ignored by meat sellers as it is for fish sellers?  But don’t you care where your food is produced?  I do.

Technophobe that I am, I firmly resist calls to Twitter.    Surely, you don’t really care where I am or what I eat.   But thanks to a twitter-pushing friend, you can now get these posts via Twitter @marionnestle.  Enjoy!

Thanks to Elinor, Eric, and Lisa for sending this news item from the Onion.  As The Onion points out, the easiest way to solve the pesky Salmonella problem is to make it legal.  I love the illustrations and will be plagiarizing that cereal box for powerpoint presentations.

For this one, I answered a bunch of questions and responded to a letter to the editor from Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.  He took me to task for exaggerating the inadequacies of our our food safety system.  He’s right.  I exaggerated.  But he should know better than anyone how badly the system works.  He was in charge of the pet food recalls in 2007 and is now in charge of the current peanut butter recalls.

President Obama had quite a lot to say about food safety this morning and I’m happy to say that it sounds like he gets it: the present system is outdated (it was developed a century ago), too spread out, under-resourced, and hazardous to health.  He’s going to appoint a committee to make recommendations and promises that all will be fixed “under the leadership of Dr. Margaret Hamburg.”  I hope she knows what she’s gotten herself into.

In the meantime, here’s his radio address and lawyer Bill Marler’s take on it.  And thanks Bill for posting the entire text of the speech.

And while I’m at it, how about the USDA’s new plan to test the meat at hamburger packing plants four times a month?  Is this an improvement or a clear effort to make sure nobody ever finds anything wrong?  Here’s Brian Hartman’s discussion of that question at ABC News.

Why do I get suspicious when I hear that the National Restaurant Association (NRA) and coalitions of its supporters are in favor of proposed legislation to require calorie labeling in fast food restaurants?  Jim Matheson (Dem-Utah) has just introduced a bill that the NRA and its supporters think is just fine.  Why?  It requires calorie information on menu boards or some other place in the store (hidden under the counter, perhaps?).  The New York City initiative puts the information on menu boards in the same size type as the price.

Three cheers for Margaret Hamburg who, rumors say, is to be the new FDA Commissioner.  We worked in the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the same time in the late 1980s when I was a nutrition policy advisor and she was assistant to the director.  Since then, I have followed her career with great interest and admiration, especially when she headed up the New York City Health Department.  She’s a great choice.  This is a really tough job and she will need all the help we can give her.  So I’m starting with Go Peggy!