Under the current rules, meat sold as organic must come from animals with access to pasture.  Loophole alert!  The animals did not have to be raised on pasture.  The USDA now proposes to close the loophole as it applies to ruminant animals. This proposal is open for comment.  If you want to see how such things are done, this one is an excellent example (it includes a detailed history of the regulations, among other useful things).  USDA wrote this in response to more than 80,000 comments on the “announcement of proposed rulemaking.”  Virtually all of these wanted organically raised ruminants to be grazing on pasture.  The Federal Register notice is 24 pages of tiny type but my immediate take is that the USDA proposals are really good.  Take a look and see what you think.  I’m withholding final judgment until somebody does a decent summary so I don’t get bogged down in “We propose to remove the word “or” at the end of paragraph X and replacing the period at the end of paragraph Y with a semicolon.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a new report out on food allergies.  As everyone suspects, these have become more common in the last 10 years, especially among kids with asthma.  But the increase is really quite small and much smaller than I suspected.  The one big change is in the rate of hospitalizations; these have more than doubled.  Why? What’s really depressing is that nobody really knows.  I have argued for years that we need more research on food allergies.  With a food supply as complicated as ours, having one is no joke.

Today’s Food Matters column in the San Francisco Chronicle is about the melamine scandals.  Melamine is still a big problem.  It has just turned up as the cause of death of 1,500 raccoon “dogs” (animals raised for fur in China) and in pizzas in Japan.  There seems no end to ingenious uses for making food and feed appear to have more protein than they really do, never mind that melamine forms kidney crystals when mixed with one of its by-products, cyanuric acid.

For the science types among you, the intrepid Procter & Gamble scientists who identified melamine in pet food have just published their toxicology findings.  Take a look at Figure 1, which compares the chromatography of the “control” (safe) cat food with the cat food “tainted” with melamine and its nasty by-products.  And check out Table 1; it reports that nearly 15% of the so-called wheat gluten was actually melamine and cyanuric acid.  The amounts in Chinese infant formula were in the same ballpark, so it’s no wonder that so many babies got sick.  This is a huge scandal and clear indication that our food safety systems need a major fix.

Center for Science in the Public Interest has mapped legislative initiatives by state.  Here’s a quick way to see which states are doing what.

Adam Voiland of U.S. News and World Report interviewed David Ludwig and me for this story based on our recent JAMA article.  He’s packed a lot of information into these 10 categories, which start with #1, the billions advertisers spend on marketing to kids, and end with #10, food industry attacks on critics (this means me).  Check out the links!

Melamine-laden milk powder made in China has made its way into Chinese infant formula, of course, but is also turning up in candy in New Zealand, croissants in Japan, M&Ms in South Korea, and coffee drinks in the United States.  Now the British Food Standards Agency (FSA) warns that melamine has been found in something more exotic.  Would you believe chocolate-flavored “willy” syrup.  You don’t know what this is?  Consider it a caloric sex toy.   If you have used it already, the FSA says not to worry.  The melamine dose is too low to do harm.  Whew.

Thanks (I think) to blogger Doctor Yoni Freedhoff for passing this one along.

And this one is international.  Ketchum Public Relations asked about 1000 people in the U.S., the U.K, Germany, Argentina, and China what they thought about a bunch of issues about food choice.  The results are interesting, if not particularly credible.  For example, 44% say they are confused about which foods are good for them, and only 30% or so would rank profit as the highest priority if they were CEO of a global food company.  That’s the difference between consumers and people who go to business school, I guess.  Enjoy and have a sane weekend.

Andrew Martin begins his account of the latest Pepsi quarterly report like this: “Tap water is making a comeback.  That’s bad news for PepsiCo’s profits.”  Sales are down 10%.  Why?  People aren’t buying as much soda or bottled water.  Score one for the environmental movement.

The Environmental Working Group says the plastic bottles are bad for the environment but that’s not all.  Its latest report tests the waters and finds plenty of fertilizer and drug residues in them. Oh great.