Omnivore Atlanta

At a recent lunch, a friend was complaining that it’s hard to find a hamburger cooked rare in our city, despite the epidemic of new burger joints. According to the New York Times, there is very good reason for that. Today’s paper includes a lengthy story in which the writer, Michael Moss, traces Upton-Sinclair-like, the hamburger whose E. coli contamination left Stephanie Smith paralyzed:

Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.

Read the entire article, with its account of slaughterhouses that refuse to sell meat to companies that insist on rigorous testing,  and you’ll never complain again about your hamburger being overcooked.

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This post by Jennifer Leslie on 11Alive.com, qualifies as one of the most disturbing local restaurant stories I’ve ever come across — and if you’ve got a weak stomach I don’t recommend you click the link. The story’s opening:

DORAVILLE, Ga. — A local restaurant with a loyal following and rave reviews is under the microscope.

Doraville Police took pictures a few months ago of a skinned cat and raw meat stacked in the back of Ming’s BBQ on Buford Highway.

The pictures, taken on January 23, forced Ming’s to make big changes.

They showed grease traps overflowing, pigs stacked in buckets, boxes of raw meat sitting outside and pieces of raw meat hanging from a fence.

“One of the employees was taking, we don’t know what kind of meat it was, but he was tossing it over a fence, and we did get pictures of that,” said Officer Rosemary Martin.

The numerous comments at the end of the article are quite interesting, with many accusing the media of sensationalizing the story, particularly in implying that the restaurant had butchered a cat. There are quite a few posts also (understandably) alleging ethnic stereotyping. (Hat tip to our commenter, FoodieMan.)

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This just in from the FDA:

Dekalb Farmers Market announced today that it is voluntarily recalling ROASTED SALTED PISTACHIO WHOLE KERNELS, sold from their retail store located in GA. The pistachios may be part of the recall by Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Inc. due to contamination with the Salmonella organism.

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I dare you to read this.

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Here’s some new strangeness brought to you by our federal government:

Beef exporters are banned from testing their cattle for mad cow disease without approval from the government, which has exclusive control on test kits, a divided federal appeals court panel said today.

A Kansas-based exporter, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, seeking to test its cattle to minimize public fear, challenged Department of Agriculture regulations that block corporations from buying and using kits to test for mad cow disease. There is no cure and no treatment for the neurological disease. It’s 100 percent fatal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in a 2-1 opinion, upheld USDA control of the kits. Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson and Judith Rogers sided with the government; Chief Judge David Sentelle dissented.

In other words, if the feds don’t test our beef, nobody else should be allowed to, either, even if foreign markets insist on it. You can read the whole story here.

Meanwhile, the FDA is proposing regulations for genetically engineered animals. The Washington Post has the story. Here’s a sample:

Some of the genetically engineered animals in development, called biofarm animals, are designed to grow faster to reach market more quickly. Others are being developed to make food healthier, Lutter said. “For example, some pigs have been genetically engineered to contain high levels of omega-3 fatty acids,” he said.

Still others are intended to produce drugs. Certain animals are being genetically altered to be used in human transplantations — for instance, providing cells or tissues or organs that are less likely to be rejected by the human immune system, Lutter said.

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Time has posted a more thorough report on the study of dirty restaurants I mentioned last week.

Atlanta is cited twice in the article — once for having a good ratio of health inspectors to retaurants. (Georgia has stricter regulatory laws than many other states, thanks to a law adopted last year.) We’re also mentioned for an undisclosed restaurant that had mold growing in its ice machine.

I found this information pretty staggering:

The CSPI estimates that the average American eats out five times a week. The vast majority of them survive unscathed, but every year, 76 million Americans fall ill from unsafe food. More than 15 years of data show that 41% of all food-borne illness outbreaks in the U.S. can be directly traced to restaurant food. In 2005 a single employee reportedly infected with norovirus at a Blimpie sub shop in Michigan ended up sickening more than 100 customers. Investigators think the virus was transferred to food products and between employees who used the same sink to wash hands and wash lettuce without sanitizing the sink between uses.

That’s one in four Americans!

“Food poisoning” has been epidemic lately, not just because of restaurant practices but because of contaminated ingredients themselves. This is a particular worry for those of us who eat out constantly. I get sick at least twice a year, as I’ve reported before. Of course, I can rarely be certain which restaurant was the culprit.

A few years ago, I got very sick after eating at a now-defunct restaurant in Midtown. I knew the particular restaurant was responsible because a friend who dined there with me also got sick. I got a completely hostile reaction from the restaurant owner-chef when I called to inform him.

Check out the Time article here.

A good blog on food safety issues is the delicately named Barf Blog operated by the International Food Safety Network.

(Graphic from the CDC.)

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It’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing one food-safety crisis after another, according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

In his column today, Krugman documents the conservative movement’s successful effort to curb federal safety regulation. The argument, as we’ve all heard a thousand times in as many contexts, is always the same: in a “free market,” companies won’t compromise safety that would jeopardize their good standing (their sales) with consumers.

Krugman documents the fiction of that claim and shows how the philosophy of deregulation actually backfires. For example, American beef producers were excluded from foreign markets by several countries because of our lax inspection standards. In order to recover the markets, tougher inspection standards were reinstated, but at least one country, South Korea, still doesn’t trust us.

Meanwhile, having failed to keep pace with needed improvements in safety regulation here in America, eating has become unpredictably risky business.

Read the column here.

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Still undecided on who to vote for in the upcoming primaries and presidential election? Never fear — I’ve got the information to help you make up your mind: where the candidates stand on … food! That’s right, health care, education and security might be kinda important, I guess, but where the candidates stand on issues of food is the real test.

OK, maybe not. But I did think it would be interesting to take a look at what different candidates had to say about our food supply and our farm communities, as well as food safety. Anyone who has followed the politics of food in the past few years, or read Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, knows that government legislation is directly affecting what we eat, what is available to us and at what prices, and contributing to the obesity epidemic in America. So where do this crop of presidential candidates stand on these issues? I decided to check it out.

What follows is everything I could find on the top three Democratic and Republican candidate’s websites, as well as some searching on their voting records and press about their activities relating to these issues. It’s not the most appetizing stuff in the world, but I think it gives an interesting insight into how deeply some of them are thinking about an issue that probably won’t get a ton of attention in the upcoming elections.

Barack Obama

Obama is the only candidate I could find who specifically mentions supporting local and organic food on his website. Under the “Issues” tab in the section devoted to the steps Obama will take on issues related to agriculture, it reads:

Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: Obama will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and reform crop insurance to not penalize organic farmers. He also will promote regional food systems.

Obama also supports country-of-origin labeling, so consumers will know how far food has traveled to get to our shelves, and so shoppers have the option to consciously buy American.

(more…)

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If you pay even scant attention to the news, you know that food has become a major subject of political discourse. That’s especially true recently because of the questions about Chinese seafood.On July 4, the New York Times printed an editorial about how the Bush administration, in its usual fashion, has put the public at risk to protect the interests of big money — in this case the big money of agribusiness. It has delayed enforcement of a 2002 law requiring country-of-origin labels on fresh fruit and vegetables, red meats, seafood and peanuts. Says the Times (subscription only):

As Andrew Martin reported in The Times on Monday, the Bush administration’s Agriculture Department was hostile to the labeling from the start. That comes as no surprise given that many of its top officials had worked for a trade association representing meatpackers and ranchers that opposes labeling. The Republican-controlled Congress, with key members beholden to campaign contributions from agribusiness, twice delayed the starting date for mandatory labeling, ultimately pushing it back to September 2008.

Industry lobbyists raise a flurry of unpersuasive objections. They claim it would be too costly for American meatpackers to segregate and track imported meat, and especially difficult to label ground meat which often comes from different cows. They also claim that labeling is a disguised form of protectionism, which implies that all foreign food is suspect. But these rationales are trumped by the simple argument that consumers have a right to know the origins of what they are buying. The required record-keeping should also help in tracking any dangerous products back through the supply chain to the source of contamination.

The Times calls for Democrats in Congress to implement the labeling requirement now, it being obvious that consumers ought to be able to make decisions for themselves about whether they want to risk consuming imported foods.

(more…)

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Check out this toe-tappin’ animated rewrite of an Eagles tune from the food safety folks at the University of California:
Stomachache Tonight

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U.S. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana has written letters to President Bush and the head of the FDA demanding a crackdown on food and medicine imports, particularly from China. Currently, the FDA inspects less than 2 percent of all imports, creating a gap through which terrorists could slip deadly poisons. Ezra Klein’s website has the details, plus more updates about food safety.

The New York Times (subscription-only) has created a game, “Food Import Folly,” that allows you, the imperiled consumer, “to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources.”

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