food museum blog

Slaughtering News From All Over, Plus, A Teapot Scandal?

Grateful that I do not have 150 feet of intestines tucked inside, as do manatees, I see that the current crop of free healthy product magazines are recommending a huge roster of "cleansing" items this winter, none of which would be needed if the magazines' audience were eating as advised in the first place, right?

But I digress---a slaughterhouse video from Hallmark Meat Packing in Chino, CA, has prompted Los Angeles schools to withhold meat products from a company called Westland that buys meat from Hallmark, on the grounds that the "downer" cattle unable to walk towards their deaths were being dragged or pushed in, and thus might be suffering from diseases that could render their meat iffy for human consumption. Westland provides ground beef to the USDA's National School Lunch Program.  Many school systems around the US have chosen to reject meat from Westland, including some in Oregon and Florida.

( Meanwhile, rival groups in Kenya have been killing one another not only machetes, but also with bows and arrows. )

Japanese whalers, despite concentrated efforts to stop them, continue to slaughter whales with impunity, though Australian authorities now claim the video evidence they have will bolster their case against the spurious legal claim of the Japanese that they are taking whales for "research purposes."

Apparently The Teapot Museum of Sparta, NC, was the recipient of a $500,000 grant from the Federal Transportation office back in 2006, a fact now revealed to all and sundry with great derision. This report from 2007 says the planned new museum idea has been scrapped. Now as one who applauds any museum effort directed however tangentially at the subject of food, the stuff that sustains us, rather than at yet another monument to war and destruction, I must say that chunk of change would have been a fine first step towards the creation of the National Museum of Food & Farm on the Mall in Washington, DC. Read more about The FOOD Museum's proposal here.

Topps Goes Bottoms Up After Burger Recall

According to today's NYTimes report, the first hint that frozen hamburger patties from Topps Meat Company of Elizabeth, NJ might carry the E.coli bacteria came on July 5 when a girl in Pennsylvania sickened after eating one. Testing confirmed the bacteria to be present on September 7.  ( Over a month for these results??)

Yet the USDA apparently did not announce the recall of 21.7 million pounds of meat until September 25. Today Topps, in business since 1940, closed its doors and sent 87 employees home.

The Times stated that "Anthony D’Urso, the chief operating officer at Topps, said the company was unable to withstand the financial burden of the recall.

“This is tragic for all concerned,” Mr. D’Urso said in a statement. “In one week we have gone from the largest U.S. manufacturer of frozen hamburgers to a company that cannot overcome the economic reality of a recall this large.”"   I think he missed the part about being falling ill from eating his company's tainted products...

The USDA website has a different, somewhat more complex report on this.

Deputy Assistant Administrator for the USDA Office of Policy, Dr. Daniel Engeljohn, said the agency would require all beef plants to demonstrate they have E.coli: 0157: H7 under control, based on a checklist established in 2002.

He went on to say, limply, "We are notifying all slaughter and grinder establishments that it is their responsibility to ensure that these measures are in place. " 

(The words "slaughter and grinder" really stick in my craw, like a piece of tainted meat. Mass animal processing described in raw terms.)

Not Just China--Vietnam Suffers From Food Scares

A country  known for its healthy, veggie-rich cuisine is reeling from news reports of toxic domestically-raised soy sauce, cancer-causing chemicals saturating greens, and formaldehyde in the country's signature pho noodle soup.

Agrarian Vietnam, "where three quarters of people are farmers"  is being rapidly transformed into a "industrialized and market-driven economy," according to a report from Agence France Presse.

"A recent survey by the state-run Plant Protection Department found pesticides on 30 to 60 percent of the vegetables tested in Hanoi markets, including substances that are banned in Vietnam and other countries.

One of them was the insecticide metamidophos, which has been linked to health problems in China, Hong Kong, South Korea and the United States. Many farmers in Vietnam and neighbouring China use high doses of chemical fertilisers and pesticides to boost production in a cut-throat market where margins are slim, even though many know the substances pose health risks."

One farmer, Nguyen Thi Nhuong, admitted she and her family do not eat what she grows commercially.

"We have set aside a small part of our garden for vegetables that grow naturally for our daily use. We are afraid the chemicals will harm our health."

(Thanks to http://www.dgfoundation.org/programs/country-gateway-support.html for the photo of  Vietnamese farmers.)

China Bars American Frozen Chicken Feet

The bribe-taking food and drug regulator has been executed and a vendor of pork-flavored cardboard-filled steamed buns or baozi has been shut down as food authorities in China take charge.

And, while reports continue to come in here regarding tainted Chinese food imports, the Chinese government has decided to invoke the "people in glass houses" rule and more heavily scrutinize American products sold to China.

The AP reports today:

"Frozen poultry products from Tyson Foods Inc., the world's largest meat processor, were found to be contaminated with salmonella, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said on its Web site late Friday.

Other imports barred by China included frozen chicken feet from Sanderson Farms, Inc. tainted with residue of an anti-parasite drug, as well as frozen pork ribs from Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. containing a leanness-enhancing feed additive, the AQSIQ said.

A spokesman for Cargill denied the agency's claims, while officials at Tyson and Sanderson Farms were not immediately available to comment."

I cannot help but ask....Dear Martha: What do I do with a pound of frozen chicken feet, salt, pepper and a dream? Pls advise.

( Evidently slowly braised c. f's are common in dim sum restaurants and compare favorably with osso buco.. (??!)

( Thanks to http://www.alibaba.com/catalog/11123841/Chicken_Feet_Chicken_Paw.html  for chicken feet pic.)

Bean-Fed Fish

The U.S. has evidently signed a major contract with the Chinese who will purchase $3 billion worth of soybeans from American farmers, with more purchases to come.  As the soybean is one of the few beans that is NOT native to the US, this may sound implausible. But one of  the biggest Chinese food businesses is now aquaculture--feeding fish stocks to fish being farm raised is getting too expensive, and fish stocks are being rapidly depleted--so aqua growers are substituting soy protein for the food that comes naturally to most fish--other fish.

Does anyone know what this will mean for the fish, or for those who eat them?

( Logo is from the combined American Soybean Association and the United Soybean Board--for further info click on this: http://www.soyaqua.org/quickfacts.html)

Further from the Dept of Tainted Food--Forget Fido, Whaddabout Us?!

Apparently melamine-laced feed from our Chinese trading partners has been ingested by chickens, and hogs, and said critters have then been ingested by our fellow Americans.

According to the NYTimes, " The Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration said that some 30 broiler poultry farms and eight breeder poultry farms in Indiana had received contaminated feed in early February and fed it to chickens within days of receiving it. All of those potentially affected chickens have since been processed.

The two agencies said they believed the likelihood of illness to people eating contaminated chicken was low because the contamination was most likely diluted. Without evidence of harm to humans, the agencies said they were not issuing recalls of any of the processed chicken products.

The Agriculture Department and the F.D.A. revealed last week that eight pork producers in seven states had purchased adulterated feed. Some 6,000 hogs were quarantined as a result in California, Kansas, North Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Authorities are also in contact with a feed mill in Missouri that might have received adulterated products.

On Monday, Tyson Foods acknowledged that it had sent nearly 200 hogs that may have eaten feed containing melamine to a pork-processing plant. But the F.D.A. and the U.S.D.A. said they were not concerned that those hogs posed any risk to people, according to Bloomberg News. "

Italics above are mine--note the words "likelihood low" and "most likely diluted?"

Wow-- I am so utterly reassured now, aren't you? Ready to chow down on wings and ribs?

Want to Know You're Eating Dolly?

The California Legislature is attempting to pass a bill that would require labeling of any foods produced from cloned animals or their offspring. According to the April 17 AP story, the U.S.  Food and Drug Administration apparently is ready to approve such products for sale without labeling, though a bill pending in Congress could require it.

"According to research by Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, the FDA has based its preliminary findings on limited samples, said Jean Halloran, the group's director of food policy initiatives. Findings that cloned pork could be safe, for example, were based on tests of just five pigs, while the findings about cows' milk were from 43 cows.

"Considering that 90 percent of cloned animals die because there's something wrong with them, we don't consider that to be an adequate safety assessment of what millions of people would be eating and drinking from millions of different animals," Halloran said."

Don't want to put you off your feed, but for further info from the FDA, go here.

Put A Chicken/Pig/Cow In Your Tank

While we're on the subject of liquid alternative fuels, at the Reuters Food Summit in Chicago yesterday, Tyson Foods Inc. chief Richard Bond said his company is developing fat-based fuels for use in jet engines or diesel engines.

According to the Reuters report, "The largest U.S. meat company, which produces 2.3 billion pounds of fat a year as a byproduct of its operations, could potentially start production of the fuel by the end of the year, Bond said."

The notion of pouring fuel derived from the fat of  dead animals into our tanks may be be slightly less enticing than that of using the lightly citrus-scented ( !) fuel blogged about yesterday here...But hey, it's all renewable and that's great.

p.s. An expert I spoke with recently said that if all the money poured into Iraq had been put into developing alternatives fuels, the foreign-oil dependency problem would be solved by now.

(As for the Reuters Food Summit that ran from March 5-8,  even after viewing the company video purporting to answer the question "What Are Summits? " we are not exactly sure...)

Faux Fish?

A pork chop is a pork chop, a chicken wing a wing, a burger a burger.....BUT--Fish eaters can no longer feel secure that they know what they are eating. The US is doing DNA tests on fish entering the country because apparently fish fraud is a real issue. This has been covered recently in the Washington Post--but we were in Florida a few days ago, living this dilemma.

We had no doubts that what we were buying at the Star Market in Cortez, Florida was the real thing--Pomano, Snapper, Grouper and so on. Why?  Well for one, because it was an actual fish market.  And for another, we could see the fish carcases being cut up on a long table behind the sales case, scales flying, the egrets , heron and pelicans awaiting the fish market's detritus under the dock's pilings.

But when we passed through Sarasota, when we inquired what fish was being used for the fish sandwich at a joint perched over the marina, the waitress said Basa, a fish flown in from Asia, frozen.  "It's the new, new thing in fish," she said. ( Buyer beware-not all basa is basa....)

Oh.

We visited friends on their houseboat berthed near Orlando at Sanford, Florida on the St John's River. The local greasy spoon at the end of the pier featured a fish called "snook," a local Florida specialty. Or so we thought. The fish market guys back in Cortez had told us snook in a restaurant was not legal. Only the person who caught it could eat it and it could not be sold commercially.  Hmmm. The weary waitress at the spoony place said their snook came in from Lake Victoria in Africa, from their distributor.

We noticed a Sysco sticker on the cash register.

Oi vey.

Was snook in actuality Nile Perch?

Was the grouper we had eaten out in Bradenton really grouper, or was it  a version of Asian catfish, well disguised under the blackening seasonings we chose? Or maybe farm-raised white fish something from Missouri?

( Grouper ???? from groups.msn.com)

Musing on Velveeta

Apparently, eastern New Mexico is home to one of the largest factory co-op dairy operations in the States, turning out blocks of rubber cheese similar to Velveeta, and other products. It's called Southwest Cheese Company, ( sounds almost quaint,  with wooden hand churns and Daisy chewing her cud and peering through the window,)  and it's  in Clovis.  It supposedly produces over 250 million pounds of "American cheese." 

Back in the ancient days of my childhood, Velveeta was eaten in other homes, not ours. So when I was at a friend's place, I occasionally stuck my fingers in the Velveeta, amazed at its un-cheeselike consistency and its almost melted-before-melting quality.

A quick Google of Velveeta reveals that in 1928 Kraft Foods itself described V as not quite cheese. This text is taken from the company website.

" After several years of research on the nutri tive value of whey - a by - product of cheese making - Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation introduces Velveeta© pasteurized process cheese food in the United States and Canada in a half-pound package."

It's a "cheese food." Huh?

Back in February of 2000 Steve Ritter was wondering the same thing--he had been musing on Cheez ( Why Johnny Can't Spell) Whiz, another Kraft product. Here's what he found out, after trial and error:

"Pasteurized process cheese, for example, is made from one or more cheeses, such as cheddar or colby, and may have cream or anhydrous milkfat added. The cheese is blended and heated with an emulsifier—typically a sodium or potassium phosphate, tartrate, or citrate—and other optional ingredients such as water, salt, artificial color, and spices or other flavorings.

Pasteurized process cheese food is a variation of process cheese that may have dry milk, whey solids, or anhydrous milkfat added, which reduces the amount of cheese in the finished product. It must contain at least 51% of the cheese ingredient by weight, have a moisture content less than 44%, and have at least 23% milkfat."

So cheese food is something edible, and contains at least half of what it purports to be.

I won't go into the whole feedlot, cows jowl to jowl who never see pasture, old milkers get axed and are shipped to McDonald's thing here. You know all that anyway.

(SW Cheese factory pic from www.southwestcheese.com. Velveeta pic from http://www.kraftfoods.com/Velveeta/Timeline)