American McNuggets (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain the chemical preservative tBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product. They also contain dimethylpolysiloxane, “an anti-foaming agent” also used in Silly Putty.
FRIDAY, March 5 (HealthDay News) — Conventional wisdom has dictated that fat from red meat is a risk factor for heart disease, but a new analysis from Harvard researchers finds it’s eating processed meat — not unprocessed red meat — that increases the risk for heart disease and even diabetes.
Every Ingredient In A Pizza Pocket.
Ah, the healthy nutritious snack that is a pizza pocket, laid out in a loving array of typefaces. I could really go for some modified food starch about now. Thanks Justin Perricone and Boing Boing!
People respond to the economics of food choices. Lab scientists aren’t able to handle this concept—for them, talking about the price of food is taboo—but it’s extremely important. Americans spend about three dollars and seventy-five cents a day on food that they eat at home. They can eat pizza at about a thousand calories a dollar, or Oreo cookies at about twelve hundred calories a dollar. M&M’s, at about three thousand calories per dollar, are a huge bargain. Spinach is about thirty calories a dollar, not a bargain. And don’t even think about lettuce or cucumbers or tomatoes or, heaven forbid, strawberries—by comparison, those foods are a rip-off! Nutrition educators tell us how to eat, but they don’t give us the money to change our behavior. Given that people don’t really want to spend more on food, I don’t see that they have any choice here … the choice is really made for them. Rats in a lab have a choice. But humans are constrained by costs.
Adam Drewnowski, Director of the Nutritional Sciences Program and Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Drewnowski was quoted in The Hungry Gene by Ellen Ruppel Shell. (via wildcat2030) (via buffleheadcabin) (via robot-heart-politics)
Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.
This is the inside of a meat processing plant.
A plant that injects beef with ammonia to kill bacteria.
Repeat, they are INJECTING BEEF WITH AMMONIA TO KILL BACTERIA.
(snip)
I just want to say that Carol Guzy is amazing.
Carol Guzy is one of the news photographers I am privileged to have met, and she is a good soul who is among the top in her field, yes.
Confidential grinding logs and other records and interviews reveal the ingredients and E. coli issues in a typical hamburger sold by grocers and fast-food restaurants. This patty was made by the food giant Cargill, which recalled 844,812 pounds of ground beef on Oct. 6, 2007, after an estimated 940 people were sickened, including Stephanie Smith, 22, of Cold Spring, Minn.
In late 2006, something strange began to happen to America’s honeybees. Colonies that were once thriving suddenly went still, almost overnight. The worker bees that make hives run simply disappeared, their bodies never to be found. Over the past couple of years, nearly one-third of all honeybee colonies have collapsed this way, which led to a straightforward name for the phenomenon: colony collapse disorder (CCD).
Support this bill. There is nothing wrong with giving some antibiotics to sick animals—but that’s not how they are used. Antibiotics are mixed in with animal feed preventatively. The overuse of antibiotics leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria that will affect both humans and animals.
In other words, because the feed lots are so crowded and unhealthy that they think it is necessary to preventatively dose all the healthy animals with antibiotics, our antibiotics may not work when we need them to.
And this is just the portion we’re sure about. Other things—like the effects of lingering antibiotics on our food and watersupply are only speculative. But they can’t be good.
Our current food industry is the perfect storm of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle colliding with George Orwell’s 1984. Not only do many in the food industry degrade their workers, but they take great steps to conceal this exploitation. These companies have used their power to pass laws preventing you from questioning where your food comes from.
Demanding Justice for the People that Harvest our Food (via azspot) …as well as using the same power/laws to destroy biodiversity in the name of market control. The biggest threat to our food supply is now the lack of biodiversity. If this trend continues, the options for diet will dwindle so thin that a single disease could easily destroy the entire world’s food supply. (via morningstar)
The European Union’s top scientific authority pushed aside doubts raised by several member states on Tuesday as it concluded that MON810, the only genetically modified maize cultivated in Europe, was as safe as traditional corn crops.
[via It’s Time to Learn From Frogs - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com]
“This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.
“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.
“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.”
The real caloric value of food and how much exercise it takes to burn it off. Tumbled from @Kris Colvin.
California caterers, hotels and restaurants throw out roughly 1.5 million tons of perfectly good food every year, according to the state Integrated Waste Management Board. (latimes)
the food that gets thrown out is leftovers, extra ingredients, things that will go bad soon - all of it goes straight into the garbage. in the past, restaurant owners worried about potential liability for food donations - if someone got sick from eating the food, for example - but a 1996 federal good samaritan law protects companies who donate food from legal liability.
so the only real reason this food is going to waste is logistics.
“It’s not the liability that caterers are worried about,” said Michael Flood, chief exec of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. “It’s the logistics.” Simply put, it’s often too much hassle for caterers and hotels to arrange for leftover food to be given to a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. So they toss it in the trash. (latimes)
in CA, a state senator worked on legislation that would have required only that catering companies inform clients of their option to require that leftover food be donated. “That bill, SB 1443, was shot down by the California Restaurant Assn., which argued that any such requirement would be troublesome for its members.”
i read recently about an effort to address this technologically, by creating “an online tool that will match non-profits feeding low-income individuals with the produce from groceries, markets, and farms that would otherwise go to waste. Imagine online dating meets your neighborhood produce section. “Food need profiles” will match up information fields including produce type, amount, geographical location, refrigerator storage space and availability of transportation for pick ups, notifying organizations with the greatest need when there is food available for donation.”
it sounds clever, but unless the people who have the extra food agree to participate, it won’t work. and it sounds like those people in CA are dead set against cooperating.
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