Green Options

In the wake of the peanut butter recalls, and well, years of food safety issues, the Senate and House are reviewing bills that will strengthen our food safety laws. Opinions on the bills vary from the positive to fears of what the bills mean for small farmers.

While I plan on reading the actual legislation proposed, and more articles, I also decided to ask a real expert on the subject. Dr. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, was kind enough to share some of her thoughts on the topic of how politics impacts our plates. Her groundbreaking book covers such topics as “Undermining Dietary Advice,” exploitation of kids and schools, and the inner workings of food lobbies and their influence on government. I caught up with Dr. Nestle at a Food Policy conference in Kansas City.

BB: In your speech at the Kansas City Food Policy meeting, you mentioned that the issue of food safety is “less of an FDA issue than a Congress issue.” Given the poor track record of the FDA and USDA on food safety, can you explain your comment?

Updates on Obama, Stimulus and Food Policy in Washington

Stimulating an Appetite for More
Just over three percent of the massive stimulus price tag is allocated to food programs including food stamps, meals for elderly, after-school food programs and WIC — the Special Nutrition Supplement Program for Women, Infants and Children. Advocates for food programs and agriculture reform were hoping for more. Read the report here.

“Sustainable” Deputy for the USDA Announced
Sustainable agriculture advocates were justifiably dismayed when Vilsack was nominated as head of the USDA. Vilsack historically had strong support for  agribusiness and ethanol. Now there’s reason for some hope with the nomination for USDA second-in-command, Kathleen Merrigan, currently director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts. Merrigan was one of the “sustainable dozen” candidates proposed by the group Food Democracy Now. There’s good reason to believe sustainability concerns will be heard in the new USDA administration.

While national policies have left a lot to be desired regarding food safety, states have taken a lot of steps forward to combat food issues. Consider the state and city bans on transfats, New York’s mandate for calorie labeling on fast food menus. Even as the FDA and USDA fail, for many reasons, to step up to protect consumers, individual states are taking action and leading the charge.

Maryland is the next notable state taking action. Two bills have currently been proposed to ban the use of controversial food dyes in the wake of two British studies (PDF) that show some of the dyes may be linked to hyperactivity and behavior problems in children. One of the bills would mandate labeling on the food packages that contain the dyes, and give industry until 2012 to stop using them. The other bill specifically prohibits schools from purchasing, providing and serving any food item that contains the dyes by 2010.

Learn where you can lookup common foods to see which have these dyes after the jump.

Valentine’s Day and chocolate, it’s an ethical eater’s dilemma for certain. All that worry about carbon footprint, fair trade, ogranic. “But, Honey, it wasn’t eco-friendly!” may not help your cause on Feb. 14th with a real chocolate-loving sweetheart. Here’s a relationship that won’t require any compromises: Askinosie. Ask what?

Rare, Single Bean Origins, Even Rarer Ethics

Askinosie is a small chocolate company out of Springfield, Missouri. It’s not exactly tip of the tongue for foodie locations, but to Midwesterners, it’s as local as chocolate can get. The Askinosie bars are all single bean origin, and unique origins at that. Their Soconuso bar is the first chocolate bar consumed outside Mexico in over 100 years that contains beans from this region. Other origins include San Jose Del Tambo, Ecuador and Davao, Phillipines.

Perhaps best of all is that owner Shawn Askinosie not only pays the farmers better than fair trade prices, he shares directly with them 10 percent of the net profits from chocolate made from their farms. Askinosie also works directly with the farmers, no middlemen, to make sure the beans are produced to exacting standards.

There has been a lot of criticism heaved onto China, rightly so, over the use of melamine in foods. Perhaps we should save more of that outrage for closer to home. Three days ago, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy published their findings in association with the Environmental Health Journal study:
Mercury was found in over a third of processed food products tested, the source of the mercury is contaminated high fructose corn syrup.
One of the researchers, Renee Dufalt, led inquiry into the possibility that HFCS contained mercury while working with the FDA in 2005.

The FDA did nothing to inform consumers about the mercury in the last four years.

Two other very common food additives are also manufactured with mercury cell technology; citric acid and sodium benzoate. These additives have not yet been tested.

After the jump don’t miss the list of names to contact including who is making the tainted HFCS, who was head of the EPA at the time, where you can take action, and what you can do.

Even as a bitter cold front is keeping the temperature in the single digits, I am thinking about warmer days. You see, this is the time of year that seed catalogs arrive and I spend winter nights huddled under a comforter, gazing at jewel-toned heirloom vegetables, ordering seeds, and counting the days until the last frost.

It’s fitting then, that I just finished reading Tim Stark’s book, Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer. The writer turned consultant, turned farmer and writer, tells of his own slippery slope from using scrap lumber in a dumpster to build a germination rack, then starting tomato plants indoors in a New York apartment, to his full-on obsessive slide into tackling organic heirloom tomato farming on the land surrounding his boyhood home.

Few other foods are as fraught with environmental issues as meat. From the treatment of animals, to the environmental impacts of factory farms, to the recalls and health questions, it’s all become a rather meaty issue, pardon the pun.

As consumers demand better choices, those items appear at the market, often with confusing labels and overlapping terms that lead consumers to believe statements that may not be true. Take, for example, cage-free. In one’s mind, there may be visions of happy chickens running free, but in actuality, this only means the chickens were not enclosed in a cage. The birds could still have been raised indoors in overcrowded conditions, with no access to pasture. If you think these labels were designed to confuse you, well, you may be right.

Link to get your own free guide after the jump.

If your waistband permits, here is one more seasonal, sustainable menu for the last of the holiday parties ahead. This is an elegant, yet healthy sit-down dinner for New Year’s, just right after a season of perhaps too many cookies! It’s also one to bookmark for next year’s Thanksgiving menu.

Join in the feast for New Englanders with Bon Appetit Management’s Chef Kimberly Triplett. Triplett runs the kitchens for Goucher College in Towson, MD. Recipes follow the jump.

LOW CARBON HOLIDAY MENU

1. Local mesclun and arugula greens with toasted pumpkin seeds and crispy onions tossed in a roasted shallot oil  (greens, shallots, crispy onion and pumpkin seeds are from Even Star organic farms, Lexington Maryland)

2. Roasted Brussels sprouts with apples, bacon in a grain mustard vinaigrette (Brussels sprouts, apples are from Licking Creek Bend  Farm in Needmore, PA .Bacon is from Springfield Farms in Monkton, Maryland)

Continuing our series from Bon Appetit Management chefs, is a visit to the West Coast for seasonal salads, brightly colored with pomegranate and persimmon over lush green arugula. No wonder the rest of the country gets a bit green with envy over the steady diet of local salad all year.

My personal answer is a CSA farmer with a few greenhouses, a trend I hope catches on. Until then, we can all have visions of persimmons dancing in our heads with this menu from Chef Melissa Miller, Café Bon Appetit at SAP Corporation in Menlo Park, CA.

Over on the opposite coast, fish is local and the dishes from Chef Michael Aquaro at Duke University in Durham, NC, include Oyster Stew, Cumin Crusted Petit Poussin, and Southern “Pecan Pie” Braised Greens. Recipes for the Oyster Stew and Dried Cranberry Oatmeal cookies are included in this post.

Recipes follow the jump.

Giving Mother Earth a Gift This Holiday Season by Cooking Green.
Can a winter’s holiday feast be local and sustainable? It doesn’t seem such an easy task, even for a locavore like myself as I contemplate turnips, a few remaining pumpkins and sweet potatoes. Even so, with some resourcefulness and help from regional chefs of the Bon Appetit Management Company, we can all have a Low-Carbon Christmas — even in the frozen tundra of the upper Midwest.

Bon Apetit, a company that offers corporations, universities and colleges onsite catering and food service with a commitment to sustainable, local cuisine, had four of its chefs from various regions of the country put together low-carbon, high-flavor menus for the season.

The regions include Upper Midwest (follows), Northeast, West Coast and Southeast. Each of the menus will be featured in an Eat Drink Better post beginning with the upper Midwest menu, below.

General tips for parties and seasonal gathering that keep things low carbon include not using bottled water or disposable dinnerware. Don’t use bottled water and compost food waste as much as possible. Use less beef and dairy products.

Menu after the jump.