Archive for the ‘Food Politics’ Category
So, this is happening right now…
I just saw this on Twitter… (or, Taco Bell likes to stretch the truth)
[h/t to @appetite4profit for this one - you should follow her if you are interested, at all, in food politics.]
Here is what they say:
@TacoBell tweeted first: “Get an 88¢ Crunchwrap Supreme® for a limited time @TacoBell – Hurry! Offer ends March 5th! http://bit.ly/88Promo #NowThatsADeal”
In response, @treyisnotdead wrote: “@TacoBell How can you afford to generate fake meat so cheaply?”
@TacoBell then wrote: “@TacoBell is large U.S. beef buyer & gets good prices: http://bit.ly/ingredfaq RT @treyisnotdead: How can you generate meat so cheaply?”
DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE? Trey certainly did.
He then posted: “FRAUD ALERT! FRAUD ALERT! @TACOBELL RETWEETED ME BUT DID NOT INCLUDE THE WORD “FAKE” TO DESCRIBE THEIR “MEAT.”"
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Wow. So, Taco Bell has already been busted for falsely advertising their “meat” as meat. And now, using a social media site where one can EASILY track what people have said, they manipulated a tweet to try to brag about their ability to purchase that “beef” at good prices.
Stay classy, Taco Bell.
Bittman vs. McD’s Oatmeal
Mark Bittman lays the smackdown on McDonald’s new “wholesome” oatmeal. Part I found most shocking (leading me to immediately say to myself: “why am I shocked anymore?”):
The aspect one cannot argue is nutrition: Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)
The bottom-line question is, “Why?” Why would McDonald’s, which appears every now and then to try to persuade us that it is adding “healthier” foods to its menu, take a venerable ingredient like oatmeal and turn it into expensive junk food? Why create a hideous concoction of 21 ingredients, many of them chemical and/or unnecessary? Why not try, for once, to keep it honest?
Why Are Tea Partiers Hating on Breastfeeding?
Strangely enough, some conservatives leapt to attack the simple notion of encouraging breast-feeding — which has been shown in many studies to reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. Tea Party star and Minn. Rep. Michelle Bachmann accused the first lady of pushing a leftist agenda intent on making “government the answer to everything.” On Laura Ingram’s radio show last week, Bachmann said: “To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump … You want to talk about nanny state, I think we just got a new definition.”
Bachmann’s claim that the government is buying breast pumps is nonsense. The IRS simply announced it would allow people to deduct breast-feeding expenses from their taxes. And since breast pumps can be costly (I found them online in the range of $75 to $350) the tax break would be a relief to many working mothers. But for Bachmann and her ilk, any government intervention to support healthier options is fodder for harsh criticism. [...]
Palin made a contentious remark of her own about Obama’s breast-feeding statements, saying, “No wonder Michelle Obama’s telling everybody, ‘you’d better breast-feed your baby.’ Yeah, you’d better, because the price of milk is so high right now!”
It’s unclear why Bachmann or Palin wouldn’t want to foster an environment that makes it easier for mothers to breast-feed their babies. Bachman’s implication that this is unpatriotic and an infringement on American rights is baffling given the fact that all politicians at least pay lip service to the importance of motherhood — to attack breast-feeding, as Bachmann and Palin have, is to attack healthy mothers and babies.
Originally, breast pumps and nursing supplies did not qualify for tax breaks or deductions. In fact, after extensive complaint and feedback from advocacy groups, health groups, individuals, and President Obama himself, the IRS changed its policy to allow families to use their own pre-tax dollars, through their flexible spending account, to cover breast pumps or to be able to deduct the cost of breastfeeding supplies from their taxes. [...]
It’s not Bachmann’s job as a lawmaker to rail against anything and everything she personally doesn’t like. In this, Republicans seem to excel. Bachmann, in particular, reasons that because she had five children, all of whom she breastfed, without using her own pre-tax dollars deposited into a flexible spending account or tax deductions to cover the costs of her breastfeeding supplies, then, by extension, no American mother should have the opportunity to do so either. [...]
There are millions of American mothers who do not receive any sort of paid family leave. They return to work almost immediately and, in the struggle to feed their babies and maintain a job, they must pump their breast milk during the day. Using a breast pump, and related supplies, which can be extremely costly is a medical or health care related expense. [...]
It’s not surprising but fairly ridiculous that Bachmann has chosen to make an enemy of American mothers, babies and the First Lady herself for working to improve public health overall, and the health of our babies first and foremost.
Store/Food Politics: Feb. 22, 2011
Title of article at Fair Food Fight says it all: Wal-mart Slumps; Whole Foods jumps.
Food Politics: Feb 15, 2011
Grocery Stores (Whole Foods, Walmart, Trader Joe’s):
- Leading Animal Welfare Standards (Whole Foods blog)
I’m really excited to announce that we are providing shoppers with a new level of transparency about how farm animals are raised by now offering beef, pork and chicken certified under the 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating system.
The rating system is the signature program of Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit organization that facilitates and encourages continuous improvement in animal agriculture. Independent, third-party certifiers audit farms and rate animal welfare practices and conditions using a tiered system that ranges from Step 1 (no crates, cages or crowding) to Step 5+ (animals spend their entire lives on one farm). We are proud to adopt this new rating system that helps shoppers make even more informed buying decisions while offering them peace of mind that the animals from our producers are raised with care.
- The Reasons for Walmart’s Healthy Food Initiative (The Atlantic)
- Trader Joe’s Seafood to be Sustainable by End of 2012 (Just Means)
The challenge is to find and support sustainable seafood sources while also keeping their stores stocked well enough to meet current consumer demand. Although the projected date for complete sustainability is still far ahead, Trader Joe’s has already taken steps toward sustainable seafood by stopping the sale of Chilean Sea Bass and Orange Roughy, both of which appear on the “Avoid” list at Seafood Watch because they are overfished or caught by methods that damage other sea life. Over the course of 2011 and 2012, Trader Joe’s has vowed to shift its purchasing practices so that all Trader Joe’s seafood, whether canned, fresh or frozen, comes from companies that use ethical fishing practices.
Many more articles after the jump…
Food Politics: Feb. 9, 2011 [Updated]
Adding some stuff that came down the pipe today so that I don’t have to wait for tomorrow’s (or, really, next week’s Food Politics roundup):
- Roy Blunt: Agribusinesses Subsidies Are More Important Then Feeding Poor People (Matt Yglesias)
- Fast food chains’ religious leanings flavor patronage (CNN wire, via Reesenews)
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Confession: I normally collect articles via an RSS feed. I do it over a series of days and then pick the ones I think deserve the most attention. I use Google Reader to do this and yesterday, after collecting a stash of food politics articles, I accidentally hit the “Mark all as Read” tab and BOOM, lost them all. I mean, they still exist somewhere but I had spent enough time already reading and sorting that I couldn’t imagine doing it again. So, those are lost as far as I am concerned. But some stuff has come through the reader since that ill-fated moment of mindless internet-ing. So here is a much shorter list than I intended for this post.
In no particular order:
- Rising Food Prices and the Fed’s Shady Alibi: The Fed says it’s not to blame for rising food prices. But could its money printing be a cause? (Bill Bonner at The Christian Science Monitor)
- Is “Eat Real Food” Unthinkable? (Mark Bittman at NYTimes)
- Cost of Feeding World’s Poor Leaps (Caroline Henshaw at WSJ)
- Brace Yourself for the food-price bubble: If the world has a poor harvest this year, food prices will rise to previously unimaginable levels. Food riots will multiply, political unrest will spread, and governments will fall. (Lester R. Brown at The Christian Science Monitor)
- Beverage Industry touts progress on calorie labeling and reduction (Caroline Scott-Thomas at Food Navigator)
- KFC gets a bad rap in Egypt: Rumors spread that anti-Mubarak protesters were paid money and given a KFC meal, a symbol of western influence. Witnesses say otherwise. (Raja Abdulrahim at The Los Angeles Times)
- FoodNavigator.com’s collected wisdom on the Dietary Guidelines (Marion Nestle at Food Politics)
- Health features low in food preference considerations, suggests study (Nathan Gray at Food Navigator)
Food Politics: Jan. 30, 2011
The big story at the end of the week:
- In a stunning reversal, USDA chief Vilsack greenlights Monsanto’s alfalfa (Tom Philpott at the Grist)
USDA chief Tom Vilsack had hinted strongly that he would place geographic restrictions on the growing of GMO alfalfa, to protect organic alfalfa growers from the threat of GMO contamination. He even floated a fancy name for the policy: “coexistence,” as in GMO crops and organic crops all just getting along. Even such a relatively mild restrictive policy would have broken with the longstanding USDA practice of giving GMOs a free pass. [...]
Thursday’s announcement marks a complete USDA cave-in to the biotech industry’s demands, and yet more evidence that Obama wants to be seen as a friend to powerful business interests — at the expense of smaller, less powerful interests like organic alfalfa and dairy growers, and, in this case, of the public interest.
- USDA approves controversial GM alfalfa (Marion Nestle at Food Politics)
- Monsanto’s Hostile Takeover of the USDA (Michele Simon at Appetite for Profit)
- Genetifically Modified Alfalfa Officially On The Way (Barry Estabrook of The Atlantic)
- Vilsack caved on GM alfalfa, so what’s the impact? (Sam Fromartz at Chews Wise)
More articles after the jump…
Food Politics: Jan. 27, 2011
International Food Politics:
Indigenous activists in Bolivia have been holding a mass coca-chewing protest as part of campaign to end an international ban on the practice. Hundreds of people chewed the leaf outside the US embassy in La Paz and in other cities across the country.
Bolivia wants to amend a UN drugs treaty that bans chewing coca, which is an ancient tradition in the Andes. But the US has said it will veto the amendment because coca is also the raw material for making cocaine.
The protesters outside the US embassy also displayed products made from coca, including soft drinks, toothpaste, sweets and ointments. [...]
The US is opposed to changing the UN convention because it says it would weaken the fight against cocaine production. [...]
The US is the world’s largest consumer of cocaine and has been leading efforts to eradicate coca production in the Andes for decades. Bolivia is the world’s first biggest producer of cocaine after Peru and Colombia, and much of its coca crop is used to make the illegal drug. Bolivian President Evo Morales has long advocated the recognition of coca as a plant of great medicinal, cultural and religious importance that is distinct from cocaine.
- Innovation of the Week: Making a Week’s Worth of Rain Last the Whole Year (Andrew Boyd at Worldwatch)
More articles after the jump…
Food Politics: Jan. 26, 2011
Domestic Food Politics:
- SURPRISE: GOP farm cuts target organic, avoids big ag subsidies (Philip Brasher at The Des Moines Register)
The grain and cotton growers that dominate U.S. farm subsidies came out unscathed in the first proposal from some of the most conservative House Republicans to cut spending. Instead, the Republican Study Committee targeted spending for organic farmers, sugar growers and an export promotion program that is popular with fruit and vegetable growers.
The panel made no proposal to cut the biggest single source of farm subsidies – the $5 billion in fixed annual payments that primarily go to growers of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton. About 10 percent payments go to Iowa alone.
Instead, the committee proposed to eliminate a program that subsidizes the cost of getting certified as an organic farm, packer and processor. The proposal is listed as saving more than $56 million. But a group that backs the program, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, says there isn’t that much there. The 2008 farm bill allocated $22 million for the program over five years and most of that has already been spent, and it may run out of money entirely in the fiscal year that starts this fall, said Ariane Lotti, the group’s policy director.
- Girl Scout Cookies and other sweets offer confusing labels on trans fats (Monica Eng at The LA Times)
Girl Scout Cookies, whose ordering season finished last week in the Chicago area, came with an extra pledge this year. For the first time ever, the scouts could promise that the majority of the cookies on the order form — five of eight varieties — contained no hydrogenated oils. In other words: No artery-clogging trans fats.
That was great news for health-conscious cookie lovers who didn’t order Samoas, Tagalongs or Thin Mints. Despite carrying a “0 grams trans fat” badge since 2007, these three — most popular cookies on the roster — still feature partially hydrogenated oils as their second and third ingredients. This inconsistency is allowed under rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which mandated labeling on artificial trans fats starting in 2006 but allows products to be marked “0 grams trans fat” as long as the amount falls below 0.5 grams per serving. In this case of Samoas, that’s two cookies. So a person who eats eight of them could be taking in nearly 2 grams of trans fats — a substance the National Academy of Science says cannot be safely consumed in any amount.
- New York State: 85 chemicals to avoid (Olga Naidenko at Environmental Working Group)
- Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, Under Secretary for Food Safety, on the challenge of STECs (Shiga-toxin producing E. coli) (Bill Marler)
- Where Westlands water flows, California’s Agriculture follows (Matt Jenkins at Grist)
- Republican rep halts House composting program to make room for all-new garbage (Jess Zimmerman at Grist)
- F.D.A and Dairy Industry Spar Over Testing of Milk (William Neuman at the NYT)
- Republicans want a return to workplace immigration raids (Brian Bennett at LA Times)
