Just kidding. You don’t have to call, simply read on:

I don’t mean to proselytize, but a new study just demonstrated one of the powerful effects of changing to a vegetarian diet: significantly reduced bodily levels of harmful environmental compounds.  Published in the journal Environmental Research this year, the study analyzed participant levels of antibiotics and phthalate metabolites (compounds that are formed once they react with the body) before and after a 5-day “temple stay”.   While at the Guemsan Temple in Korea, the participants practiced a vegetarian diet and followed the daily routines of Buddhist monks.  They gave to the researchers a urine sample right before entering into the program and then once more shortly before the temple stay’s termination.  They also provided the researchers with accounts of the typical eating habits and the amount of tap water they drank (again, before and after).

All targeted compounds were found to be significantly lower after their five-day vegetarian diet.  Since no participants had a recent medication history and water inatke did not correlate with levels of contaminants, the authors conclude that the dietary change was responsible for the reduction.   The linear trends in animal product consumption and urinary levels of phthalates/antibiotics before the participants did the temple stay also suggest that diet is a substantial contributor to “inadvertent exposure”–The more animal products are eaten, the higher the exposure to these kinds of environmental contaminants.

It is important to note that while there was a significant reduction in the amount of antibiotic and phthalate compounds due to the vegetarian diets, the levels of antibiotics and phthalates never exceeded  “acceptable” or “tolerable” levels beforehand.  Of course, what you find to be acceptable for your body may be different from what the government has declared to be safe (with plenty of input from the relevant industries, I’m sure).

Anyhow, what this study shows superbly is that even short-term changes in your diet can really improve your bodys’ well-being.  It gives a whole new meaning to healthy eating, doesn’t it?

To get back in the swing of blogging, I thought I’d start off with something easy and fun.  To ring in the New Year, this group of people combined their two passions (which I happen to share): cupcakes and games.  They made individual cupcakes honoring 100 different games that ran the gamut from board games to video games, with quite a few others to boot.  Challenge yourself to see how many you can name.

And here is a link to various other “crazy cupcakes” and where I learned about the gamer cupcakes.  Thanks, Mental_Floss!

Recent research from the Consumer Reports Magazine found that those bagged salad mixes, most claiming to be pre-washed and ready to eat, aren’t as clean as you’d like them to be.  Thankfully, what they found wasn’t e coli, salmonella or anything as dreadful as that.  Instead, in their sample of 208 bags (representing 16 brands) they found bacteria like coliform or enterococcus that could only get there one way – fecal contamination.

Several industry experts [that Consumer Reports] consulted suggested that for leafy greens, an unacceptable level of total coliforms or enterococcus is 10,000 or more colony forming units per gram (CFU/g) or a comparable estimate. In our tests, 39 percent of samples exceeded that level for total coliforms and 23 percent for enterococcus.

Tasty.

Anyway…The bagged salad varied widely in amount of contamination, but the ones farthest from their sell-by date were often better.  As such, Consumer Reports suggest that you buy packages as far from their use-by date as you can find.  And, of course, wash your greens.  They say it won’t get rid of all the bacteria, but it will help to remove residual soil.

Happy salad eating, everyone!

In an email to Erik Marcus of vegan.com, Jonathan Safran Foer described his more recent adventure with the professional craft-maker and (television) host, Martha Stewart:

I was on Martha Stewart today, along with the director of Food, Inc., a veg chef, and a family farmer. I couldn’t possibly have been more impressed by how Martha handled things. Firstly, to devote an entire show to the horrors of the meat industry without feeling a need to offer the industry a voice. Secondly, she came right out and said the meat industry is bad. She didn’t mince her words. She wasn’t cagey or indirect. She spoke plainly and openly about the secrecy, about how they went after Oprah, about how they torture animals (her words), about how she’s going to have a vegetarian Thanksgiving. She told her audience, “You’ll probably agree with just about all of the conclusions in Jonathan’s book.” Frankly, she came off as further down the spectrum than I did.

Jonathan Safran Foer

You know it’s a really great book when it infuriates some and inspires a whole lot more to change.

I think I know what’s on my shopping list this holiday season.

He recently wrote a sort of ‘top ten’ list of food policy blogs for blogs.com:

In this list, he looked beyond the excellent sites that already appeared in a recent list at Culinate, which included Ethicurean, Green Fork, ChewsWise, Food Politics, Politics of the Plate, Grist, Civil Eats, and Obama Foodorama. Parke’s list adds some more blogs from within what might loosely be called the “good food movement,” but it emphasizes other selections that he reads to maintain diversity in his information stream.

Food Law Prof Blog
For legal news and insight, a member of the Law Professor Blog Network. More legal blogging comes from the Agricultural Law blog.

Amber Waves
The dry but substantial electronic magazine from USDA’s Economic Research Service, with accompanying RSS feed, is enough like a blog to make this list. In the same vein, one could mention Choices electronic magazine from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

La Vida Locavore
A thick stream of news and policy commentary from a local food perspective.

Blogriculture
By the staff of Capital News agriculture newspaper.

Farm Policy
A thorough summary of daily agricultural news coverage, with excerpts and little editorial commentary.

Fooducate
Practical food shopping advice. No pills. No industry affiliation.

Center for a Livable Future Blog
Focusing on industrialized food production systems.

Marler Blog
Commentary on food poisoning outbreaks and litigation.

TEFAP Alliance Blog
News about food assistance programs and the anti-hunger movement.

Daily Bread
The food business blog at Slate’s site, The Big Money.

Damn straight...

If you are further interested in what a crackpot Richard Berman is, you can find out about him and his expertise at bermanexposed.com.  Essentially, there are a lot of high paid lobbyists fronting as non-profits.

With consumer skepticism over the Smart Choices program, mandatory calorie labels on menus, the FDA developing nutrition label revisions (pdf), and the words ‘soda taxes‘ on the tip of every tongue, it is no wonder that industries are bringing out all their guns, pulling no stops when it comes to, well, their freedom to confuse consumers and obfuscate facts.  The moral here?  Always read the small print.  Sometimes, though, they make so easy for us:

I’m not advocating for or against soda taxes at this point (though, earlier I was definitely against the idea).  There are many pros and cons to this issue that need to be studied further before any actual implementation.  Plus, there are other avenues of curbing soda consumption that should be considered.  For instance, ending subsidies on the corn the fuels high fructose corn syrup products would not only increase the price of soda (and other junk, processed foods), but it would also allow the government to save some money.

With budget shortfalls and growing deficits, states are looking for new funding sources, too…Which is why they may be less and less reluctant to turn to soda taxes.  State governments could help curb obesity and rake in some major dollars with a soda tax as little as one cent per ounce.  Thanks to Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, you can easily calculate how much your state could earn with a new soda tax.  By its calculation, California could make almost $3 billion on all sugar-sweetened beverages.   That ought to help the Governator plug some budgetary holes.

Does the potential revenue from soda taxes persuade anyone to give anyone a second thought?

First of all, the one thing that should be celebrated in conjunction with food in space is that microgravity does not affect natural swallowing processes–something scientists were rightly worried about before John Glenn (the first American to orbit Earth) tried it out in space.

Looking at how the astronauts eat would make any germaphobic really happy, I think.  Eliminating bacteria on the food is key while making space food.  No 24/7 Walgreen’s will be able to help if an astronaut got sick.  On the other hand, it might make environmentalists cringe.  Talk about excessive packaging!  Space and weight restrictions made vacuum packing dehydrated food items very necessary.  Plus, there had to be no chance of spilling or crumbs. Remember when Homer spilled his potato chips while in space? Not good.

But, you really have to overlook all that packaging to consider the fact that we, human beings, are in space!

The science that goes into making the astronaut’s food is just as cool as the science that got us into space.  Not only that, but the technologies developed for taking food into space transformed the way we eat down on Earth.  The packaging, preservatives, added minerals and vitamins that gave the astronauts healthy food that lasted their entire mission gives us a pantry full of portable, long-lasting snacks.  Not to mention fast food and other convenient, less than healthy foods.  We might not have our Twinkies and McDonald’s if it weren’t for NASA pouring a ton of money into the space program’s food development.  (Perhaps if we had more Earth-bound ambitions we wouldn’t have the obesity epidemic.)

The first astronauts in space ate bite-sized cubes of food, freeze-dried powders, and semiliquids in aluminum tubes (see picture below). Although the food had significantly improved with the next series of missions, one astronaut wanted to sneak his Commander’s favorite food on board; the first corned beef sandwich in space!  The Commander didn’t eat much of it before he realized that the crumbs could be a big problem (and, probably reluctantly, put it away).  Needless to say, NASA was more weary of what astronauts brought on board in future flights.

Today, NASA boasts that astronauts eat three meals a day and have a wide variety of foods to choose from.  There are 74 kinds of food and 20 kinds of beverages to choose from.  Plus, the usual condiments are available. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, salt and pepper are in liquid form.  “The salt and pepper would simply float away” and furthermore, “there is a danger they could clog air vents, contaminate equipment or get stuck in an astronaut’s eyes, mouth or nose.”

Food products now also have an 18-month long shelf life, and the shuttles have a galley complete with stove. Shrimp cocktail is, and has been for years, the favorite dish among Astronauts, according to NASA, because crew members like the spicy sauce that accompanies it. In fact by 2006, things had gotten so foodie that restaurateur and celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse designed a menu that included selections like “kicked-up” mashed potatoes, jambalaya and bread pudding. Nowadays, NASA food tech is being used to develop everything from shelf-stable foods for elderly populations to baby formula, to foodpacks for natural disaster victims, to highly nutritious rehabilitation foods for those incapable of chewing, to pet foods.

Obama Foodorama

Isn’t science awesome?

The idea of cultivating meat in labs dates back to the early 1900’s when Alexis Carrel kept tissue cultured from an embryonic chicken heart alive in a nutrient bath for over 20 years.  But, it’s recent incarnation starts with one man’s journey to India in 2003.  The environmentally conscious Jason Matheny visited what he thought was unthinkable in the traditionally vegetarian country of India:  industrial sized chicken (factory) farms.  All of the McDonald’s packed with people eating chicken sandwiches helped to explain the upsurge in chicken farming.

When he returned to the States, he found statistics confirming his observations. Poultry consumption in India had doubled in the previous five years. And it wasn’t just India: in China meat demand was doubling every ten years. Matheny considered the toll of skyrocketing meat consumption—the millions of acres of land needed, the water use, the fossil fuels required to power industrial-scale animal farms. Then there was animal waste and the mounting evidence that livestock production is a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Doing the math, he thought, “It just wasn’t sustainable in 50 years.”

A vegetarian since middle school (now 34), Matheny is comfortable with meat substitutes like tofu and seitan, but knew that switching to that kind of diet would be hard to, well, swallow for a lot of people.

So he turned to technology. Ever since he attended a 2001 Berkeley lecture series on the energy crisis, Matheny has believed that instead of getting people to take fewer showers or drive less, it was most effective to satisfy existing needs with more efficient technologies, like hybrid cars or the compact fluorescent light bulb, which has begun to replace the energy-hogging incandescent bulb. “What we needed was the compact fluorescent light bulb for meat production.”

Future Fillet – The University of Chicago Magazine

Matheny didn’t know which way the thought would take him until he started doing research.  There had been plenty of technological advancements in the science of fake meats, but the flavor and mouth feel is always a bit off.  The switch to a different diet had to be easy and as tasty as it could be if the number of people changing over was to hit critical mass.  He created New Harvest in 2004 to “support the development of meat substitutes, with the long-term goal of delivering economically competitive alternatives to conventional meat production.”

Then, he found a NASA-funded project where as a part of exploration into new food sources for long space missions bioengineers had grown chunks of goldfish meat.  Just like Alexis Carrel, they had grown the tissue from live-muscle cells placed in a nutrient broth.  Two-dozen other papers on tissue growth in humans and animals made the idea of lab-grown meat all the more possible.  He emailed the authors of those papers, all experts on muscle-tissue engineering, a simple question, “Can this be tested as a food idea?”

Stem cell-grown meat substitutes minus the environmental damage, hormones, cruelty, antibiotics, e. coli, and the threat of mad cow disease, plus omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins are within range.

Long story short (too late!), he co-authored a theoretical paper that earned “Lab Grown Meat” the award for best science story of 2005 from Discover magazine, and dozens of mentions in other popular media.  His research into in vitro meat also helped to encourage the Netherlands to grant 2 million Euros to a proposal they had just received on the same topic.  “It was my happiest moment,” Matheny said. “We actually had a chance to see if this could work.”

In the future, Obama’s juicy burger could very well be made by scientists instead of farmers.

So, where is lab-cultured meat now? The Dutch laboratory could make a hamburger right now, but it would “cost thousands of dollars per pound”, says Matheny.  Matheny’s non-profit , New Harvest , is funding a project that is evaluating the potential energy use of cultured meat in comparison to traditional meat production.  After all, one of the points of a meat substitute is to reduce the impact of our diet on the environment.  And, venture capitalists are looking at in vitro meat as a possible green technology investment.

If it’s tasty enough, if it’s cheap enough, this lab-grown meat could really save the world.

Sorry, there are no theaters within 20 miles of my zipcode that are playing Food Inc.  I will have to get it on Netflix when it comes out. In the mean time, I have watched the trailer and read a bunch of the reviews:

• There is the short and sweet review by Marion Nestle, who describes what sort of educational materials come with the film.
• Parke Wilde, a self-described “nutrition economist” from Tufts, tackles the film from a progressive food policy angle.  He says there were so many poignant arguments it could have made, but didn’t.
• Erik Marcus wonders about the impact of Food Inc. on the viewer’s diet.  Erik Marcus is surprised at the fact that in the entirety of the movie the word vegan or vegetarian isn’t uttered once.
• The New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof covers the more personal aspects of Food Inc, discussing his relationship to food and the various people who popped up in the film, like Barbara Kowalcyk, whose two-and-a-half-year-old child died after he ate a hamburger tainted with E. coli bacteria.
• Food Inc. must have had a mighty impact on the infamous film critic, Roger Ebert, because instead of a regular review, he ends up detailing a lot of the horrific “plot” of the thing.  He wrote:

This review doesn’t read one thing like a movie review. But most of the stuff I discuss in it, I learned from the new documentary “Food, Inc.,” directed by Robert Kenner and based on the recent book An Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I figured it wasn’t important for me to go into detail about the photography and the editing. I just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what “Food, Inc.” did to me.

I encourage everyone to have bejesus scared out of them.  Maybe some good will come of it.