Food and Health

by Bonnie Azab Powell.

It’s the height of summer, and the tables of farmers markets around the country are overflowing with firm-fleshed, scarlet tomatoes; bunches of fragrant basil; and—depending on where you live—juicy stone fruits, avocados, and more. Such bounty makes it easy to celebrate National Farmers Market Week August 1-7 by visiting a market near you (you can find one via the Eat Well Guide, LocalHarvest, or USDA). And there almost definitely is one near you, as there are now more than 5,000 around the country, up an astonishing 13 percent from the previous year.

I’m lucky enough—or cursed, depending how you see it—to live in Oakland, Calif., where every day I have several farmers markets within 20 miles to choose from, all the way through the winter. And I love them. I’ve been doing the bulk of my produce shopping at them for five years now, trying varieties of apples I never see in the grocery store, and practicing seasonal martyrdom by forswearing strawberries and tomatoes until they reappear in the spring and summer, respectively.

Whichever market I go to, I always run into several friends, either shopping or selling, and I come home in a better mood than when I left—something I cannot say about supermarket shopping.

I’m in a rut, though, with my farmers market routine. I know what I like, who I like to buy it from, and I head straight for those stands. So this year, I’m going to celebrate National Farmers Market Week by forcing myself out of my vegetable comfort zone. I’ll be picking up whatever looks weirdest or most unfamiliar to me—kohlrabi, say, or Romanesco broccoli—and figuring out how to cook it. I’ll share the results right here with you guys. They probably won’t be fancy, but when food is this fresh—as Grist’s Jennifer Prediger keeps marveling—you don’t need no stinkin’ fancy.

Care to join me?

Related Links:

Urbivore’s Dilemma, Week 7: Cooking with the ones you love

Urbivore’s Dilemma, Week 6: How I turned vegetables into a time machine

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by Grist.

Using meat as “buns.” Adding an extra sandwich—or two. Making anything a “footlong.”

What results from these tricks of the fast food world aren’t examples of food; they’re freak gimmicks of a cheap’n'easy system of calorie production. But that doesn’t stop hoards of people from gobbling them up with glee and extra “special sauce” dribbling down their chins.

Chain restaurants usually offer their Frankenfood inventions for “a limited time only,” but the effects on people’s health and on the health of the planet stick around for a lot longer. Feast your eyes on some of the most recent food bastards and let us know in the comments area below what creations we might have missed.

KFC Double Down

In the run-up to its much-rumored release, the Double Down was hailed with the words: “It’s real.” While this legendary, lard-laden fast food creation needs no explaining, we still feel a little upchuck coming on every time we run across it.

Some cheeky vegans got a hold of the Double Down and turned it into an animal-free meal with a much more apt tagline: “It’s fake.”

The bastard child of Krispy Kreme and KFC

Imitation my be the sincerest form of flattery, but when it means squeezing a Double Down between two Krispy Kreme doughnuts, it’s the sincerest form of fattery. A commentator on The Consumerist recently featured this creation: a Double Down sandwiched between two Krispy Kreme Cheerwine doughnuts. It’s the perfect culinary combination of sugar, fried dough, fried chicken, bacon, and cheese.

Friendly’s Grilled Cheese Burger Melt

Recently featured on Grist’s WTFood, Friendly’s Grilled Cheeseburger Melt may be one of the most heart-stopping fast food industry hybrids yet. Taking a cue from KFC, Friendly’s opted to ditch the traditional burger buns in favor of two whole grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s like a future heart attack sandwiched between memories of a chubby childhood.

IHOP Pancake Stackers

The battle royale continues as IHOP—not to be outdone by KFC or Friendly’s—throws their Pancake Stackers into the chunking-out-America challenge. This, okay, disgusting delicacy starts with the breakfast house’s popular pancakes, then adds cheesecake, whipped cream, and strawberry compote on top.

What would a well-rounded breakfast be if it didn’t make you, well ... rounded?

SONIC Introduces New Footlong Quarter Pound Coney

Dear SONIC,

My lifelong dream of eating a quarter-pound foot-long chili-topped hot dog can now become reality thanks to your new Footlong Quarter Pound Coney.

Now, anyone can go to SONIC and buy this beef and pork monstrosity topped with chili and melty, melty cheese for a mere $2.99! My heart will beat for you until the day it stops (because you clogged my arteries), Footlong Quarter Pound Coney.

Love,
America

Carl’s Jr. Footlong cheeseburger

Not to be out-grossed by SONIC, Carl’s Jr. has come out with its own super-sized feature: the Carl’s Jr. Footlong cheeseburger. Although the meat is not actually one foot-long, but rather two smaller patties set side by side in the special long buns, we’re still mesmerized by this greasy burger-sub sandwich hybrid.

Salad undressing

We know what you’re thinking: you’ll avoid the bigger, fatter, longer drive-thru fare by ordering a salad instead, an option now in most fast food shops. But buyers beware—even seemingly low-cal salads can be waist-wideners. As it turns out, some of these token “healthy options” can actually be much worse for you and your ticker.

Take Wendy’s Chicken BLT Salad with Honey Dijon Dressing. It packs a whopping 720 calories, 51 grams of fat, and 1,540 milligrams of sodium. That’s almost enough to make the Double Down look like the smarter choice. Toss those salads ... while trying not to toss your cookies.

Our advice? Stay far, far away from the drive-thru universe if you can—no one is safe in a world where footlong cheeseburgers and thousand-calorie salads grace the menus.

WTFood! Check out more disgusting food slideshows and fast-food facts.

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Are kickbacks from Kellogg and others driving school-food purchasing?

by David Gumpert.

For two months earlier this year, Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger let the proposed contract sit unsigned on his desk.

The agreement specified that a nonprofit organization known as Right to Choose Healthy Food, and headed by raw food advocate Aajonus Vonderplanitz, would lease his farm’s 50 cows and dozens of chickens—“the works,” says Hershberger. In exchange, the organization would have access to all the food from the animals: milk, eggs, and meat.

Then, on June 2, agents from the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection raided his Grazin’ Acres farm near Madison, and placed seals on the refrigerators in his small store. He was operating without a retailer license and a dairy license, the regulators said. The fact that he wasn’t open to the general public, but was selling direct to “members” of his farm, didn’t matter.

The day after the raid, Hershberger cut the DATCP seals and defiantly re-opened for business. His confidence was buttressed by the fact that he decided that day to sign the contract with Right to Choose Healthy Food.

The deal is “simple,” says Hershberger, and besides, “I think Aajonus knows what he’s doing.”

The wizard of raws

Vonderplanitz followed up by sending a letter to Wisconsin’s DATCP explaining that Hershberger

... is not engaged in commerce. His farm animals are leased to Right To Choose Healthy Food’s Grazin’ Acres Farm Coop Club who owns them. Vernon Hershberger is the boarder, caretaker, milker, packager, and deliverer of our animals’ products. Since the private club owns dairy, egg, and meat production, there is no commerce involved. Since no commerce of buying or selling raw milk and our other products to the public is involved, or distributed in public places, government agencies have NO JURISDICTION over the production, labeling and use of the club’s products consumed by its members, nor is any permit required ... It is shameful for (DATCP) to try to prevent us from producing and distributing our health-giving raw milk and other farm products to our members by threatening and imposing false warrants, seizures, and arrests of our property. Since you were duly warned that this was a private club and you had no jurisdiction over it, your actions were criminal stealing, kidnap, and trespass.

Though DATCP agents have since been back to his farm twice more with search warrants, the last time taking Hershberger’s computer, checkbook, and other records, there has been no sign of any criminal or other charges being filed against the farmer.

If the experiences of other farmers like Hershberger are any indication, there’s a good chance no charges will come. Over the last eight years, Vonderplanitz has put together lease agreements giving Right to Choose Healthy Food, and its hundreds of consumer members around the country, the rights to the land and produce of about 40 small farms.

While there have been a number of raids, especially in recent months, as I described previously for Grist, there have yet to be any legal challenges brought against the lease arrangements, he says. “If they had jurisdiction, they would have busted us a long time ago,” he told me.

Not only is Vonderplanitz not afraid of a legal challenge, he welcomes one. “I hope they file charges against us,” he says. While the distribution centers in major urban areas, like the one raided in Venice, must comply with fire codes and zoning regulations, they need not comply with food licensing or labeling laws required of foods sold to the public, he argues. Nor must they comply with the federal prohibition on interstate sales of raw milk. There can’t be such a prohibition for member leaseholders, he maintains, since they own the farm products when they are produced.

“If you take your property from Pennsylvania to California, there is no federal jurisdiction,” he says. Vonderplanitz likens the farm lease agreements to automobile leases. “In lease agreements, you have total ownership of the contract and responsibility for the items leased. If you wreck a leased car, you are totally responsible.”

The analogy is important, he says, since lease-related law has a 75-year history of recognition by our legal system. “Herdshare” and “cowshare” agreements, used in many states to give raw-milk drinkers shares in cows and goats, are less legally secure, he says. He likens the rights of a herdshare owner to those of an owner of stock in a major corporation, where shareholders have certain financial rights, but don’t necessarily have right to the corporation’s products, or responsibility for the products. (Though herdshare rights were upheld by an Ohio court in 2006, and the state didn’t appeal the case.)

Vonderplanitz maintains that the lease agreements aren’t just devices to enable foodies to avoid complying with food licensing rules and the federal interstate raw milk prohibition, and has successfully persuaded farmers who’ve considered backing out of the agreements to stand firm.

In a case last winter, a Midwest farmer in the midst of a two-year lease agreement with Right to Choose considered shutting down his raw milk production after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sought to enforce warning letters maintaining the farmer was violating the federal prohibition on raw-milk sales across state lines. Vonderplanitz says he told the farmer that his group would enforce its lease agreement by taking over the farm and cows to continue producing milk for members. The farmer, encouraged by Vonderplanitz’s commitment, decided to fire his lawyers, who’d encouraged him to accept the FDA mandate, and continue with the Vonderplanitz organization. Vonderplanitz says he notified the FDA, much the same as he did Wisconsin DATCP in the Hershberger case, that the farm was under a lease agreement, and says the farm continues to provide his members with raw milk.

Another farmer who signed on with RTCHF was Daniel Allgyer. He made his decision shortly after agents from the FDA showed up at his Pennsylvania farm last April with a search warrant and a letter alleging he was involved in interstate sale of raw milk. Allgyer continues to supply RTCHF with milk.

Vonderplanitz sees himself as having “rescued” these and other farmers from possibly being thrown out of business by FDA and state agriculture authority actions against private food organizations. “They have left all the people alone since I notified the authorities.”

The raid on the RTCHF warehouse in Venice, Calif., three weeks ago, along with that on Sharon Palmer’s farm in nearby Ventura County, whose goats are under lease to RTCHF, represent payback in Vanderplanitz’s view.

“They are looking for any way they can to break us,” he says. “They’re not going to get away from it.”

He says a number of prominent Los Angeles lawyers have offered legal services, and RTCHF plans to sue the government agencies involved in the raids against Rawesome and Sharon Palmer’s farm for $1 million apiece, for false arrest.

Crackdown habit

It’s hard to know what the government agencies will do. While they have clearly shied away thus far from a legal confrontation over the leasing matter, the various searches suggest officials are seriously considering legal action, such as charges of violating the ban on interstate sale of raw milk. Or else they could continue their harassment actions in hopes of intimidating consumers and farmers, and scaring them away from the increasingly popular leasing arrangement.

Even without government legal action against RTCHF, there is the pending suit against the FDA by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund challenging the federal prohibition on interstate commerce of raw milk.

Clearly, we are moving closer to judicial consideration of how far consumer rights extend when it comes to consumers opting out of the factory food system and arranging for private access to the nutritionally-dense foods of their choice.

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by Ed Bruske.

Sodexo, one of the world’s largest food service companies, has agreed to pay New York $20 million to settle complaints that it fraudulently pocketed rebates from food manufacturers that it was supposed to turn over to some 21 public school districts and the State University of New York, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced today.

“This company cut sweetheart deals with suppliers and then denied taxpayer-supported schools the benefits,” Cuomo said in a statement. An investigation revealed that over a five-year period beginning in 2004, Sodexo “received significant rebates from its suppliers without acknowledging or passing the savings on to these schools—in violation of the contracts [between Sodexo and the schools] as well as state and federal laws.”

New York’s investigation was sparked by two former Sodexo employees, brothers John and Jay Carciero, who were general managers for the company in Massachussetts and were “outraged when they discovered Sodexo’s practice of pressuring food and beverage vendors to kick back huge rebates and then secretly pocketing the savings rather than passing them on to government clients as required by their contracts,” according to a statement released by the Carcieros’ attorney. The clients included hospitals, universities, schools, and nursing homes.

John Carciero complained he was fired after he complained internally about Sodexo’s rebate practices. Jay Carciero said he was demoted and later fired for the same reason. The brothers filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Sodexo under the federal False Claims Act in Massachusetts, and later added claims under similar state laws in New York.

The settlement was described as the largest ever under New York’s false claims statute that did not involve Medicaid.

Jay Carciero has since died. John Carciero yesterday issued a statement, saying, “My brother, Jay, and I were angry when we learned that Sodexo, a multi-billion dollar company, was ripping off school lunch programs and other government food services. The million of dollars from the rebates should have gone back to schools and other government clients. Sodexo betrayed the trust of the clients it was supposed to serve and hurt taxpayers at the same time.”

Under New York state law, the Carcieros as whistleblowers are entitled to $3.6 million of the $20 million. The rest will be divided among the school districts involved.

Manufacturers commonly give rebates for purchases from large food service companies such as Sodexo, Chartwells, and Aramark, as I detailed in this previous post. Under federal law, contractors are supposed to credit those rebates as part of their invoices, so that federal agencies are paying only “net costs.” Under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules governing the federally-subsidized school lunch program, school contracts with food service providers must explicitly state that all rebates will be credited to the schools. But it has been widely assumed in school-food circles that the big food service vendors were not returning all of the rebates they receive.

The investigation in New York “has revealed that it is common practice within the food service industry for service providers like Sodexo to leverage their size and market dominance to obtain these rebates from vendors that supply food products, equipment, and supplies,” said Cuomo. Those rebates typically amounted to about 14 percent of Sodexo’s purchases from suppliers, according to the New York attorney general’s office. Cuomo said his investigation “continues to examine the rebating practices of other large, multi-national corporate providers of food service and facilities management.”

A report I recently published based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed that D.C. Public Schools had received more than $1 million in rebates from Chartwells, its contracted food service provider, since Chartwells took over the job two years ago. The rebates help explain why children in D.C. schools are often served brand-name products of dubious nutritional value. But the rebates Chartwells declared on its invoices totaled only 5 percent of purchases, a rate some observers say is low—and certainly far less than the 14 percent cited by Cuomo in the Sodexo case.

D.C. school officials said they requested an itemized accounting from Chartwells last October of where the rebates it claimed had come from, but had only recently received it. They have not made it public.

An attorney for the Carcieros in Washington, D.C., Colette G. Matzzie, said in a statement, “New York is not the only state where Sodexo operates school cafeterias and accepts rebates from vendors. With so many state and local governments short on funds, we hope that other governments will look to what New York has done for its citizens and make sure that Sodexo and other food vendors pass along savings to those who are paying the bills.”

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Has Congress run out of time for school lunch and food safety?

by Tom Philpott.

More than a billion people are hungry worldwide, reports the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations—and the hunger rate has been rising since 2006. Why? The FAO does not mince words:

Hunger has increased not as a result of poor harvests but because of high domestic food prices, lower incomes, and increasing unemployment due to the global economic crisis. Many poor people can not afford the food they need.

The chart at right underscores that point. Global food production has more than kept up with population growth—there’s been steady growth in per-capita food production. Yet nearly one in six people on the planet go hungry. The problem is complex—but it clearly can’t be solved merely by growing more food. We need economic models that spread income more equitably; and food production models that promote food security within communities.

For agrichemical industry executives, though, such considerations are meaningless. They make money by moving product, not by rethinking economic models. The current global food system, for all its obvious flaws, has been very good to them. Their pitch is simple: Forget about the underlying causes of hunger and strive to grow more food ... using our pesticides, fertilizers, and patented GMO seeds.

That evidently, is the main message of a D.C. conference recently put on by Croplife America, the main trade group for U.S. agrichemical interests. (This is the outfit that rebuked Michelle Obama for not using “crop protection”—synthetic pesticides—on her organic garden.)

Now, I have to acknowledge that I was invited to speak at the conference but could not attend, and that two of the fiercest and most cogent critics of the agrichemical industry, Margaret Mellon of Union of Concerned Scientists and Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety, were on hand. Croplife deserves praise for inviting high-profile industry critics to its soiree. We need more, not less, blunt debate about how to “feed the world.” 

Even so, from what I’ve seen, industrial-ag cant filled the area like pesticides spewing from a cropduster.

According to a blog report, Julie Borlaug, granddaughter of Green Revolution architect Norman Borlaug (1914-2009), was on hand to soothe the gathered execs with industry-friendly platitudes. The younger Borlaug, who now serves as a functionary at the academic center at Texas A&M that bears her grandfather’s name, reportedly declared:

It is a production problem ... if they cannot produce the food, if we cannot get the food to where it needs to be ... it’s not just global justice, it’s global production. If they don’t have the inputs, if there’s no infrastructure, they don’t have any technology, you can’t say it’s an equity problem—it’s a production problem for the people, where they are.

Peel away the Palinesque syntax and you get a straight industry talking point: hunger can only be solved with ever-spiraling doses of “inputs” and “technology”: the very wares being peddled by the assembled executives.

According to the venerable website Farm Chemicals International, Borlaug added a plug for transgenic seeds, aka genetically modified organisms: “My grandfather thought that the only way we will feed all the people in 2050 is through technology, specifically GMOs.”  

Invoking her grandfather, whose name is spoken in awed tones among the agrichemichal execs whose products he did so much to promote, gave her argument the aura of finality, of “case closed.” It’s like quoting Jesus Christ to settle an argument among Pentecostals, or Ronald Reagan to quiet some warring Tea Partyers.

But Holy Writ often crumbles under scrutiny. Julie Borlaug’s GMO statement hinges on two assumptions: that ever-increasing yields are needed to “feed the world,” and that only GMOs can deliver them.

Both are dubious claims. For the past half century, billions of dollars in research cash have been poured into increasing yields—and global hunger remains persistent. And GMOs have thus far utterly failed to increase yields.

Rather than adding to a serious debate about the future of agriculture, Borlaug was merely flattering her hosts. I’m glad Mellon and Kimbrell were there to challenge this August assembly— and I wish I had been there, too.

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