Now Hear (But Don't Eat) This

LIST OF THE MONTH: NOW HEAR (BUT DON’T EAT) THIS

On February 12, Onion Crock of Michigan recalled Old Fashion Potato Soup and Minestrone Soup due to undeclared wheat and soy allergens.
On February 14, Summit Import Corp. recalled Oriental Mascot Sweetened Sliced Coconut because of undeclared sulfites.
On February 15, Nutri-Foods recalled unhulled organic sesame seeds in half pound containers because of a “possible health risk.”
On February 18, Pierre’s Ice Cream issued an allergy alert on Homestyle Brand Dutch Chocolate for undeclared peanut butter candies.
On February 22, Lion Pavilion issued an alert on undeclared sulfites in Grassplot Dried Pachyrhizus.
On February 26, Summit Import Corp. issued an alert that fish in its packages of Sum Cheong Lung dried fish hadn’t had their intestines removed, creating a danger of botulism.
On February 28, Walker Food Products Co. recalled its Four Bean Salad because of “possible health risk.”
On February 29, Palo Alto Labs recalled its Aspire 36 and Aspire Lite dietary supplements because of contamination by a male erectile dysfunction drug,
On March 3, Gorton’s Seafood recalled Crispy Battered Fish Fillets (package of six) due to “possible adulteration.”
On March 4, Quaker Oats Co. recalled a “limited number” of Aunt Jemima Pancake and Waffle Mix products because of possible salmonella contamination.
On March 5, New BCN Trading, Inc. issued an allergy alert on undeclared sulfites in Asian Boy Sweet Ginger.
On March 8, the Texas Dept. of State Health Services closed Aransas, Corpus Christi and Copano Bays to shellfish harvesting due to a toxic algae bloom, and warned that “cooking does not destroy the toxin.”
On March 10, Hartz Mountain Corp. recalled Vitamin Care for Cats because of a “possible health risk.”
On March 14, Slade Gordon and Co. recalled Icybay Cooked Langostinos because of a “possible health risk.”
On March 16, Publix issued a recall for assorted flavors of Empanadas due to undeclared milk.
On March 19, the Food for Life Baking Co. recalled 2,241 cases of Spelt Bread because it contained spelt, a known hybrid of wheat.
On March 20, Williams Food, Inc. issued an allergy alert on undeclared milk in Bass Pro Shops Uncle Buck’s Light ‘N Krispy Fish Batter Mixes.
On March 22, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an import allergy regarding entry of cantaloupes from Agropecuaria Montelibano, a Honduran grower and packer, because they appeared to be associated with an outbreak of Salmonella Litchfield.

There were headlines in Vermont about that last one, but anyone who subscribed to the FDA’s email alert list (free) could see that a whole lot goes on behind the scenes that we never hear much about. Personally, from looking at a couple of months of these electronic missives, I’ve tentatively concluded the following:
--Our food is more likely to go kahooey than our pharmaceuticals. There were a few recalls of heparin products during the same time as the above food alerts—it’s a drug that helps keep blood flowing in intravenous hookups—but nothing much.
--Food is more likely to have problems because the food system is so complex. I’d never heard of pachyrhizus (“Pachyrha: a small genus of five or six species of tropical and subtropical plants growing from large, often edible taproots”) or empanadas (“These Latin American pastries, filled with seafood, meat, cheese, vegetables or fruit are wildly popular”) before they appeared in the emails. The FDA folks not only have to know what these comestibles are, they have to know how and where such goods are imported.
--American cuisine is being enriched by immigration, especially from Latin and South America.
--At the same time, it’s perfectly logical and appropriate that there be a localvore counterreaction. The words “possible health risk” make me think “this is worse than it’s been made out to be.”
--The human body, also very complex, is subject to a great diversity of ailments, including some caused by the intestinal immigration of inappropriate foods. Appearances truly deceive: the person to whom you are speaking, while seemingly quite “normal,” may be coping with any number of biochemical aberrations. At least the FDA recognizes that adjustments must be made for these people, too, to have good lives. I’ll say it here and I’ll say it again elsewhere: God have mercy on the chemical cripple, because nobody else will. I remember in my college biochem course, the Nobel prizewinneing professor said that each of us is carrying about eight lethal genes, which helps to account for the high level—perhaps as high as 50 percent, including first-month events—of miscarriages. As I said to my first wife, “I hope the bullets don’t fit the gun.” That was before our miscarriage. I would guess we have another thousand years of debating the nature of personhood before all this gets fully integrated into our lives.
--It just isn’t true that all, or even most, federal employees are “bureaucrats” who sit at desks soaking up tax money to no purpose. If the FDA has problems with politics at the uppermost levels, I don’t think those are coming down to the investigators, who ought to be counted among our best counterterrorism operatives.

Bread & Woeisus

BREAD & WOEISUS

I was upset when the price of bread hit a dollar, so you can imagine how I feel about paying $2 a loaf. Old phrases drift into mind, like gathering clouds—mass calls like “Bread, peace, land” and “Give us bread but give us roses.” When the staff of life bears a stiff price, expect bad stuff to happen.
In our household, we’ve gotten the automatic breadbaker going again. Of course if you’re paying a hefty price for a package of bread mix plus the electricity, store-bought bread might be the better bargain. So we’re on a quest to find a good from-scratch recipe for whole wheat bread.
The “woe is us” part of this blog is on impending onset of a diabetes epidemic, with yours truly doing his best to stave off Type II thereof. Eat whole grains, not refined grains, say the medical experts. But if that’s your goal, read the labels closely. “Wheat” bread is white bread with the whiteness covered up. “Multigrain” bread often has white flour as a major ingredient. And like so many other products, bread has become a way of dumping corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup for human digestive system disposal, regardless of the health consequences.
So if we can find a reliable recipe for the bread machine (using the oven would waste way too much heat, much as both of us love baking) would solve several problems at once. However, we haven’t solved the recipe problem. Maybe I didn’t measure things out correctly, maybe I did—I’ll try the recipe again. The first batch came out so badly that the breadmaker quit, twice, refusing to go any further. The results made good pancakes, but pancakes make awkward sandwiches.
It’s possible that our local whole wheat bread is so different from the substance usually available that the recipe must be restructured. Here in Addison County, Ben Gleason has mastered the art of growing Vermont wheat, and flour from it is reasonably priced at the Middlebury food co-op. So going localvore is another reason for baking our own bread. We’ll keep at it, after the bread mixes I glommed onto during a discount food store’s going-out-of-business sale gets used up. The first one worked fine.
While we’re on the subject of adult onset diabetes, I want to tell you about one of my investigations-in-progress. Cinnamon, according to several reliable sources, can help in sugar metabolism; but a medical school newsletter expressed skepticism about this as a nutritional because you would have to eat 1-6 grams a day for it to have the effect in question.
It’s entirely possible that I do eat that much, in my usual breakfast of nonfat cottage cheese, milk, artificial sweetener, raisins and dry cereal. I’m accustomed enough to cinnamon to put in a tablespoon of it, not just sprinkle some on top, which I suspect is what the medical newsletter folks think everyone does.
The food co-op didn’t have a scale that would weigh something as light as a gram—but I’m sure there’s one somewhere in Middlebury College’s seven-story science center. I’m about to email some people I met when the college magazine asked me to do an article on undergraduate research there. Stay tuned.

VERMONT STATE TOMATO

VERMONT STATE TOMATO

Yesterday, January 8, 2007, I ate our last tomatoes—that is, the last tomatoes we had grown ourselves. Brought in as teenie greenies back when the hard frosts arrived, in November, they had gradually matured and turned red. I wouldn’t call them flavor champions, but they were tasty, and best of all they were mercifully free from all the stuff in which the “perfect” supermarket tomatoes were probably soaked to ward off Southern weeds and bugs.
They were Romas.
For the first time, but not the last, we had experimented with growing our tomatoes in five-gallon buckets rather than putting them out in the clay area where the slugs celebrate various summer fairs and festivals, many of which concern vegetables. First-timers that we were, we didn’t have enough good soil to fill the buckets to the brim, and weren’t sure which varieties to plant.
To cut to the finale, Brandywine (promise of big red ones, but with too long a growing season for us) literally flopped. Sweet 100 just about paid back all our costs with its clusters of mini-tomatoes, which came in first. But our beloved Romas once again proved the best producers.
There are some types of tomatoes bred for container gardening (apparently there’s a Windowbox Roma), but try to find flats of them at the local garden store. Someone who would like to make some money, perhaps as a school class fund-raiser, should advertise that for a fee they will start your seeds under lights and in their greenhouse—with you sending the seeds.
But much as I like to experiment, the vigorous and bountiful Roma would be my choice for a Vermont Tomato. The plants are “determinate,” which means you don’t really have to prune them, because they lack the desire to conquer the world shown by many varieties. The clusters of medium-size fruits will supply either sauce- and salsa-makers or salad enthusiasts. The chunky little ovals are not as frustrating to can as the more watery round varieties, and they dry better. They are less apt to bruise if you grow too many (very easy) and want to give some away. They last and last once brought indoors--I’ve even used one as the star on a Christmas tree.
And if you let them go long enough for them to start showing signs of illness, usually you can cut off that end (the meatier interior has more compartmentalization that with round tomatoes) and immediately gulp down the rest, because they’re at maximum sweetness just before they decide to try a mid-life career change as compost.
Vermont’s climate may actually make it easier to domesticate Romas. Here’s a North Carolina contributor to a nice gardening site called Dave’s Garden (the following is at http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/30674):
“On Mar 25, 2003, Piedmont_NC wrote:
‘VERY productive, with over 100 tomatoes per plant. Excellent for canning, sauces, and salsa. Plum shaped, but about 1.5 times larger than a plum.

Although this is a bush variety, I would recommend at least a 4 foot tall cage. My 3 foot cages got pulled out of the ground by this vigorous plant!

Another great point: very disease resistant.

If I were to choose one variety for an inexperienced gardener, this would be it. Easy to grow, and LOTS of tasty tomatoes!’”
If you’re serious about extending the tomato-eating season, look in catalogs for winter-keeper varieties like Criterion. Make sure to wash what you bring into the house in the fall, both red and green, and dip each tomato in a weak Chlorox-and-water mixture to kill off your fungal competitors (about one sodium hydroxide to ten hydrogen dioxide, if I remember rightly—I think I’ll call the Master Gardener hotline on that one). Some sources say to wrap them in newspaper, but then how do you know which ones are ready or going bad? Do put a pad of something underneath, like a few Rutland Heralds, so any that ooze don’t contaminate a bunch of others. Store them in something with enough of a lid to keep them from drying out, and don’t forget to check them.
I’m an unrepentant former back-to-the-lander, so I’m delighted to see a critical mass of concern developing over importing so much of our food. I hope to see the day when people talk about the different breeds of winter squash, and which ones the kids like best as dried “candy” (cut into thin strips, put near the stove, throw those oily potato chips in the fire for additional drying heat). I want to see the local “chicken tractor” garden get as much attention as the latest celebrity scandal (divide the land half and half, raise chickens on one half and garden on the other, switch halves each year). I’d like to see Red Landon recognized for all the work he’s done on how to grow mushrooms (anyone remember the Thursday Extra I did on his homestead in Shrewsbury?). I long for the day when neighbors see someone digging in the snow out back of their house in December and say “I’ll bet they still have brussels sprouts.” I want to see the LEEDS point system for honoring the best “green” construction include extra points for walling off a root cellar on the other side of the basement from the furnace. The pilot of a small plant cruising over a town ought to see flash after flash from the window glass of living room solariums.
Though we don’t have the land for a very big garden, and are shaded by neighboring trees, you can bet we’ll be growing tomatoes in buckets again. And you can bet the majority will be Lycopersicum lycopersicon, cultivar “Roma.”

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

Lee Houston was right: the mess in China is our mess, too.

Brandonites may remember Lee as the manager brought in to begin the turnaround of the Vermont Tubbs Furniture plant and keep it competitive with lowball furniture from abroad, a task his successors have accomplished to an extraordinary degree. At a time when so many manufacturers have rolled over and died, Tubbs supplies big name stores with, rarity of rarities, something Made in America.

Lee got that job because he had a long record of working with companies in trouble, one that included several years helping companies in China—which gave him a broad view of the situation. He had lived with air pollution so bad you couldn’t see from one side of the city to another, had witnessed workers living in prison-like barracks under robotic conditions, and knew firsthand about dealing with corrupt officials.

Three years ago, he emailed me and told me that if I wanted a good book project, or a team of journalists wanted to do a news series, there was a big story to be told about the hazardous nature of many products the Chinese were sending our way. “It would take a great deal of work, but if a group of reporters were to do a story, a book, on all of the potential problems Chinese products may cause, the nation would be well served,” were his exact words.
I didn’t have the contacts and credibility in the publishing world to change my whole way of life and dive into these murky waters, but boy, was he ever spot on. Any such book would be old news now, because a far-flung “team” of reporters have made headlines with news about poisonous dogfood, contaminated toothpaste, sicko seafood, and lately toxic toys. Lee had been worried about the toys. “Our
daughter works in a pediatrician's office and they have noticed an upswing in lead poisoning symptoms and tested blood levels and are seeing high levels of lead in kids that they KNOW do not live in houses that have lead,” he wrote.

Lee had his own example of the true cost of cheap goods: mirrors. When he wrote about our toxic orientations, he was president of two companies in the South, one making particle board and one making mirrors. The particle board was safe from overseas competition, he said, because it would cost too much to ship such a heavy but relatively low-cost commodity. But at the mirror factory, the Chinese were “after us,” he said.

“It is the same old story,” he wrote. “We Americans work at a decent wage and produce products that meet or exceed all governmental standards. The Chinese are sending in mirrors made with near slave labor using aluminum coating backed-up with paint whose lead content is 2.4 to 2.6 times our country's maximum limit.

“The problem is that our laws only affect the guy that ultimately takes the broken mirror to the dump years in the future. So, they can flood our market with the cheap stuff, and we'll pay the environmental bill years from now.

“We use silver and low lead content paint. In fact, we are 60% below EPA standards. Washington doesn't give a damn – we do not want to upset the Chinese.”

And the Chinese, though our largest source of imports, do not have a monopoly on environmental degradation. “I have been in 21 countries, mostly on business.” Lee said. “Without thinking very hard, I have seen pollution in both China, Russia, Taiwan and Malaysia that would turn your stomach.”

Here’s one I’m going to look into: apple juice. Have you tried to buy juice lately? Look at the label and you will probably find apple juice listed high up, even if it’s supposedly cranberry juice or peach juice, for instance. Juicy Juice used to be a trusted source—100 percent juice, not water as the first ingredient or lots of high-fructose corn syrup (which I’ll talk about in a later posting). Now it’s been taken over by Nestle. They still don’t add corn syrup or sugar or artificial flavors or preservatives, but here’s the list of ingredients for “All Natural 100 percent Grape: “apple juice, grape juice and pear juice (water, juice concentrates), natural flavors, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), citric acid.”
It’s apple juice, flavored with grape juice, folks. Why? Presumably because apple juice is a lot cheaper. And is that because it’s coming from China, where the trees are sprayed with who knows what that may have been banned in this country decades ago?
There’s a number on the Juicy Juice can for “Questions?” which I’m going to call: 800-510-6763, Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-8 p.m. I would be DELIGHTED to learn that only domestic apple juice goes into those cans, and will report that here—or will report that the person didn’t know and couldn’t provide me with a way to find out. By all means call, too, if you want, and please let me know how it turns out. As it says on the Juicy Juice can, “IT’S GOOD TO KNOW.”

Yearns, concerns, and stomach turns can be shipped to outabout@sover.net.