Great Food Science Videos.

 I thought I would do a little outreach today and post some videos that highlight food science in some way...

Disney & @IFT

 

Penn State's Food Science Dept.

My favorite series of food science related videos featuring Science media personality, @DrKiki

My favorite food science related video features Cornell Researcher Brian Wansink on a segment of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

Childhood Obesity

 This is sort of a blog request from @WineePamela after some tweets I wrote about how to fight Obesity.  I've written about weight loss before, but I really feel weird about doing it because I'm a pretty big guy.  I guess I'm like a coach, where I know all about the game but I wasn't the greatest player.


If you are really concerned that kids are too fat, then you have to approach things from a more pragmatic standpoint and stop with all the slogans, easy answers, and non-expert speculation. So to fight childhood obesity...


1. Parents:


When kids are little, all parents ever do is tell kids to stop running around, slow down, sit still... and finish your dinner.  I thought all the hoopla over Kids meal toys at McDonald's was silly because most kids I've ever seen eat there waste more than half of their food.


So maybe be glad when the kids are doing winds sprints while giggling and if the kids don't finish their dinner... give them a little less.


2. Coaches:


What I remember the most about playing sports in middle and high school was all the punishment exercise and yelling.  I got horrible anxieties before practices.  Coaches do more to limit physical activity later in life than any video game console.  When one guy screws around, the football/basketball/wrestling coach has everyone run wind sprints, do laps, or do some form of calisthenics as punishment.  This is a horrible message to send.


3. Teachers:


Coming from a food science background, I naturally think it's an ideal subject for high school students to tie together chemistry, biology, and chemistry, but it also gives you a great background in nutrition.  Kids should know what a calorie is, how to calculate the number of calories they need to maintain/lose/gain weight, and how to track their caloric intake.  it's also a great way to learn which foods are the best sources of protein/iron/vitamins/calcium/potassium.  This is very practical knowledge that also reinforces what the kids have already learned in school, while also reinforcing scientific method and critical thinking skills.


4.  Other Kids:

Kids are mean and being fat seems to be one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination in this country.  This is a tragic combination.  Fat people in general get very little sympathy because they are just seen as sloth-like lazy buffoons.  Other kids can help by not shaming or being cruel to obese kids.  Furthermore, they can make friends with obese kids and include them in their physical activities.  Shame does not work.  If your feeling down on yourself, you slow down, stay out of view... you don't go for a walk or go exercise.

5.  Food Activists:

I know you think everything is all a big conspiracy and that all processed foods are poison... but seriously, knock it off.  Misinformation serves only to confuse people and prevents them from reaching a solid, science based understanding of food.  Misinformation also allows people to peddle their ridiculous weight loss schemes and bilk the public for billions of dollars a years.  Please stop.

6. Fashion Industry:

Pencil thin models give people an unrealistic yard stick to judge themselves and others by.  We no longer think hometown girls are cute because they don't look nearly as hot as the model.  This also creates a much bigger gap bewteen the beautiful people and the obese.  

If you are a big kid, your clothes aren't only bigger, but they're completely different.  Why?  Why can't you get big sizes from Gap, Adidas, Champion, and Nike.  How easy is it to get active wear in big sizes in the same style as the smaller sizes?  And while I'm at it, stop putting flames or dragons... or flaming dragons on big & tall clothing.  What is that?  So not only do fat people feel ostracized, they have special fat clothes that look completely different.

PayPal

You should see a PayPal Donation button in this blog post and on the side of this page.  I'm currently out of work and behind on rent.  I've done this blog for two and a half years and have many great, informative posts.  If you can spare anything... even $5, it would be greatly appreciated. The donations are anonymous, so you don't have to worry about getting an awkward half sobbing thank you from me or me pledging a life debt to you.  Rent is overdue and I hope to get hired on somewhere... for something, sometime soon.  So if you've read and liked my writing over the past couple years, please send a dollar or two my way.  Even if you think I'm a tool, give me a buck so I can keep writing and giving you more to complain about.

Slow Food.

Slow Food USA is having some sort of problem, according to the article I read in Chow.  I think their problems are a little more... existential in nature.

The problem here is that the group itself is formed under a false premise.  Organic/natural foods aren't intrinsically better than conventional or 'mass produced' food.  You can think it tastes better as a sort of placebo effect, but nutritionally, an organic/natural version of a conventional food is the same.  Asking people in this country to pay more for their food is pretty insulting and shows a complete lack of understanding about economic development. 

Much of why we spend so little on food is because we have so much more money and spend it on other things, so as a percentage, we spend less on the food.  There's not a lot of people buying Xbox 360's and cars and flat screen tv's in Sub-Saharan Africa.  And many people there grow their own food, not because they're hip and socially conscious, but because they'd starve otherwise.  As subsistence level farmers, they HAVE to decide how much food they need to sell instead of eat.  Their incomes are practically non-existent.

Like most foodies, the Slow Food movement meant well, but were misguided, misinformed, and generally uneducated about food.  So what they did was substitute their opinions and feelings in place of facts and then built an institution around them.  To shore up that institution, they needed enemies and that's where corporations came in.  Most foodies are anti-corporatist, so for them, it was easy to direct vitriol and hatred to any 'big' entity.

Thoughts, feelings, accusations, paranoia, and conspiracy theories support the cause, not science.  They see science as part of the 'big' machine that exist only as Yes Men.  The problem with this is that any serious critique of a foodie movement like Slow Food shows that that they simply make oversimplified, and unsubstantiated good vs evil populist claims about food.

Eggs-treme Pun-ishment

First off... hello.  It's been a little while.  I've been busy figuring out a career of some sort and thought now would be a great time to check in with some thoughts.

So I guess most of you have heard about all the trouble with eggs in the news.  Undercover video surfaced of some sort of animal abuse at Sparboe Farms.

I haven't seen the video, and I don't feel I need to in this case because my comments will be very general and only use Sparboe Farms as an example.

So here's the scenario:  a video surfaces showing [fill in the blank here] which seem to always be at a facility affiliated with a giant corporation.  Next, we have; public outrage, several righteous press conference by the investigative reporters involved, some threats of boycott & yada yada yada...  The next thing you know, the facility is closed or the company is severely damaged in terms of finances and public perception.  The secret videographers walk away proud that they've proven just how horrible a company is when it reaches a certain size.

Some things to consider:

1. The groups that film these things never seem to make their way onto a small farm... instead, they always end up on what they call a factory farm. 

Why is that?  Are 100% of the small to medium sized farm operations perfect, with no violations or atrocities?  No.  Small and medium farms are usually not associated with a corporation, so activist groups don't actively seek their demise. By the way, what is a factory farm?  I don't know, I always thought that's where Cabbage Patch Dolls were made.

2. We only ever see a video on the videographer's terms.

You could see a dark and dirty barn with animals crowded together, but you'll never see footage of the guy turning the lights off and filming when the animals are only temporarily close together because some other pens are being cleaned(the reason that pen may still be dirty).

Also, we can't accurately judge authentic footage vs. staged footage.  Remember James O'Keefe and those crazy ACORN undercover videos?  How did that work out for ACORN?  Out of business.  You know what else?  The videos were edited and made out to be way worse than they ever really were.  It didn't matter whether it was true or not, it enraged people, and they acted hastily.  Remember the Duke Lacrosse scandal?  Those guys had their lives ruined... and the accusations weren't true.  You get my point.

3. Bad organization or lone wolf?

Even if the video is true and the people filming just happened to be walking by with their cameras and film the horrors they saw, it doesn't tell us how the incident happened and why.  Did the abuser have marching orders or did they act alone?  Did we see a dirty facility on it's worst day or does it always look like that?  Was the person friendly with the person filming and wanted to give them something to go to the media with?  Of course, it can be a horrible culture where certain abuses are allowed, but you really can't gauge that from watching a video.  I will say that large companies spend a ton of money on training for things like food safety and animal welfare.  Does the careless actions of one or two employees speak for an entire organization?

4. Can a company recover from this?

This is a question about punishment.  Is it a lifetime punishment for an offense or can a company correct it's problems whether they are built into the culture or the result of a lone wolf? 


There was a debate last year about undercover videos and whether they should be protected.  My thoughts were that rather than picking up a camera and running to the YouTube or news station with the footage, you should start with the management.  The reason for that is because of #3.  Did you uncover a sinister corporation that beats animals or keeps them in filth because they're evil and that's what evil corporate syndicates do or did you uncover Steve, the disgruntled townie that kicked a hen because it pecked on his foot?  Believe it or not, people that raise animals or make food or even people in general want to do a good job.  Chances are, if that person who filmed that footage took his/her concerns with management, they would have acted to stop it.


By the way, Sparboe Farms had an SQF audit and passed.  I've been in an SQF audit, and trust me, they are no cake walk.  The auditor gets paid whether you pass or not and he/she worked for an approved auditing company that has it's own reputation to worry about, so they have ever reason in the world to call balls and strikes... and trust me, SQF auditors have a very big strike zone.  Even a facility on top of it's game will have a very difficult week with the auditor.  A bad facility will have a very short week with the auditor, because they'll fail quickly.

So are the abuses true?  Could be.  If so, Sparboe Farms should be singled out, but they should also be allowed to make whatever corrections they need to make and still exist.  Let's keep in mind that even-though we have plenty of activists that are essentially anti-corporatists, we have many people that work at these facilities and help run these facilities that are just regular people with bills to pay, not evil henchmen out to get you.

Why We Need To Fund The FDA.

Food Manufacturing posted a story this morning about a seafood company having it's products seized due to non-conformance with HACCP.  I looked up the warning letter and was amazed at how horrible their HACCP plan was.  They had critical control points for holding raw fish that didn't include a temperature and a ccp for thawing frozen seafood that also had no temperature controls.

Incredible.

Then imagine my surprise when I found out they received another FDA warning letter way back in 1998.  It was then that I was even more disturbed to learn that this wasn't, Meiko, the seafood company whose products were seized... this was Schneider's Fish & Seafood Company.

I looked into it and a search for "seafood HACCP" of the FDA's Warning Letter's site yielded 997 results since 1998.  For those unaware, the FDA issued a final rule on Seafood HACCP in 1995.  40 companies were repeat offenders, many of which went 4 years or more between warning letters.  

I find a couple things troubling about this. First, it's unclear if these places were inspected during those 4+ year gaps.  Second, these are only warning letters that pertain to their HACCP plans either being inadequate or plans not being followed.

The fact that there are companies that lack complete seafood HACCP plans in 2011 is insane and points out a glaring hole in our food safety system... Inspectors.  These guys aren't consistently inspecting these facilities because they're stretched way too thin.  We didn't need the the new regulations that were passed earlier in the year.  What we needed and still need is the staffing to enforce the laws we already have.

This would have several benefits, the most obvious being jobs.  We need several thousand more inspectors in both the FDA and the FSIS(USDA).  The result of this could mean that more recent college grads with food backgrounds can get a solid position and they can start paying back student loans.  The money they'll get paid will go right back into the economy.  Increased inspections mean more hotel and airline bookings, more eating out at restaurants, which puts more money in the pockets of the service industry workers.  Government work means government benefits, which also means there will be more people insured in this country.

But even more than that is the growth this will spur in the food industry.  Many companies, while concerned about food safety, may not be too worried about an inspector showing up anytime soon.  This means that they get a little more lax on the cleaning and some of the upkeep.  With the promise of more inspections, capital projects are more likely to be invested in, which means more hiring and more overtime, more millwrights will be employed and processing lines will get updated.  As much as industry likes to complain about regulation, they also hate when a similar company has a major food safety issue because it makes them look bad by proxy.  Also, it's good for timely inspections to weed out the bad seeds, and give all the other players in the industry a chance to gain market share.

It's unfortunate that political ideology has gotten in the way of sound economic and domestic policy.  This, along with infrastructure spending, seems like a complete no-brainer to me.

Peak Organic

I was reading farmnwife's blog(@farmnwife on Twitter) and left a lengthy comment, as I tend to do at times.  I decided to post most of that comment since it was something I haven't really talked about here in any great detail.  No big drawn out intro, so if you're confused, leave a comment on here or find me on Twitter @samvance...

There is an economic tipping point that is in organic's future which will doom it, that I never hear anyone mention.  Basically, organic food started out costing about 75% more than conventional and as it became more popular, the prices dropped to about 40-50% more.  As more people use organic, the price will continue to drop until the price equals that of conventional foods.  Normally, this is where a business can finally start to compete and dominate the market, but we have to remember that organic is a more labor intensive choice to create a premium product.  Meaning that farmers really only grow it because it's more profitable. At the point where it costs more for the farmer to grow than conventional(meaning that they see less profit than conventional), they will stop growing organic and switch back to conventional.

This is the reason American beverage bottlers use HFCS primarily and Mexican beverage bottlers use cane sugar... not because of a difference on philosophy, but because HFCS is cheaper than cane sugar in this country due to some trade restrictions we put on Brazilian sugar.  Mexico doesn't have such restrictions, and thus, has cheaper sugar.

I'm not pro or anti-HFCS, I'm just using that as an analogy to explain what will eventually happen to organic food.

Coming Clean About Dirty Fruit.

I'm sure many of you have seen the Dirty Dozen list that has been reported on in the media over the last few days.  Basically, they are warning us that these supposedly healthy fruits and vegetables are laden with evil deadly pesticides.  It's not that they want you to not eat fruits and vegetables, it's that they don't want you to endanger yourself by eating one of the Dirty Dozen.

Before I go forward, here is the Dirty Dozen:

1. Apples

2. Celery

3. Strawberries

4. Peaches

5. Spinach

6. Imported Nectarines

7. Imported Grapes

8. Sweet Bell Peppers

9. Potatoes

10. Domestic Blueberries

11. Lettuce

12. Kale/Collard Greens

For this Dirty Dozen list, they want you to switch to organic if you simply have to have any of these items.  The people that put out this list is the Environmental Working Group.  This is a group I consider very similar to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as both groups are non-expert activists that present their agenda with zero context.  For instance, Michael Jacobson of the CSPI put out an article in the Huffington Post about caramel coloring for cola where he derides the ingredient for causing cancer.  As I said, these groups tend to report what sounds horrific in the absence of all context. Why? Well, if he wrote that article and said, 'but you'll need to drink 18,000 20oz bottles of cola before you have enough coloring to potentially cause cancer', you would not freak out and give his organization money.

I find it interesting that the EWG advocates for organic without finishing their story.  The rest of the story is the context they are so sorely missing, so I'm here to help.  I am using the calculator on safefruitsandveggies.com to show how much of each item an adult male will have to consume in a day in order to do themselves harm via the pesticides.  For those of you concerned with bias, I'd like to point out that both the EWG and Safe Fruits and Veggies use the USDA's own residue data.  So here for your reading pleasure is the full context version of the Dirty Dozen.

Dirty Dozen?

1. Apples                        - 571 servings/day

2. Celery                         - 133,951 servings/day

3. Strawberries                - 2,640 servings/day

4. Peaches                       - 318 servings/day

5. Spinach                        - 4,487 servings/day

6. Imported Nectarines    - 439 servings/day

7. Imported Grapes          - No figure given. Amt for cherries is 1,171 servings/day

8. Sweet Bell Peppers      - 845 servings/day

9. Potatoes                        - 12,626 servings/day

10. Domestic Blueberries - 306 servings/day

11. Lettuce                        - 15,227 servings/day

12. Kale/Collard Greens   - 3,265 servings/day

It's also very important to note that these figure are based on the highest residues reported by the USDA, so this is a worst case scenario.  Still scared?  Remember to keep these articles you read by groups like the EWG or CSPI in context.  Are they giving you numbers and context?  Also beware of correlation studies and terms like 'linked'.  So eat anything you want from this list.  It is virtually impossible to eat enough for the residues to make you sick.