The Center for Environmental Health, the Center for Food Safety, Cultivate Oregon, and the International Center for Technology Assessment have filed a complaint for declaratory and equitable relief against Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, alleging that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) withdrawal of the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices rule (OLPP) violated both the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) and the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Ctr. for Envt’l Health v. Perdue, No. 18-1763 (N.D. Cal., filed March 21, 2018). The complaint alleges that USDA’s first rationale for withdrawal of the OLPP, that it lacked the authority to set standards for livestock production, is “contrary to the plain language of OFPA, which unambiguously requires USDA to promulgate additional standards for the care of livestock based on NOSB (National Organic Standards Board) recommendation." The rationale was not a permissible interpretation of the OFPA's requirements, the complaint asserts, and is arbitrary and capricious.…
Category Archives Issue 667
A jury in Pennsylvania federal court has awarded $200,000 to a former Mondelez employee who alleged the company discriminated against her because of her age and terminated her after she complained of the alleged discrimination. Konsavage v. Mondelez Global LLC, No. 15-1155 (M.D. Pa., verdict issued March 19, 2018). The plaintiff, who worked for Nabisco and its successor Mondelez for 31 years, reportedly said that beginning in 2013 a new supervisor told her that she should reduce her workload to give younger employees a chance, that she lacked agility and that she had no potential at her age. The following year, she was allegedly demoted and forced to take a $9,000 pay cut before being fired a few months later. The jury awarded her emotional distress damages pursuant to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act.
Rebbl Inc. faces a putative class action alleging its “super herb” beverages are falsely advertised and labeled because the claims made for their ingredients are “not supported by sound scientific evidence.” Richburg v. Rebbl Inc., No. 18-1674 (E.D.N.Y., filed March 16, 2018). The complaint alleges that beverages in Rebbl’s product line of “Elixirs” and “Proteins” contain several ingredients—turmeric, reishi, maca, matcha, ashwaganda, medium chain triglyceride oil and coconut milk—that the company falsely asserts can reduce stress and improve beauty, health or wellness. Claiming violations of New York’s General Business Law, breach of warranties, fraud and unjust enrichment, the plaintiff seeks class certification, injunctive relief, damages and attorney’s fees.
Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, is facing criticism from a couple that owns the rights to “The Joy of Cooking,” which Wansink asserted had increased calorie counts of its recipes by an average of 44 percent since its first publication in 1936. The New Yorker reports that John Becker and his wife were “blindsided” when Wansink published “The Joy of Cooking Too Much” in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2009, but they assumed his findings were correct. At the time, they posted a response on the cookbook's website saying that out of 4,400 recipes, Wansink had analyzed 18. Becker later saw a cartoon commissioned by Cornell to appear with Wansink’s original study, and he decided to check Wansink’s results, apparently finding numerous recipes that contradicted Wansink's findings. Becker forwarded his research to James Heathers, a behavioral scientist at Northeastern University, who reportedly found issues…
Washington Governor Jay Inslee has signed into law the Healthy Food Packaging Act (H.B. 2658/S.B. 6396), making the state the first in the country to ban perfluorinated chemicals (PFAs) in food packaging. If the Washington's Department of Ecology identifies safer alternatives to PFAs by January 1, 2020, the law will ban PFAs in paper food packaging effective January 1, 2022; if the state is unable to find a safer alternative, the law will not go into effect and the Department of Ecology must annually review the availability of alternatives. When the department finds an acceptable alternative, the ban will go into effect two years later.
During negotiations for updates to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trump administration is reportedly seeking to stop the enactment of laws mandating food labels that warn of high levels of sugar, salt and fat. Officials in Mexico and Canada are reportedly considering regulatory actions similar to those in Chile, which approved requirements for black-box warnings on food labels in 2016. Although public health experts reportedly praise Chile’s new rules, the United States and other countries, along with food industry trade organizations, fought the legislation before the World Trade Organization. The New York Times quoted Dr. Camila Corvalán, a nutritionist at the University of Chile who helped develop the warning labels, as saying, “The fact that the industry is freaking out is reassuring, but at the same time it’s worrying that the U.S. government is trying to defend the position of the food industry.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will sponsor a public meeting April 6, 2018, in Washington, D.C., to provide information and receive public comment on U.S. draft positions for the Codex Committee on Methods of Analysis and Sampling meeting to be held in Budapest, Hungary, May 7-11, 2018. The committee is responsible for defining criteria and serving as a coordinating body for groups working on analysis, sampling and quality assurance systems applicable to foods.
Researchers have released a study concluding that rates of childhood obesity are rising rather than declining or stabilizing as previously reported. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), researchers reportedly found that although the prevalence of obesity has increased across all childhood age groups since 1999, “significant increases in obesity and severe obesity” have appeared in children aged two to five and adolescent females aged 16 to 19. Asheley C. Skinner, et al., “Prevalence of Obesity and Severe Obesity in US Children, 1999-2016,” Pediatrics, March 2018. The researchers reported that they observed “disconcerting” racial-ethnic differences in obesity rates, with African-Americans and Hispanics having a higher prevalence of obesity while Asian-American children had a lower prevalence in all age and sex categories. Specifically, the researchers noted “astounding” differences between Hispanic children and those of all other races, finding nearly half of all Hispanic youth overweight or obese. Researchers purportedly…
Using a "food impacts" database, researchers from Tulane University and the University of Michigan have reportedly found that high levels of beef and dairy consumption account for large portions of diet-related greenhouse gas emissions. Martin C. Heller, et al., “Greenhouse gas emissions and energy use associated with production of individual self-selected US diets,” Environmental Research Letters, March 2018. The study reported that the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions by food group was “quite typical of Western dietary patterns, with the dominant impacts coming from meats and dairy.” Beef consumption accounted for 72 percent of the emissions difference between the highest-impact and lowest-impact groups. The researchers also discovered that beverages, primarily fruit and vegetable juices, had the third-largest impact in the analysis. A New York Times op-ed argued a similar point less than a week before the study's publication. Citing a paper by researchers from the Toulouse School of Economics on the practicality…
After the Vietnamese government asked the World Trade Organization (WTO) to discuss U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) restrictions on catfish imports, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer asking him to support repeal of the restrictions. “Since its implementation, the USDA Catfish Inspection Program has done nothing more than erect a damaging trade barrier against Asian catfish imports to protect a handful of domestic catfish farmers in Southern states," the senators wrote. “If the U.S. loses this latest WTO battle, it could negatively impact U.S. agriculture exports to Vietnam, including cotton, wheat, pork, soybeans, beef, poultry, eggs and fruit. Vietnam is one of our largest Asian trading partners and our 10th largest agricultural export market. Additionally, more than 525,000 American jobs directly rely on imported seafood.” McCain and Shaheen have been critics of the catfish restrictions since at least 2013,…
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