“Known in the food business as ‘aquatic chicken’ because it breeds easily and tastes bland, tilapia is the perfect factory fish; it happily eats pellets made largely of corn and soy and gains weight rapidly, easily converting a diet that resembles cheap chicken feed into low-cost seafood,” writes New York Times correspondent Elizabeth Rosenthal in a May 2, 2011, article exploring the global tilapia market. “[P]romoted as good for your health and for the environment at a time when many marine stocks have been seriously depleted,” tilapia is mostly imported from Latin America and Asia for consumption in the United States, where its newfound fame has also drawn attention to aquaculture practices overseas. In particular, Rosenthal notes that critics have raised questions about raising tilapia in pens, a practice that purportedly pollutes lakes and damages local ecosystems, and on diets that nutritionists say can reduce the production and quality of omega 3…
Category Archives Media Coverage
According to an April 29, 2011, New York Times article, a plan to regulate purchases under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) continues to gain steam in New York City, where officials recently asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to approve a two-year pilot project prohibiting the use of food stamps to buy sugar-sweetened beverages with more than 10 calories per serving. Proponents of the measure have apparently estimated that city residents each year spend “$75 million to $135 million in food stamp benefits” on sugar-sweetened beverages, which advocates say are “the single largest contributor to the obesity epidemic.” But industry groups and other opponents have warned that the pilot project will serve only to stigmatize some consumers while giving government leave to police other purchasing decisions. “Once you start going into grocery carts, deciding what people can or cannot buy, where do you stop?,” asked one American…
“Forty years before it was removed from paint, pediatricians had enough evidence of lead’s ability to maim children’s brains—catastrophically and irreversibly—to warrant discussion in a medical textbook,” opines Sandra Steingraber in the March/April 2011 edition of Orion Magazine, where she posits that not only is the developing brain more vulnerable than the adult brain to social and nutritional environments, but “that neurotoxins can act in concert with each other” and “that the chemicals designed to act as neurobiological poisons—the organophosphate pesticides—truly do so.” In addition to summarizing studies on the effect of lead, arsenic, mercury, and other substances on developmental health, Steingraber highlights the latest research suggesting that organophosphate pesticides created to attack “the nervous systems of insect pests…have the same effect in humans,” interfering with “the recycling of the neurotransmitter acetycholine, one of the messaging signals that flow between neurons.” In particular, she cites studies purportedly showing that “organophosphate…
An April 21, 2011, New York Times article targets the online marketing techniques allegedly used by food companies “to build deep ties with young consumers,” claiming that “multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps” have become “part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers.” The Times highlights the efforts of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Childhood Obesity, which have backed strict regulation in lieu of the current voluntary measures. “Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said CCFC Director Susan Linn. According to the article, the groups have called for rules similar to those governing children’s TV that require “a buffer between ads and programs so that…
“When Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his priceless heritage unless he paid a one-million-euro ransom, he thought it was a sick joke,” writes Maximillian Potter in this May 2011 Vanity Fair article chronicling “an unprecedented and decidedly un-French” plan to poison the world’s most famous vineyard, La Romanée-Conti. Considered the Holy Grail of Burgundy, the eponymous wines produced by this 4.46-acre, centuries-old vineyard currently sell for $6,455 per bottle, with 1945 vintages fetching upward of $38,000 per bottle. According to Potter, it was only a few months before a record-setting auction of Romanée-Conti that “word of the attack began seeping into the world beyond Burgundy,” which has since sought to keep the affair quiet. Potter traces the remarkable crime from early 2010, when vineyard owner de Villaine began receiving anonymous ransom demands in the mail, to the arrest of a career…
According to public health lawyer and activist Michele Simon, who recently attended a meeting in Brussels “to address the problem of cross-border marketing of unhealthy food to children,” the same types of issues confronting public health advocates in the United States confront their counterparts in Europe. Regulatory standards are apparently under development, but Simon did not share the details because they are still in draft and the meeting was closed to the public. She did, however, discuss a presentation by an industry representative who apparently outlined voluntary efforts that food and beverage companies have undertaken in Europe to decrease the number of TV ads children are exposed to. Simon questioned the effectiveness of these efforts and industry’s transparency, noting that the messages companies are delivering to children in other ways, such as the Internet, are not apparently being tracked. Simon also provided a summary of the Federal Trade Commission’s update…
Individual members of the U.K. Food and Drink Federation (FDF) have reportedly announced plans to reconfigure their packaging after recent studies showed mineral oils from recycled cardboard leaching into food items. According to a March 8, 2011, BBC News article, which cited government researchers in Switzerland, the chemicals are used in printing inks “and have been linked to inflammation of internal organs and cancers.” At least one study evidently demonstrated that mineral oils could pass “easily” through many of the inner linings used in recycled cardboard boxes, with only 30 out of 119 sampled products deemed free of mineral oil. “For the others they all exceeded the limit, and most exceeded it more than 10 times, and we calculated that in the long run they would probably exceed the limit 50 times on average and many will exceed it several hundred times,” one researcher was quoted as saying. As a…
“Diet soda isn’t as addictive as drugs like nicotine, but something about it seems to make some people psychologically—and even physically—dependent on it,” opens this Health.com article on individuals who drink more than the average amount of diet soda per day. According to journalist Denise Mann, some diet soft drink aficionados imbibe anywhere from four cans to 2 liters every day, raising questions for medical professionals about whether these consumers are “true addicts.” The article cites self-reported “addicts” as well as researchers claiming, for instance, that some diet soda drinkers are simply swapping one compulsive behavior for another, or conditioning themselves to crave diet soft drinks while performing certain activities. But Mann also references research suggesting that “the artificial sweeteners in diet soda (such as aspartame) may prompt people to keep refilling their glass because these fake sugars don’t satisfy like the real thing.” In addition, she notes that although…
Highlighting the California lawsuit that seeks to stop McDonald’s from marketing “Happy Meals” to children, a March 2011 Inside Counsel article cautions corporate counsel to pay attention to such litigation, because, frivolous or not, the case marks a growing national focus on health and governmental initiatives to impose reforms on the food industry. Additional information about the case appears in Issue 375 of this Update. Author and managing editor Ashley Trent quotes Shook, Hardy & Bacon Agribusiness & Food Safety Co-Chair Madeleine McDonough, who questioned whether the lawsuit could be certified as a class. “There are so many individual issues,” she said. “What kind of advertising did [putative class members] actually see? What’s the proof that they actually relied on the advertising? What are the reasons they ate at McDonald’s? What did they eat? What kind of control did the parents exercise?” Other legal experts questioned the strength of the lawsuit’s substantive…
New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman tackles the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) latest dietary guidelines in this opinion piece claiming that “the agency’s nutrition experts are at odds with its other mission: to promote our bounty in whatever form its processors make it.” According to Bittman, the guidelines are clearest when promoting “good” foods like fresh produce, but become “vague” when describing what not to eat, often resorting to scientific language and acronyms like SOFAS—Solid Fats and Added Sugars—“to avoid offending meat and sugar lobbies.” “The [USDA] can succeed at its conflicting goals only by convincing us that eating manufactured food lower in SOFAS is ‘healthy,’ thus implicitly endorsing hyper-engineered junk food with added fiber, reduced and solid fats and so on, ‘food’ that is often unimaginably far from its origins,” opines Bittman. “The advice people need is to cook and eat more real food, at the expense…
