Food Safety
The Genetically Modified Food You Eat Every Day
GMO crops have infiltrated 80% of all the packaged food in the United States, and no one has told you. Here’s why.
Genetically modified food is in a store near you today. In fact, it’s been there for years. You may not know it, but in all the fracas over genetically modified food, one point is often left out: You’ve been eating it for a long time and no one has told you. This infographic from Nature’s Path–which makes organic cereals, bars, and waffles that contain no GMO ingredients, they’d like you to know–shows where you’re getting your genetically modified treats, and why no one has told you:
Debate Heats Up Over Poultry Inspection Proposal
By Helena Bottemiller
If you listen to both critics and proponents of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture proposal to expand a pilot poultry inspection program, you might wonder if they’re talking about the same thing. In January, the USDA’s Food Safety and…
Has Salmonella Sushi Sickened 3,000?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that for every reported case of Salmonella, an additional 29.3 infections go undiagnosed and unreported. Undiagnosed Salmonella victims are never counted in official Salmonella outbreak case-counts. There may well be nearly 3,000 sickened.
In the wake of an April, 2012 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announcement that at least 100 people have become ill in a Salmonella outbreak linked to Sushi, the attorneys at Marler Clark are distributing a FAQ list for consumers who may have been exposed in the outbreak. The CDC has identified cases in the following states: Alabama (2), Arkansas (1), Connecticut (5), District of Columbia (2), Georgia (4), Illinois (9), Louisiana (2), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (4), Mississippi (1), Missouri (1), New Jersey (7), New York (23), North Carolina (2), Pennsylvania (3), Rhode Island (4), South Carolina (3), Texas (3), Virginia (5), and Wisconsin (9).
What do consumers need to know in a Sushi Salmonella Outbreak?……
7 Food Ingredients Most Prone for Food Fraud
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee and apple juice are the seven most likely food ingredients to be targets for intentional or economically motivated adulteration of food, or food fraud, according to analysis of the first U.S. public database created to compile information on risk factors for food fraud published in the Journal of Food Science.
The database was created by the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) and provides baseline information to assist interested parties in assessing the risks of specific products. It includes a total of 1,305 records for food fraud based on a total of 667 scholarly, media and other publicly available reports.
Food fraud is a collective term that encompasses the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients or food packaging, or false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain. A more specific type of fraud is the fraudulent addition of nonauthentic substances or removal or replacement of authentic substances without the purchaser’s knowledge for economic gain of the seller.
According to the authors of the paper, food fraud may be more risky than traditional threats to the food supply because the adulterants used in these activities often are unconventional and designed to avoid detection through routine analyses.
“The vast majority of food fraud is primarily technical and economical,” said John Spink, associate director with the anti-counterfeiting and product protection program at Michigan State University. “However, there are some cases where there can be serious health consequences as illustrated when melamine was added to infant formula and pet food in order to falsify the level of protein content in these products.”
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Recalls
Some Planters Cocktail Peanuts Recalled
By News Desk
Kraft Foods Group, Inc. is recalling about 3,000 cases of Planters Cocktail Peanuts because there is a possibility that the product was exposed to water not intended for use in food during the production process.Consumers who purchased the affected code…
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Articles of Interest
BPI and ‘Pink Slime’: A Timeline
By James Andrews
The story of Beef Products Inc.’s Lean Finely Textured Beef isn’t new, and neither is the nickname “pink slime”. Yet after more than 10 years on the market, the beef additive had never received the level of attention it did…
A Question of Origin
By Alli Condra
Dear Reader: Where did your last meal come from?Given our globalized food system, this is a difficult question to answer. The question of food origin breaks down into several parts. Do we care where it originated? Or, do we care…
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